On this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson interviews Alex Blumberg. Alex is a former Wall Street Journal bestselling author, hedge fund manager, and hedge fund analyst. He s been in the investing business for over 30 years and is a regular contributor to Forbes and the New York Times. Alex and Tucker discuss how he got to where he is today, what he s learned, and what he thinks about the current state of the economy.
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00:00:30.0002020 was an incredibly prolific period for me. I'd wake up out of bed and I was doing deals and it was like I had the world in the palm of my hand, it felt like.
00:00:45.680I was moving markets every time I communicated publicly. That was incredibly dizzying and it had the exact opposite effect on me that it should have.
00:00:56.000What it should have done, I should have taken a step back and say, hold on, this has nothing to do with me. What is this moment?
00:01:03.900And the moment would have been, we're at the tail end of zero rates. We had trillions of dollars that the government had basically given to individuals.
00:01:12.220We had an enormous M2 money supply. And instead, I thought it was me.
00:01:17.180And then in, you know, 2022, when the war in Ukraine started, the bottom fell out in financially, in Silicon Valley, in frankly, a lot of things that I was working on.
00:01:29.780It was such a wake up call and it was the biggest blessing of my life.
00:01:33.580You know, I never thought I would be in a position to have made that much money.
00:01:37.460In hindsight, I've never been more blessed than to torch, you know, three or four billion dollars.
00:01:42.520Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else.
00:01:59.620And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers.
00:02:02.640We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly.
00:02:07.900Check out all of our content at TuckerCarlson.com. Here's the episode.
00:02:11.580Do you think, I mean, there's, you know, we're still, it's still ongoing, the war in Ukraine, but it had, you said, an immediate effect on markets.
00:02:23.120You could point, you could put it on a map, March of 2022, I'll never forget it.
00:02:27.640So that war, my opinion, was, you know, welcomed by many in the West.
00:02:35.220And I wonder if, whatever they said, it was clear they were for it.
00:02:41.020Do you think that those two things are connected?
00:02:45.980It's not clear to me how connected they are, but the first part of what you said I do agree with, which is that we have silently allowed this insidious war machine to take over large parts of the government.
00:03:06.400But it turns out over these last few years, especially since this MAGA takeover, this hostile takeover that Donald Trump affected, which I think is enormously important in historical context.
00:03:16.760But it's, it's more within the Democratic Party now.
00:04:14.820Because I had to take a step back and actually figure out how much of this was actually me and my preparation and my process or my dark passenger.
00:04:27.480And here's what I mean by this because I thought about this a lot.
00:14:20.440And at first I was mad, I was mad at her, you know, meaning subconsciously, like, because she's giving me something that I don't understand.
00:14:28.720And I thought, there's got to be a catch.
00:16:44.300And then when I looked around, it wasn't just me.
00:16:47.360There's so many of my peers in Silicon Valley that it also just wasted the last decade doing nothing.
00:16:52.640We were all, quote, unquote, wealthier, but we were more broke, you know?
00:16:56.600I wonder, I do know, and I've certainly seen that a lot, having spent a lot of time around rich people.
00:17:03.340But I've rarely seen someone address it as honestly as you are now.
00:17:08.500And do you know other people who've been willing to look at themselves as clearly?
00:17:13.200I think there are people that may not talk about it, but I think that they've lived it.
00:17:27.080I know Elon's lived it, where he's always underwritten things based on, like, this is the, so, like, you know, the great thing about being in Silicon Valley is that there are people that I have the honor and the luck of knowing.
00:17:41.440And my, like him, but I didn't really try to learn from him until 2022, if that makes sense.
00:17:50.640Meaning, there were all these decisions that he made that I would reductively reduce to, that's a smart business decision.
00:17:58.300And it had nothing to do with business.
00:18:00.320He had, he was always leading from, what are my, what are my core moral beliefs and let me act on those.
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00:22:43.440So you got very rich in your early 30s.
00:34:48.340I can tell you that there's at least 25,000 or 50,000 of them that are like Michael Jordan-esque capable.
00:34:54.980And instead, what we told these people is, hey, don't win six championships in eight years.
00:35:03.000Don't be the most prolific player ever.
00:35:05.580What we told them to do was like, hey, you can dribble down the court, but don't dribble too fast because you'll make these other people feel bad.
