#375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism
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The following is a conversation of David pacemen, a left wing progressive political commentator and host of the David packman show. I hope to continue to have many conversations on politics with prominent, insightful and sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum. David and I have been planning to speak for a long time, and i'm sure we'll speak many more times.

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Are there interesting differences to you between terms like liberal, democrat, left wing, leftist, progressive, socialist, communist, Marks is, far left, send left? All these labels is are interesting distinctions between them.

Yeah, there are two sets of distinctions. One is, if you just want to say, let's define these as political terms, they're all different terms. You can be a progressive ideologically but not be a member of the democratic party. Many say the democratic party isn't even really very progressive. So these are certainly terms that we could define uh, in order to have a conversation about the next thing kind of as a precursor to a conversation.

Sometimes the terms are used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not really linked to policy or any particular political question, but they can be used positively or negatively to just kind of say here's the image of this individual that I have in my mind so like exist is right now very popularly being used by some on the right um to attack democrats. There's very few actual markus, certainly not in positions of power in the united states but even among the general population. Um so I think it's important to distinguish are we defining these terms because we want to comparing contrast the ideas that a particular group might bring through the discussion or are we using them as insults or to stifle conversation, the terms that can be used to start conversation or to .

stop IT and the use of those terms is evolving rapidly months by month. So the term left test, I think, is a relatively popular term. Now to using the negative context to describe um what an outraged left wing commentator I think what you're kind .

of grasping onto is that there's probably some set of ideas that would apply to most of those who consider themselves to be on the left. The discussion of how that term is mostly being used is not about policy ideas. You're accurately kind of a identifying that. And IT does seem like progressive is no longer being used as a smear and leftist is being used as a mere more at this point.

okay. But sometimes some these terms are useful. Like can we try to pick the terms that are useful like liberal and progressive democrat? Liberal, progressive is their interesting definable distinction between liberal.

progressive that maybe one of the most interesting ones. Ten years ago, liberal often meant what now we mean by progressive. More recently, the progressive socialist leaning part of the political spectrum has started to use liberal to mean job in, to mean someone who is not really left enough.

So liberals, very interesting, because I remember talking with my audience years ago, maybe eight years ago, or something like that where I identified, i'm going to now use the term progressive more commonly to describe my own beliefs, because liberal has now been made to smear. It's being shifted into something else. And IT also means more of like a center left politics. So it's changed in some sense, by by necessary, by force, and also because the the spectrum has shifted to some degree.

So the term liberal has evolved now liberal, meaning some kind of embodiment of the mainstream democratic party almost to some degree.

Sometimes i'm called, i'm written off by within my space there are all sorts of shades of grey, which i'm sure we can talk about, about where I am versus should be, could be or wrongly placed. And sometimes an attack on me is he's just a lib, meaning i'm not left enough. I'm not progressive socialist wherever else you want to go. So yeah, the problem with a lot of these terms, and they use very casually by people who call into my show, is that unless we actually define the each time, they very often mean very different things to different people and often come with an agenda, attach to them. And so I find that they often stay full, meaningful conversation .

rather than encourage. You think that there's a drifting of what is the threshold to be progressive or is is there this should be used progressive anonymous ly with the democratic socialist?

I think we should not use a cynthy's sly with democratic socialist. And this is where there's another linguistic confusion and a political confusion. So we'll first talk about the linguistic one, social democracy versus democratic socialism.

Very similar words in a different order. Okay, my, the way I Operate is democratic socialism is actually a form of socialism where one would seek to socialize owner ship of the means of production. As an example, social democracy is a very a highly regulated form of capitalism, the likes of which we would see in northern europe, denmark, eeta. These are very different things. I associate progressive m in twenty twenty three with social democracy and would consider democratic social M A form of actual socialism that is different is IT were no longer talking about A A capitalist organization of society.

the transition from one to the others, a fundamental shift in house, in how society Operation.

absolutely. And when you talk about social democracy, you're talking about socializing a couple more things than we socialize in most modern capitalist countries. I had this conversation with Patrick bet David recently.

Social democracy is okay. We've socialized the military already in the united states. We've socialized some health care in the sense of like the va and medicated sea. We're talking about socializing a couple more things still in a capitalist country. Democratic socialism would be something beyond that. And and as someone who was not a democratic socialist myself and maybe not the best advocate for explaining exactly how that system would function, but IT would have some version of socializing ownership of the means of production businesses at era.

So you mentioned you appeared on the P. P. D podcast with Patrick by David.

The debate was pretty tense. I I think I should say I personally enjoyed IT. I thought, um actually you did well and I thought Patrick did well.

There was a good conversation, a little bit tension yeah and I I thought the patric actually so I disagree with the internet, thought Peter just took on a cana devils advocate like he he was purposely being stubbing to bring out the best in you. But the internet thought that he's being stuff and not being open to your ideas. I thought the tension between ideas. I think a lot of the attention had to do, probably with down on trumped trump supporters. That certainly .

could be the case. And people wrote to me, people wrote to me, the full gammage of everything you can imagine from this was your best thing you've ever done in public to you got humiliated and your mother should have aborted you. Okay, so, and everything in between.

So, you know, take your pick. But the most interesting feedback I got was from people who asked me after was an incredibly tense and awkward. And because IT seems so combative and I think for i'm so used to those types of tensions in the discussions that I have, that it's very comfortable to me.

It's not like afterwards, it's it's there's a graduate tensor, whatever the case may be. I'm very comfortable just I I disagree with people and that's IT. So I did not find anything that happened inappropriate. I disagree with a lot of the things he said certainly.

So you also spoken macos um I think about the idea of what is a woman I do. Can you speak broadly about your conversations with people you disagree with? Um you know some of the cases IT feels like it's gone wrong.

The conversations have gone. yes. yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of different things. And i'm the first to tell you that depending on who i'm talking to, I go in with a different attitude about how quote seriously i'm taking IT in the sense of whether I think it's going to be A D policy discussion verses or whether it's going to be more of a performance for an audience that is expecting a certain thing. And I think there's different types of shows when I was interviewed by this stagecraft term and los Angeles, it's very different, for example, than when i'm talking to patri bet.

David, just to give to two examples, I I think the reason I stopped doing the Michael noll show was the number of of threats I would get after the fact that really the I was glad to engage with him to the extent that the interviews were interesting and we could organize that reasonably efficiently um but the reason I stepped away was sort the aftermath but I did find him to be someone who was abundantly clear about his view and where he comes from. And while I could not possibly disagree more with him in terms of politics and culture in our backgrounds, everything is just so, so different. I found IT easy to engage in the conversation just because of how upfront and clear he was about what his beliefs were.

But the other threats, yes.

yeah, I was just too much. And this, I don't know how much you saw about this recent twitter dustup I was involved in that peaked with Donald trump junior tweet about me, and then that then declining from there.

talk through. I didn't OK have to understand, like we study shakespeare, have to study your twitter. I have to understand how much of the casm was mostly sarcasm.

I, I mean, here's the thing and I know that there are people who will say, David, you're dealing with such serious issues, it's really not okay not to take everything you do completely seriously. But my view is it's so incredible that i've between chance and timing and so different things fAllen into a position where this is what I do professionally and it's a career and it's financially sustainable.

And all these different things, I don't want to end up taking myself too seriously because I recognize the timing and lock in all of these other things and this could have one a completely different way. So my approach to a lot of this is let's not take ourselves too seriously. And in particular, on twitter, a platform that you know the degree to which which should be taken very seriously maybe has changed over time. I'm always sort of thinking a little bit tongue cheek on twitter.

So what happened with the junior so or the full art of IT .

yeah to make give you a one minute arc and then we can pick whichever parts we want after a mass shooting. Now you might say there's like two or three a day, you're correct. After the nash will mass shooting at a Christian school, I twisted snarky tongue cheek to point that thoughts and prayers not only aren't particularly useful after a shooting, they also don't prevent shooting's that there is some confusion about how there would be a shooting at a Christian school, given that IT is a ay place where prayer is taking place. I think I I, you know, jokingly said .

something like where they not praying enough for correctly in my deep journal integrity. I, this is the only display of journalists degree I will show today. okay. And I have a couple of responses for, and you deleted the .

tweet since then, which I regret.

which we can talk about, that I would love to is such a interesting decision. Because when you tweet something, one of things i've also learned is you don't often understand. How's going to be red is going to be analyzed, like I mentioned shakespeare, like there's certain the use of certain words that you regret saying in a certain kind of way.

Maybe just because IT wasn't as eloquent as powerful did actually convey the thing, or is the distraction of the main message of that kind of stuff okay? The actual tweet is very surprising that there will be a math shooting at a Christian school. Given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these global events is impossible.

They weren't praying enough or correctly, despite being a Christian school. And a lot of people, quote, required that, which i'm assuming was A A criticism. So calm, right route.

I used to consider you a reasonable progressive, but you clearly devolved into party. An hacking on an atheist IT cannot begin to find them. Using the murder of children and adults at a Christian school is an opportunity dunk on the concept of prayer.

And you responded, i'm dunning, on the people who send thoughts and prayers, do nothing else and the shootings continue. sure. There's a lot of other .

interactions. There's a few other hundred thousand years so that do you want the art leading to this reading? So so I do you know what time of day I tweet the original when I feel like I was in the afternoon or evening of on a monday.

three, forty two P M. And twenty seven, march twenty seven.

which was a monday. Okay, so basically I tweet that and then I finish the day and I tweet and then .

you go on with your day.

I might have looked once at twitter, and IT had two thousand likes and a few people saying this might miss the mark, but it's sort of like it's one of my twenty thousand tweet at are now I wake up the next morning. My baby daughter did not sleep till seven thirty the way I would like. So she's up at six. I, M, and I get up and i'm just there starting to make breakfast and I gLance at my phone and i'm starting to this was, when verified, meant a different thing that that means now i'm seeing all these verified accounts that are, you know, quote, tweet, IT and demanding a retraction and whatever I go oh okay.

This looks like it's getting looks like it's getting some attention um I then continue about my day around noon I hear from my dad that he got a hundred messages from you should have aborted your son to we're going to find all of you to whatever else my that has no idea what's going on he's like I don't know what this is but I have one hundred dms to everything else you can imagine um and I start to get emails about you know we you know your jewish faith this and that and the other thing and so at that point to me, I thought this is just going to get worse and worse and worse. And so I deleted the tweet and I really regret doing that because over the forty eight hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated. IT went through canada ones.

And then at fox news dot com news, max, kind of peaking with with Donald trump's unior and IT was horrible. I mean, thousands and thousands of the, okay. But once I told my audience about what happened, I got thousands of messages from people saying, David, only someone who doesn't know you and is determent to interpret this in the world possible faith, would think you're blaming kids who died for getting shot.

Of course you aren't doing that. I wish you hadn't deleted IT so that IT would still be up and you would now see the tide kind of turning on IT. This was not a fun three days regardless.

But I do regret having deleted IT because I was a pat. I wanted to do the quicker st thing I thought I could to get people to stop trying to find family members and send them threats. And so around noon, that's what I did. And the truth is, the threads didn't stop anyway because everybody had screen shot IT. And I do wish i'd left IT up.

And is there some degree, maybe stepping outside yourself, that you regret tweet that in that IT feels the mockery engine that that fuels twitter. So like does that wait really represent what you .

believe IT absolutely represents the discussed with a politics that includes saying we can't touch guns, we just we can't, but we're willing to point to mental health or say we need more prayer in schools or whatever one thousand percent IT represents. That view is IT the type of sark and sarcasm that I would use if given an hour to discuss the topic, rather than whatever the number of characters is now on twitter? No, definitely not. And so I A very cognition of the fact that IT was unnecessarily provocative, how IT was written .

hi I think I ask a similar question to bench peo. Do you worry that this style presentation can turn you from being um you know a deeply thoughtful objective political thinker to somebody who is just a partisan hack or partisan um what's a good word talking head?

Do you mean with regard to twitter or the format .

of my show in general? IT was a twitter for now. Start with twitter for now. And can you silo your style of communication on twitter from being a virus that affects your mind? right?

I don't have deep thoughts about the twitter component beyond, I think, across all sorts of disciplines. This is not the best way to most effectively solve problems and figure out solutions to complex issues. Twitter now, right now, i'm talking about twitter.

That being said, I think all of us, to some degree, have to adapt our content to the platform that we're using in the same way that what I post to youtube is different than what I post a tiktok. What I post to twitter is also different. Do I think twitter has been an unmitigated good for society? no.

Um have I chosen to step into twitter as one of the ways in which I get my message out with the good and the bad? yes. And I think that there is a deep conversation to be had there.

I think zoom ing out a little bit in terms of what I do. And I was hoping this would come up because I think it's really interesting. I will often get emails from people who say two things.

I will get the you would have such a bigger audience if you did x tae. And usually they are plays to sensationalism, sales and titillating content. More pop cultural stuff at sara.

On the other hand, it's focus. Say, listen, what you're doing really isn't as serious as IT could be. And IT seems like you could do something more serious and you should consider doing deep dives. You know, once that I was, do a deep dive into calvin coolidge and I, like nobody will watch. So there is not by accident that my show is the way, is right in an hour.

I'm thinking of all the platforms I mine and I say, okay, I want to do a relatively deep dive on the federal budget and I want to talk about some of the um um political tom fuller's going on within the post office. And i'm going to do a segment about the wacky rally where trump said crazy things and made up three words and said, endorsed the candidate whose named IT right? I'm crafting that in total to find a baLance between let's build the audience as much as I can in order to have a bigger base to get my message out there and include the more serious stuff with the hope that there's a little bit of something for everyone.

And i'm finding a baLance between those two sides of spectrum. It's a deliberate thing. And i'm aware that if I were producing my show fifty years ago, the baLance would probably be different and IT would probably change again if we didn't. If the show was audio only rather than having all these video platforms, IT would also be different. But it's a decision that's proactively made to try to get the best and most out of the hour that i'm creating everyday.

But IT just feels like there's an entire machine that by twitter and journalism that wants to divide people and the DRAM of that division, highlighting the the part is and division, the drama of that division, feels like its attention with objective, clear thinking sometimes. So that's the I worry that there's a drug to IT. There's too much fun to mark ridiculous people on on on the other side.

I think you're write about that. And the fact that that is true to me supports i've talked with my audience about, you know, like the old food pyramid, which I guess was like wrong. But let's imagine that there was a pyramid ID that that made sense .

in the bottom bread.

I think like whole grains. Maybe I don't remember .

it's it's been a junk .

food is at the very time i'm very open with my audience, the vast majority of what I do is the top of that pyramid. And I tell people very openly, I don't consume a lot of the type of content I produce. And I think it's really important to, as a base, be doing critical thinking.

A piston logy, how do we believe the things we believe basics about the world after that reading history, economics, pho, sophy, eta after that. Now we're getting into current events. I would mostly be looking at consuming um primary source reporting, things like associated press, whatever.

I know everybody will have a different list of what comes there after that is when i'd say indulge in some of the commentary type stuff that I do if you find that i'm thoughtful enough to make IT into that. But i'm very open. And really what I try to do on my show often is in being that at the top of the pyramid, tell people there's all this other stuff that should be forming your foundation that I hope you're consuming in addition to just watching me. And i'm very open with my audience about that.

what about the shape, the dynamics, uh, the characteristics of your audience? Is there some degree to which your through marking maybe republicans that there's a there's a lean to that audience and then you become capture by the audience to do you worry about the .

audience capture? I worry about IT. I'm relatively comfortable that it's not shaping the program to agree degree in the sense that at this point, I have a pretty good sense of the things I can say that will upset what I might call my core audience.

You know, one of the interesting things, just to briefly go back to the twitter thing, was those people who were furious with me on twitter, and they contacted my advertisers, and some advertisers dropped me and on and on and on. None of them are actually in my audience. None, none of them are regular consumers of my audience.

They were kind of web ize against me by people who said, hey, look at this the people who follow canadian es on twitter other than for their kind of shock value. They're not in my audience and with my core audience, I know there are things I can talk about that will generate um. This pleasure, I guess you could say with my audience sometimes when I touched the israeli palestinian conflict, that will happen sometimes on vaccines.

There's a portion of my audience that is more generally skeptical of vaccines um sometimes on some foreign policy uh, issues or you know i'm not a big fan of marion Williams and nobby Kennedy juniors. Um chAllenges to joe biden not because I love joe biden, but because I don't consider them to be the most serious chAllenges. I know there's people in know my audience who don't like that. They get they get mad at me about that and i'm totally OK with that uh and that tension with with my core audience. So in that sense, I don't feel as though i've had that audience capture take place, but I know I can happen and i'm very open to to being told ways in which IT may be happening without me noticing.

So i've made a call for questions and read IT for this conversation. There's a lot of the questions that i'll probably bring up but one of them was about mm Williams son um asking why David thinks she's a garbage candidate which of course .

i've never said but IT.

perhaps you have more eloquent criticize so let's go there to the twenty twenty four election okay. So bin job officially nalty he's running again. Now trump officially announced that he's running again. And if that's the match up, who you think wins.

if the elections held today, I think biden, why? Well, first of all, I believe he won last time. And if I start with the results from twenty, twenty, and I think to myself what has happened since then, that would push your poll voters one way or the other.

I have a hard time making a case that trump is in a Better position today than he was in november of twenty twenty. So that kind of my starting point, which is it's a rematch of an election with a known outcome. What has changed? And I can make a case for circumstances having changed in trust favor.

To give a couple of state level examples, florida seems to be kind of moving more to the republican side since twenty twenty, but trump, one that stayed already in twenty twenty. So IT wouldn't really change the outcome. Arizona was close.

