Peter Thiel on the Triumph of the Counter-Elites

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss.

President-elect Donald Trump is announcing the appointments of additional members of his administration today. Tonight, Trump is announcing that a Department of Government Efficiency will be led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and V.C. Ramaswamy.

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur and former presidential candidate V.C. Ramaswamy, will head a new department in the Trump administration. They're calling it the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Dogecoin is surging, as you might know, following the President-elect's victory, getting an extra boost from headlines around Elon Musk.

We saw Dogecoin surge as much as 20% on Tuesday night right after Donald Trump formally announced the Department of Government Efficiency, which he called DOGE in a hat tip to the dog-themed meme coin. Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed in the White House, Dogecoin is a meme coin. If you don't understand what I just said, fear not; I'm sure Nelly will cover it in TGIF tomorrow.

But what the announcement solidifies, if Trump's win hadn't already, is the triumph of the counter-elite. In other words, a bunch of oddball outsiders banded together, supported Trump, and ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood, and the oddballs won. They are about to reshape not just the government but also American culture in ways I don't think we can fully imagine.

How they did that, and why, is a question that I've been thinking about pretty much non-stop since last Tuesday. There was one person more than any other that I wanted to discuss it with, and that is the vanguard of those anti-establishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel.

People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms. He's been called the most successful tech investor in the world and also a political kingmaker. Others call him the boogeyman of the left, but he is the center of gravity, at least in a certain part of Silicon Valley, and he's created a kind of world around him.

There's the Thielverse, Thiel Bucks, and to say he's developed an obsessive cult following would be an understatement. If you listen to my last conversation with Thiel a year and a half ago on this show, you'll remember that Peter was the first person in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016.

"I'm Peter Thiel. I build companies, and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. I'm not a politician," he said, "but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America." That year, he gave a very memorable speech at the RNC: "Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican." A speech that many in his orbit thought was a step way too far, and he suffered for it.

He lost business at the startup incubator Y Combinator, where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like V.C. and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel's endorsement of Trump one of the most dangerous things he had ever seen. Jason Calacanis, one of the hosts of the All-In podcast, wrote at the time, "If you are backing Trump, you are choosing the side of hate, racism, and misogyny. There is no compromise on this issue."

Calacanis wrote, "It's not a difference of political opinion; it's about what kind of human being you want to be." Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics, at least publicly. He didn't donate to Trump's campaign this time around, and there was no big RNC speech.

But the bigger change, I'd argue, is a cultural one. Thiel is no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump. There's Bill Amman, Mark Andreessen, David Sacks, Sha Maguire, and of course Elon Musk, among many other tech titans, some of whom used to support the Democrats and have joined the Trump train.

On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions or, at least, paradoxes. He's a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump's White House wants to break up Big Tech. He's a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and also the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college but also, in this conversation, seems to still venerate the Ivy League. But perhaps that's the secret to his success: he's beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own.

And why wouldn't you be when you make so many winning bets—from co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal to the data analytics firm Palantir, which was used to find Osama bin Laden, and being the first outside investor in Facebook?

Thiel's investments in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few, have paid off big time. His most recent bet, helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected senator of Ohio and then Vice President of the United States, seems to have paid off big time. I guess the next four years will determine just how high Thiel's profit margin will be.

Today, Peter Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump, why he thinks Kamala Harris and liberalism more broadly lost the election. We talk about the southern border, tariffs and trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism on the right, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what a dreaded World War III might look like. This is a conversation you will not want to miss. Stay with us.

Peter Thiel, welcome to Honestly. "Thanks for having me, Barry. Thanks for making the time."

Okay, we last spoke— I don't know if you remember this—we were in Miami. It was May of 2023, and the world was a very different place. Joe Biden was the president and he was the presumptive Democratic nominee. There was a Republican primary underway. You were supporting Ron DeSantis, but you weren't being very loud about it. Trump was sort of on the outs with a lot of people.

The amount that has changed over the past year and a half is profound. Six months after our conversation, October 7th happened. It felt like the world shifted on its axis. Then Trump won the GOP nomination in July. Biden dropped out of the race; Kamala was coronated, of course. Trump survived this wild assassination attempt near my hometown in Butler, Pennsylvania. And then last week was the election. Trump not only won the White House, he won the popular vote. Now it looks like the Republicans are poised to control all three branches of government.

I think it's an understatement to say that we're living in a changed world. And the reason that I wanted to sit down with you today is that you saw so many of those changes coming. You can make an argument that you maybe saw them even too early. So I want to start with kind of a broad question, which is: How are you feeling about this political moment that we're in?

"I wouldn't say I'm ecstatic, but I'm relieved. I think I would be incredibly depressed if the election had gone the other way. And you know, it's probably a little bit asymmetric. I would have been—we're less happy than I would be unhappy had it gone the other way. You know, I never actually supported DeSantis. I did meet with him a couple of times, maybe toyed with the idea a little bit. DeSantis felt promising in early 2021 when he was sort of the courageous COVID governor."

"And by early 2023, it felt like he was a little bit too locked in on these culture wars, and I didn't believe that that was, you know, they're important, but they're not the most important thing. So it already felt very, very off in early 2023 to me."

"Were you surprised by what happened on Tuesday night? Because some have credited you for predicting it. You said it was going to kind of be a blowout in one direction or the other."

"I didn't think it was going to be that close, and I suppose I didn't think that Harris was going to win by a big margin. So if you combine those two things, it's a way of saying that I thought it was going to be a solid win for Trump. I mean, you know, he was way behind in the polls in 2016 and 2020. Both of those were, you know, extremely close. And if you just believe that the polls hadn't been fully adjusted, and they hadn't fully corrected whatever mistake they were making in the polling from four or eight years ago, and the polls were even that suggested, you know, that suggested it was going to be a very, very solid win."

"And then, on some level, I think it was just a collapse of liberalism."

"Say more."

"I mean of liberalism or of the Democratic Party. I think it's too narrow to blame it on, you know, a somewhat senile Biden and a, you know, somewhat goofy Kamala Harris. It was sort of just a, you know, somehow it was just this much broader collapse. It feels like a much more decisive election. You know, in a way, you can say in 2016, Trump beat the Republicans—the Bush Republicans—and, um, he sort of maybe lucked out or snuck by Hillary, and, um, she didn't take him seriously at all."

"You can't say that about 2024. Everyone knew it was going to be the Midwest states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. The Democrats gave it their all. They, you know, spent two or three times as much money as Trump spent the last, you know, three, four months, and it just didn't work."

"They certainly—the institutions tried to prosecute him, prosecute him criminally. They tried to take him off the ballot. They tried to stop him in every way possible. And so unlike 2016, this time it was Trump against the Democrats. The Democrats gave it their all, and it just collapsed."