00:35:11.620You can do a couple of layups, but don't do too many layups because you should actually pass the ball so that these other people we hired because the team photo looks better.
00:35:18.360You know, give them a chance to score.
00:36:06.600It sounds like just good old-fashioned decadence, kind of.
00:36:08.720But I think that there was some sabotage, meaning, or maybe sabotage is not the right word, but there were traps that were laid out and we all fell on them.
00:36:20.840The DEI trap, the woke trap, all this kind of stuff that were distractions to core innovation.
00:36:29.220I'll give you two examples that paint the picture.
00:37:17.800Whether you agree or you disagree, should that toolbox be in our toolbox where we can meet it out, or should it be in China's toolbox where they can decide?
00:37:28.540Where if all of a sudden there is some disease in the future and it requires this very precise form of gene editing and only they can do it,
00:37:39.000and now a state-sponsored entity in China is the one that provisions a cure for 8 billion humans around the world,
00:37:45.080that will give them tremendous economic power.
00:37:52.120Is that smart for America to have done that?
00:38:04.000And what the EO said is, executive order, AI is going to be critical, and so we want to give the ability for federal lands to be used for AI data centers.
00:38:26.660And by the second or third paragraph, what it says is, however, we need to think about the diversity and equity inclusions of said data centers.
00:38:37.740And, and, no, hold on, and, you have to basically give preference to clean power.
00:38:49.040Well, is that the same clean power that was essentially made impossible because of permitting issues and environmental impact studies?
00:38:57.540You know, you can't just build solar farms that you want to.
00:39:00.300You can't build wind farms in America if you want to.
00:39:02.920You can't build nuclear reactors because they won't let you.
00:39:07.820These are not technological limitations.
00:39:44.760They are doing very strategic things with the capital.
00:39:50.420What they've decided is they're going to allocate money that they take from selling oil to build a global data center infrastructure for AI.
00:42:58.820It cost $10 billion because of all the roadblocks that we put in front of companies to make the things that we need to maintain our technical supremacy.
00:43:10.880There is a huge – so, for example, one of the things that China chooses to not do is they don't really respect copyright law.
00:43:17.460Now, I'm not saying we should violate copyright law, but I think it's important to acknowledge that there is a technical overhang that it creates in training these brains to try to filter out content that the New York Times tags or Fox News tags and says, don't learn on this.
00:43:35.100You're not allowed unless you have a deal with me.
00:43:38.940That creates an enormous layer of expense.
00:43:51.500It's do you believe in copyright or do you not believe in copyright?
00:43:54.840I think it's a much more nuanced question.
00:43:58.380For the sake of training these digital brains, if there was an economic relationship that we could create, isn't it better that our digital brain is smarter than these other ones and that we make it as cheap as possible?
00:44:08.900Well, if you ask that question, a lot of people would say, gosh, that's a nuanced question.
00:44:15.720It's neither an easy no or an easy yes, but on the margins, I would say yes, knowing that there are these impacts.
00:44:44.080It's that building that facility had a multi-year environmental impact study, umpteen lawsuits, all kinds of indirection and misdirection from all of these independent actors who believed that they were pursuing their own priorities.
00:45:02.420And there was no release valve that said, I appreciate and respect the smelt that you're trying to protect or the land grouse, but this is bigger than that.
00:45:15.960We need to make sure we maintain our technical superiority.
00:45:18.840That data center is going to be used by the NSA to protect America.
00:45:39.420And the output are practical costs of building these things that are just two orders of magnitude bigger than our competitors.
00:45:46.960We're not going to use the word revival, but it does seem true that millions of Americans simultaneously are coming to the conclusion that buying things online and going on vacation may not be the sum total purpose of life.
00:46:01.400And if you're one of those people who's beginning to ask questions, what else is there?
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00:46:50.260We recently interviewed the founder and CEO of Hallow, and that conversation left us more convinced than ever that this will never become a godless society because people won't let that happen.
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00:49:01.500There is nothing that the Western countries can do that will equate in any way, shape, or form the impact of what China and India decides to do.
00:49:47.500So I think the reason why, for example, like we have, again, so we have lost so much ground.
00:49:53.100The California wildfires are an example that lays us bare.