I think arizona has moved to the left sce twenty, twenty. So I don't see trump taking that one. Wisconsin, I think the same sort of thing apply. So being very like practical, that would be kind of the start of my reasoning.

Do you think job in is a Better candidate now that then he was in twenty, twenty?

I think he's the worst candidate. This is going to sound ages, but I think he's a worst candidate in that he's even older. And there already seems to be an appetite for Younger candidates, particularly on the democratic voting side.

So he's going to be four years older. And in a sense, that could be a liability. However, he also is going to have four years of accomplishments. Now you might not like the things he's done, in which case that would hurt him, but he has started to accumulate um not in significant number of accomplishments, some of the big things that are known inflation reduction act and covet stimulus, you know but also less well known things like a bunch of little tweak to health care, bunch of little tweaks to student lending.

There's been a lot of little things um at the macro o level I don't actually think job in has that much to do with this the same way I didn't credit or attack trump for a lot of the macro o economic stuff, but inflation has started to come down significantly, the stock markets quite steady, these sort of things. I think looking historical, it's a pretty OK environment for jobs. With the exception that he was already the oldest president to be inaugurated in twenty one and he would beat his own record in january of twenty twenty five. And I just don't know how voters are going to see that.

So in terms of just the public human being, uh, how would you compare trump in biden? So if I would give criticism torst trumpy would be that his chaotic may be to the point of being disrespectful to a lot of different groups, to a lot of different ideas, a lot different nations and leaders and all that kind of stuff. And then the criticism and towards biden, would be that he maybe, perhaps because of age or any other kind of cognitive capabilities, is not really there mentally, as you know, in the way that perhaps you could say that brock obama was there just mentally being able to hand all kinds of aspects of being a public representative of a nation to the world and to the people of that nation, so which share in the competition of personality flaws, which you think is more powerful.

You've laid out fair and I believe accurate assessments of pants of both of those man with you haven't waited on to what degree you value each of those assessments, which is where I think the the kind of meat of this question really is. Um I don't see and I know that you know, why is gonna get us into world war three? World world three doesn't seem to be happening.

Um I don't see the biden deficits you listed, which I agree with you on. I don't see them as a dangerous or threatening to the standing of the united states in this kind of environment with our western traditional western allies and geopolitics eta in the way that the sort of unhinged personality of trump, combined with his lack of knowledge about most issues, is a threat. So for me, if those two are the candidates, biden would be my choice.

Now, other people I would rather see on the democratic side, yes, if I knew the president would be a republican, can I think of Better options than trump? absolutely. You know I think it's it's so funny when in twenty twelve IT was obama versus romney, the difference seemed so significant between them. Thinking back, i'm sure I would disagree with met romey about tax rates and his views on LGBT or i'm sure I know we're different than mine, but IT seems without looking at in with rose color glasses so comparatively benie given the the four years of trump so that kind of where I .

come down even now machine and obama, the the the differences seem quite drastic.

Yeah mind was interesting because palin, as his running mate, open the door to the sort of cartoonish stuff that we ve started to see on the republican side. Palin, trump, margery, Taylor Green, IT started going in that direction, which has made the party a bit of a joke. Aside from what you believe the tax rate would be, right? You can say taxes are too high, but jewish space lasers come on you know so but but I agree with you on machine also.

So go back to the political territory. Talk about what where in that special do you place yourself today um which is the label to think captures your political .

views progressive social democrat um which which again is a capitalist I own my own business, I pay the taxes, are legally required to pay and not have any more and you all all those things that's right place myself .

would you please out the left of juba? yes. Where is the L, C thing into that?

It's a good question.

What do you think about L, C. As a candidate? Do you think he eventually runs?

I think that if he doesn't run into some kind of scandal, and I don't mean scandal in the sense of some personal impropriety that, you know, but I mean some kind of major political problem, IT seems that he has the staying power to be in american elected politics for a long time. Whether he would even want to be president verses maybe going to the senator being governor, whatever the case. Maybe I have no idea what her ambitions are in that sense, but certainly, like policy aside, SHE has this combination of carma like ability to some, but also something about her personality that angers the people who don't like her in a way that only fuel her sort of presence, which I think applies to trump as well, that I do think that he has the potential to be to have significant stinking power.

american politics. And I know the future of political elections in politics in general, is people who are able to skilfully pissed off the other side by gale y. And prompted.

I think it's an aspect of IT. I think it's also understanding how to communicate policy ideas. trump. I have things I can praise trump about. If we want to get to that segment at some point, let me know when that is. But I do think that there are some things trump is very good at and this is why it's very hard for you to believe that ran desi entice has what IT takes to actually fight trump in a national primary. And um one of those things is trump has a even though he often says very strange things that if you transcribe them you go that what language is that that does make any sense whatever in the moment.

The way he relates to um adversaries on stage at sara is very good in that he is very much aware of how he is going to be seen by the audience and so that's why a lot of times it's more about doesn't matter that a word salad came out of his mouth, how he immediately responded and related to the person who very good so I think that knowing how to be good when clips are shared all the time, often out of context, is extraordinary ly important. Knowing how to use social media, which every election cycle that means something different, but understanding how to use social media, very important. Those things are absolutely so important.

And whether you're able to do a deep dive on the deficit, certainly useful. But I would say it's a bad thing. It's becoming less important in terms of figuring out who we want to represent us.

Was just lingering on the L C. And then maybe less stone berny Sanders on that. The word you place yourself in huddy, do the layout of the land the berny centers will see job an and do bad my instinct .

is and the the i'm going to answer IT. The thing that makes this tough is bernie says i'm he's a democratic socialist. He ran as a social democrat.

He didn't run on anything that was really socialism, right? So i'm going by the public facing platforms. You've been listening .

to him for many, many years and all all the way back to the tom hard show. And I think using the terms as you've been using them, yeah, he has I don't ever been a democratic socialist. I haven't heard him speak about socialism. I think i've heard him speak about social programs and the value of social programs throughout the history of the united states and there and how they're been beneficial.

My understanding is very similar years, although there may be stuff from the seventies where he really was talking .

in seven .

yeah and you and I even who went around we .

doing in the seven.

my sense would be biden is like center left. And then i'm to the left of that, but maybe just inside of where aoc and bernier very, very similar to burning. I mean, I identify with a lot of berne s ideas.

Maybe their implementation i'm more flexible on. I'll give you one example, medicare for all. One way of trying to get health care to everybody, which bernis very big on, is you take the current medicare program.

You just eliminate the age limit, make IT available to everybody, pay for through taxation. interesting. However, i'm open to other models.

If they get everybody health care that is good quality and affordable. Singapore has an interesting model. Germany has an interesting model. I am I am more agnostic about how we do IT than just saying let's expand medicare. Whether that puts me to the right of of berne, I don't I don't know, but i'm not like exactly right there on IT .

has to be medicare for all. Yeah, that's more of this, more just flexibility or is dogged. Sm, so I don't know if I put you to the left.

to the right and what do .

you think about the we can turn manipulation of the corruption in the dnc that perhaps tip the scales against bernie in the election? Do you think .

there was six or.

Both, I would say, in different the dynamics there were different with hello clan and that could the pressure from a hilly clinton and candidate is on, yeah what mean? What was there? Why didn't bernie win? I guess this one one would ask.

okay, I think there's a couple things here. First, the dnc, i'm not a democrats, just bar audience may not know i'm just a independent yeah I mostly vote for candidates that end up being democrats in local elections. Often there's no party designation. So okay, i'm obviously left. I'm not denying that, but the democratic party is as an institution, isn't never really .

been interesting to me. You're still a rebel. Resist belonged to the institution.

Exactly right, exactly right. And whether IT matters I don't know. Um the dnc and the R N cy really are organizations that to some degree exist to justify their own existence because if they were no longer necessary um they would go away. And so they have to assert their value and their importance.

They do this in a number of different ways, organizing the way that the dominy is chosen, the convention, uh, working with states on everything from redistricting to whatever of the case, maybe setting the order of primaries and having some involvement in how that's all going to happen and also coordinating behind the scenes. Uh, I guess they would describe IT as making sure our candidates don't get in each other other's ways. We might see IT and say they're picking the the winner.

There's nothing illegal about them being involved in picking the winner, but we might say it's not in people's interest. I think the twenty twenty primary was really interesting berny supporter myself. I started telling my audience after a couple primaries and even before, based on polling in different things, I see a real up hill battle here for burnley.

And it's really important. People in my audience are not the average, you know, union worker in michigan who is mostly working and raising a family and then goes to vote primary day and goes to vote on election day. If you spend a lot of time on edit in twitter, you're going to have an inflated sense of burner's popularity within the democratic party.

That was my sense. And to some degree, we saw that in certain states, I don't have the exact or primary order in results in front of me or or in my head. But the big turning point was south CarOlina.

South CarOlina was when joe biden, one and one handy, understood to be because of the larger african american population in south CarOlina. And right around that exact same time, I actually don't remember now whether IT was the day after or the day before some of the smaller democratic candidate, smaller in terms of support, got out and said, i'm endorsing ing. Joe biden.

And to some degree, of course, IT was all organized in time to help job. And there is no doubt about that. This is what the dnc does.

It's hard for me to be mad at the dnc because this is sort of like if we believe they were there to be unbiased arbiter and to stay as much on the side as possible, IT would make sense to be furious that they've gone against their stated kind of Mandate. But we know that the dnc negotiates in, is working behind the scenes and has a favourite. That favourite was Hillary in twenty sixteen, twenty, twenty.

So I share the frustration about the power that the dnc has. But for people who were saying they did something illegal or whatever else the case, maybe that that doesn't seem to be the case. But this is part of why, I mean, I would love thee not to be this duos of republicans and democrats. And there's probably four major changes that have to happen in order to make that a reality. But I share the frustration of a folks while recognizing that reddit was not accurately representing burn's level of popularity.

Still, I wish that the bias wasn't towards the what could be negative ly turn the deep state towards the biocon acy towards the momentum of the past, which I think job and kind of represents a versus new ideas, which is fine to say that berny said somehow represents new ideas because he is also an older gentlemen.

Well, it's a frame. It's a lot of framing. And the other aspect of that is on paper. Joe boyd's platform was arguably the most progressive of any democratic candidate who won the nomination. Now, of course, there were people who chAllenged the nominations who were to at joe binds left a lot of this is perspective and you know that's how you end up saying the guy was a couple years older than by and is actually the guy with the fresh perspective, which is interesting because I don't disagree with .

you yeah I in and also to say the perspective doesn't know as a line with the policies, you're right. And you know the actual policies of your biden are different than that. Maybe the perception of job in .

or what he ran on. I mean, just two examples I would give up during his campaign. He played up a little bit his interest in doing student loan forgiveness and something on cannabis.

I never bought IT. I told my audience. I think he's saying this stuff because this is the way the tide is, kind of the wind is blowing. And he's being advised to say this stuff, I know that he's going to do very much on either of these things. He did actually do some student long stuff, but that would be two examples, I think.

Okay, let's go to the something you eluded to, which is the process cause of a particular candidate. Well, what do you, as a critic of trump, what to you are to prose the strength of a Donald trump and which you are as biggest weaknesses.

the strength of trump? See how I can frame them in a way that is both accurate and and accurately assess is my feeling about IT .

and could be taken out the context most masters ly through the clipping process. Yes.

trumps strengths are mostly superficial. And in terms of presentation, trump was able to, I I call IT a grip. Some on the right say he's just so good at relating to different types of people.

Trump, as a rich guy from new york city, was able to convince people that he spent most of his life trying to be kept isolated from, that he had their best interest in mind that he knew why they weren't doing well in the twenty sixteen economy, and that he had solutions that he was going to bring forward. The truth is, he never really like those people. And as soon as they weren't useful to him for a brief period of time, he that that love affair with his followers stopped.

And then now it's back that he needs them. He didn't really understand the causes of the problems that those folks were experiencing, and his solutions were laughing ble right. Like jerrett was going to solve the israel palestinian conflict in year one.

He was going to replace obama care in two thousand, seven year, things that we're never going anywhere, anywhere um but what he did really well was he put up a united front of I know what is Ailing you. I know how to fix IT and I know how to fix IT, I guess because he's a business man and he's been above the fray of politics for so long, knowing how to use political donations to his advantage. He called that smart. I think that is greatest strength.

Why do you say that the, the, the the jarred plan for israel pain and the plan for health care to improve obama care? why? Why do you say this laugh ble?

Well, only someone I would include the north korea plan as well, which i'm glad to talk about. Only someone who doesn't know anything about the size and scope of these issues could so arrogant say that they could solve them in that way and on that timeframe. I'm all for optimism and and bringing a new face to thing.

Absolutely with, without a doubt, but you know, a wall with mexico that mexico will pay for at the end of my first term. I know there were people who believed IT because they would call into my show and say i'm voting for trump because of IT. But it's hard to believe that anybody serious would fall for that unless you were deliberately wanting to just believe whatever was being fed or you just hadn't ever thought about these issues before.

The health care plan, you know, in twenty seventeen they proposed one would have had to twenty four million or so people ending up without health care, didn't go anywhere where exit. So terrible. And then in August of twenty twenty, trumps said in in two weeks i'm gonna finally have my health care proposal.

It's twenty twenty three. We still never got IT you know, with all of these things when you think them through IT was just sort of arrogance. And I get the perspective of I want optimism, and I liked that optimism.

IT worked. I mean, fair. A lot of people thought and liked IT as someone who followed a lot of those those issues closely, they seemed, of course, like impossible promises .

with a double sort. So to push back a little bit, if you look at the things I have a little bit more knowledge about, which is the space of artificial intelligence. There is a company called deep mind, and the company called open a eye that were left out for a long time when they were talking about that y'll going to solve intelligence in our we've made especially deep mind in our most recently, open a eye with GPT.

They've made progress that mostly community would not have. Imagine the able to make everything from alphago between the world, uh, world go champion, just all the different steps and progress that can get into were surprised everybody and they are legitimately. Uh fearlessly pursuing uh the task of solving intelligence.

The other aspect, he gets a lot of criticism now, but another example is in our mosque in I can say a lot of things like space ex. So commercial space flight, he was left out for a long time that that's possible. Uh, same thing with autopilot in tesla autonomous vehicles.

His approach is harshly criticized by all the experts, and I still criticize to this day, deeply criticize. And I, as a person that I believe objectively, can look at the progress of autopilot as a semur onest vehicle system has been incredibly surprising. So the reason I mention that is sometimes he feels like you need the guy or the girl who makes those preposterous, ambitious statements.

Like we're going to solve health care this year. Like and then and then there's experts like yourself, there's looking, thinking, have you read anything about the history? israel? And is a good, is an example that do you know there's a history there.

Do you realize how complicated? How many people have tried? How many people have failed? How many millions of people hate each other in this, in this little place, in this, in this land? Like sometimes the expertise can really wait down, so sort to push back. Sometimes you have to have the almost be naive, ve and stupid and just rush in with an optimism in order actually make some progress.

I agree with you one hundred percent. I think it's interesting that all of the examples you gave of of successes are from the technology space politics, which not from politics, which mean, listen, I would love to be able to make headway on some of these issues more quickly.

Without a doubt, I do think at some point though, when IT comes down to voting and saying one of these people is going to be ostensibly in charge for four years through all of the departments and secretaries and choices that they make. We do want to apply some level of realism with the with the understanding that your examples are from the tax space and their good examples there. There is no question about IT.

One thing I add to this I recently read broadly hope the new book about north korea and it's really about an activist um who doesn't even really matter but the in the background of the book it's written much of what is written about happens during the trump era and when trump did the first and then the second um I guess you'd call them the summit with kim jung on and IT actually did seem like to some degree trumps we're gona handle this like I do a business deal approach to kim wrong on in some sense IT actually was logical because of kim john gen and the way that IT was so ego driven and they both as sort of authoritarian strongmen types to different degrees, wanted that there was actually a cornal where I actually thought, as I read IT, trump's initial idea wasn't crazy. The problem was he knew nothing about the back story of the relationship. He felt for all sorts of lies from came jungle and he made offers that didn't make any sense to make IT fell apart.

fine. But that's an example where I think the trump s personality was not actually at its base. The problem when I came to north korea.

well, there's other things of this nature that could go on where some people argue goes in the strength and prose. Although trump for china, for example, terrace in china, can you make the case? There are some positive outcomes of the way trump acted with china.

Really tough. And i'll give .

you couple .

of it's tough to make. So the china thing is really so, just very recently to win recording this, trump was on fox news interviewed by a guide named mark levin, and trump proposed a new ecology da conspiracy theory. Maybe I will strike you, or something different about china cove IT in tariff s and trump suggestion was that the tariff s cost china so much money.

China sent the U. S. So much money in tariff that they released, covered as punishment.

Now there's a couple problems with that. One, american companies pay the tariff s. Trump still doesn't seem to know this. Trump seems to believe that when he puts a tariff on chinese imports, someone in china is cutting a check to the united states. American companies buy the stuff from from china, and then american companies cut track to the united .

states for .

the terf prop doesn't seem to get that.

but I still has thing to the chinese.

You can make the argument that if there is a suitable alternative domestic year from a different country, that IT will reduce imports. But IT didn't happen. And we actually have reports now that the tariff on china cost about a quarter million american jobs.

The other problem with that idea is china created and released the virus in order to hurt you. But as of today, five point seven of the six point eight million deaths were in other countries. To a very indirect way. You're mostly killing people in other countries to hurt trump. Maybe there was a this is the sort of thing where when I think about how trump ed dealt with china is very scary because given another four years, who who knows what he might do if he still doesn't understand how tabs work?