"One other dimension of it—that's so many different observations one can make—but one other dimension of it that I find striking is, uh, is that if we talked about this in 2016, it would be, you know, the Republicans are this party of white voters and old voters, and they're going to die, um, and eventually they'll be replaced by younger and more diverse Democrats. This was the whole demographics-is-destiny argument."

"And so for Trump to be able—and eight years is actually a long time, and there are, you know, a lot of Republican voters from 2016 who are not alive anymore. And so for Trump to be able to win in 2024 and by a much more significant margin, at least in the popular vote than in 2016, it means you had to change the minds of millions of people. And you had to do something that, if you believe that demographics destiny or identity politics means that people cannot listen to reason and it's all subject to these subrational factors like your race or your gender or your sexual orientation or something like this, then nobody would ever be able to change their mind."

"You exploded the lie of identity politics that, um, you know, your identity matters more than the argument or the case. And Trump made an argument. J.D. Vance made an argument. They made a strong case, and I think there was no argument on the Democratic side. It was free of substance, free of ideas. You know, people say that, uh, that Harris struggled in saying how she was different from Biden, how she was substantively different from Biden. But, you know, that's too narrow a way of putting it. She had nothing to say of substance on anything. And so, obviously, if you have zero substance, then there's also zero substantive difference with Biden."

"I want to pick up on the idea of the Democratic Party, maybe even liberalism, collapsing. It's—you know, one striking—there are so many striking visuals of this campaign, but I think one of them is when you look at the murderer's row of celebrities and the pretty people that were lined up behind the Democratic ticket. Whether it's literally everyone—it's Oprah, it's Beyoncé, it's—you name a Hollywood celebrity, there you go. And on the other side, yes, you had a few sort of dissidents from the elite like Elon Musk, but you had, you know, podcasters, you had the MyPillow guy, you had—you know, not anyone that people would maybe choose if they were thinking about who to seek endorsements from to curry popular favor."

"What does that say about, like, where the culture is?"

"Yeah, I mean, look, these things are always very overdetermined, but I would say it tells us that celebrity isn't what it used to be. And, uh, celebrity used to have a certain mystique, and it has been somewhat deconstructed. And we, you know, we think of a lot of the Hollywood celebrities, a lot of the, you know, music celebrities as, um, as just these, um, you know, left-wing ditto heads. And, um, you know, they may be smart people; they're not allowed to articulate smart things; they're not allowed to be individuals."

"And, uh, you know, one striking thing is I don't think there is room for individual thought left on the left. And, um, it's certainly not in Hollywood. And I think, you know, Hollywood in the 1990s, it was liberal, but, you know, behind closed doors, you could say very transgressive things, and you realized it was this liberal show you were putting on, and then there are parts of it you believed and parts of it that you could question. I don't think people are able to have, uh, conversations even in small groups, at dinners behind closed doors, in a liberal context. People are not allowed to think for themselves. Same thing for university professors."

"You know, when I was at Stanford in the '80s and early '90s, uh, it was overwhelmingly liberal, but you had a lot of thoughtful liberals. There were still such a thing as an eccentric university professor, and that's a species that's basically gone extinct. And, uh, and then we can go down, you know, down the list of institutions."

"You know, there were, you know, there were elder statesman-type figures, people who have been in the government for a long time and, um, were very thoughtful and had good nuanced perspectives. And there were all these ways this was more true on the left, on the Democratic side, on the liberal side than the Republican side. The progressives thought of themselves as more elite and the smarter people, and, um, and, uh, but there's just no individuality left whatsoever."

"And then, you know, the story of people like Elon or Tulsi Gabbard or, uh, RFK Jr., or maybe yourself, is, um, is at some point this sort of straitjacket where you're just joining the Borg is not what you signed up when you started as a liberal."

"You know, I've known Elon since 2000—24—almost 25 years. And, um, you know, he was not never doctrinaire. But for the first 20 years, you know, he was left of center. Um, you know, was he was a Tesla was a clean energy electric vehicle company. The Republicans were these people who didn't believe in climate change. And, and so it was—it was sort of naturally much more comfortable in sort of deep blue Democratic California."

"And then, at some point, Elon shifted. And I—it's overdetermined why he shifted or why you shifted or some of these other people did. I didn't shift—Peter, everyone."

"Yeah, yeah, but everyone feels that way, of course. But, but I—but I know these things are overdetermined, but I keep thinking part of it is just this sort of straitjacket is not what you all signed up for. Well, this intellectual straitjacket where you're not allowed to have ideas—even if you agree with 80%. It's never enough; you have to be 100%. And, uh, you know, one of the other metaphors I've used is that, you know, the, the left, the Democratic Party, it's like the Empire. They're all Imperial Stormtroopers, and you know, we're, we're the ragtag Rebel Alliance."

"And it is a, it's an uncomfortably diverse, heterogeneous group. And you have, you know, I don't know, a teenage Chewbacca and a Princess Leia-type character. And then we have, you know, we have a, um, autistic C3PO policy wonk person. And it is a, you know, it's, it's a ragtag Rebel Alliance against the Empire."

"I thought a lot about—I don't know if you were into the Hunger Games in the same way you were into Star Wars—but like a lot of, to me, like the people that I know that either sat out this, that were reliable Democrats and liberals, who either sat out this election or voted Trump for the first time, did not do it because they like Donald Trump. Most of them find him abhorrent. They did it because they wanted to give a middle finger to the capital. Like in the Hunger Games analogy, because they felt all of the things you're describing."

"And I think one of the things I'm thinking about in the aftermath of the election is, you know, will the Democrats sort of double down on all of the narratives and the myths that have landed them in this place? You can watch it right now on MSNBC where they're still talking about, they're somehow finding a way to look at black voters going to the right, Latino men especially, going to the right and somehow it's still a story of misogyny and white supremacy. Or are they going to sort of spend their time in the wilderness regrouping, um, in much of the way the Democrats did sort of after Carter's loss? And then, of course, you have like, you know, Al from and James Carville, etc., building the Clinton machine."

"Yeah, although that took, that took 12 years. It took a long time. I don't know, but I wonder, I worry that, um, the sort of skill for introspection, reflection, thought has just really, really atrophied. And there's, you know, there's—but isn't losing a very good lesson in it?"

"It should be, but you know somehow the Democrat—it's a long history. But you know, the Clintons in the '90s, it was triangulation, which was, you know, maybe a little bit nihilistic, moderate-compromise-seeking. But behind closed doors, I think you had, you know, very smart people in the Clinton administration who had debates and were able to articulate things. Then you got to some centrist consensus view. And there was a big shift with Obama in 2008. And, you know, in a way, you could say there were only two people in the Obama administration, two individuals, him and her. And, um, you know, everybody else was just an NPC. You were just going with the Borg."

"And it was—you very quickly figured out what the consent was, and then it was rigidly enforced. And it had a certain power, but then there were all these ways it went very wrong."

"And then, you know, and then the Obama legacy was that, you know, you got Hillary Clinton in 2016. You know, probably Biden was their best candidate in 2020. Was almost blocked by Obama. And then in '24, you ended up with, uh, with Harris, um, who, you know, was sort of pushed by Obama both as VP and then for president."