00:49:58.460We should have 50% of the American population on solar panels and battery walls today.
00:50:06.660The reason, it's nice to have that you do it for climate change, but the reason is resilience.
00:50:13.200The reason is so that you can power yourself in moments of calamity.
00:50:17.140The reason is so that you can make sure that you can take care of your family, cook food, you know, desalinate water, whatever it is that you need to do.
00:50:29.780And instead, we make it this sort of like moral blanket that you have to wrap yourself in.
00:50:36.220Everybody then takes a view and all it does is retard progress.
00:50:39.980So I guess what I'm saying is we spend way too much time getting distracted on fringe ideas and we need to recalibrate.
00:50:52.180We need to be and we need to remain the most singular muscular power in the world, which comes from economic and military supremacy, which comes from only one thing, technical supremacy.
00:51:03.900So you have to find a way of enabling those 50,000 Michael Jordans that exist in America to cook.
00:51:27.260And just to double click into a robot, a robot moves through these things called actuators, okay?
00:51:33.900And one of the things that actuators needs, one of the ways that they generate mechanical motion, 3D planar mechanical motion, is through the use of magnets, permanent magnets.
00:51:45.680And permanent magnets are different than the ones you and I play with or what our kids play with.
00:51:49.440They are made from these things called rare earth metals.
00:51:56.420They are not rare, but they are abundantly available in the earth.
00:52:01.140There is an incredible supply of rare earths in California.
00:52:06.300You could not, for the life of you, get a permit in California, no matter how clean, how green, to mine those materials, to make sure that we could make magnets, so that we could make the robots, so that we maintained our technical supremacy.
00:53:04.840You're going to spend 13 years in permitting hell in California to try to get that done?
00:53:08.560So, and I know this, the reason I know this is that I started a business to make sure that China does not have access to the only supply of rare earths.
00:53:24.080And I initially tried to do it in California.
00:53:28.160I invested in one business that actually had an old mind that we were able to get back online through a bankruptcy process and blah, blah, blah.
00:53:37.660So, I went to India, and I was able to get a deal done with the Indian government.
00:53:44.680And what they were able to see was the strategic rationale of making sure we had access to not only the rare earths, but also to make sure that there were subsidies so that they would compete on the global stage cheaper than China.
00:53:58.580And now I can bring them back into the United States to make these magnets.
00:55:10.520We have more nat gas and oil in the United States.
00:55:15.200I don't know if you saw this, Tucker, but there was a piece of data that came out this week, but our reliance on foreign oil is almost entirely gone.
00:55:43.440If you're not fighting over that critical resource, it's going to be very unlikely you're going to go to war, which, if you look past the last four or five wars, the trillions of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of American lives, what were they all about?
00:56:26.200So, back to this, though, but, like, you know, if you're able to build these things, I think what Biden should have done is just say, hey, listen, folks, do your best, get the energy, because it exists, use NAC gas, use oil, and we will figure it out after we've won.
00:57:02.300But I just think that we're—I mean, if you've got mandates for net zero or mandates for no hydrocarbons, mandates for EVs, and this economic imperative around AI, I just don't—and people like air conditioning, I just don't think we're going to have enough electricity unless there's hardware built, like, really soon.
00:57:20.040It's incredible that you mentioned air conditioning.
00:57:24.840So back to sort of one of these—back to one of these ways where I was like, you know, after 2022, how can I just get back to basics and do the things that I do well?
00:57:35.340One of the projects that I started with this incredible mechanical engineer was we set out to rebuild the air conditioner.
00:58:51.020So there was probably a very smart, capable lawyer representing some smart organization who knew that this was something that they could write in to slow people down.
00:59:01.720But what people need to understand is, again, it just slows down our ability to remain number one.
00:59:07.300But where does this—I think you're exactly right.
00:59:09.560I think you've described it very nicely.
01:00:48.260There are far more Brits in the Emirates than there are Emiratis in Britain.
01:00:52.080So the thing that we need to do, I think, as a Western set of nations, is we need to understand and agree on the fact that governance over this last decade has totally and miserably failed by focusing on these fringe issues and by losing sight of these global priorities.
01:02:43.120I think that it had had some principles back then that I think are very legitimate and I think should exist in the United States.
