trust in the media collapsed just because of the willingness to revise things that had been common knowledge until they weren't it seems to me that the accountability has disappeared it's more fun to be devastatingly witty I understand the temptation but the real
work of a Critic then the real risk that a Critic takes is the defense of the new people who romanticize the past should maybe take a look at what happened in the past if you aren't allowed to fail in little ways where you learn then you don't get to the big successes all of
the old Power centers are collapsing most of them are built on Sand most magazines historically were subsidized by print advertising that's why they can put it in an airport we decided let's do something that's a higher price where people are paying not to be spammed
people are paying not to be treated like [Music] children well hello everybody it's Jim oaba with yet another infinite Loops I have been looking forward to today's guest for a long time because he and I think a lot alike it is Max Meyer the
founder and editor of Arena magazine which Max by the way the physical copy which I'm holding up for people watching us instead of listening is absolutely beautiful so congratulations you are the founder and editor and chief of this magazine you're also the former editor-in Chief of the
Stanford review and you're a writer at Joe lonsdale's 8bc welcome thank you so I mean my first question is like duh why what has happened to all of the Legacy mediate Tech Publications and I you know when when I heard that you were doing this I'm like
[ __ ] a right it's about time what what's going on with the Legacy Tech you know there are there are a few stories that I tell I think that I think that the main one is that as the internet came along um people who were smart enough to write about technology
would rather just be technologists and so you have this sort of um diverging path between the technologists and the people that are writing about it where there's almost this like parasitic relationship where even some of the even some of the mid-level technologists are
making a lot more money than the best technology writers um a and and so it's there's an unhealthy Dynamic there and it just means that the talented people have all gone into the industry which leaves sort of others behind to uh to to cover it it's it's not to say that there
aren't brilliant journalists or people that want to write write about technology but I think that that's like a I think that's a huge Dynamic and then over the course of the last you know 15 years Facebook and Google have upended the digital advertising model that
existed for the first first 15 years or so of the internet um Google and Facebook now make all of the money on advertising and banner advertising which used to subsidize these online Publications has just collapsed um and so you know the people who figured out
how to either do high-end advertising or subscriptions have survived and the ones that are still relying on very poor advertising uh Revenue are are really really hostile that makes sense but what's your economic model how is it how how does it differ from from those I
mean we charge the readers quite a lot um this is an expensive magazine it's printed on extremely high quality paper it'll last for 150 years on a bookshelf and we're charging about $100 a year for a subscription you most magazines historically were subsidized by print
advertising print advertising is the the most opaque form of advertising nobody really knew whether it was working there was no reliable way to measure the metrics and magazines were being sold at a loss because the the advertisements
were paying for it that selling at a loss relative to the cost of the paper the cost of Distributing it that's why they can put it in an airport it's unbelievably expensive to fulfill these things all over the place but if it's so chalk full of advertisements then you
can do it we decided let's do something that's a higher price where people are paying not to be spammed people are paying not to be you know treated like children or or treated like members of a mob which is how which is how most of the advertising uh driven Farms have to
treat their readers it's they're they're trying to rile them up they're trying to you know turn them into members of the mob to go after the next scapegoat that's interesting so uh I I had thought about it in that context so the the collapse of the old business
model uh was an accelerant uh of the race to the bottom of pessimism anger rage I think because you know unfortunately human OS is ruled I think mostly by emotions and I think that the king of those emotions is fear and fear of like the novel uh like we
saw with Co it it it disheartened me greatly to see people literally being willing to act like sheep and follow uh orders that didn't have a lot of rationality around them I followed them you know and the the aftermath I think is going to be it's gonna I don't even
know and I want your opinion on on what some of the outcomes are going to be over the next decade because of the lockdown and how badly it was handled not by the way just by the United States but globally I mean sort of obvious at this point but I think that collapse in the media
collap trust in the media collapsed just because of the willingness to uh you know revise things that had been common knowledge until they weren't I mean for example if you had asked anyone at the NIH or the niid which is the agency that fouchi was the head of you know do do do
cloth face masks work to prevent Airborne viral transmission you know for 20 years it was common knowledge do not uh for the first month or so of the co Public Health Emergency it was still common knowledge that they do not and then all of a sudden they decided yes
they do and the media ran with it and and then you sort of have another reversal with is it safe to congregate outdoors in large numbers is it safe to congregate outdoors in large numbers no no no no no and then you have a left-wing protest movement black lives
matter that all of a sudden wants to do protests and again it was just reality was revised right in front of us yes it's safe to go out there racism is a bigger Public Health Emergency than the virus itself and so you have an obligation to go out there it's uh yeah
it was sort of this uh North Korean esque revision of reality right in front of our faces and I think it's unfortunate because you know by the end of the pandemic you know the media was saying some some some some true things which is that you know broadly speaking
the vaccine will will reduce your mortality if you're especially in an older age bracket or whatnot but by that time they had lied so many times that you know it's the boy who cried wolf yeah and and the thing that dismays me is uh you know I'm so I'm 64 I grew
up I I went from 10 to 20 in the 1970s be thank God that you're young and that you didn't go through the 70s and and so this probably gives me prior that are a bit more um extreme about the idea of looking for evidence looking for you know wh why are we doing this particular
thing at this particular time but back back in the day all of the institutions that we kind of now see crumbling we have an entire thesis about it here at ASI Ventures we call it the great reshuffle and essentially it's all of the old Power centers are collapsing uh
most of them are built on Sand and that that causes a lot of anxiety among regular people right in the old days you looked at do you trust the media do you trust the government I mean my God we had you know Walter grony most trusted person in America but if you dig right
like they were lying back then too absolutely and they were just doing it better or easier because they had three broadcast channels and basically two na newspapers that mattered the New York Times And The Wall Street Journal and so much much easier to do and the internet
blew that up right so I I think about uh one of the first things where I had an Insight like holy [ __ ] this is going to be a whole new world was um a while back I think it was Dan Rather ran a hit piece on George Bush uh spoiler alert I
was no fan of George W bush let's just make that clear uh but nevertheless uh the hit piece included a letter that was said to be written about why he got out of military service or why he got into the particular Branch he was in and I'm really not getting you Max within an