"This last summer, for my mom, who I know listens to the show, an NPC is a non-player character. It's sort of like a zombie. It's like, yeah, like a zombie."

"I think in 2020, everyone—maybe not everyone—but many people, even those who supported Trump, could tell themselves a story that his presidency was some kind of anomaly. Now I think with this overwhelming victory, historians are going to be telling themselves a very different story."

"Well, say it was—that 2020 was the fluke, right? Explain that."

"Well, it's, uh, yeah, this is what seemed important to me about the 2024 election because, uh, I think the Hollywood movie term is retroactive continuity, and it's, uh, it's like you have a—you have a popular character who dies in an avalanche, but the people want him back, and then we somehow find a way for him to survive and make it back. And, um, you may—and then you come up with a way to make it retroactively continuous. So we have to tell a story of what happened the last eight years."

"And if Harris had won, the story would have been 2016 was a fluke. We can ignore it. And, you know, liberalism is basically fine, and we can go back to the sort of somewhat brain-dead but comfortable Obama consensus."

"And it seems to me that the straightforward retroactively continuous story is that 2020 was the fluke, and it was one last time for this regime with a, you know, an president Biden to doddle over the finish line one last time. But it was not, you know, it was not a sign of health at all."

"You were able to put it together. There were all these paradoxes, you know, um, maybe one of the crazy paradoxes of, um, of the diversity politics is that, uh, it you know, is that if you—one of the lessons of the last three elections for Democrats is maybe they can only elect old straight white men. And, um, and the logic of it would be that, uh, if you if you if you go with a diverse person, you always have to go with a specific category. Let's say Kamala Harris is a black woman, but maybe that doesn't mean that much from my—in the eyes of a gay guy. Or, um, maybe—maybe it's alienating to Latinos or something like this."

"And so as soon as you concretize this abstract idea of a diverse person into a specific person, um, you lose way more people than you get. I mean, I don't know; it's maybe 7% of our population are black women. And so, yeah, maybe Harris helps with 7%, but then isn't the logic of identity politics that it should hurt you with the other 93%?"

"If you say you should vote for candidate X because candidate X shares your trait, but I think one of the interesting things about this election, unlike the Hillary Clinton election, which was all about sort of girl boss, lean in, female empowerment, Kamala Harris, you know, almost didn't talk about it."

"No, it obviously didn't work anymore. But I think, yeah, I think the last time the identity politics worked for real was probably the 2008 election with Obama, and it worked because in 2008—we were still in a pre-Internet world, and a pre-Internet world meant you could tell one message to one group of people and a different message to a different group of people.”

“And so for black voters, Obama could say he was a black person and they should vote for him because he was black like them. And to white voters, Obama could say he was a post-racial person and they should vote for him because he was post-racial.”

“By the time you get to 2016, it doesn't actually work. Yeah, Hillary can't tell, um, you know, women to vote for her because she's a woman and men to vote for her because she's a post-gender person or something like that.”

“And you know the sort of micro-targeting Mark Penn political strategy from the 90s was way past its cell by date in 2016. So yeah, so somehow—although I will say both presidential candidates, interestingly, in this election sort of had one message for Arab Muslim voters, certainly in parts of Michigan, and a very different message for Jewish voters in the same state.”

“So I'm just wondering if the rule always holds that, that one is—that one is complicated, I suppose. And we can analyze in a lot of ways, but I suppose it's evidence of just the total collapse of the Democratic Party. If you lose ground among both Jews and Muslims—like, how do you do that? And, uh, and, uh, I can come up with all sorts of ways to explain it, but let's just say as a fact, it sort of suggests to you that, wow, if you can't even gain with one of those groups at the expense of the other, this whole identity politics thing has gone super, super haywire."

"But yeah, it's, you know, Kamala didn't know how to talk about it in the right way. And maybe there was no way, no good way to do it. But I don't think this is a conversation they can have on the Democratic side because Biden was the compromise. He was the old straight white male, and the promise was he's going to be the last one we'll ever have. We need him this one time to get through in 2020."

"So somehow they knew that this was the most electable person in 2020, and then, of course, we'll get a more diverse person after Biden. But then, sort of two, three, four years later, wow, it's anybody post-Biden is worse than Biden."

"And then it's only when the senility really, really catches up that we have to do something. And then somehow the consensus shifted very quickly to we don't have time for a primary, therefore we have to go with Kamala Harris. Therefore we have to have this wishful thinking that she's the most wonderful candidate ever, even though that's not something we believed for the three-and-a-half years before."

"And, you know, it works for a few weeks but then unravels pretty, pretty badly, as we all saw just one hypo and then I'll move on."

"I guess I'm curious if you think the X factor in this election was Trump or Kamala's weakness. In other words, if Trump had been running against, let's say, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or someone like a West Moore or perhaps even a Gavin Newsom, would it still have been a blowout?"

"It's always hard to do these counterfactuals, but my intuition is that it was a broader failing of the Democratic Party. It was not just Biden's fault; it was not just Harris's fault. I don't think all these people are that impressive."

"You know, if we go with elite credentialing, uh, you know, J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School. If President Trump were here, he would tell you he went to Penn. It's an Ivy League school; yes, he would. You can't—you can't be a dummy, and they only take the smartest of the smart people there. And he’d tell you that."

"And, um, you know, I don't know—in the 90s, Bill Clinton was a Yale Law Rhodes Scholar. Obama was Harvard Law; Hillary Clinton was Yale Law. They had impressive elite credentials. And there was a collapse with Biden. I think in retrospect, we can say it was a transition from smart to dumb, or elite to non-elite. And it was University of Delaware, and then Kamala was, um, Howard, UC Hastings Law School, um, well, even dumber, even more mediocre."

"And, um, there is nothing elite left. And I think, you know, I don't know, Gavin Newsom was University of Santa Clara—not a very elite place at all. Um, Shapiro was a little bit smarter, but it's like Georgetown Law School, which is still a lot less elite than, um, than—but this is hilarious because you're someone who does not believe in the—in the fact that these places should still hold the prestige that they do. You think that they're corrupt and rotten. So square the paradox that's coming through here.”

“I can believe they're corrupt and rotten and, uh, and that they still select for very smart people and, and, and find it amazing that the Democrats no longer believe in them and that they've come around to my point of view that there's—or maybe that they are so rotten that they are no longer good places to learn how to defend liberalism. Maybe, maybe there are good places for training conservatives. You know, if you go to Yale Law School, and if you're one of, you know, five people in the class of 170 who's still conservative at the end, you'll be pretty good at understanding what's wrong with liberalism. You'll have thought about it a lot, and you'll be a more thoughtful person, and so it will actually train you well to be a conservative. And we're right to—to value the, you know, the small number of conservatives who come out of that gauntlet as quite talented people."