01:02:50.120The most important being a capped cost of higher education.
01:02:53.600I spent $12,000 a year to get an electrical engineering degree from a place called the University of Waterloo, which globally is as good, frankly, better than MIT.
01:03:05.420If I had to be in the United States and if I had gotten into MIT, which I probably would not have, but had I been able to, I'd be $100,000 or $200,000 in debt.
01:03:17.840And so had I not had this lottery ticket for me pay off with an IPO and working at Facebook, I don't know where I would be today.
01:03:26.440So there are things that Canada, I think, and we should acknowledge that, does really right.
01:03:31.080That is probably the most important thing that it does right.
01:03:35.420And I think the idea of a state-sponsored healthcare system, it's implemented horribly poorly, but there are elements of that where I think, especially around sort of capped costs, which I think are important, meaning, you know, in the United States, a healthcare CEO was telling me, when you look inside of an EMR system, the electronic medical care system.
01:03:57.020Let's say, Tucker, you're a doctor and you did a knee surgery, you would have 100 different prices attached to you, depending on the plan, depending on the insurer, that's dumb.
01:04:09.980You are one person, those are one set of hands, that's one surgery, it's one quality.
01:04:16.300The idea that one person is lucky enough to pay $1,000 deductible and the other person has to pay $50,000 is an egregious market failure.
01:04:40.020Not everything else in Canada is broken, I think, but those two ideas...
01:04:42.440Well, their healthcare system is a disaster.
01:04:43.900Well, the implementation then of the system...
01:04:46.160So, my question is, you know, it's like one of those things that, I'm not against it in theory, but I can't think of, I mean, national health system doesn't work, the Canadian healthcare system doesn't work.
01:04:55.820I mean, is there a working national healthcare system?
01:04:58.300Yes, I think that you need to have competition.
01:05:06.520There's a hybrid that the United States could implement that is not NHS or the Canadian system, but it's not just a pure free market free for all.
01:05:18.040It's a little bit in between, and let me describe what the in between parts are.
01:05:23.280Medicare is an incredibly important insurance program in the United States.
01:05:27.360I think it stands to reason that Medicare should have its own PBM.
01:05:33.500If Medicare was able to negotiate, you know, an extremely aggressive price for drugs, it sets the boundary for what is allowable for everybody else.
01:05:44.940And for folks that are 65 and older, then now they have a very viable alternative to use that.
01:05:50.800It also creates transparency around the variation in pricing, number one.
01:05:57.360Number two, there needs to be a way where a private insurer can build up some credit for doing things today that may only pay off for that employee in the future when he's no longer an employee.
01:06:21.180Have put you on a statin in your early 40s to help you manage your...
01:06:27.200I'm not saying you have rising cholesterol, but if you had that, because in 10 or 15 years from now, it would help a potential cardiac arrest or heart attack.
01:06:38.000A lot of the companies that are faced with this decision today say, we're not going to do that because you may not be an employee in 15 years, so why am I paying now for something where I get the benefit then?
01:06:49.320But that's a simple healthcare economics market solution.
01:06:55.380We should give private insurers incentives to, you know, in some cases, maybe the right thing to do is to put people on Ozempic and Munjaro.
01:10:51.300So you said AI can be used to make sense of, you know, like the Talmud of health insurance regulations.
01:11:00.380What, looking down the next five years, you know, name three or four innovations that you're pretty certain we're going to see life enhancers from AI.
01:11:18.720But when I don't see something that I think I can start right away and there's somebody that's a little bit in the lead, I'll just invest and I'll just take a large piece so that I can help guide them.
01:11:26.260One of those businesses where I'm the largest shareholder has been working on breast cancer surgery.
01:11:34.380And today across America, for every 10 women that go and get diagnosed with breast cancer, three of the surgeries are, leave cancer behind.
01:11:49.260So, and the way that it works is you go in for what's called, so there's two different kinds of breast cancer surgery.
01:11:53.280There's a lumpectomy, which is take out the lump or a mastectomy, which is take out the entire breast.
01:11:59.620And in the lumpectomy, you have to have, you visualize with your own eyes, whether you think most of the cancer is gone, you close up the woman and you take that sample, you give it to a pathologist.