The geopolitics Operates in complicated ways with carrots and sticks, and Henry is really quite A A lot about this. In some sense. The positive aspect here that downtrodden is willing to take big risks in in the game of geologic with a giant superpower that is china. And a lot of others are too afraid, too afraid to call them to come to the table and criticize.

I certainly think that's an argument that can be made. My question would be what tangible positive outcomes did IT lead to? And it's tough to identify any, but I think it's a great thing. I mean, listen, one of the things you're kind of getting out maybe indirectly, is that there's been this sense that politics has been done very similarly for a long time.

And even between democrats and republicans, still even with some policy differences, they're still the kind of feeling that it's disconnected folks in dc mostly dealing with issues that don't directly affect look, I get that. I'm with you on that. I think the question is to whether trumps bluster was positive rather than extraordinary ily humiliating in many ways. I just come down on IT was an absolute total humiliation, but I understand that you can recognize trump doesn't know a lot of stuff, but his attitude was a refreshing in some way that a reasonable position for someone to take. I disagree with IT, but I understand that.

but it's trying and feeling Better than not trying.

This goes well beyond politics. You know, when great sky is waited about this, Michael Jordan has waited. And I mean, this is, yeah, is, is IT Better to have tried and failed.

That is IT Better to have loved and lost than never to have. I don't know. I mean, listen, we live through four years of trump.

We know what that four year term was like. And it's very hard for me to say that the things he tried were were overwhelmingly reasonable. But I get the point you're trying to make and I appreciate IT. And if we don't do any of IT, where do we end up? Sure, we know where we ended up with with trump and he was pretty barrasso.

ah okay, let's linger on some more strength. We did starting new words. We didn't say something to that.

Yeah that's it's interesting. There's a few different approaches to dealing with that. Um first, it's really important to remember that the counter point to that from the folks who like to say that was that Hillary clinton on was going to start three wars.

Sometimes they say four wars. Sometimes they say five wars, okay um the geopolitical situation during the four years that trump was in office, I don't know that they obviously lent themselves to wars that trump just barely was able to keep us out of. I think the russia thing is interesting because now it's very popular to go back and say me know the reason putin didn't do the ukraine thing when trump er right and to somehow give trump credit for that.

There's a counterpoint to IT, which is putin under trump, particularly if trump got four more years, would have been able to maybe consolidate power in other ways because of his relationship with trump. T i'm not coming down on one side or the other. It's not my area of expertise, but it's not the open shut slam down that you know trump like to say is putin didn't invade because he knew I would crush on IT.

okay. So it's not obvious to me that there were imminently wars that would have started during that time. That being said, um you know for all the criticism of obama during crimea, trump seemed to just kind of forget about that after all the criticism and I am not actually going to a do anything about that and so there are foreign policy a criticisms that that could be made but IT is true. No new wars were started under trump and that I like that I don't like wars.

What do you think about his handling of covered? Can you say what are the process cause of his handling of covered?

The kind for him is he'd be president right now if he had handled IT differently. I think it's abundantly clear um early on and there's now a lot of really good reporting about the conversations he was having with Jerry questioner and others. He became convinced either because of things he was being told or because he decided this is the way it's going to be.

This is gonna away. fine. It's in china. okay? It's in china, in italy, okay? We have fifteen cases, but I will soon be zero will be opened by easter of twenty twenty. None of IT happened if he had handled that in the following way.

And i've said this to rogan, and i've said this to patch by David, and they tend to all see my side of this if trumpet said, listen, we don't know how bad this is gonna be, but I care too much about the american people to take a shot. So it's not gonna be two weeks. It's gonna be a little bit.

But I need your help. We're going to bring everybody together. I don't care if you your democrator republican, we're going to have mega masks and you could have kept fifty cents on the dollar to pay off stormy or who at right? But IT would have been.

I think he wins real election because the perception was in reality, is a version of that. The perception was that he was way too cavalry about IT early on, uh, people died who didn't need to die. And I think that I was arguably the one area where he could have all but guaranteed that he was going to get himself elected to push back.

I mean, because you can sort of masks and kind of uh.

solution to cove IT. I didn't mention like downs.

but i'm glad to talk about people like there are several solutions to pandemic yeah speaking. And one of them as vaccine. And so you didn't mention that he fast track the development he his administration fast track the development of the vaccine, which surprising he didn't really take much credit for.

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

What to me IT seems like you could make the case with the trump hand gestures that his decisions for fast tracking in the development of vaccines saved tens of millions of lives you can make. He could, in the champion way.

make that case so couple different things. I know you don't necessarily follow trump s rallies as closely as I do and i'm jealous of you for that. But um he did tell the vaccine stuff hugely for a while until his audience turned against him and then he had to draw the line where he was going.

I made the vaccines, which none of you have to take, by the way, freedom. You don't have to take him but it's fantastic and nobody else could have done IT but don't worry, nobody is is going to make you take the vaccine and he actually got booed at a couple of his own rallies when talking about the vaccines. But let's back up a little bit fast tracking.

My understanding of what he did is he did what any president in his situation would do, and what many world leaders elsewhere that as well which is he agreed to a free purchase supply of vaccine in order to provide money to pharmacology companies to scale up the manufacturing which is absolutely fine um but he wants one of the stories he tells us IT usually takes twelve years to develop a vaccine. We did IT in my nine months, thanks to me decades of M. R.

N. A technology being developed, created the platform in which you can make a particular vaccine in nine months. Didn't have anything to do with trump. He did refund and say we will buy huge supply. And that provided liquidity to the pharmaceutical companies.

But you deleted control to uh to people, to experts that enable that kind of uh, fast tracking vaccines, right?

He was very eager for the F. D. A to approve IT because he saw that there would be a political .

benefit didn't get in the way.

I guess he didn't get in the way. fair. I think now we're on the same. He did not get in the way of vaccines being developed.

which is good. Presidents and bureaucracies have a way of getting in the way.

I don't disagree with that. I'm not aware of really any governments that got in the way I mean, IT seemed given the global situation, everybody european countries were prepare chasing vaccine. Uh, african countries were who were going to be later to receive vaccines, were partnering with the european countries that IT prepare chased.

But the most interesting thing about all of this is trump did play up the vaccines for a long time until his, his cloud didn't want to hear about IT anymore, which was crazy. IT was sort of like he became a victim of the monster he created. To some degree.

one of the effects of all this that makes you truly sad is, uh, this division over the vaccines has created distrust and science. yes. And also who makes me sad is the leaders are in three thousand being one of the representatives of that community, I would say, completely dropped .

the ball.

They, they spoke with arrogance. They spoke down to people. They spoke away that they are great item, does not speak, which is they spoke with certainty without humility, like they have all the wisdom, and ever all of us are too, don't understand that, but they're going to be the parents that tells us executive to do versus speaking to the message of the problem, the deep core of the problem being the uncertainty.

We don't know what to do. The the terrifying thing about the panna icc, we don't know. And you think think about IT as it's happening, as we have to make decisions, you have to take risks, but maybe you have to overreact in order to protect the populous. But it's in the face of uncertainty. They have to do that, uh, not powered, empowered by science somehow and the deep expertise that something I can fall he claims to have so like the I just am really trouble by um yeah the distrust and science, the result of from that that you have to blame the leaders in to the degree leaders take responsibility. I think anything thought you was the scientific leader behind um the american response to the pandemic and I think he failed as a good as a scientist, as a representation .

of science. Unless I don't know if interested is the right word. But the kind of the the fouche review is less interesting to me in terms of what comes next than the first part you mention, which is the distrust in science.

And sometimes i'll get voice mails or emails from people on audience to say that I have had to back pedal on certain things related to this. And one of the things I tried to do from the beginning was not speak in certain terms when we really didn't have complete information. So there was this period where hydrox y chlor.

Quin was first sort of mentioned as a possible treatment propac's or or you know proactive treatment for covered or active treatment for covered, along with a bunch of other stuff. There was, i've remick in, there was vitamin. Indeed, there were all sorts of different things.

And I tried to be careful to say, right now, we don't have rigorous science that tells us that some of these things work IT doesn't mean that won't come in the future. At which point, if there was something as cheapest hydroxyl lorica in that treated, covered effectively, unbelievable, fantastic. It's not there's no way IT ever will be determined.

We don't have that information right now. So it's not supervise right now to go and start taking this stuff we eventually learned, like with vitamin d. Having an appropriate vitamin d level does seem to be based on what I most recently read, generally protective and uh, a good thing when IT comes to infections of different great.

okay. So that one we we figured out one of the really difficult things is that the quote, truth about the vaccines did change. And the original, again, this is all, I don't pretend to be an expert, but just someone who synthesizing the medical data, writing about IT, originally the first vaccine related to the wild type strain, did seem to be very effective, not only at preventing death and serious illness, but also transmission.

There were people then saying IT doesn't prevent transmission over time. As the variants came forward, the vaccine became less effective at that. At that point, I started telling my audience something different because as far as I was concerned, the reality on the ground had changed in my mind. That's how science works. It's not backpedalling, its we're adJusting our beliefs to what is taking place in the real world.

But to be fair, uh, the scientists, may of who are my friends, biologist, biologist, they have way more humidity than people. I can't even thought he was speaking about this, or the CEO fizz who are speaking about this. This is the fundamental problem here is the way science work is has the way science works, is there is usually a lot more humility and a lot more transparency about what we know, what we don't know.

And people can antithetic thought I would be Better efficient for the world if he speaks with more certainty. But because of the political division that formed around that, that certainty resulted became completely conor productive, that people didn't trust anything about the vaccine, didn't trust any institutions there were, uh, that contained the experts that actually knew what they were doing, and basically didn't trust anything that was coming out of the mouths of scientists. Some of some large percent of the population.

So that made you completely in effective in um at scale as a society trying to respond to a terrible pandemic. And that's where I put a lot of blame on leaders. So political leaders and scientific leaders are the ones that didn't inspire us.

They all get together and respond that that should be the case for the pandemic. That should be the case in the time of war. All this kind stuff.

I I generally agree with you and for me is really about shared blame. And there were a lot of different reasons why that the early communication wasn't good. Uh part of IT was mean for me.

I prefer accuracy rather than um over confidence. I would prefer listen, we don't really know right now whether masks do x or why. What we do know is the supplies really limited of this type of mask.

We're going to try to keep them for the front line workers. I love that. That's the way I want to be communicated to a call was made to do IT differently, which was to say the mass stone actually help.

But the real reason is they want to keep them for health care workers. And then later, the masks are what's going to with you, one hundred percent. I think the other layer to IT is you can ignore the political situation at the time.

If trump had one real election and the vaccine distribution had taken place while trump was president, rather than biden, my belief is that the same number of democrats would have gotten vaccinated, but way more republicans would have as well, because they were following not science, but political leaders. And when I was by in dc, instead of trump, a lot of those people said, I don't trust the vaccine, but wait, it's crumps vaccine I thought, yeah, but something about the way by and distributing IT. So I do think you can't ignore that political layer. I agree with you. The communication was a disaster.

We ask you about job iden, what are the strength of witnesses of .

job weaknesses, I think, are some of the things you ve identified. He is not seen as um high energy. He is um not the same joe biden that debated paul ryan in twenty twelve and ran circles around him and just an incredible debate performance ah he is not inspiring in the way that someone like a barack obama was two people coming up and starting to get interested in politics.

I think a lot of those uh are fair criticisms. I think on policy he's not interested in a lot of the things that Younger voters are interested in. I mentioned canvas reform um I mentioned student loans.

So so I think that that's a deficit for biden. I think the upside to biden is when IT comes to foreign policy, diplomacy, high level negotiations, knowing how to engage with allies in a productive way. It's tough to find someone with with more experience than by.

I know that there are counterpoints to what i'm saying and those include that was the old biden. The new biden doesn't have IT that includes that's just a sign of rot because he's been around for so long. Nobody should be around that long in public fit.

Perfectly reasonable criticisms to talk about, but I do see that as one of his strength. And he also is good at knowing when he can work with republicans and when he can. And not wasting more time than is sort of expected for postering reasons. And I think that that's a good thing.

Do you think is actually there so in a daily day Operation, government, given his company capabilities, do you think is so uh, an active and practicing executive?

I don't know that I can say that it's because of what may be going on cognitively, but my sense from the people I talk to is that he's very much involved in the highest level, geopolitical and big domestic economic stuff, but that a lot of the smaller issues that presidents might or might not be plugged into, that he's not plugged into the the details of a lot of the the lower level stuff.

I mean, you could probably apply the same exact criticism even more sotos down true administration in terms of being a practicing active executive whose paying attention like for example, like a vana a food and is somebody um who loves the role of the executive, has a huge amount meetings, has constantly tracking information about agriculture and all the different subsystems of government. Stalin funy enough was also extremely good at this. So certain people just love the job of being an executive and i'm i'm not sure if that trumped um and i'm not sure if job ad in this current state has the cognitive capability too.

It's a it's a good question. I came to hong winds and other one, by the way, you know, the videos of him a examining a pottery factory where they make plates and making very specific comments about how the plates should be made. I think that in that case, there's a lot of propaganda value to IT with trump.

Uh, I think you're probably right. You know, he did get involved in the manual of things. I mean, once he pulled out a weather map and with a sharpie drew a different hurricane path that was more politically convenient to him that's pretty micro, you know, saying the weather channel and he went to porter ro.

And he gave out paper tows after a hurry ane now he was shooting them like free throws, which didn't look very good. So he'll get involved in the micro when its advantages, you know what I mean, but I do agree with you that he wants to just kind of make IT. So build the wall, I don't know, just build IT, figure IT out, get IT done.

Quite a bathing break hours. And just for the sake of complete ness, I should mention the subway at what biden has done. I was also what trump has done, but not as active. And IT has like this master list of all the accomplishments. It's I recommend people look at IT because it's it's kind of rigorous and interesting with links.

A list of all the things he's done, just list some of them restored daily press briefings, cancelled the keystone pipeline, reversed from muslim ban, required mask of federal property, rejoins the parent climate agreement, extend student law payment freeze, extend eviction freeze historic stimulus bill. As when you mentioned hds funny for border wall and so on and so forth. data.

Uh, border is strengthening of data joins the worlds health organization in the timing of this is of course is important yeah several historically to in his bills, which of course you can critize support a raise the minimum wage for federal contractors and federal employees for fifteen dollars. Um there's a lot there's a lot IT makes you realize um we will both trumped buying. There's put a small details that matter yeah like that matter on people's lives like actual little policies prompted a lot of though, as far as I heard for the military but not big stuff but small stuff yeah.

I'd be curious what you're thinking of. I mean, I know one of the big things under trump as we're going to get trans people out of the military.

that's not what you think .

and he can you trump l areas with these stories that he tells and one of the story, and you get to know them if if you follow him at all, he tells the story. When I came into office, the generals came to me and they said, sir, the covers are bear. We have no bullets.

And so I rebuilt the military. You know, the covers were bare when obama left IT, and I was just terrible. But I rebuilt IT and the generals.

I've got the best generals. They said, so it's incredible what you able to do you look into IT and it's like, yeah, that's not really true. Like IT is true that there are arms ents that just like on a schedule, do you get replaced and that's part of the military industrial complex.

But there's nothing like special trump really did. But these stories become they take on like a life of their own. And it's interesting to sometimes try to dig down and figure out like, was there any policy connected to that? Is that just a .

story do you think is possible to have a good conversation to to them down trump and jobs in a in a podcast context or in a debate context?

absolutely. Yeah, you're thing like, could I with either them? Oh, one hundred percent.

yeah. sure. yeah. What can you dig into that a little more?

Well, I mean, I don't know what I think there is maybe something implicit in in your question, but this .

deeper about the nature politics and politicians, yes.

I think with either of them, I mean the political differences wouldn't be an impediment ate to having a good conversation with either of them. Um I think one of the things that's really toughed in my experience when talking to elected officials is they could be super interesting about a hundred different topics but handlers decide or try to get you to talk about something you don't really care about and something really narrow, which doesn't bring out your best nor their best and that's a frustration. But I think that given an unstructured through our conversation, I think that would be interesting to talk to what I mean, listen with biden, aside from his view on cannabis, whatever his background and the incredible and imaginable family tragedy that he had in his first wife and multiple kids dying. And I mean, IT, it's just incredible, you know and and with trump, I think also you get have an interesting conversation .

that human beings with a live story. Yes, there that and there are some of the most successful humans who have ever lived to have a rose to the highest office in interesting, complex ways. yes.

Mean, one of the things i'm troubled by, maybe you can speak to us why we're so negative towards presidential candidate and presidents. Why is just to go through the street storm no matter who they are? Yes, they are like hated, like all the conspiring theory and just the dynamics of how we talk about them is vicious. If if you just look at replies even broke obama on twitter, it's like what is going on here White because we look at other leaders and other spaces that we're generally positive about IT.

Yeah, there's a couple different things. There's this dynamic which is really unfortunate, which is you ask people, do you approve of the job a particular president is doing? And very often, if at any point while they were in office they did something you don't like, people will say I don't approve.

And so by its nature, what that means is just like the longer you're in office, the lower your approval ratings going to be. And very often, that's the way IT works. I mean, there's major events like nine, eleven Spike, George w. Bush's approval to a incredible level than came back down with the iraq war.

But there's this unfortunate thing that when people are just asked, you think bid's doing a good job if four months ago, by did something on health care that somebody didn't like, even if you like most of IT, a lot of people from that point forward will say I don't approve. They might still go forum because they like him Better than the alternative, whatever. It's just the dynamic of politics.

And I agree it's it's very have to be that way. I don't think IT has to be that way. But to unwind IT, so many things would have to change.

I think our election system is part of why politics is the way that is, where you have two choices and its first past the post, and we have this electoral college, so that depending on which state you vote in, the kind of meaning and significance of your vote is different. If you vote in monta, the republican candidate is going to win. And that changes the the dynamics.