hour there was some guy who loved fonts and typography on well back then it was a forum I guess but it blew up and it was yeah no the font on that letter wasn't invented when they say it was written and like boom but here's my point that had a massive impact on CBS
news on Dan Rather they were held accountable it seems to me that the accountability has disappeared I think that the accountability is sort of inversely correlated to the level of competition ironically when there were just three broadcasters if there was
something obvious where they published you know fake news as we'd say they would actually be held accountable I mean you had large swats of the media that over the course of the last 10 years published you know in some case outright Fabrications about alleged
Russian influence in the United States of the Trump campaign stuff of that nature but instead of those people being held accountable most people realizing that that can't be done anymore just went to Alternatives they went to Independent Outlets I think that's part
of why I think that's part of why something like a substack is is is so is so consequential it gave people an out and I think that that's part of the reason why why people are lashing out is because there is this like new kid on the Block um and you have very
successful you know commercially successful news Publications now that are totally independent and that is um you know I don't think it's threatening to the New York Times yet just because the New York Times is like this Behemoth um but you know for example uh the Free
Press Barry wife's Independent Media Outlet I'm a small contributor there they have 1% of paid subscribers of the of the New York Times They just crossed 100,000 the New York Times has 10 million so it's like it's a fairly it's a fairly small publication relative to
the largest one in the world but the Free Press can still move the news because the free press's 100,000 subscribers are a extremely Savvy they're High Fidelity to the publication they know what they're sort of a part of they know what they're getting and if
they publish something shocking or aggressive on a Monday morning it'll move news in Washington in New York in Los Angeles and that's like a that's like a huge accomplishment um and they're making a fortune doing it which is which is more than most of the uh
most of the media can say nowadays yeah and that was kind of my thesis for what would happen um but I'm still struck I mean I I totally understand so I have a uh elderly mother-in-law that lives with us and we care for and and she she didn't get the Mellow that
the media is no longer completely unbiased and and so I get the idea of older people who grew up in an environment false as it was that believed that what you know your political leaders your media was telling you what your institutions were telling
you were were all basically true things right and and so I I get how it's easier to maybe get them to believe things that just ain't so I also notice it among young people though which really surprises me what what are you what's your take on that I think it's Tik Tock brain I think that I
think that there's something about the like I think there's something you see this in young activists especially I when I was a when I was a student at Stanford though I was the editor of the Stanford review while I was sort of up and coming in the review I was actually
living in a a left-wing social justice vegetarian activist Cooperative house this was totally voluntary I was a vegetarian at the time I was totally right-wing I didn't subscribe to the sort of all the values of this house but I had a few friends that were there and
so I so I moved in and almost all of these people were sort of semi-professional social justice activists protesting the university protesting the police going to all sorts of protests across the bay area and it's interesting the extent to which uh
Instagram is probably the most important like activism medium that's ever been invented uh and it's it's really short text and it's really short video and there's something about this there's something about this form factor uh that I think lends itself well to believing narratives that
are without Merit um because it's dressed up in in in some cases sort of childish stuff colorful fonts uh you know quick Transitions and there's something about the person you know holding a cell phone looking into the front-facing camera that that's like the
the The Young Person's Walter kronite there's some sort of air of authority to it I don't quite get it but I think that's what it is uh and you see you Tik Tok and Instagram are sort of you know the places where where where where where madeup narratives for young people uh are
born so uh you know with the Proviso that I I will state that I am in favor of free speech meaning I think everyone even people who I think are absolutely 100% wrong should be able to express their thoughts should be able to protest should be able to do all of those things
but it it does seem to me that the the na I guess would be the term I would use news where where like the evidence is just so overwhelming like look at a satellite photo of North Korea and South Korea and South Korea is all lit up and North Korea is enshrouded in
darkness every time one of these revolutionary things actually gets power and moves to a dictatorship like Venezuela good example went from the most the richest country in Latin America to people in crushing poverty like why is it so hard for people to get that memo
to understand that I think we've always had a contingent of young people that have been in the case of something like North Korea sympathizers what you could call a tanky um tanky being sort of the reference to um the the the the famous photo from
1989 Tian Square where there where there there are tanks rolling down this this this prominade in China and the man is standing there um you know most westerners sympathize with the man standing in front of the tank with his grocery bags you know one man in the face of
tyranny and then you always have some sort of you know group of young people that are into the hammer and sickle um and side with the tank I had a great professor at Stanford Norman nyar who was a PhD student in the 60s and back then there were actual Mists on campus
who would run around with their little red books and Professor nyar is a a sovietologists the sovietology department the Russian studies Department was was considered very conservative uh the Hoover institution in Stanford and the Stanford Russian Department were always a Bastion
for dissidents from the communist countries Alexander soljan niton actually lived in Hoover tower for a few years and so Nar is a PhD student and he's considered a conservative because he's inquiring into the nature of the Russian state of the Soviet state and he
recounts literally being chased around by people waving the Little Red Book the the the the the the sayings of chairman Ma and so I do think I do think that there is there is something that maybe is a bit of a an accelerationist thing with like Instagram and Tik Tok but
we've always had this and so I I don't necessarily think that it was like a before and after with social media I think that maybe the social media is speeding things up um but for what it's worth the sort of steal in of you know Instagram Tik Tok is that for the
average like American child going to a public school in a major city Tik Tok and Instagram are going to be some of the only places where they can get any dissenting thought from the mainstream left it's the only place where they're going to encounter Republican
politicians they're certainly not going to be shown that uh in their school classroom or whatnot uh and so I mean a lot of people could say that that we need those things even if it does you know prove useful for uh the crazy leftwing activists I had a theory uh I I didn't
develop it too much because I got too busy with other things to be honest but that social media maybe was actually quite a useful steam Bel and by that I mean people get pissed off they get angry they get fir up in the old days they grabbed their Pitchfork and their
torches and they went around burning [ __ ] to the ground and killing people and now they have this this uh these platforms where they can go on and just you know God damn it I'm have you seen the movie network Fighting Chance made in the early