01:12:12.540And typically between seven and 11 days, which is how long it takes because they're clogged up and there's backlog, they'll look under a microscope and visually inspect and say, actually, sorry, 30% of the time they say you left some cancer behind.
01:12:26.260So, now that woman has to, those three women have to go back, they get another surgery, but again, 30% error rate, they do it again.
01:12:36.160And then one of those women gets a ding.
01:12:37.980So, now one woman has had three breast cancer surgeries.
01:12:42.680Now, if you go to a really, really good teaching hospital, that error rate will be 5% because the docs are incredible.
01:12:52.920If you go to an overly zealous doctor, that error rate will also be low, but you'll come in for a lumpectomy, you'll end up with a mastectomy kind of a thing.
01:13:01.800They'll just take out so much of that and that creates a disfiguration.
01:13:05.920So, this company basically says, hold on a second, I'll just use AI.
01:13:12.300I'll look right down to the granular microscopic level.
01:13:16.120I'll take an extremely high-res picture.
01:13:19.140My brain will be trained on only this one task.
01:13:22.600Is there cancer or is there no cancer?
01:13:24.960So, we built it and it's in a bunch of the leading hospitals in America.
01:13:29.360But we had to file with the FDA to be allowed to tell the doctor.
01:14:37.380And that can get breast cancer surgeries to be so prolifically good that the error rate goes to zero.
01:14:44.700The impact and the quality of life of those women, and then by extension, their families, their kids that have to deal with that stress as well, can go away.
01:14:58.180So, that's a profound impact of AI that you're going to see in the next year.
01:15:02.180We could quibble that this should have been faster, could have cost a lot less money.
01:15:06.420Meaning, it cost me the same amount of money to get this trial done as it cost that Chinese company to build a digital brain that's as good as OpenAI or Facebook.
01:16:06.440Now it's 7 times better than that 10 times to not get into an accident.
01:16:12.060So, the idea about using AI now to just eliminate all the unnecessary deaths that happen because of traffic mishaps, there's the potential where that goes to zero.
01:16:52.020So, it's not a plane, not a helicopter, but it's kind of this hybrid thing in between.
01:16:56.400And they have this autopilot where it's like taking off in a no-pilot configuration, piloting it in the air, which is much simpler, by the way, than driving on the ground, and then landing.
01:17:11.200And you have the ability to now just create a level of transportation which increases GDP.
01:17:16.500And that is an AI brain that's calculating all the system variables around itself, being able to fly safely, getting from point A to point B.
01:28:30.560You know, like when you see kids around, and there are some, they are polite, they're kind, they may buy contact.
01:28:38.020There's these, I don't want to call them simple, but there are these building blocks of being a human being that you need to be taught by your parents.
01:29:34.360And it was just the amount of contortion that people were going through to try to prevent this man from getting into power made me want him to be in power even more.
01:30:06.120But, yeah, that's as far as I've gotten.
01:30:08.020And then, you know, different from his first time around, the caliber of the people around him, it's like the 92 Barcelona, you know, dream team.
01:30:18.540As far as I can tell, I mean, like, my gosh.
01:30:32.860I want to tell you about an amazing documentary series from our friend Sean Stone called All the President's Men, the Conspiracy Against Trump.
01:30:41.200It is a series of interviews with people at the very heart of the first Trump term, many of whom are close to the heart of the second Trump term.
01:30:50.460This is their stories about what Permanent Washington tried to do to them, in many cases send them to prison, for the crime of supporting Donald Trump.
01:30:58.600Their words have never been more relevant than they are now.
01:31:29.080I remember vividly the day that you all had that fundraiser for Trump and thinking, I never thought I would live to see this.
01:31:37.060This is like a major change, major, major change.
01:31:39.680Was there a major change in attitudes in Silicon Valley toward Trump after that?
01:31:43.500After that, yeah, because it gave permission.
01:31:45.360David is very complimentary to me in that because I was a little bit more promiscuous and not necessarily just a straight hardline Republican, it was a little bit more valuable, I think, for that cohort of people because they could kind of say, oh, well, if it's, you know, Chamath said it, oh, then yeah, sure.
01:32:09.260But I think that he probably took a lot of heat as well.
01:32:14.300And more than that, what he did was he then said, you know, I'm really going to put my foot on the gas here.