"But, um, you know, if you're a liberal and you graduate from, from any of these places, I don't think you—you would do a better job defending liberalism. And it wouldn't some—you know, so I don't know, um, I don't know who the smartest young liberals are."

"Pete Butigieg—if you know, if you try to make him square the circle and defend, you know, the incredible deficits, the inflation, you know, the out-of-control border, you know, all the substantive policy that were wrong, it would be more embarrassing than Harris because we expect Buttigieg to be smart and it would just show how incoherent it is. You know, if it's word salad coming out of Harris, maybe we can blame it on Harris. If you had someone really smart, it would be more embarrassing. So maybe the liberals were correct to say that they could no longer pick someone from an elite school because it would sort of blow up all of liberalism, whereas now we can still pretend that it was, you know, just the fault of Biden or Harris."

"I think although I think it was much broader than that. I think the whole thing is how you go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. And at some point it's just past the sell-by date, and it's over. And you know, it's somehow—I don't know. The 20th century lasted—it was—it went on in this zombie way for like another 20 years in the 2000s and 2010s, and somehow, you know, the 20th century is actually over. And, uh, and this sort of New Deal liberalism, political correct leftism, this whole constellation of, you know, the progressive cult that is the university, you know, these things have have finally unraveled."

"And there are people like me who are in some ways oppositional to this or fighting this for a long time, and, and it's, it's, it's up and felt like, man, this stuff never changes. You know, I started the Thiel Fellowship to encourage kids to drop out of college in 2010, and I remember in 2019, nine years later, I was at this event at MIT, and the university president was talking. It was all these bromides—it was like it was 2005. And man, we're never going to make progress in these institutions. You know, they're unreformable, but they don't need to reform."

"And, uh, and five years later, you know, the collapse has been has been pretty big, and it's hard—I don't see how, how it recovers. I—you know, they will figure something out, but it's not obvious how they will. I mean, something I've been thinking about a lot since Tuesday night is like, does Peter Thiel feel vindicated in this moment?"

"I, um, sure, sure, but you know, I think there are—I mean, is that an embarrassing thing to answer yes to?”

“Well, it's, it's—you must feel vindicated. I mean, here's how I was thinking about it: like in 2016, you were the boogeyman, okay? I'm sure you were called that in a million articles, but that's what it was. And you were sort of alone as the—maybe the way I think about you as like the vanguard of the counter-elite. You made history; you were at the RNC; you were the first gay man to ever speak at the RNC, and it didn't lead to a cascade of other people, let's say, standing with you."

"And this election, you have Bill Amman, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk. I want to talk in a little bit about what created that shift, but you were ahead, arguably by eight years. There's no, in my view, there's no way you couldn't feel vindicated."

"Yeah, I think I think the—well, I think the fantasy I had in 2016 was something like there were there were all these deep substantive problems that I think exist in our society. I think our society is too stagnant; we're not making enough progress. There's a way the intergenerational compact has broken down. The younger generation is finding it, um, much harder to get their footing."

"And, um, yeah, there are sort of all these ways that our society is no longer progressing. The economy is not doing as well—all sorts of different variations of this problem of stagnation or even outright decline that I had been talking about for a while."

"And I think my fantasy in 2016 was that, um, Trump was a way for us to force a conversation about the stagnation. You know, 'Make America Great Again' was the most pessimistic slogan that any presidential candidate, certainly any Republican candidate, had had in a hundred years because it was maybe you're going to make it great again, but you're going to start by saying we are no longer a great country."

"I felt it was a politic— it was this powerful political way of articulating this problem of stagnation. You know, what do you do about it? Hard to say; first step is you talk about it. First, how do we make our country great? Don't know, but probably first step is not as great as we think we are. And then maybe we can become great again if we sort of level set and admit where we are."

"And so that was sort of my fantasy, and then I—I don't think I don't think the country was remotely ready for this and certainly not the Democratic part of the country. I don't know if they're—I don't know if the Democrats are ready for it. I think the country as a whole is, and, and so there, you know, there is sort of summit mission that man, there was a lot of stuff that Trump was right about. There's a lot of stuff where things sure feel like they're on the wrong track."

"And I think that's where we are in a very, very different place. Let's talk a little bit about the shift that happened in Silicon Valley, okay, because I think it—what happened is what's called a preference cascade. You probably know that term better than me, but it's essentially when several people, maybe a group of people, around the same time realize they're not the only one, and in fact, you know, maybe they represent, if not a majority, a powerful minority."

"And I remember—I remember it very clearly because it was the day our son was born. Our son was born and a few hours later, um, Trump got shot at in Butler. And I watched as people who had sort of all of the aesthetics had been indicating to me that they were Trump supporters, but all of a sudden—with the picture of Trump and all of them retweeting it— it became, oh my God, like abundantly clear as one after the other sort of started to basically endorse him with this picture."

“Yes, explain that phenomenon to me, because like me, I'm sure you know lots of people who have sort of like one politics on Signal or WhatsApp and another politics in public, and I felt like over the course of basically from July to the election, the gap between those things sort of radically narrowed.”

"What happened?"

"Yeah, it's—it's probably something like what you described. It's, uh, there was some degree to which, um, it was safer for people to speak out when other people were speaking out. You know, once you know you're lying and you know that everybody's lying and you know that everybody knows that everybody's lying, um, you know, at some point it becomes pretty unstable, and it can just all of a sudden, you know, shift pretty fast into—was Elon the critical ingredient? Did he give people cover?"

"I think Elon was incredibly important to it. I think there was a—there were a lot of pieces that had built up in—in Silicon Valley; there was a, you know, there's always—there was always a way where, um, for many years people had been doubling down on the wokeness, the political correctness, you know, inside these companies."

"And, um, and then there's always an ambiguous thing—if something is not working, let's say wokeness isn't really working, it's not making your employees happier and more productive and more constructive and it's instead deranging it. But the ambiguity is, does that mean you need to have more wokeness or do you need to cut it out altogether?"

"And for, you know, for a number of years, um, the intuition was, well, we just have to do a little bit more. And we have to try a little bit harder and do a little bit more, and then, you know, there's—there's some point where it just got exhausted."

"And certainly, certainly a lot of the, uh, the top tech founders and CEOs felt comfortable telling me this behind closed doors, and maybe they're just telling me things that I want to hear, but I tend to think they're telling me what they really think."

"And, um, and so I was, yeah, was very aware of this incredible disconnect in Silicon Valley. I think it was a lot of it was, um, experienced as corporate governance as, you know, how ridiculous it's gotten to manage these, um, ideologically deranged millennial employees."

"And, you know, uh, there was—you know, I won't—I’ll try not to name names, but you know, one of the bigger companies that was in San Francisco, you know, um, the people in 2017—the founders told me, you know, they weren't sure they could take any more money from me because I supported Trump and it was sort of difficult to explain to their employees."