70s oh I would highly recommend it to you well the the protagonist is a news anchor named Beal who essentially loses his mind and and he gets on air and and he gets up and he goes I am manad as hell about everything and I'm not gonna
take it anymore and so literally he tells people to go it's said in Manhattan obviously and he tells people to go to their window and Shout that and of course in the movie everyone is going to their window and shouting I'm mad and so I'm not gonna think it anymore so I
kind of thought ripping on that movie may maybe social media actually does uh served a reasonably good function in just that alone where where people are able to like spew their anger and then hopefully get over it we've always had we've always had the scapegoat problem
we've always had the need to relieve societal pressure when it gets to a boiling point uh and I I think I I think I accept the argument that uh that social media can be a steam valve you know maybe someone could say that it'd be better if we had actual confrontation
every once in a while because it would feel more real um but I think that for most people I think it's uh I think it's think is probably pretty good and and I for one am am a huge believer in in the benefits of social media from from for most people in terms of just the the raw
connection that become that that's become possible and the economic possibilities with it as am I I'm a huge fan and have taken uh some criticism for that uh I I still believe believe uh no matter what your feelings are about Elon Musk or Twitter X I still believe look
at that thing is really anti fragile he took it over he fired 80% of the the techs and and other employees continued working just fine but I I had always envisioned and started writing about it kind of like 2017 that Twitter was in my I my sense
it was the lead hor on creating a global intelligence Network yes where you can literally meet lots of people that you would under any other circumstance not have an opportunity to make any exchanges with I have about you know 30,000 followers now which is sort of a
it's a good critical mass for regularly getting incoming and and my mom is always concerned when I'm saying that I'm that I'm meeting these people from from Twitter when I go to different cities but it's like it's become a huge source of uh meeting new people professionally for me um
and I don't think that there's anything like it because it's the the the level of I I think the most amazing thing about it is just the everyone sort of playing on the same field you have people with you know three 400 followers that are engaging with some of the most
prominent richest most powerful people in the world and especially in the tech World those people have no qual about engaging with uh with random people on Twitter it's not it's not like politicians are going to be responding to the the 500 or the thousand followers
or whatnot but you know Mark andreon is out there following 25,000 people uh you know people will people will send him messages and um and I think that and I think that especially the you know the technology side of of Twitter is really amazing like
that yeah and I I think that you know the more networked we become you you move towards creating the human Colossus right you cognitive diversity I think is very important and and being able to meet people who think differently than you do who have different uh ideas about
things it's it's very refreshing and I too for example I would say I don't know maybe half of the teammates I have at aony ventures I found on Twitter yeah and and one of the great things about that is you can watch their account for a while and that that builds up a body
of work that you can you know a single interview I I very rarely do them anymore simply because like there just a snapshot and I'd rather look at the movie but it the other thing I think that we should acknowledge here is it's not just media right so markets have
been affected by this um you know during there was a huge savings and loan crisis when George Bush Senior was president in the late 80s and guess what lots of people went to jail they went to they went to jail for a long time too in other words they were
held accountable in 2008 during the great financial crisis the thing that worried me the most and that I would not shut up about is why is no one going to jail what do you think crazy um I think that the end of the Cold War sort of symbolizes this thing of like we
won and then after that there's more of a government willingness to just do things that are kind of fake like zero interest rates and it's not a mistake that zero interest rates happens right after no one goes to jail it's almost just like trying to reverse the last few
rounds of a board game or something being like let's let's repair the original state but of course you know the bailout is almost like the least um you the least real way to deal with something and we can just sort of play in a pretend world
and that's you know the things that you could count in pretend world are yeah let everyone go don't punish anyone for this huge huge economic catastrophe do a massive stimulus do a huge bailout then go to zero interest rates for the next decade uh and just start accumulating
debt it's just sort of this like you know make believe um and you know the 20th century was real and when things are real you you get dictators you know farar Germany had tons of inflation and then Adolf Hitler is made Chancellor and it's like that's super unpleasant let's do
things that are let's do things that are fake rather than things that are real just because we had so much real confrontation in the 20th century that like zero interest fairy land that was kind of nice compared to it yeah yeah I I was smiling because we
had that very conversation at dinner last night and that was my thesis by pieces was if you look prior to the Cold War ending the political parties in America at least had to basically agree on one thing which was foreign policy and so the Democratic party and the
Republican party like they might have hated each other about a bunch of other stuff but on foreign policy they they usually walked pretty lock step and then when when when that when we won the Cold War they were free to no longer continue that kind of at least agreement on that
one particular thing and each of them kind of went off the reservation so to speak in terms of like who they were appealing to but it's also like I want to get into the the magazine now too because your Manifesto the new needs friends like I I I loved the the piece I
thought it was really really well written but it really like bummed me out like H how how is this possible that like all of the these incredible Innovations and wonders that are making human life vastly better you know saving lives making a enriching lives all of
these things right and and that we you got to start a new magazine so that we can say yeah yeah progress and and yet you know like bring it up to and I use this example a lot it's it's not like this is anything new right I mean the New York Times classic Artic uh
editorial of October 9th 1903 saying that it would take humans one to 10 million years for humans to achieve flight and then couple of months later on December 17th the famous the right Brothers flew the flyer in Kitty Hawk North Carolina what what is it that
orients word cells Andor the chattering classes to pessimism well so for the readers that that don't recognize the phrase the new needs friends um I did you recognize the the uh where that where that phrase is sort of uh spun from yes but inform our
listeners and and uh so at the end the of the animated movie Ratatouille the the the the sort of vampiric looking food critic Anton ego is talking about how negative criticism is is is really fun to read and really fun to write but the real work of a Critic then the real
risk that a Critic takes is is is is the defense of the new and that so that's so that's sort of where we get that idea um I think that that's basically it is that it's more fun to be devastatingly witty and as a person who's been a writer for all my adult life I understand the
Temptation and if you go back to my old columns in the stand for review some of them were brutal I was tearing apart these different activist movements and thinking of funny jokes and that's like uh that's like a a normal mode for someone who is you know talented at