01:32:19.900And he's great at this, which is just like, I'm going to tip the preference cascade.
01:32:24.420So then he went to the Republican Convention.
01:32:46.160But, you know, it did turn out that his partner also gave like 50 or 100 million bucks to Kamala, which I suspect then that Marc probably gave 50 or 100 million to Trump.
01:32:56.020It looked like they were splitting it.
01:36:44.360And Gavin Newsom is extremely charismatic.
01:36:48.600And he is able to convince people of things that are just not true.
01:36:54.360And so, he is fighting for his political life.
01:37:02.060He definitely wants to be on the national stage.
01:37:06.200And so, the real question is, is he able to convince enough people that this was the environment and that these winds came out of nowhere?
01:37:14.780Or will it be laid bare at his feet that it was just a lack of skill, intellectual rigor, and distraction, and negligence, and incompetence that caused this fire?
01:37:30.020I mean, I think you make a pretty strong case for the latter.
01:37:32.200You know, I found that there were three bills that started in the legislature that were either approved by the legislature and were then vetoed by Newsom or were then pulled down by the legislature itself.
01:37:46.420Again, this is like Democrats on Democrat violence.
01:37:50.620To just give a waiver to all of these local municipalities to go and clear the brush.
01:38:09.820So, take away some of the fuel and the fire will be less.
01:38:12.940And if we can't even admit that plain truth, this is what I mean by if we're going to continue to just lie to ourselves because we care so much about this failed ideology, then California is going to just continue to just degrade.
01:38:24.900But there's a point, I mean, you see the same thing in New York City where if the, you know, the engines of the economy leave because it is, you know, a country with 50 states, you know, there's a point where the math doesn't work and things just decline so quickly that it's hard to recover.
01:38:41.380The thing, it is true, but the thing that is important to keep in mind about California is sometimes you get lucky.
01:38:49.980And we have to acknowledge our luck but not fritter it away.
01:38:53.800Specifically in California, there is a critical mass of these 50,000 Michael Jordan engineers.
01:39:15.740But that is not the place or the way to create the technical vibrancy we need to generate technical supremacy.
01:39:23.000You need these people close and around you so that they're cross-pollinating from each other.
01:39:27.980And this is, again, where why hasn't the state realized that?
01:39:31.660That is an incredibly critical resource.
01:39:35.240Well, at this point with, you know, the decline of ag and the entertainment business and aerospace, I don't really know what drives the economy of California other than technology.
01:39:46.540Well, right now, if you look at California's employment, the employment picture is quite scary because it is government jobs that are convoluting how healthy the actual state is.
01:40:41.560I mean, look, my, again, I'll tell you in terms of my poker game, half of that, half of those people that have been my lifelong friends for 20 years have left.
01:41:07.500One of my friends left because, you know, one of their children went through, you know, a bit of an identity crisis, if you want to call it that.
01:41:16.580And the police showed up and wanted to, you know, take the kid away, you know, so that the kid could go through like a transition that the kid ultimately decided they didn't want to go through.
01:41:35.220I'm not sure if it's to encourage it, but my understanding of the way this works is if you, if you as a child have these issues and you escalate that, there is a requirement for the school to basically call Child Protective Services, who may or may not call the police, who may or may not come to your house and try to take the kid away.
01:42:25.020Right, and so, like, the idea that just some random person in an office somewhere can read some piece of paper and all of a sudden take your kids away, that's very scary.
01:44:16.020There are some really competent people that are in that state that will try now to come out of the woodwork to do the right thing, to deregulate California.
01:44:28.760California has 60,000 regulations on the books.
01:45:27.580So, how long do, you know, well-heeled Democratic voters need to see their state run over, need to see their lives ruined, and now their kids' lives ruined?
01:45:37.820And maybe this is the thing that actually—
01:45:40.160Well, you tell me you live among them.
01:45:42.660Um, so, not where I live, because the only thing that—the only damage that has ever happened in Silicon Valley is economic damage, but then it's righted itself.
01:46:16.200You know, I gave this speech at Stanford in 2016, which went pretty viral, which kind of laid bare what was going on in social media, and he and I have not spoken since.
01:46:28.400Well, knowing him as you do and for as long as you have, what do you make of his Joe Rogan appearance?