I think that's part of IT. I think that at a personal level, i've experienced this in my life a lot. We've become, and by we, I mean people in the united states some degree who talk about this stuff, we've become uncomfortable when there is disagreement and IT bleeds over into.

Now we can have a Normal interpersonal relationship anymore. I'm from argentina, and in argentina it's really common even in my family there are incredibly heated political debates at the start, the middle end of some kind of gathering. But then everybody just goes back to like, okay, we disagree on some things, but that's okay and we can now go and you know finish cooking the bee for whatever is they were doing.

And I experiences the civil, even with people who come up to me on the street, and they go. Just earlier today, a guy came up to me and he said, R, F, K, all the way. Baby, talking about bobbi Kennedy junior.

And I just can't, you know, you are right, know, but see what happens. And then there was another moment where the guy ended up standing next to me for maybe longer than he thought. And I could tell this guys getting so awkward because IT was an other, and he thought that would just be on the flying he'd begun.

But now we're standing next waiting for our sandwich. Es, it's like, no big deal, you know it's oh okay. You like Bobby Kennedy junior, I don't plan to offer.

It's fine, you know and that's like a social cultural thing. I think there's lots of other countries i've spent time in, uh, italy. I have relatives in israel. We're like shouting at each other is sort of like Normal and then you just go back and finish the me that sounds like shouting and of very animated what seemed like big disagreements and then everybody's cool. Yeah, I wish IT we're more Normal.

So maybe the mechanism of going from shouting to being cool again needs to improve, because maybe we can solve the shouting each other. So maybe we need to somehow figure out the escalation, like making up. I've had a few recent fight with friends, I, dad, no, no, but political style, emotionally drenched stuff.

And IT. IT was interesting to go to the full process and then make up at the end. But IT is a process, and IT was a process that required being in person, talking through IT.

And I was stressed the all, the whole thing, maybe because most of our interactions are online, we don't get a chance to do that in person. Making up again, I don't know, but you think is a feature or a bug of the system. They were so.

We just hate each well, the powerful you mentioned the online part, I think it's you mentioned IT earlier perfectly, which is you take contentious political issues. You create a platform that rewards controversy and disagreement and limits the number of characters you can use to express yourself. You kind of a throw IT into a baking dish and you know, mixed entire thing up.

It's complete and total chaos. And one of the things that, you know, i've talked before about all the angry emails and threats and stuff that I get, i'm acutely aware that if I had in person conversations with most of these people, the conversations would basically like, oh, we have different views about how to solve some of the problems were facing. We probably agree about what the problem is, and we probably share many values.

But on these particular for issues, we may have very different views, but that's okay online. That's not the case. And IT leads to you know the the ss mess that we get ourselves. And but I think that it's a feature of a lot of the systems that are being used to disseminate information.

Again, the million or on that, do you regret some of the mccurry and the snark he used on twitter and even in your show, that kind of fees, that division?

I don't regret IT in the sense that it's a calculated part or tool that I use in addition to figuring out out a simplify, complicated concepts and choosing stories that I think you're unrepresented and it's all part of like the package of what i'm doing. I recognize that my show is not the audio visual version of a peer reviewed, you know, randomized, controlled LED trial about a abortion, views on abortion or whatever the case like. I'm very much aware of that, but I don't regret including IT as a as a tool that i've used to build the community in some total that I built over the last more than ten years. I guess I could .

ask about the different decor ies you think I show my. So, you know, the dynamic you handle down from junior and maybe kandis own is the more appropriate comparison. Are you OK having that dance for the next few years between you and kanda oz? And just kind of the mockery, the division that supported that process in taking part in that.

you know, i'm fine with that in the sense of personally, I tolerate IT well until IT crosses the line and people pull my family in and that's .

the part family. If I said that in the i'm glad .

to mix IT up to has blocked for years until this incident SHE unblocked me just to tweet about what I tweet about, I don't know the back story of that. Genuinely, I have no idea. So I don't have a sense that she's super interested in engaging with me on that.

But all of these people, I mean, Candy soans is welcome on my show any time. Don n juniors, welcome on my show anytime. It's been a decade since I had bench o on.

He's welcome at any time. I'm glad to have these conversations, and I think it's an important thing. And also I wish that everybody was willing to have the conversations in good faith rather than as performance, even really performance are rather than being simply performative for an audience that .

you have in turn, your motivations do see do you vote the effects of something you spoke of, spoke about offline, like the youtube of algorithm? Do you are you driven by the number of views your videos get? Or you driven by something else?

So in my world, I guess I would say the number of views that any platform generates is a metric that I can choose how to interpret IT. I can choose to interpret IT as i've created content that's interesting to people or i've created a content that's really angering people and that's why they're showing up. They don't actually like IT.

It's because they're angry, whatever is the yy. But IT is true that there are algorithmic changes that can take place there. Something happened in early jane that affected us on youtube or their periods on tiktok, where you can tell we're doing all the same things. Something has happened and then you never usually figure out what IT is.

So for me, is sort of just like a general tool to see what is the level of interest in what i'm doing and are the customers so out of wack, which with what I would expect that I should look into whether something deeper is happening, has there been some change to to an algorithm or whatever the case? Maybe I had a debate once with someone who accused me of using click bait to generate views. And we had a really interesting conversation where I said, tell me really what you mean by that is your argument that i'm using titles that don't actually represent what's in the video? No, what's in the title is in the video.

I go, okay. So it's not that the title is dishonest. Are you same saying i'm deliberately picking titles that will garner a larger audience and they said, yeah, that's kind of what I mean and I said, isn't that kind of what we're all doing? The alternative would be choosing titles to generate a smaller audience, which seems like a real kind of waste of time. So i'm trying to navigate and play the game in a way that's comfortable, but use the metrics s more as a tool than as something to obsess over.

Nevertheless, the metrics are what they are and that they are able to, uh, affect your psyche. It's very difficult. Or which is why I have a chronic extension that hides all the views and all that on youtube.

For me, it's difficult not to let that affect how you think about ideas. So maybe your extensive exploration of a particular topic like health care generate very few views. It's difficult feed to still care about health care.

There is some aspect of the human mind that starts are being affected by those use. And I think that's a really dangerous thing. Mostly it's it's probably beneficial because IT probably makes you a Better presenter if if you do care about a topic like you become more charismatic more, you learn in a Jimmy mr.

Beest way how to present the ideas Better. H, but IT also can affect which topics you chose to cover, what you choose to think about those topics in the audience, capture those topics. And that's a really scary effect. I am really worried about my old mind and that so I run from that aggressively.

One of the things that I included in my overall approaches, I don't think about any one clip. I think about an entire show or a week of shows or a month of shows. And so it's less about does anyone clip do well.

My view going in is i'm going to do stuff that won't do that well, but I think it's really important to do. And I wanted make a part of my show. And so when I did a clip with ten ideas for reducing gun violence, I know that that's not gna get five hundred thousand or a million views.

I know it's just not going to. And the first day i'll get twelve thousand and i'll go. I don't care. That's that's fine there.

There is a group of people in my audience that values s this stuff, and I want to keep doing this stuff. I'll end up surprise sometime, and two weeks later has one hundred and fifty thousand views because IT started being shared or great. But I don't go into IT thinking.

These all need to be home runs by that metric. I always go in saying I want to put out a diversity of content, including stuff that is less titillation stalactites, but is important to do. It's more researched at sara. And so that's the way I try to resist exactly what you're talking about.

And they have to probably know yourself like for me metrics. I just like numbers too much and for me, matters do affect me. This is why I don't pay all like I can't um I would love to hire somebody in the team who cares because we currently have an folks with all of us just don't care because he probably is good to care enough to kind of just do good summers and as kind of stuff to pay attention al.

But to me personally, I just find inner peace and focus if I don't think about the numbers at all because I find myself, I just remember a long time ago when I started to park, as I think that I failed, if I didn't do well, like if I I didn't celebrate the person well enough, I didn't do a good job enough of conversation. And that's not necessarily at all what that means. It's it's hard not .

to this tough stuff. I mean, yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. And part of IT is I mean, IT starts in my you have a little bit of a different situation than me because you're doing long form conversations with people and the prep is a little bit different. One of the things in my space because i'm reacting mostly to whats going on in the news and then also picking topics to dive into a little bit more deeply, is I A very little control over the new cycle.

And there is A A metal metric or a macro o metric that affects me that will quite a rupp of my audience and then take seventy five percent of the away, which is the seasonality of election cycles yeah and the first few election cycles is very tough because I go, it's it's october on my at this right, working after twenty millions subscribers by the next. These numbers are unbelievable. And then is january fifth, the inauguration ation over the debate is is about the debt ceiling and nothing's going on.

And I go, nobody's watching my content. I must have, I must have forgotten to uploads like something must be. It's completely beyond my control. So I just and I think part of what your saying is I try to focus on the things I can control and understand those that I really have no control over whatsoever, and try not to worry .

about them and try to do the things that make you happy. At the end of the day, you might not F, K, the guy you met. What do you think about, uh, some of the other candidates at the jobs and in the democratic party? R, F, K, junior, what what do you think of him? Was candidate?

I've met him. We once had dinner, and we have a number of friends in common, which is what makes this a little more awwad. But I think his campaign is basically sort of like a chaos candidacy to raise awareness and maybe raise money either for his bookers antivari ine or organization children's defense fund.

I believe it's called I think there's some reporting that Steve ban and really like the idea of him running as a democrats again to just generate chaos. I don't find IT super interesting. I don't find IT worthy of that much discussion.

Uh, smart guy. Nice sky. Has been doing anti vaccine work that I don't find particularly inspiring.

It's not just anti covet vaccine is in that .

space LG before the code. Yeah, I don't find IT super interesting.

Well, he also rote the book, the real that name the book.

Did he write that I did? I don't know that. I'm not sure about that. I'm aware of that book. I didn't .

know he wrote IT. I think a bit has been a has been on my reading list. Get a i've been trying to get a good baLance reading list about a the covet pandemic to understand what the hell happened. And any time I start to try to go into that place is just i'm exhausted by IT. What's interesting .

to me that you wouldn't wait longer before delivery into those books to have maybe a more clear .

hindsight ability. This is a pretty good time. You don't think so. Like this is, uh, IT depends on on your goals. If you are thinking of IT is a historical event, yes, you should probably wait longer.

But if you're talking about like understanding what is broken about our system, that we responded so poorly that there was so much division, what is broken about our political system, that he didn't unite us, divided us, who's to blame? There's probably a lot of different nature, but I feel like the more you learn about this, the the body can understand. I read, I just let me put now at like five biography already, maybe more just IT helps to really understand the people involved.

The organisations evolved. I don't know everything from the scientists to the political leaders. I felt like the blog post and the tweet didn't quite that.

Now, what one of the things I read a ton, I don't read any like modern political book, so I don't read the memories of elected officials. I don't read. And I just feel like I get enough of IT in my job.

So my reading list is just other things. It's history, it's narrative, nonfiction, economics eeta. And that's my bias because i'm so overloaded with a lot of the stuff you're talking about. I haven't read any of obama's books. I didn't read john bolton s book or I don't read any of that stuff, although i'm sure there there is value to be clean from IT.

What about the other candidate that according to the suburb, as you mentioned, you've criticised a little bit marian Williamson. Do you think what are the person cause of her as a candidate?

This is another area where many in my audience really are angry with me. Yeah, I don't find her candida sy super interesting. I'll tell you the person, the kind as I see them.

I do think that we have elected officials in the U. S, particularly presidents, from a really narrow range of backgrounds. So it's lawyers and sometimes business people, very, very often lawyers. I would I think we would benefit from a much greater diversity of backgrounds.

And I once said and that would include, uh, people from education, people from the science world, people with backgrounds maybe running on profits at at a now american Williams and did, I guess at one point runs some kind of small non profit and some in my audience, that that credential alone would make me fall head over heels in love with the idea of american candidacy i've interviewed for her it's just not for me, is the way I like to say IT. It's the the background of the woooo type stuff is a bit off putting to me. I understand that someone with literal, Christian, bible beliefs that also I I don't like, maybe i'm more willing to accept as most of our presidents, of course, I have had those views because they're otherwise more qualified.

But some of the things that he says just strike me as and I just don't know, i'll give you an example. When he was on with Russell brand, he said there's no such thing as clinical depression. IT just means someone in a clinic told you you have depression.

I don't believe that to be the case. I think we have an understanding these two types of depression. There's like a genetic previous position.

depression. There's like a acute something's happening in my life. Temporary depression. Okay, when SHE was asked about IT recently, SHE said, I didn't mean that I was just trying to impress Russell brand.

I don't know if i'm more bothered by the things you first said or by the fact that you wanted to impress rossland, but it's just like it's just really not for me and I agree with her on we need to take the climate more seriously. We need to expand access to help. I I am with that stuff now.

I I want to say one of the thing about this. Anybody who wants to run should run. I am not suggesting there should be an uncontested primary for joe. I absolutely think .

you be contested.

What I mean by contested is so there's two parts to what we mean by contested. Will the dnc organize debates will get there in a second. But should anybody who's on the left get out of the way, because joe bae in his president and he's uniting for real election? Absolutely not.

The question about should there be debates? I would like there to be debates. The dnc pretty clearly isn't going to organize them.

I think if you did them, you would have to say at what polling level do you qualify? And I don't know exactly where you put that number, but I think that would be a great thing to put joe bye on a stage with. If you can get what six percent eight person. I am not really sure with the number would be. I'm totally all for that.

Why is a set of candidates, at least for my perspective, so weak? Do you do you have any shame?

There's a lot of different answers to this one aspect to this, which I think is more of a social cultural thing, which i've recently read about to some degree, is the job actually turns off the people who would be best at IT because of what you need to do to become president. And IT includes all but completely abandoning your existing data day life job, which you may depend on and family to some degree.

Um it's horribly a negative as we already talked about. And at the end of all of that, you either lose and then have to rebuild and maybe you're not in a position to be able to do that or you win. And then now you've got four years of being one of the most hated people no matter how good a job you do.

So I think by its nature, IT turns off a lot of people that would otherwise be good. Um I also think that there's a lot of posters from within the parties about, well, you might be good, but it's not your time me yet so you should wait and then let's talk about maybe a senate seat here and there. So it's it's like a company essentially and they are figuring out where they want to place people. Uh, I think all of these things make IT. So we end up with candidates most people aren't .

super throw with. So is difficult for somebody who's Young or an outsider to a to quickly become a candidate.

I think that that's true. And I think also in a lot of ways it's just not I mean, would you want to be present? No I mean I can't because I wasn't born in the U S. Was easy for me to say .

but um if everyone says no then were a good to people that we have.

No, I understand. So I I would .

love to help somehow. sure. And I feel like there's not even a mechanism for helping to accept to the democratic to the voting process. But i'm just annoyed how little technology there is in the whole process, how little innovation there is in the whole process. All of this.

the sad thing is this is written about a lot, which is there's this thing called political hab ism. And I think there's a good chance that some of the people in my audience, or political hobbie's, in the sense that they follow this stuff as entertainment to some degree. And i've written a lot about how i've read a lot and talked a lot about how, okay, we vote every two years or every four years in our local elections at sara.

And then we think about politics all the time. A neil postman wrote about this in his book, amusing ourselves to death, but what are you actually going to do about the kids starving in this country and the nuclear build up in that country? OK? If everybody refocused their attention on their immediate communities, and that could mean any number that could mean the town or city you live in or IT might mean um an athletic club, whatever. If everybody this time they spent on political hobby ism, they moved somewhere else, which might put me out of a job that's okay, willing to lose my job because I think I would be so beneficial, then our our communities would just be that much Better because you can actually affect change in a much more tangible way locally, whether it's of the people talk about part holes, but other things as well.

Yeah and I wish our system was more amenable to that kind of contribution. Hopefully that the digital space that would be I let me ask you about on the republic lan sign around distances as what do you think of him as a kind money against a downdraft?

I think in a couple of weeks before our our discussion today, his campaign, which hasn't even started, has sort of started to explode. And this was something that I started thinking about in september, october. He really doesn't seem ready for prime time in the sense that just being confronted and confronted, not even the right, were just being asked about h some topics he didn't really seem to want to talk about.

He responded in such a sort of disproportion IT unhinged way. During his recent trip to asia, he was asked about, why aren't you or why are you responding? But in this weird way to trumps attacks on you, and he went into this weird bobble head thing with a weird smile, and something came out that didn't make any sense, and he sort of got mad at the reporter.

And I was just like, if you can't handle that, you can be on a debate stage with Donald trump. And again, for all my criticisms of trump, the guy gets you on a debate stage. He can make you look pretty silly. He was recently asked about his role at guantanamo oo bay when he was an officer. And I forget which branch of the armed forces, and he just sort of attacked the journalist asking the question, and IT IT just looked very bad.

And there are increasingly big republic lan donors who are not fans of trump and were sort of hoping to put their eggs in the room descendest basket, who are saying, this guy just doesn't happy to take, I don't think can do IT. So I don't know if the santis will be able to get away once you're polling twenty something like he is and you have even announced its very attractive and he probably to some degrees thinking if I wait twenty, twenty, I might not have this opportunity again. But trumps polling fifty two, fifty three, which means even if the santis gets all of the current non trust vote, he has to figure out how to take something more for from trump. I just don't know how he does IT.

First of all, the explosion aspect, that's that's part of the process. Isn't you kind of implode a bunch of a bunch of times and then rebuild yourself, then rebuild? And because the new cycle of kind of forgets.

it's possible. The problem is if the first debate is in August so that only a few months away and the decisions going, we have to be made pretty soon. And unless he can get a new momentum going, I just don't know how he gets what he needs in order to really have a shot.