language the word cell the challenging thing is to reverse that and write stuff that's really fun to read that's also you know sort of reverent to the to the principles that we that that we that we hold dear so I think that's basically it it's fun it's the mo it's the most fun
way to write and it's why and it's why all of the socalled you know great writers always have something witty to say y Twain um Tom Wolf uh you name it yeah Oscar wild would have killed on Twitter um but but the and and speaking of that movie um I always use the
example where they give him the Ratatouille and he's immediately transported back to his childhood as an example of qualia and why it might be harder for us to come up with you know super intelligent computers if they don't have a sense for being able to
understand that Quia maybe I'm wrong but I I love that scene in the movie because I I use it all the time when when I when people say what do you mean quality I always send them that clip yeah um I think that it's it's always amazing I watch that movie time it's like it it's
it's so brilliant and the other sort of famous line from it which is um you know not everyone can be a great artist but a great artist can come from anywhere it's like it that's like the best version of meritocracy and sort of social advancement that we have and it's
amazing I don't think that that movie could be made today just because not everyone can become a great artist is itself sort of this this this even though it's just the first clause in the sentence it's still a rejection of of the sort of leading egalitarian ethos
which is that you know everyone can get a perfect sat everyone can everyone can be a great artist but the version that we have to hold on to is that a great artist can come from anywhere I completely agree I I think it's funny the idea that the the it it you know wrong think
is being enforced um and the there's a great quote from the uh I guess philosopher I don't know really what he is Jed McKinna that I really love and he says you know if you're having a little tea party with Lord lion and Lady gazelle and someone
comes along who doesn't quite buy your fantasy narrative it's not that they're being negative it's that maybe your little fantasy narrative is a little too fragile and I love the line because I see these fragile narratives or what I think of as fragile in other words they
have no empirical evidence supporting their claims they have in fact empir Lo loads truckloads of empirical evidence denying their claims and yet they persist like what what's your take on that social dynamics among the people telling the stories
yep I think that's basically it there's someone who's there's someone who's egging them on there's someone who's uh there's someone who's telling them you know yes Lord lion and Miss gazelle you know very good dinner guests but me it's not me telling them
that I know I definitely know that it may even be sort of um polarizing to them when someone comes along and is like no that's not real uh you saw that happen with um you saw that happen with with the co story you had you had sort of um I don't know if you remember
um you had the sort of split of of New York Times reporters there were some of the New York Times reporters that were insane and they were publishing stuff that was intended to demoralize the population and scare them and then you had a few that were a little bit more
sane and when they when they when they try to when they try to say look this is this is this is wrong then it's like ah you're you you're far right when this is when this person is clearly not and so there's like an allergic reaction to being told you're wrong by the wrong
person um and so it's like we don't have you know functioning discussion like that anymore yeah and it it seems to me that I I find it uh almost deliciously ironic that being in favor of free speech rule of law free markets is is coded right-wing these days wh watch
watch some videos of President John Kennedy oh yeah and like my God what what would they make of a John Kennedy today would they call him like a farri politician I think the line would probably be I mean he'd be he'd be called an isolationist he'd be called
you know he he'd be he he'd be he'd be distrusted for distrusting the military-- industrial complex just like Eisenhower uh and you know JFK is sort of the the last president uh in in in in that lineage um of you know let's let's be really careful about the sort of
encroachment of of of the state into everything and the fusing of civil and Military Affairs I think that that would be the thing that would be the thing that would be considered I mean Donald Trump is considered uh you know dictatorial by by certain parts of the
media for you know wishing to exercise actual civilian control over the military as commander-in-chief um yep take a look at Kennedy there was no one who wanted to do that more than John F Kennedy uh and you a lot of people believe that he was
uh that he was killed for it and yet the other point about Kennedy that I like to make is he was also a bit like Ronald Reagan uh a a spokesman for optimism for Progress for all the things that made this country in my opinion the greatest country that ever existed on the face of
the planet and you know the speeches are really incredible not only because you know politicians used to speak in full sentences I know it blew my mind too but and and quite eloquently and then I always have people yeah that was because he had Ted soron okay so maybe they had
better stre speech writers back then but he delivered it quite well it's not true it's not the speech writers it's not the it's it was a different type of it was a different type of person and look no further than John F Kennedy's brother Robert F Kennedy who in May of 1968 when
Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated Robert F Kennedy at that point a United States senator from New York he's campaigning for the presidency and he's in Indianapolis and the news breaks that Martin Luther King Jr has been assassinated and all over
the United States Atlanta Los Angeles Little Rock uh there are riots breaking out people who are you know black Americans who are just stressed and in Indianapolis Robert F Kennedy is about to address a majority black crowd and they don't know the news he tells them
the news and there are there are gasps and he goes on to quote escalus from memory and it's actually a sort of funny misation of escalus but it was it was poignant it was beautiful I encourage everyone to take a look and it was the only major city in America that didn't
have any unrest that night was Indianapolis because Robert F Kennedy had literally used the power of English to to to soothe people um you almost can't imagine that today it's not just the full sentences it's um you know there was a there was there was a study
that was published uh the average you know grade level of English that presidents have used over time uh and it's like I think we're down we're down to third or fourth grade um I think it's I think it's disappointing I think that uh I think that people still could be
inspired by you know great oratory um but I don't know I agree and you know um Martin Luther King Jr hero of mine I mean the what that guy did not single-handedly OB obviously but he he speaking of the power of the English language he he was he almost had no peer
during that time and you know I have a dream that speech I learned the other day that he uh impro or he did improv on like more than 30% of that speech which I didn't know that um but I've watched I watch it a lot because like it is such an optim IC and good message given
during a time where it was really shitty to be a black person in America and and the idea and that's the other thing that bothers me it's like if you look at all the countries in the world yes America has a ton of problems there's no question there's no
no debating that even and yet can you site a country that has changed more in the last 50 years many of them not for the better but changed for example when in 1971 where I'm going to lead you next because of the context of the progress 1820 through 1971 something Happ you know there's a
website even what happened in 19 what the [ __ ] happened in 1971 but but the idea that we have not made I I'm I'm the youngest of my family in 1971 my sisters couldn't get married and keep their maiden name unless they went to court it was a law that women had to