"But it was about a 12-month period. By 2019, you know, they hadn't shifted to being pro-Trump, but it was—they really appreciated my courage, and they, um, they organized their company where, you know, they had—the hiring goals were to shift employees away from San Francisco Bay Area as fast as possible."

"So we are—we have x% of people working in San Francisco, and we want to reduce that percentage as quickly as possible for a company as big as we are."

"And it was—and then, you know, if we built our employee workforce in any place other than San Francisco, it would be less woke and less crazy and more productive."

"And so this was the kind of just very prosaic conversation you had about, you know, how to manage a company, and then at some point, um, at some point we got the preference cascade that was was 2024."

"But yeah, obviously Elon gave, um, gave people a great deal of cover. You know there's—I mean, I mean, it certainly seemed incredibly dangerous to me what he did— incredibly courageous. You know, what would have happened to him if, um, if Trump would have lost?"

"And then certainly, uh, it—it was well, you know, maybe all—in all the rest of us can be a little bit more courageous than we otherwise were going to be, but he he gave cover to everybody."

"One of the things that was being said on both sides before the election by Oprah and Elon, and they sounded different saying it, but it was the same message, was that if their candidate didn't win, this was going to be the last American election. I thought that was totally nuts, but maybe you don't, um, or maybe you hear it differently."

"Let me—I didn't want to believe Elon when he said this, and I, you know, I texted him a few weeks before the election and told him, you know, I hadn't believed you when you said this at first, but it's—but I—I think it's because psychologically, I don't want to believe that. I don't want to believe that the country is so far gone that you have to leave the country or something."

"But then it was the sense in which I felt that he was he was correct was that if, um, if Trump—with what I think are much better substance, much better on so many things—could not win in 2024 against the machine, um, the machine would always win, and if the machine always wins, you no longer have a democracy. You know, you certainly no longer have a democratic process within the Democratic Party."

"You know, we always debate the election shenanigans in November of 2020. The far more extraordinary thing was March of 2020, where Biden comes in fourth place, fifth place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and then somehow gets rammed through South Carolina. All the other candidates drop off."

"So this is the extremely non-democratic primary in the Democratic Party in 2020, and then an even less democratic process by which Biden was replaced with Harris."

"And, uh, and yeah, it was going to be this. And if the machine could, um, could defeat Trump, I—I thought it was reasonable that it would gain even more power and somehow be unbeatable."

"And, you know, the country would become California, become a one-party state, and it would be far worse than California because the constraint on California is people can leave California. It's much harder to leave the U.S."

"When you say the machine, explain what you mean by that."

"It's, um, well, it's sort of a question of what is actually going on in the Democratic Party or in this progressive cult that is the left, and maybe a cult is too kind a word, because, you know, a cult normally has a cult leader. There's like one person who's thinking inside a cult, the cult leader, and, uh, it is, again, it's a machine because there are no individuals. And it's like, you know, it's like, um, you are just a small cog in the machine, and you're destined to become an ever smaller cog in this ever bigger machine."

"And that's—that's kind of the vibe of it, and, uh, it doesn't—you know, ideas don't matter, um, debates don't matter, you know, speech doesn't matter. It's—it's—it's just some kind of fast consensus formation process. We get to an answer and then—and then we—we rigorously enforce it."

"I—you know, it's always too extreme to describe like the Communist Party or something like this, but it is—it’s just this extremely regimented process that's, um, you know, somehow not very democratic, not very thoughtful, not very Republican, you know, not very American."

"Okay, one of the things that interested me about your role in this election cycle is, you know, when you look back at 2016, you were all in, right? You gave, you know, tens of millions between Trump and then I think 16 Republican candidates, including senator, now VP elect J.D. Vance, who we'll get to. But you sat this presidential election cycle out, and you were at the Aspen Ideas Festival—not a place that I expect to see you—and you said this: If you hold a gun to my head, I'll vote for Trump, but I'm not going to give any money to his super PAC. Why the Aspen Ideas Festival?"

"It's a 75% liberal audience."

"So even in front of—it's way big more than 75%."

"I will say when I showed up there, I was like the most right-wing person, if you take me literally. Uh, Barry, I—I’ll just make this point, um, and you held a gun to my head in front of a liberal audience, and I would say I'm still voting for Trump even if you hold a gun to my head in front of this very liberal audience—you better believe that I'm very, very pro-Trump."

"I also said that I, you know, I didn't think the money would make that much of a difference and it turned out really not to, right? It was—it was, you know, Trump was insanely outspent and it didn't matter."

"And, um, but yeah, I, uh, I think what I mean is like you're all in in 2016, and then it feels like you sort of retreated. Other people stepped into the breach, but you retreated. And if I see a pattern to your life and the bets you make, you're often very early and very ahead, and so I guess I wonder what that pulling back indicates."

"I don't know. I articulated in various contexts why I thought Trump was going to win, why he should win. Uh, you know, what I went on to discuss at the—at the Aspen Ideas Festival, probably the thing I said that was the most scandalous was just descriptively, he's going to win, he's going to win by a big margin because, uh, for that audience, you know, it's always Hegelian—the actual is the ideal—and so his—and so if you say that Trump's going to win, that's a way of saying Trump should win, and he deserves to win."

"And that was the—and so the most scandalous thing I could have told those people was not I'm going to work really hard for Trump and it may or may not succeed. The most scandalous thing I could tell them was, you know, Trump is on the winning side of history, and he's going to crush it whether I help him or not."

"So that was the most shocking thing, and there were like audible gasps when I said that to that audience."

"You said in one interview in 2023 that the Trump administration was crazier and more dangerous than you expected. What do you mean by that?"

"It felt very unstable. It felt—it felt dangerous for the people who got involved. You know, there were, there were, um, you know, all sorts of people who got prosecuted. Um, people went to jail. You know, they probably did things that were wrong. Um, they were also subject to crazy double standards, and, uh, and so, uh, yeah, there was sort of—there were aspects of it that felt like, you know, a circular firing squad where, you know, it was, I don't know, this, um, you know, and, and so yeah, there were all sorts of things where, um, it felt like there was a lot of uncompensated volatility for the people that— that got involved at the time."

"I still—I still have some worries that it—I—I'm certain it will be much improved this time. I still worry it will not be improved by enough."

"Or a different way of formulating it, um, would be that, uh, you know, one of the paradoxes of our elections is the elections are always relativistic exercises. It's basically two candidates: which one do you like more or which one do you hate less? It's more, more negative, which one do you hate less? And then, once the elections are over, we have just one president, and then that person gets put on this pedestal, and they are always found to fall way short of that standard."

"So elections are relativistic; after the elections, it's—it’s absolute. And so I have—I have a worry in the back of my head that there are elements of that that will repeat that, uh, you know, on a relative basis, Trump was, um, greatly to be preferred to us. You know, on an absolute basis, uh, there are all these ways I expect him to fall short."

"You know, in some ways, the problems are extremely difficult—they are harder than they were eight years ago. You know, the, uh, the border issue is out of control, so you know, maybe, uh, maybe you need to actually deport people instead of just building a wall, and that's a far more violent, far more drastic thing to do."