So would anyone else running is very .

tough right now. I mean, there are other people on running. There's this guy, the vacation a swami who's running nicki Haley is running her campaign basically dead on arrival um trump actually does Better in polls. The more people when it's just him in scientist, that's the best scenario for the scientist.

It's not great for the scientist but it's it's uh certainly Better um but I think the difficulty is this is a question for republicans to figure out the people who rightly recognized in two thousand sixteen that this guy is not good for their party um still believe this guy is not good for their party but many of them recognize that most of the voters are still behind him. You can always say its early. His polling doesn't really mean anything.

Anything could happen. Something major would have to happen for trump to lose that lead if he got more, if he was arrested two more times and had more indictments. And IT just became like, this guy can even campaign because he so busy going from court to court. Maybe that would make a difference. It's really tough to imagine you .

said that there are three categories of people who vote republican and that the top introduced the fourth one. Well, can you go through the four category? sure.

So you've got like your pro business, low tax republicans. These are mostly people like MIT romney. Mitt romney has a bit of the social conservatism as well as morning, and that's there.

But mitt romney primarily, particularly as in northeast sort of republican. And I know uta bt governor master hudes, he is like a low tax, pro business type guy. You've got your libertarian type republicans who are primarily about freedom and liberty.

Often they are actually more socially liberal where they go. I don't care about game marriage. I don't care so much about abortion.

Um and that over left a little bit with the tea party movement in twenty ten, although tea party did have a religious component but sort like the libertarian freedom minded folks and then the religious conservatives. People that support candidate like josh holy or uh ted cruz is set where their big thing are social issues. Often they actually want a Christianity being civil government. They don't want separation of church and state.

Those are traditionally the three republican groups the one that trump introduced was people who just didn't really pay attention to politics but either followed celebrity or had grievances that they didn't yet have escape code for um and we're sort of right leaning culturally even though they didn't attribute that to republicanism and trump was able to bring them into politics often for the first time as voters. They could be part of any of those three groups if they get more into politics or kind of be the same thing. But they're more kind of like cult of personality. I'm here for trumpet types.

Did you have to doing anything about the culture wars and the identity politics, all that kind of stuff?

yeah. I mean, so in twenty sixteen, when trump mobilize them, those weren't really issues the way they are now. So I think at the at that time, IT certainly was not a factor.

What was the mobilizing issue? I know IT was a just antihero.

ary in two thousand six. There he did a good time on antihero. But a lot of IT was identifying real economic problems, wage depression, lack of jobs in parts of the country, you know, ohio and inDiana.

Trump t rightly identified that we have an issue here. We don't have enough entrepreneur ship is a um but there was also a lot of scapegoating that was, you know china and people coming through the U. S.

Mexico border were popular scape goats for a lot of those problems. This gets this kind of the popular m populum is a rhetoric and populism, as rhetoric doesn't necessarily come with particular policies. You can be a populist, a user of populist rhetoric, and propose solutions that would be more aligned with bernie or tucker carson.

Populists will often identify the plate of the middle class. The difference would be, bernie will say, we've got to put some restrictions on how much, uh, billionaire can make, and we've got ta reinvest in these social programs. Talker will say, B, L, M, taking your house and uh, a Brown person for mexico taking your job are what we need to deal with. So the the populous redit can lend, lend itself to very different policy. And trump use that very effectively in twenty sixteen.

Why do you think Hillary clinton was hated as intense issue was by certain percent of the population? IT feels like that's the first election ight witness. But there's a lot of hate.

Maybe I member, I don't remember obama. I don't remember the degree of hate. There was a conspiracy theory that he was important in this country. But I don't remember hate towards obama .

record death threats under obama more than .

any previous president .

to tower yeah do you mean more hate between voters .

or between voters, between voters? But like that's, I guess, what I was speaking to. But that hate was directed as um the narrative, the threat that connected all of that. I am twice sixteen was hilary clin.

Few different things um and i'm not ranking these these are just all things that come to mind one is Hillary clinton had been around in the political space for a long time from her time as first lady through a senator, secretary of state at tara so I think that there was enough time for different groups to develop an antipathy towards her for different reasons so time um secondly, trump s branding of her as crooked was very effective where there were so many people demanding that should be imprisoned.

If you ask them what is the crime they don't know, but you should definitely be locked up. That became a very big thing. The email story, as IT were, and James call me doing a second public event about that investigation, even though there wasn't any actual news about IT just doing.

I can event about IT at the last minute, I think, hurt her and also generated some hate. And I don't find Hillary clinton to be particularly likable. Although I voted for her, I thought he was the Better candidate. And I think that there are others who also didn't find her particularly likable, that those are a lot of impediments to becoming president.

Was trying to understand why there's some make spiracle theory about clinton in general, clinton and hilary clinton. And I maybe i'm not researched well enough of the why .

of IT ah the way actually except .

of the conspiracy theories sort of the the conspiracy theories that theyve killed a lot of people, this current stuff.

it's hard for me to speak to them because i'm aware that they exist but i'm not an expert in them because they seem so obviously baseless to the degree that i've researched them a little bit. And then I move on and you know, it's been years since i've looked at this stuff. I know there's the seth rich one and there's the clinton body count one. I think there's one connected to estein, if I recall correctly. There's also to these different ones um without speaking any of them specifically because i'm not the expert on clinton conspiracies uh, IT does seem as though this stuff for so long has generated an audience I mean, I remember in the supermarket when bill clinton was president at the check out seeing the tabloids and there were stuff about pilly birthday, alien and baby and know all IT seems like it's been tilting to people for a very long time .

well another question from read speaking alliance. I would be curious ous to hear David views on conspiracies and conspiracy theories. The extent to which real conspiracies happen in White conspiracies that have little evidence behind, then managed to be so compelling to people regardless. Also, please bring up millions and U. A, P.

where?

Where do we start the conspiracy? what? So what are in general as a person who are thinks about politics, uh ths about this world, like where do conspiracy theory feel for you?

I think there have been conspiracies and by conspiracies are using a colloquy al definition which is basically individuals working together to um in a clandestine way uh impact or affect some kind of event or phenomenon uh very, very broadly. I mean certainly that those things have happened um the to pick to jump around to some of the things that we're in there.

I think the reason that conspiracy theory are so compelling is that it's really tough for a lot of people to accept. There are random events not predictable, specifically at a static tic level, we might be able to predict them, but specifically unpredictable bad events. In many ways.

I could be the victim of one, or you could, or my family could. That's really scary to a lot of people, understandably so. And for some people, it's less scary and more soothing and away to say there aren't really random events like this.

Somebody planned IT. And if we had just known who planned IT, IT just could have been stopped because we would have known exactly when. That's just A A psychological level easier to accept for people.

And I get that to some degree because nothing is it's not the most exciting thing that everything can just be going fine and something absolutely horrible happens and kills. Who know some number of people are. So I think that's the the biggest attractor to a lot of these conspiracy theory. IT doesn't apply all of them.

But yeah, there's still kind a basic understanding of human nature where people some people are greedy and what power and are corrupted by power.

So there is a kind of these compelling narges that stick that I don't know the vaccine is is an opportunity for a powerful billionaire to implant chips into you so you can control you further, right? IT doesn't seem what do I, anna say? It's like for some reason that doesn't seem as crazy as you should because .

you think .

like maybe holleywood contribute there. But you think, yeah, you could imagine an evil person, a personal wants more control, more power. Um and is also the same time able to convince themselves ls history shows that they actually have the best interest of the populist in mind that they're trying to do good for the world so they do evil while trying to do good.

You can kind of imagine IT just like, why not and do you listen to people in power authorities? They can't look and sound shady, you know yeah the transparency, especially older ones. I think Younger folks are Better being like real and transparent and like revealing their flaws and the basic humanity.

But people there are a little bit older in the positions of power. They're more polish. They're more like there is music. They're presenting a narrative where the truth is hidden in the shadows.

So I don't think there's anything wrong with suspecting maybe a public figure isn't giving me the full story. Yeah totally reasonable thing to question. Um I don't think does anything wrong with expLoring a lot of these different things.

I think the problem becomes, and I know you've talked about this in so many different ways with other guests, the problem becomes when we lose a shared understanding of how we would assess whether any of these things are true. And then both alleged evidence and an absence of evidence both become supportive of the conspiracy theory. Because if there is bad evidence, you manipulated and say it's good evidence.

If there is no evidence, you say the evidence was obviously hidden by the people who Carried out the thing or whatever. So unless we can have a shared understanding of how we would determine what's true, these are common conversations, often between atheists and religious spokes. How can we detect, like is is my faith in something or my desire for something to be true? A good way to evaluate whether this is true. They're really similar questions.

Well, let me ask you about trump on that front about the election, twenty twenty election in maybe the Better questions about january six. Do you think january .

six was a big deal?

I do how big of a deal .

compared to what .

a little war?

I think IT was less of a big deal in the civil war over. no. I mean, so well, that is a very interesting thing though, right? Because we have not only the the event that's that's clever, actually. It's not only the event, but it's what LED up to IT and what has happened since and did IT change what is considered on the table that citizens can, should or might do if they disagree with the result of an election.

So I think that there are further region consequences than just was the six hour period on january six, a bigger, smaller deal in the civil war and there's so much wrapped up into IT um many conspiracy theories flowed from january six as well. Uh sixty minutes recently featured a guy named rax who was targeted by some on the right um claiming that he was an instigator or an agent of the FBI or something along those lines um there were people claiming that no real was like no true scotsman sort of thing like trump supporters wouldn't write IT so by definition IT must have been antia uh, please let him in or police. You know, all these different things I think IT was a big deal in a lot of ways because IT completely made us have to go back to the top to say, okay, what are the parameters of valid discussion and activism? M, in the united states.

But what aspect of the jane six was bad for you?

Well, I mean, if you are .

taking IT from a big phil's ophth political perspective, so presumably the number of people hurt and the number of people who died is not the only metro to consider here.

absolutely. I think the some total of what IT means about how the united states Operates is what's most concerning. And i'll kind of just like fleshed out a little bit.

So summer of twenty, twenty, trumps already saying they're going to cheap. Now the polling is close, but IT shows that bindings in a good position. People aren't happy with trump.

Any reasonable person would look and say it's gonna close, but by and certainly wouldn't be a crazy thing if bin one. Trump already saying they're going going to cheat with male ballots or they are going to cheat with early voting. Are you going to cheat with machines or we should do only in person or whatever off the case maybe we have the election.

Um we knew in certain states how the vote count was going to go. Some states stop counting at ten P M. Some states count all of the mill and stuff up front and don't.

Everything was completely predictable at two way. And trump comes out and says, I want okay, but but where are you getting that, sir? As he claims, people always refer to him.

Where are you getting that? And with that statement immediately, we see that there is a large portion of this country that either is unable or unwilling to say, wait a second. The polling all said this was a real possibility.

The counting schedules are all being in here to all but trump, one that doesn't make any sense. That doesn't happen. IT builds, people are donating millions to trump for supposed audit, its which nobody can define, and lawsuits which go nowhere.

And IT builds and builds and builds, and we have a total separation from a factual reality. There is no reason to think by december first, right, give three weeks to look through some of the stuff by december first. There is no reasonable case to be made that trump actually won.

But IT doesn't end there. IT goes into maybe we can just like send different electrons, even though by in one arizona, let's just like send what I don't remember how many electors IT is in airless, just like send republican electors to say we ve vote for trump. But that's that's not democracy.

That's not the way the system works. Let's make sure we're ready, ready for what exactly. And then IT builds to maybe mike pants can just like prevent biden from being president or maybe we can just interfere in the other way. And then IT gets to lets break into the capital. It's the height of saying we no longer support ourselves attached to what is a verifiable factual reality. And when we no longer do that, we're also willing to commit crimes, property crimes, violent crimes, OK to different degrees in order to try to have something other than democracy IT wouldn't be democracy if any of those things that happen.

Yeah I think it's not the height of IT. I think there is still a case we made that that did not leave the realm of protest versus um a violation of the principles of democracy. So to me, the high of what could happen in january six is, if down trump is much Better executive, he could take control the military.

If I had succeeded and not even succeeded, the attempt would have been more, 啊， empowered, I understand. So lake, to the way not to bring up hitler every other word, which is something your support, and also told me not to do. Okay, it's kind of an important figure is interesting to study that moment in history because they revealed so much about human nature and that all of us are capable of good and evil.

But thank you to your supreme itor or editor for your contribution to the conversation. I will keep bringing up hit learn in the third ride, and I will keep bringing up stalin. There's so much to learn from that. Anyway, the an effective practice of the utalian could roll the tanks out into the city streets to an established order and in so doing pauses the process of democracy as supposed a few protesters bringing in to a questionably, uh, protected building.

I agree that what you're saying would be worse. I don't want to use IT to minimize what the protesters were intent on doing. They failed.

Fortunately to you, the intention was there.

Well, the intention was trump should remain president and that's the intention. And to what lengths they would have been willing to go if by the evening, early evening, that they you know, we're sort of like forced out, I don't know.

I agree with you that trump trying to use the military h would absolutely be where, you know, there's these reports that he tried to seize voting machines, which is kind of funny because it's like once you get the machine at maroo go, what do you do with IT? exactly? I don't know. There's a like a comedic element to trump sitting around with voting machines, but he did float trying to do some other things. I don't believe there is reporting that he actually tried to use the military.

I wanted to what degree this open the door to further things like this with other other candidates on now even in the democratic party also, do you think the'd be more more questioning of the election results?

There has been already. It's very clearly the playbook Carry lake lost SHE ran for governor in arizon twenty twenty two SHE lost. What I mean by that is her opponents received more votes, like very clear what that means that he lost.

He insists to this day that SHE one, to this day he did the same grip trump about donate. We've got a case we won in the case you didn't win, they just set a great day like doesn't doesn't what you know lies upon griffe upon lies so they did IT then um IT is I I it's extraordinary saddening. But IT seems like this is now going to be part of the playbook. Do you think .

people on the left to start doing?

I don't have reason to believe that that is going to happen, but i'm not going to say I never could. Absolutely tainted. Could people on the left could start using IT as a tactic? Right now? There is not a sign that that's going to happen, but it's certainly good.

My action is, and i'm not a betting man, but I would bet money if joe biden loses in november twenty twenty four, he will say I lost. He will call the winner. He will concede the, and he will leave the White house in orderly fashion.

You don't think there will be claims of a hack election that the ability to hack elections is becoming a more more effective with the developments on the artificial intelligence side.

The difficulty is you're basically saying, will something happen without me knowing anything about the election? Imagine there really was evidence of a hacked election, then I would want those claims to be made. But the way elections i've gone in the past, I don't expect that to claim that would be made. No.

speaking of evidence of things that were claimed, what do you think about the hunter biden laptop? Or as you twist the laptop from her, the laptop from hell? T M right. Uh, to a degree, was this, uh, laptop story important? And to a degree, not at .

this point. I have said many times, if there is any reason to believe that hand by joe biden, naomi an, jill biden, Hillary, obama dog m, if there's any evidence any of them committed a crime, they should be investigated. They should be charged.

And they should be tried, period. The hunter biden laptop thing has been floating around for so long and we still have zero actual uh, pieces of evidence of any crime particularly involving joe biden. There's the claim from some that references to the big guy are about joe biden getting ten percent for some melicent.

It's been years they've been saying this. They've ve not been able to bring forward any evidence on IT. So my assessment of the hundred biden laptop is IT seems to mostly be a story about nude images released without someone's consent, which is illegal in most states and violates twitter's own policies.

That the main story to me. Beyond that, I don't know how many people have a copy of this hard drive at this point. Rudy had a talker.

Do you remember when talker this? This is, this is unbelievable. Talker said that he mailed himself, uh, a copy, A U.

S, B. stick. And I got lost in the mail.

You you have the motherlode proving the criminality of joe hunter biden. And I don't. You just dropped that off with a stamp.

And I got lost in the male. You don't have a back up copy. You don't. So i'm ready for the evidence to come forward. One hundred by is nothing to do with joba, an administration, but as a person who if you committed a crime, charge of investigate and whatever. But it's it's getting it's almost getting sitter's the degree to which they're talking about the hunter biden laptop.

What do you think about the the social media aspect of this that the story gets answered? And what do you think about censorship in general on social media that that story during an important time in the electoral process, gets .

answered? So as a matter of principal, I think we have to define what we mean by censorship. But i'm against censorship short of, uh, illegal content, I guess, is the way I would put IT. I do respect the company's right to have terms of service to enforce them as long as they're not illegal. If twitter were to say we don't publish content from jewish people okay, now we've got a problem on our hands. But um what what is dubious to me is the claim that had people been able to see hundred bidens genitals they would have voted for trump which I know it's like David your your making light of and but at the end of the day, what exactly is the claim that if you had known more about hunter biden, I guess allegedly hiring prostitutes and having a drug problem in seeing pictures, you wouldn't have voted for joe biden I mean, I know me as a voter. I don't feel .

that I think it's less about the counter, the story and about the actions of a social media company to control what what you see, what you don't see. So you can imagine a social media company like facebook, twitter making the same kind of decision about more impactful story than a few dig picks on a laptop.

Well, I think if that happened then my view might be different um right but I do my general view though on the hundred by in story is had the articles not contained those images that were illegal in many states and violated twitter's policies, I would say published absolutely. I don't think I would have had an impact, but I would be in favor of IT being of the links being allowed .

one hundred percent okay um you know talker think my talking fired from fox um you are a media person that works independently yes for talker was immediate person who does work independently right? Yeah what do you think about that particular situation? Is that representative of some big shift is happening in mainstream media.

What would the shift be?