take their husband's last name it was a law that a woman couldn't get a credit card without her husband's permission which I think is what I I mean just like I was alive when that was actually happening I was a when when the country had a lot of really bad things in place
and so my point is we've changed like look at the old campaign videos from President Obama he was anti- gay marriage officially right but but the fact that that also changed I mean if you if you really are a lover of progress directionally a lot
of like I say I'm not trying to say that everything that changed was great but directionally I don't I don't see a country that has adopted more um uh and better uh ideas and laws etc for people can you think one no I think that historically you know most people in the
United States have been broadly better off than any other place that they could be there there there there there are caveats to that um but you know thank goodness that the that the sort of economic setup of the United States means that Minority citizens are are
better off here than anywhere in the world um and I think that yeah it's it's undeniable that there's been lots of uh uh social liberalization over the course of the last uh over the course of the last 50 years and um you know I think that America was set
up well with mechanisms for uh you know gradual and steady change I agree and you know the I I still think we were just incredibly fortunate to have our country founded at a time of the Enlightenment and the idea of understanding that we humans are an
interesting Bunch but uh our entire government is sort of engineered to take into consideration that uh that you know essentially people who claim I guess this is M I'm just winging it but he said something like anyone who claims that they want to save the human race
it's almost always a false flag flag for them wanting to rule it which which also brings me back to there's really not a lot new here in terms of The Optimist versus pessimist debate right you go back to the times of malus you you know who said everyone's going to starve you
know because they had a fixed mentality right and one of my other favorite authors David deuts beginning of Infinity uh Julian Simon who wrote The Ultimate resource according to Professor Simon the ultimate resource is we humans in fact he made a very famous bet with a
scaremonger of the edit of the environmental movement who wrote a book called the population bomb and the book essentially was saying what malur said right we're we're we're all going to die we're going to starve to death Julian Simon is like yeah no I don't think so
and so the guy's name was Paul Erick and so what an Emeritus professor at Stanford I know I know and and that's what I wanted to get your opinion on because here we have this setup right back in 1980 he's very famous he's paid a lot to make speeches Paul erck I'm talking
about and trillian Simon comes along and he goes listen man I will bet you I I can't remember what the uh monetary amount of the BET was but it was made 1980 and what Simon said to ERI was I'm gonna let you pick the medals that you say are going away and I will
take the side that 10 years from now they will be cheaper and more plentiful than they are today because of human Ingenuity and Innovation and so er picked nickel tin tuxen copper chromium uh and and yeah I think that's all five and of course Simon won yeah he won the
BET and like crickets is it is it is it just is it just part of our human operating system as you were mentioning earlier like pessimist sound smart optimists create the future my opinion yeah and optimists make the money too um yeah I think that
I think that you could almost take like Optimist pessimist and create this like dichotomy and then also put like people who are allocating Capital to new things hoping to make money on it versus people that are writing about why those things won't work and it's like the person who
writes that this will never work you know the top the the best outcome that they could possibly hope for is like a best-selling book where they make like a million dollars if they're really lucky the like moderate outcome if you're right and you're super optimistic and
you invest a bunch of money into this cool thing give tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars um I'm in Iowan I'm from Iowa one of our two statues in the National Statuary Hall in Washington from Iowa is of Norman Boro Norman Boro was a an agronomist from
Iowa who basically invented the the the strains of drought resistant wheat in the 60s uh that saved the world you know some people estimate that as many as a billion people were prevented from starving Heir writes the population bomb in 1968 warlog wins the the Nobel Prize
in 1970 um he's basically or maybe it was 80 when he won I think it was 70 though uh and he and he you know he he he he gives all these great speeches uh he just totally proved ERI Wrong by by doing it it turned out that was no cost to ERI uh to to being so to being so
wrong I think that his his reputation has suffered but you know warlog did it as an academic there are other people who did it as as businessmen the the richest people in Iowa are people who have invented sort of you new types of seeds um and so the the innovator is
always going to be someone who's you know really hoping to be right maybe hoping against hope and they have a they have a sort of positive alignment to be right the pessimist is just sort of sitting there the pessimist has no uncapped outcome if the innovator is actually
right but they have a sort of small capped option if they end up being right and it doesn't work um and I always cided much more uh with with the innovator in this and there's for example an article in the first issue of the magazine about SpaceX I was down in
Bach chica on 420 2023 for the first Lodge of the Starship and it was amazing and I'd gotten a little tour from a friend who was working at SpaceX and I saw the employee party after this rocket had exploded and it was Euphoria and then the next day I
read the headlines and if you had read the headlines and believed it you would have thought that this was a complete Calamity and those people don't have any out don't have any positive outcome when SpaceX actually works and it of course it already does work it's a $200 billion
company uh it's like they already won and then you have one rocket explode on its first launch people forget that you know the first three Falcon launches back in 20078 and N the first three failed and then they got the third they got the fourth one to work and then it's
like hundreds of consecutive launches the people back then who were like Oh They'll it'll it'll never work this this guy Elon can't launch a rocket yeah they don't have any sort of incentive to uh to to to change their mind um whereas
made a lot of money by being right and optimistic and that that that that that that makes people bitter it makes people bitter that nine months after the first Starship launch or not not nine um it's like 607 it's April and then they launch again in November and in November it
blows up again but it blows up much higher up and it was much more successful and and and then by the third one in March which is when I wrote this article the third one in March is just full colors they they passed they passed with they passed everything it
was it was brilliant and if you had actually believed the people back in April you would have been completely shocked when this thing worked but of course the people writing about it actually had no idea yeah and that uh is always been kind of one of my or Stars which is I
don't know whether it was wienstein I I think I heard nabal quote it but the idea that the truth ought to be predictive yes and what you see is I'm working on a piece right now called failure is a ladder stealing the line from Game of Thrones chaos is a ladder
because failure really is a ladder if you look at all of the greatest uh uh businessmen but it goes to everything like gang gask Khan I didn't know this as I started writing the Beats he was exiled from his village he was like if if and I kind of Imagine as I was
thinking about what I was going to chat with you about I kind of imagine if there was like it's like that Larry David Super Bowl commercial where they like invent the wheel and he's like nah never work I don't know whether you saw that one I thought it was really