"And, uh, you know, the—the foreign policy situation is m—, you know, I mean, there's a crisis in Russia, Ukraine. The Iran problem is far worse than it was eight years ago. The, uh, the China-Taiwan thing, you know, there's sort of all these ways that it feels like the world is sleepwalking to Armageddon."

"I think Trump is better than Harris, um, you know, is he good enough to stop us from Armageddon? I hope so. I'm not 100% sure that he's good enough."

"One of the—I think very, um, proper fears of those that opposed Trump was the fact that in the first administration, he had a lot of people around him who, you know, perhaps some on the right would view them as swamp creatures, but perhaps other people, me included, would view them as public servants that were trying to sort of keep this thing on the rails—many of whom, you know, were burned or fired on Twitter or suffered, as you said, you know, reputational damage, things like that."

"And the idea is like he's burned through the A-list, the B-list, the C-list. And who's left? Do you share that fear? Do you think that that that's—that's well-founded?"

"Not at all, really. Okay, I don't know. I think, uh, I think they have—I think they'll have a much stronger bench this time. I think a lot of the—I don't know. Sort of, let's say, establishmentarian swamp creature people they ended up with, um, were not that good."

"You know, I don't know, and I don't want to pick on too many individually, but someone like General Mattis as the defense secretary, you know, how bad your people skills have to be that you fall for the Elizabeth Holmes theos fraud, and you're on the board of her company. And, uh, G.E. fell for that too, to be fair, and I don't think you consider him a—he was a lot older."

"You know, I expect, you know, a general, I—the probably ways they're too regimented. I expect them to have good skills at judging people and leading people. And, um, there aren't that many frauds in Silicon Valley that, that you fall for the biggest one in the last decade."

"May—I mean, maybe FTX; I don't know, that's the fair L.I. mean, Rupert Murdoch fell for it too. He—he invested, and he was not—not on the board, but—but, you know, it's, uh, I think there were sort of all these ways, uh, the, um, I don't think these people were that good, and they were not good at rethinking rethinking some of the priorities."

"And, uh, you know, I don't—I don't think, you know, there are ways that Trump does not have, you know, a overarching ideological agenda. It's not Reaganite; it's not a programmatic agenda. But it is a—it is sort of a—there is a direction that, you know, the neocon interventionism went wrong—it needs to be re—we need to rethink the failures of especially the Bush Republican era."

"There's—you know, there's a sense that, um, the globalization project has gone very haywire, and again, it's not clear what you do instead. And there's a part of globalization in theory that was a good thing—a borderless world, a world in which there are no boundaries to trade, the movement of goods, immigration, the movement of people, um, capital, the movement of finance, and the power of banks, uh, ideas, free flow of information, the internet."

"So this was, this was globalization in theory, and then in practice, so much of it somehow got hijacked by, you know, corrupt actors, actors that are adversarial to the U.S. The WTO is a free trade organization that by 2001 was hijacked by communist China. And, uh, and then there is some way the stuff needed to be rethought."

"And again, Trump, I don't think had a great ideology on this, but, but directionally, I believe he was correct that we needed to somehow rethink these things. And the place where the swamp creatures were very unhelpful is they didn't want to rethink things. They did not. And I think—and I do think this is where the second Trump administration will be in a different place."

"Trump's almost 80 years old. He's not going to change his character and who he is, and if you're someone, let's say, who has a great life, maybe you're—maybe you're in Silicon Valley, maybe you're looking and thinking, wait, wow, maybe I could make a big difference in this administration."

"And you just see the way that he chews through people; what's going to make you overcome that? This theoretical person decides to kind of move to Washington, D.C., and give it a shot."

"Well, I like—I just don't see that aspect of it changing. You know, I—I don't think Trump is going to change his views that strongly, but again, I don't—I don't think he's that—Pro, um, I mean, his character, not his views, his character."

"But I think they—I think he was right to fire— they—they were wrong to hire a lot of the people they hired. They were right to fire a lot of them because they were not aligned; they were not remotely aligned with the administration."

"You know, there's a way to do it, and there's a way not to do it. You know, it was—I know, again, I don't want to pick on too many individuals, but Bolton as National Security adviser, he was picked because he agreed with Trump on one thing, which was that Iran was a problem, and he disagreed with Trump on everything else."

"And I think—I think Bolton didn't have a terribly well-formed set of views on China, and, uh, and it was—it was not a priority, so probably disagreed with it as a priority if nothing else; and then, yeah, maybe Trump should have known this and should not have hired Bolton."

"Um, or Bolton should have been aware of it and should have been able to, um, figure out a way to, you know, to work, um, um, you know, within, you know, the rough direction that had been set by, by Trump."

"And, uh, it—it just blew up. So yeah, my hope is there will be way fewer firings, and they'll do—they'll do a better job."

"The first time around in 2016, you had a hand in suggesting candidates for Trump's administration. Vanity Fair, which I'm sure you don't read, called you the shadow president. Who's in that role this time? Some people, you know, see Elon Musk camped out at Mar-a-Lago and saying it's him. Other people are watching as, you know, potential appointees like Bridge KBY are making their way to pilgrimage in Tucker Carlson's house in Maine. Is it him that's calling the shots? Who are the people that are most influential in Trump's ear right now?"

"I think Trump is calling the shots. I think President Trump is calling the shots. He's probably thought about it a lot more than he did when he came in in 2016. I'm not sure he'll get everything right, but I think he is he is going to be much more focused on bringing in people that are, you know, roughly in sync with a program."

"And, uh, I'm I'm hopeful it'll be off and a much better start. But I think I think, you know, at the end of the day, the buck stops with with Trump, and this was—a way where it is very different from Biden or what whatever the last four years we just had were."

"Okay, I want to talk about some of Trump's policies. He campaigned on a few policies that seem very inconceivable to me. One of them is this 20% tariff on all goods from other countries and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Should we take him, you know, seriously but not literally? Is that going to happen? And if so, what does that look like?"

"Well, um, I don't know, Barry; there's so many levels one can go through this. Um, there are—well, maybe let's start with this: Are those tariffs a good idea, in your view?"

"Uh, they are. I—I think directionally they are a good idea. Um, in—in practice, you—you probably want to be more nuanced in—you know, there's some things you want to tariff, some things you want to be more, more careful about."

"But, you know, there is—there's a way free trade theory from the classical economics of the 19th century works, and it assumes what it assumed was that you had comparable labor standards, comparable regulations, you had free flow of capital."

"So if you make money, you can invest it, and then—and then, um, the free trade theory— it implied that things would be in near equilibrium, that, um, you wouldn't have countries with chronic trade surpluses or chronic trade deficits."

"If you have a chronic trade deficit as the United States has, um, it tells you, um, I think that there's, you know, something incredibly off in the—in the Dynamics."