Basically mainstream media freaking out because the funding is getting less and less and less and less. And this could give more power to individual commentators basically talk across and just starting a podcast. So in the youtube channel.

I think that's what you should do. I think that the most profitable path, rather than maybe going to work for news max or whatever the case may be, but the firing fundamentally, was not a politically oriented firing that suggests x news is changing its tune politically in any way. There's no evidence of that whatsoever.

Um tuck carlson basically became a legal problem for fox news. There's really four points to IT. One is the seven hundred eighty seven and a half million dollars settlement with the minion partially was because of the um claims that went out on tucker carlsson program.

So to some degree tuckers program was a prominent uh node of the problematic claims that became the subject of the osu. That's number one. Number two, smart matic, which is another voting machine company, still has a similarly sized lawsuit against fox news based on the exact same sorts of claims IT may cost fox news again.

So this is now two problems that talkers a big contributor to. Number three, former tucker staffer has brought a lawsuit, and I don't remember the exact claims, but I know that there are claims of different types of discrimination. IT seems like IT has legs, and that may be a third payout related to tucker carlson.

And based on the sixty minutes piece from a few weeks ago, ray APP saying talker ruined his life by fulminating conspiracies about him around january six that's ripe for another lawsuit so to me, talk firing was a risk mitigation strategy uh of many that will be employed as as these laws' its come forward. There is no evidence that is because fox didn't like. And what we mean by that, who are we talking about? Rule murdoch doesn't like or the I don't know, but I don't have any reason to believe it's because tucker's ideas we're no longer welcome on fox.

Certainly the audience like them is not about something about the reading, about just the the legal costs.

Fox is interesting. The ratings question is interesting because fox, unlike most other or every other cable news channel, they negotiate a fee from every cable subscriber. If you have fox news as a channel, even if you don't watch IT, fox gets a little bit of money. They are dramatically less dependent on ad revenue than CNN N M S N B C. So the ratings question is an interesting one, but foxes position is different on that.

Another question from reddit, both sides are the same in quotes, is a mean notion that has spread foreign wide in american political discourse on the internet.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this notion? And why do you think IT is so popular? Now, this red comment also says the podcast like russia brand and joe rogan or the legendary comic George carlin are examples of big proponent of this notion, all of which I kind of disagree with. Russell brand, joe roan, George caron.

clain, both side are the the same.

And use that, you know, all politicians are cooked IT in this kind of thing. I don't know if there I don't know that show maybe George carlin anyway, leave that aside ah to what degree do you think I do agree with this notion that both sizes the same, left and right, the crooked crop politicians they do what politicians .

I don't agree that is the I think the different factions that like to say that um for different reasons there are some individuals who want to present themselves as kind of being of above the partisan politics and so it's A I call IT in lighten centrism um do you .

mean that possible?

No I mean negatives. It's a bit of a pejorative. The idea that I am not going to fall for being a democrat or republican, I can see that these are just two sides of the same coin, equally bad lying to okay.

So that's one is sort of like it's popular at dinner parties in some circles to go. But with all these politicians, you know left and right, so that's one side of IT. The other side of IT is that it's often used when when your side has really stepped in IT, it's a popular way to acknowledge that your side has done something wrong.

But while framing IT is it's not uniquely wrong and it's not worse than what anybody else does and I find that it's one of the lamest and most kind of crying duced things to hear because of the what comes next. And usually what comes next is not a good, accurate criticism of something that took place and the discussion of how to solve a real problem that we have. I find that a conversation stifle IT also is used to kind of suppress voter turnout, not actively.

It's not that the people who say that go rounding, don't vote. But the idea, of course, is the more people that believe that IT doesn't really make a difference who you vote for, it's going to suppress voter turnout. And I want voter turn out to be as high as possible, not as low as possible. So I also dislike IT for that reason.

So IT is possible to say that one side is worse than the other in in modern current political climate.

Listen, i'm a person on the left. I'm not pretending to come here as as a, not knowing that my view is biased because i'm a person of the left. We have spent period tel you something different.

I think in twenty, twenty three, some total. The influence of the american right wing, if the american right wing were to get everything IT wants IT would be a horrifying reality. If the left where to get everything IT wants, we'd have to figure out a few things, including exactly how we pay for certain programs.

But they're mostly noble goals. And I believe that they are more supportive of an individual self, determining what they want to do in life and how they want to live, and is more in line with the idea of freedom and liberty, then what the right is currently proposing. That's my view.

And of course, people will disagree with me, and they know we get to freedom of liberty the way that the right wants to do IT. okay. Well.

we can have that conversation. So I think you've implied in your site IT was kind of focused on policy. IT felt like that I was focused on policy. There's other stuff that people worry about 是 particularly with the left， uh, what a may be termed the walk mind vires.

Where have I heard who's using that term a lot? Now i'm trying .

to think how that where comes up. But the cultural aspect is that, you know, if you give a lot of power to people on the left that as you give us an example, there would be a lot of kind of censorship as suppression of speech, and a kind of dividing up of a society of who's allowed to. Basically, a real location resource is not based on merit, but based on some kind of high ethical connotation of what is right. And only a very small percent of the population is to decide what is, what is fair, what is right, which is little. We already have .

a small portion of the population society there OK.

But I I I don't know how many different ways I can say kind of a negative characterization of. A A focus on the left when we are now comparing IT just as to play devils advocate. So there is that something that you worry about? So saying policies aside a voguish yes, how big of a promise that .

this is a great conversation. So two sides of IT OK, we have new polling that seems to suggest so called voguish is kind of more popular in the united states than an anti vocs m. And I tell you what I mean by that, this is the less interesting part will go to the more interesting parts.

people. Sometimes what people mean by voguish is an overreaction to a perceived injustice that goes beyond what would be fairly equitable. There was this really interesting poll in IT.

Ask questions like, for example, do you believe society has gone too far, not far enough, or just about the right amount in dealing with issues affecting the trans community? The vote position, which is society hasn't gone far enough, was far more popular than we've gone too far. Now the the wing media artist st, we've gone way too far.

This is at a control, and there are lots of other similar answers. It's not a huge margin. A lot of these are like fifty eight to forty to sixty to forty.

It's not like ninety attend, but by a small margin. The so called woe perspective of we actually haven't yet done enough to fix some of these issues is a little bit more popular. So if we went back to the scientist, this is part of why I think the santis is anti woke agenda may just be a political misstep.

That's really interesting result. I wonder how the questions are framed, but IT is still interesting. Nevertheless, no matter what to hear that people are, majority of people in amErica woke in in that in the negative sense of the word.

the poll didn't use the term work tile thing. The term has have been perverted four years ago when .

the .

term was started to be used. I would have said, oh yeah, woke just means, like, I have become aware of problems that are bigger than any one person can fix for themselves that relate to the system. I think that we might disagree on which problems fall into that category. But like I was kind of benie, I think now IT just means like outrageously left wing, maybe even with socialist marxist undertones, it's becoming adjuration .

that are also like bullies.

like people sensors yeah.

But people that go around calling others racist sometimes, often times without eny proof of or justification. fair. But that was that's that's a few folks on twitter you're saying like the polling starting to show that like, no, there's still a most americans still care about these issues. And one of want to improve, want to make progress.

I think that's the case. And they want to do IT in a genuine way that doesn't suppress or oppress anybody. But now let me get to, like, to what degree do I think that actual, when IT goes too far, is a problem? IT absolutely exists.

If we can find instances of where this exists. On the left, i've been told many times that as a jewish genti ian immigrant to the united states, I actually don't qualify as oppressed enough, because jews are privileged now in the us. And my family had just enough money to leave argent.

So there is this kind of like oppression olympics thing where i've been told you don't get to comment, for example, like a topic in the latino community hours. Are you familiar with latten? x? okay.

In spanish, there's a an analogous movement where words, by their nature, sort of like have agenda. So so like the word for friend is omega, but if it's a woman, you would say omega. So right from there you can tell the gender that we're talking about.

And if it's a mixed group, you say omega, it's the male with an ass. But IT could include both. There is a movement now which wants to do away with that and put the letter E N, it's a new word OK.

It's a gender neutral word. I I guess, totally knew. I don't like that and I don't know anyone. No one in my family uses IT.

And I think it's kind of like a strange in position from someone kind of with with a solution inserts of a problem. I ve been told you moved to the U. S.

Long ago and like your english is good and like you'd look wide. And so like you don't get to way in on that. That I think is an example, if I understand correctly of the type of of thing you're talking about.

I'm kind of being bullied. I'm fine. I'm surviving by and being bullied over IT and disqualified and saying you don't get to speak on this issue. All of those example, all of that stuff I am completely against and I tell people on the left, we're actually hurting our own movement with this stuff. I just don't think it's as big as some others believe.

You don't think it's an extansion al threat to our civilization in the west?

no. I mean, look, we've got a biden administration I see by in the center left those who see biden as extreme far left. This stuff has played almost no role whatsoever in the first two plus years of his administration with .

these people to see him far left as far left.

There's people on the right who, I mean, trump says, bines a markus socialist, communist.

I ever heard that because I don't think that would stick a very much.

And that every rally. Which I tell us that you don't watch these things.

It's like deeply resource. You are in trump. I can only imagine how good your .

trump pression that thing you take trends because trends just to talk about IT a little bit, we haven't dealt with that much. The trans issue has become huge, I believe, because the right is obsessed with IT. The right is very much not concerned with gay man anymore.

IT used to be that gay men is, oh, we have to stop gen from adopting and unnatural and pedophiles. Now it's trans, it's drag shows, its Sarah, I do think that there is a fair question to say how do we deal with trans women in a very small short list of sports that's real OK. My view though is I go okay, we have all issues.

We have issues related to gender and sexual orientation. We have issues related to trans within that. We have specifically sports.

You can eliminate from that a trans men. Nobody's worried right about women, a biological women who are transmit. And then when you say it's only in certain sports that IT matters, hey, i'm right there. I think it's a complicated question. I don't know how we deal that. I would ask leagues that have experiences with this already in whatever the problem I have is pretending that the the uh vanguard of left wing politics right now is trying to force trans women into sports. It's it's just not the big issue that the right is reacting as if you were but .

perhaps because of the right it's forcing the left uh to to continue discussing IT I mean I I feel like IT even the institutions, even the universities IT feels like these ideas of diversity, inclusion and equity are taking some of the air out of the room of what the university should also care about, which is merit and IT feels like we prioritization is going a little to fight the other way.

Meaning, uh, prioritising this kind of a more of concept, diversity is moving away, is giving power to people that don't care about merit and IT just one of bully people with a big stick that says racism or sexism or anti diversity and is a kind of suffocates the people that care about merit, about meritocrat, about inspiring people for all kinds back on to succeed. And it's just you can observe that i'm sure that happens in all kinds of institutions. And the concern, I think the people that are concerned about workers m are concerned about at scale what impact that have in a society when there's so much conversation about racism and a oppression. Not to talk about mary, like who is the actual good person in the room? Yes, person little generally.

That's a concern to me. The degree to which is happening at different institutions, I think is worthy of exploration. I know people who work in academia that are getting out of academia because they don't like the environment on their campuses for exactly the reason you're think so IT exists. There is no question about IT. I also think that the idea of a perfect marios racy is maybe not necessarily the goal in the sense that um when you talk about perfect mario racy, someone wrote a book about this who I interviewed about a year and a half ago and whose name escapes me there are problems with a perfect marital cracked. I think what we want to do is generate roughly equal um um um opportunity for people understanding that there is going to be an outcome on a gradient or rebel curve, allowing people, generally speaking, to determine the path that they wanna take and giving them, if it's possible, the ability to uh uh pursue that without suppressing limit. I mean, this is like relatively uncontroversial stuff among, I would argue, ninety five percent of the left with the cave ots of what you're talking about, which I agree exist IT would .

be nice to know the actual data. Sometimes people blow stuff out of proportion. What is it's hard. It's hard to measure how much self censorship happens on university campuses.

That's true. I think also, it's sort of like the the pit bull bites stories thing, where when a pit bull bites a person, it's more likely to be reported on because IT fits a certain narrative and there are rights wing publications that are very interested in making the sea as if IT is an epidemic. I'm the first to say IT is happening to a degree. I don't know the degree that is happening to I know a lot of people in academia, only a couple of them say that it's an issue.

Would they say IT though? If they believe that.

I think they would say that to me, these are just personal contacts. It's not like i'm going .

to go blaming to push back. I kind of agree with you, but the same time most I mean, i'm deeply connected, an act D M of huge number of colleagues. Most people self sensor by not thinking about IT at all. They're like school.

That's deeper. whatever.

I'm just going to focus on the thing I love doing, which is the work. And they don't think about they basically remove themselves from politics and social issues and they just want to say i'm gonna my engineering and going to do my mathematics. 是 the problem .

with that is it's kind of you can go anywhere further to figure that out。 It's sort of like there's this funny clip or Jordan Peterson says even atheists are actually religious. They just don't know IT.

And it's like it's hard to test that. You know, I don't know. okay. I mean, I don't I don't, but it's it's a fair point. I mean, there maybe some people, if IT has become so toxic for some people, they may have represented wait down into their subconscious.

But I don't know how you would know that. But you you know symptoms of IT because on certain people speak up kind of lightly. And then nineteen year old, twenty year old of response and is outraged the fact that the administration listens to that nineteen and twenty years old and then reprimands whoever spoke up a little bit.

That's a really dangerous sign to me and I don't really care about this like so I am more with you, I don't think is a big issue. But then I noticed IT. I wonder with a minute, with this kind of environment, allow a Young known chinese y to bear on with this environment, allow like I don't know like what ten you was designed for, which is to have controversial thinkers. And that kind of weird controversial things is but really people that chAllenge things that should .

be chAllenged yeah I I sympathy without significantly, I always try to look at specific examples here. And sometimes I look at the people, us, i'll ask for them and people will send me five. And one of them is a legit Bonnie ed of what we're talking about.

And four kind of like there was a complaint and IT was investigated, but the teachers ten year was never in jeopardy. And yes, I don't know that I chock this up to a big woke event. What do you think that kind of apparatus s of the four year degree in college is going to look like in twenty years?

Oh, that I mean, were like day by day. That seems to be changing with GPT all if you've got a chance interaction .

to absolutely my entire shows I was written by.

I mean, there's that's partially a joke. IT is only because IT stopped .

looking at the internet one twenty twenty one. If I was current, I could completely just tune IT out. No, i'm kid, but it's a fascinating tool.

And a is changing the nature of how we are do homework assignments, changing the nature how we learn, how we look up new information, how we explore information, how we care about things interested in. I think I I don't think we'll have value for university degree in twenty years the way we do now. I just think IT changes everything.

I think language models, google search has already in wikipedia has already transformed outside our civilization. But is there still a value for basic education? I don't I think that starts to dissipate uh with with check GPT. So I don't I don't know. Um I I really I really don't think there's a university the way we think of university in twenty twenty three years.

I mean, I have a personal interest in IT in that my daughter is ten months old and i'm doing the five twenty nine account. I'm going through the motions as if but I also recognize, you know, if he went to the schools I went to just with the rate of tuition increase, you're talking two hundred K A year by the time she's eighteen. And what happens with wages relative to that? This is like separate from the technological thing.

And in my mind, i'm thinking, is this going to continue being the right path? What I would love to see is so many people that I interact with just by virtue of what I do, have no foundation in critical thinking of python, logy philosophy, media literacy. And if there were some way to make that, the core of some basic education that everybody's receiving, which goes beyond, you know, ChatGPT, can do so many things, but I ve not yet seen good examples of how I can teach you to think. Maybe you have a different view on how ChatGPT can teach a user to think, but those skills seem to be so lacking. And so many of the people I interact with, if there is any positive change to come from a changing dynamic with higher education, I wish IT would be to go in that direction.

When no chat, P. T is actually much Better helping me think that any educator, even books that have encounter, because it's very good at presenting the full picture, even Better than a lot of wikipedia ticks on questions like the device sleep from a lab, a coin from lab. This is presents you all the different hypotheses, the amount of evidence available to it's like, it's like a full, calm, objective picture of IT. There's no partner ship is like a really nice list of things that available.

But I guess what I mean is, does that tell you how, as a thinking human, you should evaluate the strength of each of the paragraphs IT presents to you can literally you can ask you to do.

oh, okay, no is actually a fun. It's fun to ask chat, pity that question because you get good answers. And so you basically, uh have a kind of sync, rather like A A deep, intimate, like great podcasts, yle conversation with an A I system every single day for as many hours as you want, as especially as that improves as and as the interfaces by which you communicate the thing improves.

So yeah I think I think IT will do exactly that, which is teach you how to think because you will upload the memory effects and equations and whatever else uh, school teaches you. You'll offload that to A I and instead you'll be using your human mind, which is uh, what IT for now is uniquely good at, which is asking good questions. Thinking, uh, through the complexities of issues when there are multiple perspectives on IT of that. Well.

then I stand corrected. Maybe then I don't know what college is gonna in twenty years wall.

but you were sort of commenting I see to the the financial aspect of IT.

Like why does even make sense of this? Yeah, I am figured about the transformer of effects of A I and what IT starts to ask, what is the what is even education? right? What are you suppose? What is the purpose of education? So one is to give you a kind of a background knowledge on a bunch of different topics, but the others that discover the thing you're truly passionate about and the thing you're really good at such that you can make money and you can contribute to society and have a filling life yeah and .

also learning to interact with other people with that relationships are built, socializing and so many .

other things as well. But is that, you know, that is the big value of university. And maybe should we call something else?

Can you get that for less than two hundred eight years?

Ah no, it's third kind of social club.