01:46:34.760I think it's a calculation to manage the conditions on the field.
01:46:41.000Meaning, what I said on the pod is all you need to know are two things.
01:46:48.400One is there's an incredible picture in Donald Trump's book, which is a picture of Zuck sitting in the oval.
01:46:57.200And, by the way, this is the same book which you have to get.
01:47:01.120But it's the book where, like, you know, he talks about, you know, Trudeau's mom kind of like casting about with the Rolling Stones and like, you know.
01:47:08.840Not just casting about, rolling about.
01:47:11.500And like, you know, he's like Fidel Castro's love child.
01:47:13.960Anyways, but in that book is a picture of Zuck, and it says, you know, Zuck was the nicest guy to my face, but then would, you know, work against me to turn over the election.
01:47:21.460And, you know, I've made it very clear that if he tries to do anything like that again, he'll go to prison for the rest of his life.
01:47:28.380That's what Trump says in the caption.
01:47:31.880And then he was asked about that last week, the exact same day that Mehta changed their policies.
01:47:37.920And he said, do you think it was in response to what you said?
01:47:57.400But an informed guess since you know him.
01:47:59.620You know, I think that he's a very big fan of the Roman Empire.
01:48:07.720If I had to translate and guess how that manifests in his day-to-day decision-making, I think he thinks of things empirically, meaning, like, as an empire.
01:48:56.620So, when the trend was under the Democrats to build a censorship machine, you know, you do that.
01:49:03.560And then when the trend is to do the opposite, you'll do the opposite.
01:49:07.380But he said to me a number of times over a number of years, you know, off camera, but has said, you know, basically I'm a kind of 70s liberal and I really believe in free speech.
01:49:34.400He has less economic participation, but, you know, he has absolute power.
01:49:41.860And that was the justification in some ways of explaining how he made these changes now.
01:49:47.600It doesn't explain why it veered in the other direction then.
01:49:52.560And I think it's important to just probably get the answer to that and then you'll know where he stands.
01:49:57.640You know, meaning the economic power has ebbed and flowed, but the absolute power has never changed.
01:50:02.120So, you know, the philosophy that he believed in then, if it's the same now, then the question is, well, why did the manifestation of that power change?
01:50:11.220Well, he's basically said, you know, he's bullied by the national security state.
01:50:16.680I mean, that's got to feel like a lot of pressure when you're a young guy on the come up and a bunch of these well-heeled politicos show up at your office and say, you know, bend the knee.
01:50:54.140It is the most important temperature check that we are going to make the changes that Donald Trump wants.
01:51:02.060I think the president, in some ways, is the most powerful job, but I think this second term, he's more of a vessel in the sense that he's got all of these great field generals who can now run the place.
01:51:18.180And of all the field generals, the one that has just an incremental more degree of freedom to also communicate openly and continuously with the public is him.
01:51:28.500So you'll get a sense of whether there's an arrhythmia by just monitoring his X feed.
01:51:33.940You'll also get a sense of whether there's like a, you know, like if the drumbeat is building, I think you get a sense of that from Elon as well.
01:51:42.820I think he is the, he's the heartbeat.
01:51:46.000So do you think that Elon's X feed is a kind of pretty accurate window into what he's thinking?
01:51:52.420And this is why I think, you know, when you compare and contrast Zuck with Elon, it's, I think Zuck is like every other CEO.
01:52:02.180And Elon is just a complete singular outlier in the sense that there is no book that would have told you just tell the truth grounded in your morality from day one and just burn the boats.
01:52:18.780You know, that old Cortez line, right?
01:52:44.060And so he sets a way of behavior that future CEOs should emulate.
01:52:51.780But we also have to a little bit give a break and cut some slack to everybody else because they're just never going to do as good a job as him in doing that.
01:53:40.980But but as a private citizen, non a non president, I can't think of any time in 250 years where an American has had as much power as Elon Musk has in the sense that, you know, he's the most successful businessman by many measures.
01:53:55.100He runs the most powerful media outlet in the world, which is X.
01:54:00.820And he has, you know, this mandate from the newly elected president of the United States to to change the government.
01:54:06.240I mean, I don't just nothing like that has ever happened that I know of.