"There's a political way to think about this too, which is, and use free trade in scare quotes., there is a way that free trade as it currently operates benefits certain parts of the U.S. and hurts other parts. We have a very strong dollar; it some ways it helps Silicon Valley; in some ways it helps, um, uh, Wall Street and the financial system because, um, the trade deficit, the current account deficit gets recycled into the U.S."

"So if you have a—you know, if you have a multi-billion dollar trade deficit and China ends up with hundreds of billions of dollars that it doesn't want to spend on U.S. goods or services, its only choice at the end of the day is to invest that money in the U.S."

"The money gets invested through the banking system, and the banks make money. So in a way, you can think of the Wall Street banks being long the trade deficit—the bigger the deficit, the more money they make. When the deficits go down, the banks blow up."

"And something similar happened between 2006 and 2009. In 2006, we had an $800 billion current account deficit, and basically, you had to have $800 billion of fake financial products that Wall Street had to sell, where it's like a AAA-rated subprime mortgage bond that some clueless bank in Denmark buys up from the U.S. and at some point, okay, we don't really want to buy these bonds, and maybe we don't want to sell goods to the U.S. because there's nothing we can do with the dollars."

"The trade deficit, current account deficit collapsed, and then we had the 2008 global financial crisis, which again was at the time centered on the U.S.—the U.S. banks."

"So there's sort of a way—maybe these deficits are good, but the—the sectoral effect in the U.S. is that it really helps certain parts of the U.S. economy at the expense of others."

"And politically, you know, one way to analyze the elections in 2016 was that Trump in 2016 said we're going to do something about this Rust Belt problem in the Midwest, and they failed to do much in the next four years, and then those states reverted to the Democrats. And then four years later, in a way, the Biden people did even less, and so Trump's been given another chance to do something."

"So there's sort of a political economy way of thinking of the trade deficit where if you say what Trump needs to do or what J.D. Vance needs to do to get elected president in 2028 is to fix the Rust Belt problem in the Midwest. And maybe, yeah, maybe the tariffs are bad in some aggregate sense, but just for the Republicans to politically win, you have to do something for those parts of the country."

"But I think, you know, look, I think the other theory on this is that, uh, there's a game theory to it as well, where if you have counterparts that are, um, engaged in extremely unfair trade, maybe you have to threaten tariffs as a way to get them to open up."

"If you're always saying we're never going to do anything, you know, you will end up with a very subpar kind of a free trade world."

"So this is where—even if in theory we believe in free trade, I never want free trade treaties negotiated by people who are ideological free traders because they will always think they don't need to negotiate anything."

"There are so many other points I can—let me make one last point on this. If you did 60% across-the-board tariffs on China, um, it probably would be very, very bad for Chinese companies and China. It would only be mildly bad for U.S. consumers because an awful lot of stuff would get shifted away from China."

"Because trade—we always model it is between two countries. Well, the thing people say to scare people is do you want to be, yeah, sorry, and I think there's a lot of stuff that doesn't get shifted back to the U.S. I—I don't believe that's what happens."

"So, you know, the iPhone—you can't build those economically in the U.S. So it doesn't get shifted from China to the U.S. If you put 60% tariffs on iPhones, um, and it costs twice as much to make them the U.S. than they just cost more. But what I think will happen is you—you shift the iPhones to Vietnam or India or places like that."

"And maybe—maybe our def trade deficit doesn't go down, but we, at least, aren't helping our geopolitical rival. Vietnam is an evil communist country, but it's not bent on world domination."

"So, um, so if you shift manufacturing from China to Vietnam, that hurts China; it is maybe mildly negative for American consumers; it's really good for Vietnam. But, uh, but in this geopolitical calculus, that seems very much in the American interest."

"Trump has promised not just to close the border, which I think everyone can now acknowledge after the election has become extremely chaotic and dangerous, but he's promised to deport something like 11 million people. Do you think that's actually going to happen?"

"I don't think— I—I don't think they're literally going to do that, uh, and then, you know, at the same time, there—there is some— there's some big way these—these things, you know, need to be—need to be rethought a lot."

"And like trade, um, you know, there’s a—a theory of immigration where it somehow grows the GDP. It's—it's grown the economy. Um, and, and I always think, um, one of the differences in immigration debates between Europe and the U.S. is in Europe, immigration is is mainly a cultural issue."

"And you end up with a lot of immigrants who maybe don't share, um, European cultural values and then Europe’s societies are bad at culturally assimilating these people, and there are sort of our a set of cultural challenges with immigration."

"I think the U.S. is still pretty good at assimilating people culturally, even with a lot of the ways our public schools and other institutions aren't working as well as they used to. But I think the challenges with immigration are more of an economic nature in the U.S."

"And that even though there are ways that, um, immigrants can grow the pie, it also has these effects of, um, of creating incredible, um, incredible SKS, incredible winner-loser dynamics in the U.S."

"I know the—and I go through all these different variations of it. You know, I myself am an immigrant. You know, my my parents—I was born in Germany; we immigrated to the U.S. in 1968, sort of the craziest year ever. People thought my parents were out of their mind to leave Germany and come to the U.S.—the 1968 year the country was self-destructing."

"And, uh, I'm, you know, very fortunate they did, and so I can't be sort of a categorical anti-immigrant person, or at least it'd be sort of weird pulling the ladder up behind me type of dynamic."

"But at the same time, I think, um, there one should somehow be able to talk about all the ways that it creates these incredible economic SKS and distortions."

"And, uh, the, um, I don't know. I'll just go down one particular vertical that I think, uh, is pretty important, which is, um, Henry George is this late 19th-century economist, uh, who was, um, he was considered quasi-socialist in the late 19th century; he's considered semi-libertarian in the early 21st century, which maybe tells you something about how our society changed."

"But the, uh, the basic Georgist obsession was real estate, and it was if you weren't really careful, you would get runaway real estate prices, and the people who owned the real estate would make all the gains in a society because there's something extremely inelastic about real estate, especially if you have strict zoning laws or things like this."

"The dynamic ends up being that, uh, you add 10% to the population in a city, and maybe the house prices go up 50%, and maybe people's salaries go up, but they don't go up by 50%. And so, uh, the GDP grows, but it's a giant windfall to the Boomer homeowners and to the landlords."

"And it's, um, it's a massive hit to the lower middle class and to young people who can never get on the housing ladder. And, um, and there's sort of a way that, I, I model what's happened in the U.S., in Britain, Canada, a lot of the Anglosphere countries, as a Georgist real estate catastrophe where, uh, where basically, uh, you know, there’s sort of ways I can describe this in Los Angeles, where we live, you know, but all sorts of places where, uh, yeah, the real estate prices, the rents have gone up more and more."

"If we talk about the inflation problem in this last—well, was inflation and immigration? But the, you, you know, and there's a way you could talk about inflation in terms of, you know, the prices of eggs or groceries, um, but you know, that's not that big a cost item even for lower middle-class people."