And you know one of the things I think about also is people who are well connected. I mean, is always been this isn't new, right? But if you're well connected and you have a sort of drive towards entrepreneurship and doing your own thing and you're not pursuing a field that is very licensing dependent like medicine or law, um getting started four years earlier with some internships can be a privilege in some cases.

But again, that that path is available to the people that would likely do well regardless of whether they went to college. And so it's a very privileged, self selected group. Anyway.

another question for edict. Ask David to explain why american style libertarianism is an unserious philosophy.

I don't know what they mean by american style libertarianism. I've talked before about these kind of utopia, an libertarians, where are you know, we have we don't have police. You just kind of like hire for profit company if you want protection. And if there's a conflict between two of these private security companies, then I don't know .

you figured out somehow.

So like, I M so if I don't know what the question means by that american style libertarianism. But general, my problems with libertarianism, as IT is often presented come from the work of sociology as well as human psychology, which is the reality that once you get a group that's bigger than one hundred and fifty people, you really have to start centralizing some decisions unless you're gonna subdivide the one fifty endlessly into two seventy five that now no longer of contact. But then that's not really one society.

Now it's i've not seen good evidence, and I read a fair bit about this, that once you get beyond one fifty, you can keep all decisions decentralized. And once you say some things need to be centralized, then it's a matter of how you do IT. And it's going to be some version of government that conflicts with aspects of libertarianism.

Well, IT could be companies, right? IT could be IT could be more market driven, which is the idea of an action that you're not you don't give any centralized entity of monopoly over violence, you know. And then if you think that the markets are efficient at delivering, especially in the twenty first century and beyond, where a market could have perfect information about people.

So what one of the issues is you can manipur markets because that there's not perfect information. But now in the digital age, we can we can be higher ban with participants in the market. So if you've choosing between different security companies, are you choosing between different providers, different services, you can do so more efficient and more effectively and in the digital space. So you can kind of imagine IT, but we haven't successful ly done IT uh, with our governments.

Yeah and I think there's a practical once you get beyond one fifty, you also start specializing um IT. Just as a matter of fact, you don't have everybody isn't growing their own food. Some people grow the food and other people do other things. And you come across a lot of the problems that started uh, at the agricultural revolution and whether you say that it's a company that solving IT or a government, the problems are going to be very similar. And i've not read anything that, to my satisfaction, explains how you deal with that.

Well, there is underlying principles of libertinism, which is putting priority at the freedom of the individual right. And that's a compelling notion. Yeah.

whenever ver I do these various political compass, things that put you on two axes on the authoritarian libertarian access, I am weight down on the libertarian side as a left libertarian. So my tendencies are always anti authoritarian and and towards that option, uh, when IT makes sense so I sympathy without a lot.

Another question for matter asked David what issues he disagrees with you on is there's something okay, that's good they ago, there's no issues, perfect agreement.

What's your review on tesla?

That's is a good opportunity. Ask, what do you think is strength and weaknesses of iron mask? You mention twitter. Have you paid your eight dollars?

I have not paid my dollars. I don't see the point in paying for IT. I have no problem paying for services.

I use a ton of services. I'll try the free. I'll go to the paid um right now. So the way I used to use the verified feed was I would post a tweet and then the next day when I you know review what's going on to my social media, I would look at the replies to the tweet, which should give me a mix of replies from verified and non verified people. But then I also look at the verified and see who that are verified.

Public folks have responded to me, or maybe I want to engage with what whatever the case, maybe I don't even understand why I would look at the verified feed anymore. So i'd never do because it's random folks. I don't know. It's sort of lost utility to me.

And then up the D A is if everybody human pays a dollars, IT shows to you that it's not bots, it's at least humans. From the reports about .

the number of people that i've bought the blue checkmark, I think we may be a thousand years from sign ups in order to make that sort of like a reality. The idea is an interesting idea. Honestly, from my experience, the obviously, I was seeing all sorts of attack comments, some of which were, i'm sure, from bots, but I ignoring all of those comments anyway.

So I really didn't affect my my experience that much. I mean, here's a thing about elan and I say this people sometimes like David, you obviously hate elon or you obviously love elon. I was an investor in tesla starting in two thousand and fifteen.

I've seen sold all my shirts. Great run. Um i'm on my second tesla right now.

I probably won't get a third one because I think that electric vehicle technology is now matching such that when my least is up, i'm going to have many more options with the range and charging network that's important to me. But I could be wrong maybe you know I don't know. I have known the cut of personality around people.

They mean nothing to me. So for me, it's just like people or people, nobody has only good ideas. fine. I think that what elan musk did, accelerating and pushing forward the battery and electric vehicle technology is unbelievable.

It's it's a one person wrecking ball in the best sense of saying we're not going to slow play this and do okay. Now toyota has A K, toyota has an actually entered. But now whoever we've got a ninety mile range car in next year, it'll be one.

It's just like we're doing this right now. You can compete or you can opt out and look at what happened. Fantastic on the twitter side of things.

I don't really get the whole plan. I don't know if IT started maybe is kind of a group of some kind and IT developed into, I guess I have to buy IT. And I think something about IT ended up with, there was a clause invoked wear. I think he did try to get out of buying IT.

but then was forced .

you to something he was first, the way twitter used to work was you followed people. And when you looked at your feed, you either saw the posts from the people you were following in reverse chronological order, or posts from the people you followed algorithm ally, tailored to what you're most likely to want to see.

And if you didn't follow someone, you generally wouldn't see their post unless IT was like a sponsored tweet or someone you follow, quoted or retweet them, fine. The for you feed tiktok, I believe first had a so called for you feed. The idea is this is stuff you might like based on, I don't know what either demographic data about you, your other habits, whatever. And so it's useless to me. It's it's just basically mostly right in content .

that that is not interest. Why that? So the signals that are used to generate the for you page is looking at all your are likes, all your comments, all your blocks and mutes that .

o so it's supposed to .

be very pleasant for you.

I'm sure other people go, wow, this for you thing is awesome. And i'll like if you had insert some right wing sitting here, they will go twitter used to suppress right wing voices and now finally they're getting the fair shake that they deserve in the fur you feet okay.

I mean, I wonder if there's left wing folks, uh, setting their feelings of you on aside that are enjoying the for you paid IT. That's not really important question because it's supposed to be people on left, ten people that I should be enjoying the for you page. sure.

yeah. I mean, so for me, I thought on elon is some incredible successes. I don't know about twitter. I do think that I don't believe elon is a right winner and when you see interviews with him um certainly at least socially and in many ways culturally seems very moderator even somewhat on the left in my experience so I don't think it's in the right wing er I don't that an interesting critique IT does seem though that throughout the twitter escapee he certainly ended up closer to some voices that may be influencing him in a particular way that giving some people that impression you know but as far as like the elon hate or the elon love, it's just it's just a person who has done some interesting things, some of which I like and some of which I could kind of leave leave aside.

I have seen um folks be drift towards the right more in response to just the viciousness of attacks from the left.

Look.

I am so so you .

do think he's drifted torso right in.

Uh, so I don't think at the core, but I think on the surface OK, I think and I think your rogan has as well on the surface because .

think maybe .

you can correct me. But IT feels like people on the left attack more viciously.

That has not been my experience.

No, this yeah let me know because my sense was that they attacked people on left, vicious ously as well. Left to text its its own because you're not progressive enough. You're not you know is just this kind of bullying yeah I was very .

intensely no you're a hundred percent right that when the left has attacked me um it's almost as vicious as when the right attacks me the difference in my experience is it's a smaller contingent on the left that's willing to levy those attacks against me but i'm on the left so to some degree you can say well that that's to be expected um there is toxicity on the left intense .

and I like that's what I mean. Like the attacks on people on the left just uh, you not left enough.

Yeah that's no that is a small number people. I can't deny that that is absolutely, absolutely a real phenomenon. And um IT depending on what sort of topics you take on publicly, you are going to suffer the wrath of that to a greater or or lester er degree.

But with all of these things, what I always go back to is you I probably would have more disagreements with brogan today than the last time I was on his show, which was like at the begin of the pandemic, but there would be zero. And i've done clipsed critical things that he has said. Substantive, of course, to me, is sort of like, oh yeah, I could sit down with him and do a podcast and IT would be zero big deal.

And I would tell him, I stand by thing I said about what you said. And I would say to you right now, there are people who write to me and o, oh, man, things must be really, really tense. Now, if you were to, rogan would never have you on because you disagree and he loves you.

I'm sure he's just not thinking of IT not the most important thing to joe rogan. I think both of us would be able to sit down and talk about every one of my criticisms. IT would not be taken personally.

And then we move on to be the next day. A how do you not let that break mentally?

But I don't know. So let's see. I try to a minimum of toxic space, the news in politics, partisan news and politics, partisan news and politics on the internet, with a social media component just completely, totally toxic from a personal perspective.

When i'm done producing my last show the week until monday, I tried to completely tuned from using politics altogether, and also make an effort to just not look at feedback, what's going on. I also really limit my my visibility. Uh, I don't need to read every comment. I don't need to look at every email or every tweet. I have fifteen minutes each day where I go through my social media platforms.

Look at generally what does the reaction been maybe include that in my assessment of how I want to tackle a certain issue if I missed a good point or something like that and basically try to move on when something like we talked about at the beginning happens. IT becomes obsessive. I mean, it's unhealthy, right? I'm going, oh my god, who's attacking me now that's growing IT. IT becomes um you know i'm sweaty as horrible, but I think just like limiting exposure to that and remembering that IT is impossible to please everybody and so i'd really rather have fresh genuine views each day rather than views that are sort of like restricted and flattened by what I perceived to be people's preferences.

So just case be a little more to the full process of creating the David banner show like what you wake up because you're doing five shows a week.

I have the letter and schedule, which means I do five shows in four days. I I shoot monday to thursday, but we're doing five episodes basically uh, our guests, we schedule in advance and picking sixty eight stories each day that are, like I said, a blend of stuff I think will be interesting things I want to talk about and things where there's it's being discussed at one layer. And I want to go deeper on IT. And I feel like i'm able to do that. I choose those stories in the morning record in the early afternoon, and we put the show out by that afternoon.

What the preparation was, the holy tech notes are, are you anna shea paper?

No sheet of paper anymore. I used to do sheet of paper. I found something about IT like IT work. The tactile nature of IT IT became inconvenient for sharing the notes with my team. But basically we use a wicky type system is called media wig is basically like a wiki, so we can have pages for every every topic. Yeah, I don't .

know anyone .

else was using IT. IT works really well. IT is so fast and IT takes up almost no space. So IT just is a really good tool.

When my team, you know, when we book a guest and they have notes from the publicity, they'll put IT in there and then I can access IT. So i'm basically working off of notes rather than a script. I'll pull any audio of visual stuff that I want so that that's available. Um and it's I mean it's it's really A A very seamless. You know we're doing this every day, four days a week and so we have IT down to a well oiled machine.

Where do you get ideas .

for everywhere? I have a bunch of sub credits that I follow that I think you're talking about interesting things. I have a created list for which I still use twitter, and that is very good for.

This is a curated private list of journalists that I think you're doing interesting work. So i'll see what's there. Look at the the standard news reporting, a wire services, ap and reuters. GLance at what everything from drugs to CNN to whoever is covering that day, look at google news.

How do you try to fact check stuff on your show so I can, their sources or their process.

I always try to get to a primary source, first and foremost, for the facts of the story. And then i'll use other tools for background research. Often times wikipedia fo notes, I find to be useful tools.

ChatGPT is a good one if you really have to fact check IT, but it'll give you ideas of where to do the fact checking, which I think is fantastic. Sometimes that gives me information. It's flat out wrong and when you asked for the story is like, oh yeah that actually is not real um which is okay.

It's part part of the process. Yeah but and then when there's like an expertise type of thing, if it's a breaking legal matter, i'll just call like a friend is a lawyer or call friend is a doctor or something like that. If IT lends .

itself to that, let me ask about the nature of truth you think is becoming more more difficult to know what is true, and will become continuously continue to get more difficult. A special equipment.

I think the big difficulty is in getting people to agree as to what is a statement of fact and what is a statement of opinion. I think once we can do that, reasonable people can more less agree on how to get to the truth. Or if we can't get to IT, at least figure out how we would if the information were available. But the the bigger chAllenge I am having is someone will call in with an opinion but say they wanna talk about fact and I have to explain to them you're talking about an opinion and not effect and this goes back to the lack of critical thinking and lack of media literacy. But that's the bigger chAllenge for me right now.

But I mean, I think the big statement there was gonna somewhat opinions like was the was the twenty, twenty election fair? I think any answer an opinion if we .

define fair.

Well, yes. So then I don't think it's possible to define fair in a way that's not several paragraphs each sentence IT. Now will has has facts, right? So what he what he mean by fair is that who can show up to vote was the process of how easier is to vote?

Uh, was their actual, uh, cheating going on a different than what is the evidence that have to actually get to the actual like details of a thing, high level, you know, everything is just going to be an opinion. He feels like I get you and you get appropriate that to be like it's a well found opinion. But most of science is opinion, even physics is an opinion. So like I think there's a threshold beyond which an opinion becomes like this is a pretty reliable thing to assume .

for now that this is a so I think maybe Better said, I think that the difficulty, I mean, IT is the process you described. IT is probably the right process and is is exhAusting for mundane e things. And that causes major problems if we were to say is IT Better for the economy to have a tax rate on people making over a million dollars, that's twenty percent or fifty percent.

Okay, what do we mean by Better for the economy? It's not an overwhelming task to decide on that. We could say, well, we'll say it's Better for the economy by looking at what was the unemployment rate based on the tax rate on million, you people learning a million a year and what was GDP and whatever.

Okay, we we've agreed this is a statement. We are now in the realm of just determining what is given the parameters that we've established, I think that that's that's relatively doable. The issue is with the bigger ones like you're talking about where what do we mean by a fair election and fair in whose eyes? And but I I am with you that IT often devolves into a conversation about opinions about what is fair rather than an entertainment of the fact.

Yeah and he feels like maybe avoiding some of these big, maybe there's some trigger words too, maybe avoiding them a large actually talk about the facts and through that, educate yourself and learn about lh, whether the virus league from a la or not to me as though is a super interesting question I don't know why ever to get super touch about IT uh mostly people I know, colleagues biology thought it's pretty good likelihood that the league from a lab, given everything that just the evidence is not there for a either one.

And so like you should be able to just open and talk about IT unless you're in the uh, high political office where there could be geopolitical consequences to your statements. But in general, it's an interesting question. We have to talk about IT but there no first all this time many effects are on there unfortunately um and a lot of very conclusive state about this pushing in the early days were just opinions.

I have the idea what is true that becomes little even mentioning there were truth in their context. IT feels divisive. Yeah, I completely .

agree with you, which is strange. Like I really you think IT shouldn't one of the really good opening questions that i've had work to my advantage when talking with people who I know disagree with me about a contentious topic is how do you think we would figure out ex and IT often gets people thinking first collaboratively. And obviously we might have very different opinions.

But with something like the covered labb leak, I think it's an interesting one. Because if you say, okay, maybe leave, maybe I didn't. How would we figure that out? Who would be trust to weigh on that? What evidence would count? Now we're kind of on the same team.

And then if we can establish that, then we're on a search for capitale truth together. It's kind of in the sky. But in some conversations, i've actually had success with that.

And then you can kind of realize if if there's no mont of evidence is gonna prove show to you that you're wrong in your current opinion, that's probably really bad sign for you.

IT may be a waste. Pursue the conversation further at that point. I oh so okay. You think trump is a good present.

How do you determine that? And what evidence might exist that would change your mind? There is no evidence from was the best president ever. I think the .

conversation probably cept you mention israel, pakistan. Well, what do you think about the situation in israel, pasta, and something you've thought about, spoken about for quite a time. Do you think we'll ever see piece of .

this part of the world? I don't know. I know. I could say, yeah, answer. I could say, yes. I do you one of the problems is and i'll give you may not know that the there are people on the left of my audience who call me nata yahoo shill even though i've never been a supporter of neta y ahoo and i'm on the left.

I just don't think that some of the a kind of black and White characterizations about israel are even remotely accurate. And I think most people it's become a sort of lima test. Are you criticizing is real enough?

Are you showing us that you're actually left doing? I don't do any of that stuff. I really look at the .

situation for what IT is that become a little more test in american politics and spectrum of american politics.

Um my view big picture is that, uh, I don't think we're going to really get anywhere until some renegotiated terms are set and the parties to do the negotiating are all good faith parties. For example. I don't think israel's right wing party we could is a particularly good faith or bitter of peace because I think they could benefits from there not being peace and the threat of violence and there is violence is not just the threat of violence.

I don't think commas is going to be an arbitrary peace for the palestinian people either. I think the palestinian authority is a question mark. I'm not sure.

So I think that there need to be some preconditions that would need to be set with regard to everything from settlements to a lot of this manisha big picture though, if I imagine what the most likely solution looks like, IT doesn't mean it's a perfect solution. And obviously, it's a solution. Many people will say it's not it's not going to have.

I think it's a solution where the borders are similar to what was being discussed in the clinton era to some degree, as many of the settlements as possible have to go understanding that some of the bigger ones are just not going to go and there's going have to be meaningful landslips with which yes or arafat seem to be amenable to when he waited on IT. I believe I was in the nineties the topic of um the temple mount and jerusalem at that is a complicated one but I think that almost certainly um east jerusalem is going to have to be part of an eventual palestinian day. You know I mean, like we can go with kind of a sparse as we want to with a lot of this stuff.

What world does U. S. Have to play in this coming to the table with good faith parties.

I don't know whether the I go back and forth between believing that the U. S. Should play a big role to the U. S. Should play essentially no role whatsoever because, uh, of course, of the funding of israel that the provides will the you I don't if not that I have a personal problem with american involvement. And somebody like bill clinton was arguably relatively well position to try to make something.