hysterical but I was thinking about like history right if if for example D-Day D-Day was a [ __ ] show it was as the people in the military would say Fubar [ __ ] up beyond all recognition and can you imagine if the journalist back then were like like
now may be a completely different outcome yeah I mean I think that there is I think there's no better example of the failure as a ladder as SpaceX SpaceX is the first private entity in world history to launch a a rocket and the first several launches all fail if it
had been a public agency or someone that relied on Public Funding to do that you can imagine that would have been a congressional hearing called and you would have moronic showboating representatives of the United States hauling this person in to be like who are you why did you do this were
outraged banging the fist but Elon Musk had his own money he had money from Founders fund he had money from investors that believed it was possible and they didn't con they didn't call a congressional hearing they figured it out and SpaceX pioneered this iterative
rocket testing process and if if the journal on for 2023 had known anything about that they would have understood why SpaceX was so excited seeing this rocket blow up they were thrilled I mean you know would they have liked everything to work perfectly on the
first time I don't even know if the answer to that is yes they're really interested in how these things fail because if you're you know if you understand complex systems you want to know why things fail um I think that that's the really sad thing about you
know NASA over the course of the last 40 years is that Congress has exercised simultaneously like too much control too many demands and too much scrutiny you can't have those three things all at once so for example the space launch system which is this you know NASA heavy
rocket you know hypothetically competing with the Falcon heavy and the Starship it's a complete disaster you know multiple years delayed and part of it is because they're trying to make all these la is perfect because if the space launch system does a launch and it blows
up on the first time again it's like Congressional hearing threatening you and and so there's this there's this urge to to never fail but the truth is if you aren't allowed to fail in little ways where you learn then you don't get to the big successes um and I think that
this is also true in um you know it's it's it's it's it's true in a lot of areas I think that this SpaceX one is particularly interesting just because of how how how Grand an achievement it is and the contrast with the people that rely completely on
Government funding and government bullying as a result and that brings to mind there's a great book uh called the Genius of the Beast uh a radical revision of capitalism by the author Howard Bloom and and he makes the point that no other
system in human history even though like every religion every political movement you know from Christianity to Marxism as promised we are we are the answer we are going to take you to the promised land and of course all led to disasters there's one system one and one alone
that over a 300 odd year period improved human lives in numerous ubiquitous ways and that are free markets and capitalism and yet like everybody just I that's the disconnect that is so hard for me in my mind right like if I if I was young like for example I started Adventures because
I share a lot of your views about we we've got to be optimistic and and and uh the f I have six Branch over I want the future to be great for them and and so I I was just getting so tired of what what did William Sapphire call The Press mattering NE Bobs of
negativism I thought that was kind of funny but but the point that that uh Bloom makes in his book which I also agree with as an economics major my my economics degree did me zero good in my previous career in Asset Management because you know it invents all these
the the these dehumanizing Concepts right like you utility maximization and homoeconomicus and you know cedus peribus which is other things being equal other things are never equal right and and the idea is That's a classic one all these are for this never assume
that's the thing yeah well it's a flaw in the logic too right because like you know all men are mortal all men are green therefore all green men Must Die well okay logically consistent but all men are not green so that the planted Axiom runs riot in economics and and
what Bloom wants to do is is just acknowledge the fact that the reason markets work so well is they respond to human emotions and desires yeah total demand could be renamed total desire and it would mean the same thing and also markets like almost anything in a
natural system are complex adaptive systems right and and so this idea that you could have a committee of wise people up here to to go back to your point about what would happen if nasau had done the the crashes in a row that that some Committee of wise people up
here is a better way to run an economy it's just beyond flawed and wrong we have centuries of evidence that this is true and yet yet it never dies I wrote I wrote I wrote a piece um I wrote a piece for Labor Day for herina magazine that that people should check out it was called the Earthly Miracle of
the grocery store um I read it yeah and I live in Texas I'm a midwesterner but I'm an adopted Texan and I'm it was uh you know 35 years ago this month that Boris yelson went to a Randall's grocery store outside of Houston and he just amazed by the availability of the
grocery store and and yet 35 years later we still cannot kill the the government urge to have as you said the committee of very wise people determining what's in the grocery store and what it should cost and that urge is never going to go away um and it's it is it is surreal um
because we have this we we have this 300-year record and we have all of these examples um for me my like my basic definition of capitalism is is the one rule of capitalism you're not allowed to kill your counterparty and and I think that this
is the one thing that distinguishes it from all other systems it's like before capitalism if I want to barter or trade I go kill you like I go kill you and I take your stuff uh I raid your village and I take your stuff and what capitalism by saying the one rule is you
can't kill your counterparty you have to negotiate some people are still very offended by the idea of people making decisions for example uh you know we we will never run out of people that think that charging interest on loans is predatory and that and that no one is
mature enough to agree to an interest rate or whatnot and it's like in the old days if you want to lend someone money and they don't give it back then you just go kill them now now you can just charge them interest and they agree to it and you get the money back and often
times you don't but it's like what capitalism normalizes is Let's Make a Deal instead of me being violent toward you your family and your country um and but but some people still do have this Primal urge that uh the government should be showing up to the grocery
store and if you don't set your price here then we take over your grocery store which is you is violence expropriation this urge will never die but that's why it's so important to defend the basic logic of capitalism which is that you peaceful peaceful
trade uh voluntary transactions it's like the biggest it's the biggest promoter of of human welfare ever and the biggest suppressor of mass violence amen is all I can say and I I used to joke there's a Ry Dangerfield joke where he's making fun of I can't
remember the political candidates but he's like I can't believe I'm loser to this guy I think it might have been in catd Shack but but like I feel like that sometimes and we were on a team meeting the other day and and I don't know if you're a Star Wars fan the original
Three not any of the others uh but well I was it was it was my Matrix back when I was a teenager right like we'd never seen anything like that in 1978 or whenever uh it it debuted and and so I said as unbelievable as it seems we're we're we're kind of the uh Rebel
Alliance here and we're going after the Empire with its death star and yet we have all of the evidence that the [ __ ] we want to do works really really well and is really really fair to everyone involved and yet why how how are we losing it's I mean I think it just is