"The really big cost item is the rent, and I think, um, I think in some ways, uh, Trump and J.D. Vance did manage to shift the conversation a little bit to this real estate problem, and again, I don't want to, you know, blame it all on immigration."

"But if you—yeah, if you just, you know, add more people to the mix, and you're not allowed to build new houses because of zoning laws, where it's too expensive or it's too regulated and restricted, then, um, then the prices go up a lot, and it's this incredible wealth transfer from the young and the lower middle class to the upper middle class and the landlords and the old."

"And there are reasons you might not want to do that. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to do it."

"So that's—that's sort of a very invidious distinction involved; this is just sort of a basic economics point that we can't even make."

"You know, I think most Americans, though, when they're thinking about the border and immigration, are thinking about, you know, particular stories that were, you know, I think rightly made a big deal in this campaign."

"They're thinking about criminals and drug cartels and sex trafficking and things like that. They are not thinking, I don't think we should deport the Mexican, you know, grandmother living in West Hollywood or whatever. And is that what we're going to see?"

"Well, I—I would say that the incredibly open border has put an incredible stress on the social fabric in a lot of ways, um, and yeah, there's definitely the fentanyl crisis; there are, you know, the narco drug gangs, uh, you know, there are all these sort of crazy extreme stories that shouldn't happen at all, and that tell you something's very off."

"But then I think there's also, you know, there's also a general version where, you know, I don't even know what the numbers are, but you have a Los Angeles public high school system in which you have to teach in 30 different languages or something like that, and in which, you know, um, the public schools aren't working."

"And, um, and then—and then the, uh, you know, the amount people have to spend on rent in these places is so much higher than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago as a percent of income."

"And, uh, and that's, you know, that's a stress on immigrants; it's a, uh, it's a stress on the people they're competing with directly. This is a sense in which, you know, if—if you say that, uh, the immigrants, you know, let's say I don't know, lower middle-class Mexican immigrants, are competing with lower middle-class Mexican people in L.A., then as an economic matter, those are the people who should be the most anti-immigrant."

"If we go with identity politics, they should say, well, you know, we want more Mexicans, but if—if you actually think of it in econ 101 terms, um, no, maybe you don't want more people competing for your, uh, you know, two-bedroom apartment and driving up the rent even more."

"Or even more people crowding in and, um, you know, um, paying money—paying money to the landlord."

"You know, if you're a Bangladeshi Uber driver in New York City, do you want a lot more Bangladeshis?"

"This is always—you know, this is always the point I make about cloning, where we can have all sorts of ethical debates about cloning, but the econ 101 intuition is if we came along with 100 clones of Barry Weiss with competing talk shows, you know, you might say, well, I—I can't—you know, we can debate the ethics of this, but we should be talking about the economics."

"And you would be right to say I'm kind of nervous about the economics band cloning."

"Um, Trump, I'm just— I'm just saying we should we should at least be able to talk about the economics."

"Let's talk about education, an issue you care a lot about. Trump has promised to get rid of the Department of Education, saying it's unnecessary and ineffective and a tool of the woke culture wars, and he's also threatened to cut funding for higher education. And I guess I want to ask you a first-principles question, which is, you know, should taxpayer dollars go to support private universities like Harvard? And do you think that getting rid of the Department of Education would be a good thing?"

"Yes, it would be a good thing. I—I think you have to pick the battles of what you can do, uh, and where you can—you can change things."

"I think I think there are—I don't know; there are a lot of indirect ways you can—you can shift things. There is, um, the NIH gives research grants. A lot of those go to university scientists, and then there is a overhead budget, which is typically something like 40%. If you get a million-dollar grant, maybe 40% of that or like 66% overcharge gets charged by the university in overhead."

"I believe that number can be arbitrarily reset, and you can—you can reset that as a much, much lower number. And, uh, it seems to me—and so, a nuanced argument would be, I want more money to go to the scientists, and I want less money to go to the woke administration."

"And diversity—and what we know is this bloated, um, you know, diversity machine overhead. And, um, and you know, we won't defund the universities simply, but we're going to we're going to change the overhead expensing, and I—I believe that number can be unilaterally zeroed out by executive order or changed by executive order."

"And, uh, so I think there are—there are, you know, I think the Department of Education is one of these weird departments where very little can be done, and very little changed, but there are things like that that can be done that are quite dramatic."

"There's obviously, you know, a student debt crisis that's completely out of control. It was, you know, $300 billion in student debt in 2000; it's— it's now, um, approaching $2 trillion. And then there sort of is a way that it's crept up on people that, uh, is sort of subtle."

"I was looking at this the other day. So if you look at it by cohort, if you graduated from college in 1997, um, 12 years later, 2009, you had, um, you paid off most of your student debt. It took you a long time, so probably the student debt meant you were slower to start a family, to buy a house."

"So, you know, it sort of probably in some ways had this deleterious effect on your career, but there was some way that you took on all this debt, and you could gradually get out of the hole."

"And then gradually the debt grew faster than the value of the college degree grew economically. And by 2009, the graduates of 2009 are the first cohort where the median student with debt in 2009, when you look at them 12 years later in 2021, the debts higher."

"And, um, which means that, uh, you know, that you can't even keep up with the interest payments on the student debt, it's so big, and the value of your college degree for the most part is so low."

"You get an English PhD, you end up with a barista at Starbucks or some something like this, and you know there's obviously some exceptions, like computer science, but, uh, most most degrees had so little value, the debt was so big."

"But then it—it takes 12 years to realize that it's not working like it used to because for—for a long time, the colleges can just say, well, you know, it eventually pays off. It takes a while, and maybe that's true."

"But if it's no longer true, um, man, are you in a deep hole by the time you realize it. So there's something that's that's very, very off with it."

"You know, I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the—the Biden policy that, you know, maybe on some level you need to just forgive the student debt because people will never be able to pay it off, and we need to have some realistic level setting."

"I don't think they should be bailed out by the taxpayers, and I think, you know, some of it should be should be, um, this—some of it has to be hit to the bondholders, the debt. And some of it has to be hit to, uh, the colleges."

"Hmm. And probably a lot of colleges, if—if—the colleges were even partially liable for all these unpaid debts, most of them would be out of business."

"And so there's—yeah, there's—there's something. So there are sort of a number of these things that, you know, they're—they're coming to a head regardless. I don't think Trump needs to particularly do anything."

"Let me give you—let me give you—it's going to implode on its own."

"It is; it's an exponential growing, uh, student debt problem. It's an exponentially growing debt problem generally, and, uh, you know, there's—we had for many years, you could kick the can down the road, but eventually you end up with a pile of cans and no road, and that's sort of where we are with the student debt thing—or another, you know.”

“I think this was a very strange 2024 election where, uh, there were all these big issues that I think were—were not being discussed. So one—one other—this is, you know, this is what I speculate was one of the really big issues, um, even bigger than just the student debt problem is maybe the bankruptcy of a number of blue states and blue cities."

"Illinois,