It's more just will there will that be seen as credible on the global stage? And that I think the most important thing because at the end of whatever negotiation takes place, both sides need to agree that this is where we are renouncing all past claims. And in the future, if there is a disagreement, we can go back to that thing from the eight .

or the nineteen that just like a critical piece and you know materialize into something stable over years. yes. Another difficult conflict going on in the world is the war, ukraine. What do you think about the russian invasion of the ukraine in the february twenty two?

I don't pretend to be an expert on this issue. I think you probably know more about this denial just from the brief commerce station we had before we started filming. My view as a general observer of geopolitics and the way that this area, this part of the world, is related to american presidents over the last several of you know, cycles is I don't think it's controversial to say that this was a war of aggression, an invasion of aggressive and act of aggression by fatmir putin um I do believe that if trump had been reelected, putin may have seen himself as having other tools with which to try to um expand influence that may have been different than geographical uh pursuit geographic pursuits.

Uh but I we don't know that for sure um I also have a really hard time imagining what the end of this looks like and that's very scary because sometimes the most benie and seems to be that put nuts of out of power either through no longer being alive uh or deposed in some way IT doesn't feel like that latter is super likely the former. There's reports about his health. I don't know how accurate they are.

It's just hard to imagine a face saving exit that is going to be um even remotely uh what's of the word is not even a question of acceptable. Just um it's not satisfying either. Just just not tragic, I guess, is what i'm looking .

for in terms of putin speaking to the russian people and being able to figure out what to say, what kind of nature to say, why this world make sense. yes. Now the same in the ukrainian side to figure out how to exit this war.

yes. Um I mean to some degree IT requires russian troops leaving ukraine and that is somewhat under the control. I mean if of course, it's not up to ukraine whether the initiative continues. But what I am not thrilled with are some of the reflective you know, if trump had been in power instead of joe biden, a lot of the reflective a comment about, oh you if you, if you say ukraine is just acting defensively, you're supporting neo nazis. Are some of these things that have come out of the american republican party seem both White and like they would be saying completely different things if trump happen to be in the oval office. They are really proxy attacks on joe .

biden yeah well, that in some sense ukrainy is also kind of political litmus test of how you speak about IT. I think because of the huge amount of funding that's going from us to ukraine. great. You you can correct me from wrong. But IT seems to IT seems to me that this topic has become politicised already hundred percent.

There are people like marti, Taylor Green and others saying we should be doing nothing for ukraine. The lansa is a comedian and we're supporting the ananas. That's a full stop and you either subscribe to that um or you don't and IT very quickly becomes um IT very quickly becomes as partisan as so many other issues.

And it's really the most disappointing thing is that some of these issues become incredibly devices, devices but they're simple like for example, a conspiracy theory that we know isn't true. IT shouldn't be decisive because it's so simple. Other issues become divisive and they're simplified, but in reality, their extraordinary complex and you lose the ability to talk about the complexity because they're becoming partisan.

Do you think that allows be war in the world as a bunch of folks on the subject that were interested in your different complex perspective and foreign policy? So let's talk about war. You look at the war in ukraine.

You look at was going on israel past time. You look at the wars across the world. You think there always be war, as a reddit put IT. Is that a necessary evil in the game of geopolitics?

I used to have what I now believe is extremely naive perspective, which is that if we somehow, if intelligent aliens arrived here, IT would be so momentous for homosapien s that all of our differences would immediately be exposed to. So insignificant we would never fight again, and we would realize that intelligent life.

And then I spoke to people who deal in space exploration and other, other science, and they all said that, David, that's extraordinary. Ily nave. There would be a period during which this was as momentous as you're imagining.

And then I would become Normal. And then we would go back to many of the same conflicts that we have now, sectarian eta. I think that in all likelihood, there will always be conflict between factions, whether it's what we currently think of a war.

Probably not. I mean, IT seems as though the tactics will evolve and IT will be less about missiles. And I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know whether it's going to become more biological or cyber or something we haven't even considered yet, but I think there will always be conflicts we would refer to in that way.

Didier gree with charm ski and his general harsh criticism of U. S. From policy in war, that many actions, military actions, in the united states, are criminal in nature, almost terrorists in nature.

I am not. It's been a decade more since i've read any chomsky, and I don't keep up with everything that he has recently said. So I don't want to miss characterize any of .

IT in general. Americans are sold of you that were the good guys writing freedom across the world and no chance could takes a perspective that yeah but if you look at the number of civilians you kill while do IT, it's incomparable other military .

actions across the world, right? I very much disagree with those who take the view that the U. S. Is this wonderful global police force that's spreading democracy and fixing problems. Very, very much wrong.

I think where i've had disagreements with trumps in the passes, more he frame, he seems to frame the U. S. As a uniquely bad actor in some of these cases.

And I think it's more an outcropping of the size and wealth of the U. S. And less about uniquely negative intentions. And so I think that would be my general disagreement with a transkei based .

on stuff I read a decade. He, but he says that he, the united states, he is an american. So he feels this focus of critics should be in america.

And I think that's one of the great things about being in amErica and being in america, the freedom to criticize harshly, sure, while being a university professor, by the way, he's basically the embodiment of why ten years? A really valuable thing. I agree.

Will you agree with him not? Question from redit. Ask David when he plans for his garden this year. This is a joke irl.

joi. I got into gardening a few years ago. Honestly, with the baby, I can do a garden this year.

It's just, and I have a lot of travel coming up, so everything would die. But I did start to try to figure out gardening. G, if you're stressed by the toxicity of the social media world, gardening is a great hobby. IT really is. But IT is extraordinary ly time consuming, so I have no garden planned this year.

Other books or maybe movies in your life that had a big impact on you that you know you're ticket about that diet has has there been stuff you read forget IT about even just books like blogs or writers or just sort of information that had that mulled you into the intellectual, into the political thing there that you are?

It's so hard to this is sort of like, you know, you win an Oscar and you you want to make sure you thank all the right people I I read so much and have been reading for so long that it's really hard to say but I think certainly um for me narrative nine fiction has been a fantastic genera to learn not only about history but also about people and psychology and very often when people say I don't really read like what can you recommend to me that might be interesting all depending on you know knowing them to some degree or give recommendations there in terms of of um just things I picked up recently that that I think you're interesting um i've been reading A A bunch eal postman I read a jenie dell has a new book on time and the concept of like saving time spending time at said he just published super interesting I just read a lansing book about the shakil ton voyage in antarctica in one thousand nine hundred and and fifteen and sixteen super interesting. I am really all over the map.

I have that one a to listen.

It's very interesting. And IT seems inconceivable how these guys survived in, completely inconceivable. And yet they did.

IT kind of inspires you to think of space exploration and taking on similar kinds of risky and dangerous in narrative, not fiction. I go you very much reading a lot of twenty century history about styling. And by hilter rising fall, the third right of red twice now. And I recommend.

what did you get out of reading at .

the second time. So what I I saw the second time I listen to the audio OK as I ran, I get the same thing from its as I get maybe reading message for meaning, which is all the troubles of data day in the modern world kind of fade away. Anticipate when i'm thinking about the, you know, basically the embodiment vivo at scale at that recent time in human history.

So IT makes me so appreciate all the he fills me with graduated to have all the freedoms of the just simple joys of life that we have today. And I think the second time was, as I was reading IT, uh, because William share was there, the author, the earth of the whole thing, you start to pick up little details is supposed like big things. You start to pick up the little corks of how history turns out, just like these little events.

You know, the dynamics between people in a room during a meeting with hitler. Er you just notice these little things that are mentioned because that he was you, that there are directly are herded a the next day. So you get that's why, to me, rising for the reg is interesting because by guy who is there who's reporting on IT vers a service, a more distant displaced are retained. And also like biography, have a big fan biography. And what does certain something credible ones and these jobs and and estein that kind of stuff Victor Frank's book is one i've .

read a bunch of times yeah and it's so short and ah you know reading in general. I know a lot of people who read way more than I do and I also know a lot of people who don't read at all. I mean, they haven't read books.

College, essentially, to me, it's almost like the amount I get from IT. It's almost like a secret weapon. Or when I think. You know, in two or three or four hundred pages, which I can read in whatever ten days or however long IT takes thirty pages a day, the amount of information insight into so many aspects of the human psyche that I can get. It's sort of like it's not like I mean, a competition for anything in particular with anybody. I just do my show, but it's sort of like if i'm reading dozens of books a year and you're reading zero, i'm exposed to so many different things and ideas that are not even in your universe IT just seems like the power of reading just seem .

to overwhelming. I had speaking, getting attack. I had a fun time getting attacked a few months ago for publishing your reading list, some reading, at least a book a week read, and eighty and nineteen books from the beginning of the year.

I attacked for the books .

you choose or for, but I would became quite .

a attack for reading. That's that's something. So it's .

basically what happened is that people I added actually IT is not worth folks who know no fair or folks who don't don't even worry about IT is what I really loved about being attacked for IT is IT shows you can get attack for anything, apparently. So it's not like I did something wrong, is kind of a beautiful thing, is just a the most intensely beautiful display of absurdity of twitter and the internet that there will be.

There were articles written about me with the with the bookshop. There's no bad books on IT. The thing as being marked for is reading to stay a ski reading stuff that sounds like a high school reading list.

Oh, I see, or all these kinds of aspects of the reading list doesn't stand up to any of legitimate kind of criticism, but the fact that people are just looking for single words, a single aspect of a tweet. So I want to criticize you actually force me to, because I released the video about, you know, summarizing, and I take away from from one of the books and the meaning to do more more. But every time I started, like when I recorded, I have this negative feeling. They kind of ruin the fun of sharing without .

actually what you talking about. My advice on that is don't do IT just don't record IT. Yes, because and is that what you get?

actually? Yeah, but I think time cores IT. But for now I decide to not to. Yes, I until until I feel so.

we are in such a position to even be able to do this sort of thing, right? I have taken on projects and then IT sort of sounds good or I end up doing IT because there's some third party that brings the idea and I feel like I can't really say no or whatever.

And then when I get in front of the camera, or I have to write something for a while, I did A A newspaper, a co lump that I hated doing, I realized that i'm ruining the exact thing that I have worked to build, which is that I can just do whatever I want. Why am I doing this? And sometimes IT takes me a week to realize that. Sometimes IT takes me a year, but just don't do IT. That's in this case in particular.

It's also that there's a private thing I enjoy, which is reading right. And if sharing that private thing you joy is not fun then just don't share IT that that yeah there's certain things there's certain private things that should remain private that's like which is one of the first things ever i'm i'm the same person privately I am probably but the books is like, man, I don't get to share I guess with these conversations I can share some to suffer reading and enjoying IT IT sucks that sucks to get attack for stuff and IT sucks to get attack for stuff you love yeah especially reading.

I mean, it's so, you know, that's the the bottom of the barrel. I have these ideas where i'll go, you know, maybe for my next thing, i'll go from politics, which are so toxic, i'll go to travel blogging because I there are so many travel blogger I follow and there are so many interesting places. And then I go wait a second.

I'd like traveling and just hanging out. Now, traveling is going to be my job. And now i've got to bring two cameras with me, and i've got ta get shots, and i've got to film my food. And i'm not gonna that i'm just gna do what i'm doing, but then i'll travel when I want to take a vacation.

Of course, something could be fun. I mean, I I have to say when I did one video on a book at ninety four, I really enjoyed IT that the whole process was fun was um I don't think i've ever thought as hard about a book when I had to make a video about because I like you know I read nineteen， five or eight times, probably five ten times I don't remember a read animal form way more um but I don't think I was like, what do I think about what are the key takeaway for me?

I didn't really know like if you ask me what I think about even an animal fok done that one and i've read that one I don't know over fifty times, is probably my favorite book, is like I would have to struggle and and making a video about IT a biscuit, a little mini lecture yeah. Forced me to actually have an opinion about the details of IT and to do enough research to think like, okay, what is the historical context? This book I IT and allowed me to say interesting and to think interesting stuff about the book. I was, i've found IT to be really rewarding. Basically, the old final thing, a one of the best ways to learn as the teacher.

Yeah, I can't think of one thing I would say about animal farm. And I read IT again, not that long ago.

but I don't know what. Have a good comment like authoritarians m and so on, whatever. Yeah, but there there could be interesting corks of the book in the characters in the how how corruption happens you you can see all kinds of stuff and that I may be contrasting IT like given when nineteen eighty four allowed me to contrast with brave new world and um and and how that eighty four was politicized and how is used by the republican party of today.

You can say a lot interesting stuff you like think about IT and write IT down a sheet paper, maybe only to make a video about. So I found IT to be really rewarding in general. So I I probably will do more with, but not always, not as a mean professional, just like with the travel blog.

I agree with that.

I mean, you get threaten the light, you get to attack the line on mine. Do you think about your mentally?

Well, the other day I went to the doctor and he said, you know, next physical, we're gonna be talking about a lot of new things. And so I was thinking about IT a lot that day. No, I mean, it's funny, like I recently did a bunch of a state stuff.

And when you have intellectual property, there's a question of like, okay, I have my assets, but also if I died tomorrow, especially in a particularly fire death, my youtube channel would probably for a while generate more money because there would be like, oh my goodness, this person died in a terrible what happens with the future revenue stream and all these different things. And IT got me thinking about legacy and about the fact that people who do this sort of thing, it's kind of a new thing in a sense. And so, you know, if you work at A B, C news, at some point you just retire and someone else feels in for you.

How does my career wine down given like I don't actually know the answer, i'm not sure what is IT. I just one day stop posting videos, but all my contents stays up, getting fewer and fewer views. Or do I delete everything? Do I? I don't know what .

what is the I mean, so you might trip to crank any else going to the front is the first time I did I court of video if I die and I post that and give instructions to uh to folk what to do so like there's a closure yeah but an interesting process like what happens to you at at which point of GPT take over and continued tweet for David. Well.

the tweet I care less about right now unless blue become something unbelievable and less worried about twitter. But some of my audience members have been saying, you know, some of these tools, David, are getting good enough that we could clone your voice and also make IT match video. And with scripts, you could just keep pumping out content even if you were gone. And I said now that i'm interested in that, I want to learn more about.

boy, it's gonna be a weird future. What advice do you have to Young folks that are facing this future?

Almost always is some version of start right away. And that applies in so many different ways. So if you're thinking about the often times, the contexts, people want to do what I do, and I always say, do not sit around for a year thinking about lighting.

This is how you never do anything. And I dozens of people, I felt obligated to talk you on the phone because of a personal connection. I go through all the advice and I can tell they're not going to do IT.

There's just it's already sounding too complicated. And so instead they'll sort of say, well, I got to get the right lighting in the right room. And baba aba, the best thing you can do, no matter what you're doing, is just start right away. And that applies in this business and in whatever else you're doing.

If you want to learn a new thing, find a new happy, the ability to get data right away about what's working, what's not working and whether you even like this approach that you're taking is so valuable and IT will allow you to iterate. And the sooner you do IT, the cost to a change of direction will also be lower if there's any. I don't do like self helper generic advice types of, but the one thing that applies in so many situation is situation is just try IT right away and iterate from there.

yes, start today, then do IT everyday or decide.

hey, you know what I figured out? I don't actually want to do IT.

Yeah, yeah, what usually you discover? You, you, do you think we will make IT out of the century? Human, human civil ation out of the six.

Elected twenty one hundred. Yeah.

how much about eight years?

Yeah, seventy seven. You think so. Yeah.

what are the biggest threats facing our civilization? If not.

what is if it's not vogue, it's hard to say no. Um I I actually think that if you believe that we are on an inflection point of sorts in changes to society and acceleration of technology at sara. I think it's really tough to know in twenty ninety what will actually be the biggest threat. So I don't know. It's so cliched to say nuclear and climate change and another pandemic technological.

the world might look so different almost. Yes, on the man, what would you must be human as uni magerful. And also the degree that would make progress island into space is also a gino.

I think space is super interesting. And there's people on both the left and ride who for different reasons, are kind of not into the whole space exploration thing. The people I hear from the ones on the right think it's just kind of dumb. The ones on the left thing, it's an excuse not to fix problems here.

And also this is the place thing, a billionaire 是， which is another funny kind of concept yeah.

I mean, someone to get ta pay for IT IT might not be people who have a lot of money to .

take IT either be billionaire or governments that are truly one's. So something has to pay for big, ambitious, munshi projects.

To me, the most interesting thing is that in getting closer to the next step of space exploration, we may well learn things that can then be used to improve circumstances. Here, for me, it's not one or the other. And I recently read a long piece about why, why not mars? Because it's terrible in every way for supporting life.

okay. So like that's one perspective, but still in so expLoring, who knows what we might end up learning? So I am big on IT. I don't share the view of someone left about IT.

So I guess to add your advice, Young people, if the thing seems terrible, you still might want to consider doing that.

I would say, so, yeah, how many things i've see? I listen, there are so many trips where the day before I say, why am I doing this? The jet lag.

I've GTA do this and that. Now, who, if my guest host falls through, I should just stay in work and I go on, you do this every time. Just go.

You never regret IT you learn something. You try something. I never regret the trip.

This hopefully applies to the conversion we had today. David are a big family yours thank you so much at um for talking the day. Thank you for being patient me.

You try to talk earlier. Please continue what you're doing. Please continue being objective and thoughtful and fearless.

Thank you, the internet big fan as well.

Appreciate IT. Thanks for listening to this conversion. David packman, to support us by guests, we check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from hot mganga. What difference doesn't make to the dead, the orphans in the homeless, whether the mad destruction is right under the name of totalitarian ism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy? Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.