01:54:21.740Because as a business decision, it's kind of hard to justify.
01:54:24.940Well, there's like it happened in a moment where I think that there was the intersection of a lot of free speech issues.
01:54:32.660And I just think like there was like some, you know, stuff I'm not going to get into, but like personal stuff, I think probably in his own life.
01:54:45.280And it's just like made him question, like, what are these philosophies?
01:55:45.080Elon, I've, you know, seen now for 15 plus years.
01:55:48.120And I, and when you think about those two, um, yeah, with Elon, there's just an incredible intellectual curiosity, an incredible amount of ability to suffer pain and suffering.
01:57:10.220I wish that there was an answer, but I also think it's not the right thing to answer in the sense that we're all going to give some glib answer.
01:59:12.920I'm not a great Bible scholar, hardly, but I do keep this verse because I think it actually, I mean, it's 1 John 3.
01:59:24.100Do not love this world or the things it offers you.
01:59:26.400For when you love the world, you don't have the love of the Father in you.
01:59:29.220For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and a pride in our achievements and possessions.
02:00:40.340So speaking of bookends, we began this conversation with your description of your, I hate the word journey, but it is a journey to like a much higher level of self-awareness and peace.
02:00:51.200And you're ending by describing, you know, with admiration, Elon's decision to detach himself from the world, even as he engages in the things that he really loves.
02:01:01.080Do you think that there is a greater spiritual awareness, a greater hunger in Silicon Valley where it matters because of the richest people in the country than there was?
02:01:11.780You said, you know, no one believes in God.
02:01:21.680I think that a lot of this extreme wealth was created in people that are in their 30s, some in their 20s, many of them are in their 40s.
02:01:31.200And I think that in over this next 10 or 15 years, there's going to be a crisis of identity when they realized that, you know, they were playing dumb games focused on superficial things beyond the companies themselves.
02:02:15.060And the reason I believe in God, and if I were to tell my friends in Silicon Valley, the way that I would incept this idea would be purely from a scientific lens.
02:02:28.220Which is, if you believe it is true, which I think most people do.
02:02:35.560That there is a finite moment in which the universe began.
02:02:43.320Explain not the process, but explain the moment.
02:02:50.720And it is an endless rabbit hole that if you spend your time, and again, when I was feeling very empty, that's where I started.
02:02:59.280And I, you know, I read all about, I read about Islam, I read about Christianity, I read about Judaism, I reread, you know, about Buddhism.
02:05:17.620I spent like an hour or so going through all my Google photos, clicking through and finding all the photos of him, our friends, so that we can make him an album.
02:05:26.040Um, because he lost everything and yeah, you get the clothes, whatever, but you know, these picture albums, you know, they, they mean a lot.
02:05:34.740Um, and I was happy and I felt really like a useful, good person at the end of that.
02:06:00.140I think there is, we were, we had a fever and that fever has broken.
02:06:06.840And what has to lie in its place are examples of how all of these things that we thought we were not allowed to do when we do them actually work.
02:06:20.720Meaning we're actually just going to focus on merit and get incredible people.
02:06:25.240And it'll turn out that you'll get your, you know, diversity wish, but you're not going to get it by mandating it and forcing it down our throats.
02:06:33.900We're just going to get the best people.
02:06:36.060And then the best people are just going to go and kick ass together.
02:06:38.600You know, we're going to get an ecology that we protect and love because we want to be out there hunting, fishing, camping, living it, skiing it, whatever it is.
02:06:50.580But we're going to get there because we actually manage it and take care of it and clean up all of the, you know, stuff that would otherwise burn it to the ground.
02:07:00.800So we're going to test all of this stuff.
02:07:10.260And then the other thing we need to do is we need to cut down all of these things that are these little ropes that are pulling us all back.
02:07:18.600Meaning this is a stretch, but I'll, I'll use myself in this example.
02:07:24.260I think I'm one of those 50,000 people that can go and ram and jam for Team USA.
02:07:40.580I just want it to be a little bit easier.
02:07:43.660And so I hope that we figure out a way to, instead of having 60,000 little regulations and people that want to lord over us, just give us 10,000 and just trust us that we're trying to do the right thing.
02:07:55.700And if we don't, fine, trust, but verify, you know, and if we screw up, fine.