the the the the the Temptation the temptation of controlling other people the Temptation Of Central planning and those things it's intuition like the mass intuition of the people and you see this in something like in Argentina or Venezuela like if you ask people what's
the best way to control the price of rent literally control it literally cap the rent don't allow the don't allow price increases and what happens the price goes up we know this and you have you know the ultimate sort of Rebel Alliance leader Javier down in Argentina
he gets rid of the red control in Buenos Aris and immediately the red is in a free fall which is just hilarious given that you've had three decades of so-called red control um you know there's the there's the great quote the system is what it does so rent control
is not rent control rent control is is rent increase government mandated rent increase because it constrains Supply um there's the famous American Enterprise Institute graph of infl since 2000 or so and it's cumulative product inflation and you see that all
of the most regulated sectors are the ones that are by far the most expensive there's no real government regulation on how to build a television though and so like televisions are one of the things that's come down in cost in absolute terms not even in inflation adjusted
terms in dollars televisions are literally cheaper today than they were 20 years ago and it's like oh there was no government interference there was no TV price control there was no TV cartel it was just oh we figured out how to make a cheaper product um and people
were you know people were interested in buying it still um the The Urge Never Dies because because we have sort of failing human systems humans do believe that like you know in some cases that the neighborhood grocer is out to extort them or or that or that a landlord relationship with a
tenant is inherently predatory it's just it's just this age-old mistrust of free people making free decisions um I don't think it's ever going away but I think that I think that someone like a Malay is very inspiring in in fighting that fight just because it can
be a bit more tangible than sort of unending policy studies and explanations that can sometimes Tire people out Malay is more fun and he makes it he's got the crazy mutton chops the hair the dancing um I think that that's like a perfect model for how people should should talk
about these things I agree I love him and uh you're absolutely right he he and I had the same insight about him he's entertaining as hell and like he's making the right arguments in my opinion um but if you if you just drone on and drone on and drone on like people are
going to tune you out really really fast well and I mean I think the perfect dichotomy interestingly enough is uh Milton Friedman himself versus mle one of his now most prominent sort of acolytes mle is much more fun than the late milon fredman and of course fredman
was a genius and he actually was as far as libertarian Economist go a fairly effective Communicator with the TV program and whatnot it wasn't good enough and and and Malay it just took it to another level um and the willingness to the willingness to
treat these sort of group consensuses as a joke is one of the things that's very valuable and say like no right control doesn't work no this socialism doesn't work it's destroying you um and uh you know that was the kind of the driving force for the various
vertical that we have here at osv right if if you want to change people's minds you're not going to do it with Statistics and position papers and white papers and you know think tanks having debates with each other you've got you've got to be like him right you've
got to actually be provocative right be entertaining you'll get people's attention and I think that it's interesting mle is one of the probably the best modern example of someone who's managed to take the populist intuition of we need to mistrust someone and
actually channeling it to the right to the right villains at least in a strict sort of who's making things more expensive sense which is the bureaucrats uh we don't have we don't have sort of an effective we don't have an effective person like that even Trump is sort of
you know some people would like to imagine he's pretty ineffective at that and Malay very effectively took the populist urge the the desire for you know blame someone and was actually like what if it's us what if it's the people who thought we knew better um what if
it's the people who thought we knew better than markets what if it's the wise old committee and no one ever no one is no one is really sort of effective at at at pointing out that that it's this urge to control it in the first place that is causing it to
malfunction yeah and I and I think though that that I I do see some some green shoots around that even as well because like right now the the classic corporates or bureaucratese speaking in the passive voice with word salot that don't mean anything and and I think a lot of people
are just like you know what [ __ ] you I'm I'm I would much rather get back to let's get back to Tik Tock uh I would I would much rather be see somebody entertaining and making a an actual case for something than listening to you drone on and drone on and drone on and
yet like the the the frustration for me is man it's like when you look at human history not a great place not it's like people who romanticize the past should should maybe take a look at what happened in the past because uh you know just my personal experience all of
my sisters would have died in child Helper because they had complications that were resolved by medical advances um but my daughter both of my daughters actually would have died in child birth like the world was not a really great place and and this
romanticizing of the past to me seems like obviously you're you're you're not remembering it the way it actually happened right you're you're remembering you know Leave it to Beaver and Wall-E and gee Beaver you know let's do that right but but that was false even then
right and so you're you're you're conflating things that really never happened and and and yet I I understand like one of the other things that makes this like it's never going to end is our in my opinion felicious need for certainty that the the world is an
uncertain place we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic universe and you know hilarity or tragedy often ensue and it's just like the the goes all the way back to good old Aristotle right yes no black white0 100 uh deterministic uh you know
labeling of things it is either true or false there's like life is maybe in my opinion and only people who understand that are going to try those things right if you if you're like that New York Times editorial right and you're you're talking about well clearly uh this will
never ever happen and here's why you're you're not gonna even bother looking right I think maybe is maybe is also sort of at the core of capitalism it's why you have to go back and forth this might happen if we can if we can find a price um whereas the logic of of sort of
central planning is it like yes it's going to happen because we say so um it you're taking you're taking you're taking it you're taking it for granted that that things were I will say I'll defend a little bit of the of the appeal to the past which is just people wanting
things to work better that they perceive don't um and that doesn't necessarily mean in fact it doesn't mean that you could go back to the way that things worked in the past or or or get rid of the things that have changed scientifically I think it's I think it's
actually incumbent on people like us to better communicate how to actually make things work better but you know there's the for example um you know how do you explain to someone why airplane travel is better today than it was in 1975 you've got all the famous photos of like
they're carving the turkey by the by the seat and it's like these massive seats okay and I could explain to someone all right we don't have the turkey by the seat anymore and I'm and I'm sorry and the seats are now synthetic leather instead of this ridiculous upholstered
cloth that is straight out of down ABY or something uh but the tickets in inflation adjusted terms are much cheaper and because of the Hub and spoke system that we invented with Hub airports like Dallas Fort Worth or or Atlanta Hartsfield um now you have much
more connectivity around the world and a town like mine in Iowa can be connected with just connecting flight to Chicago O'Hare Airport basically anywhere on Earth in the course of 24 hours and that this is like a huge Innovation There's a
Great Wall Street Journal column back from 2010 by Andy Kesler called how United became an airline United used to employ ticket Checkers after each flight in order to check who actually boarded the plane they would have to mail the boarding passes to Houston and manually
check them against the manifests there was no way to check on site who was actually getting on these planes and you know over the course of the 2000s thousands of ticket Checkers lost their jobs Won't Anyone think of the ticket Checkers it's like they're
unemployed now but of course when you no longer have to employ 5,000 ticket Checkers now those people can be flight attendants now those people can be gate agents now those people can train to be a first officer if they want to or or or or or work in procurement and that's how
United became an airline as Andy tells it is because these things improved and so now the main complaint is that on these extremely convenient extremely cheap extremely prolific flights the chairs are a little bit more uncomfortable than they were in the 70s
when the inflation adjusted cost was 10 times as much and it's like do I sympathize with the desire to go back to the carve turkey by your seat yes I do and the reason that we're that we don't have that is because we have this sort of Mass abundance but if The Regulators
got out of the way we could have roast turkey on certain flights there's a there's a new French Airline called uh La comp and they do they do flights from Newark in New Jersey to um Paris in London and it's business class only they have uh they have a series of long 737s
and it's like 75 business class seats that's the entire plane that's the equivalent of like the roast turkey back in the day and even flight is cheaper than the 1975 roast turkey flight um you have amazing amenities on aircraft now you can fly you know first class to
Dubai and get a and get a queen-size bed for $225,000 that's better than the roast turkey was in 1975 when you have these dinky little planes that have to stop every five hours I mean for God's sake the a350 1000 which is about to go into
service between England and eastern Australia they're going to connect London to Sydney yeah back in the day in 19 in in the 40s during the second world war they'd fly from Australia to London on what they called the double Sunrise they were timing the flights to fly over
Japanese territory at night and so they'd see two sunrises they're calling it project Sunrise where they're going to fly these a350s from London to Sydney it's going to be like a 21 and a half hour flight it's completely ridiculous but it's Non-Stop and it's like that's
an amazing innovation yes the seats are uncomfortable you're going to want to get up and walk around the plane every once in a while but like do we really want to go back to like roast turkey on a point-to-point flight that's extremely expensive I personally understand the
intuition but as I've just done it's Our obligation to explain why things work the way that they do and why they've improved in real terms and how we can you know make them better through the same means yeah I I agree and I am anything I'm not playing glossy and in any way I
I think that there's a lot to improve and I think that we will make those improvements and you know as we innovate guess what we'll have new problems I think that there'll be new and better problems but we will have new problems and that is that's just part of get
making things better and better and better you're I love your point about um the uh airline travel huh you know the other point you didn't make was and guess what all those planes back then they crashed a lot they did and so like literally you were much
more taking your life in your hands back then than you are today and and and I sometimes think that's part of the problem we get so accustomed to what in an earlier era would have been viewed as magic right like magic and and and the great joke by Louis CK I think just
really illustrates this point about about WiFi and airplanes where he's saying can you believe it I am 30,000 feet above the ground and I can surf the Internet and then it goes off and you go what the [ __ ] it's like this metal tube that's
going to take me you know to another continent today is 30 minutes late ah like it's going to take me what used to take six weeks on a dangerous boat a little more than seven hours and I'm very angry about that it's affluenza it's it's where we once you have the new
thing it starts to wear off and you expect it to always be like new um and as uh as David Foster Wallace wrote in his you know great essay and graduation speech this is water you have to sort of constantly remind yourself this is water this is water like it's amazing that I
can do this like stay in tune with the reality in front of you which is not the baby crying on the plane as the fact that you are able to you know hurdle above the Pacific at 600 miles an hour to Asia um thanks to technology and thanks to capitalism you're not flying
there on air Coro the the North Korean Airline one one Airline I would never set foot on that one um and and so what how how has been the initial reaction I I love the magazine I think it's beautiful um any any questions about why you chose to also do a physical
beautiful magazine know to us we wanted something that would endure and we thought that by doing something that would literally endure it would encourage us to do the type of stuff that 10 years from now will be really interesting to open up the the magazine on the bookshelf and be
like oh that was the picture of innovation in 2024 uh and so it's uh you know we think that we think that there's probably a we need to revert that that is one good thing from the past we're doing it differently it's not a Weekly Magazine it's not showing up at your
door every single week it's a bit more spare in terms of its circulation but it's a bit more premium it does represent this sort of part of the past that we admire which is Printed Products feeling more you know almost like having more reverence for the
content yeah and uh the perception's been great we're doing well I'm so happy to hear that because we need voices like this to um make the make the case that we we probably should have convinced people of like more than a century ago but a last we can't I know your time is
limited um so uh first off congratulations I am delighted with it I'm happy to be a subscriber and happy to be a friend um and wish you the the very very best uh with the magazine going forward uh our last question on this podcast is I think fun which is is
we're going to make you the emperor of the world that top down thing right except lots of rules you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education gab but what you can do is not be all powerful but you can be influential and by that I mean we give
you a magical microphone and you could say two things into it that are going to incept the entire population of the world whenever their next day is they're going to wake up and say you know what unlike all the other times when I had these great insights and never did
anything to act on it I'm gonna act on these two what are you except simple answer and it's one that I've you know sort of already given uh Central planning doesn't work trust in the ability of the market to get you good products at fair prices and Trust in transactions with other people it's the
best way it's the best way for your health for your country for your population and don't trust that people say that you know you need to control every transaction and control the economy it would be to try to do my best to crush the undying intuition that that
capitalism is bad I love both of those um you know you you do not get a positive sum Society With Attitudes that uh believes that all of those consensual trustworthy agreements that people make between themselves Millions happen every day and gosh it works pretty well well
thank you so much where where can everyone find you Arena mag.com perfect delighted to speak with you I hope to have you on again when we have some more time because I didn't even get to have the stuff on my list anytime all right thank you Max cheers