Francis Fukuyama Revisits The End of History

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. I think, you know, we really do need to get away from the extreme polarization where people simply oppose something because the other side is in favor of it. You're never gonna get to effective government under those circumstances. On today's episode of the Puck, I talk with Francis Fukuyama, political scientist, political economist, and international relations scholar, best known for his book, The End of History and the Last Man. We revisit the thesis 30 later to explore the promise and fragility of liberal democracy, why political decay has taken root, and whether any real alternative has emerged.

Fukuyama also lays out a practical abundance agenda, streamlining government, cutting through gridlock, and proving democracy can still deliver. It's a fascinating conversation, so let's get to it. Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the puck. Thank you very much. Great to be here.

So before we dive in, just for our listeners, can you just take a minute and tell us a little bit about your background? Well, I'm a political scientist. I started my career at a think tank called the Iran Corporation. I worked in the state department on a couple of occasions. Shows how old I am, but the first of those was in the first Reagan administration back in 1981.

I returned under George h w Bush, but basically, I've been in public policy institutions ever since. I I taught at, George Mason University, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and I'm now at Stanford University in the Freeman Spogli Institute as a as a senior fellow there. Well, your background is impressive, and I'm excited to hear your perspective on what's going on into world in the world today. But as we get started today, in in 2020, you revisited your seminal work, The End of History and the Last Man. When you look back on the original thesis and the global shifts we've seen, how has your perspective evolved over the past three decades?

Well, it's evolved in a lot of ways. You know, I really rewrote that book in this two volume series I had, the Origins of Political Order, and then the second volume, Political Order and Political Decay. And I think that, you know, there were a couple of big revisions, things that I had missed. Probably the most important was this idea of political decay because, you know, I think that the development of democracy is not a one way ratchet that only turns in one direction, and what we've seen is a, you know, pretty substantial deterioration of democracy, especially in The United States, which is something I really hadn't anticipated. On the other hand, I think it's important to point out that the book that I wrote and published in 1992 was entitled The End of History and the Last Man.

The end of history phrase comes from the philosopher, Hegel, who talked about there being a progressive historical evolutionary process. The last man came from the philosopher, Nietzsche, who felt that the kind of world that emerged at the end of history, that is to say, liberal state that produced peace and prosperity, was actually, something that people didn't wanna live in, and that there would be a revolt against that. And so in a, you know, what I did in the last chapters of that book is to explain why liberal democracy might ultimately break down. And I think, you know, we're kind of in the midst of that, that phenomenon right now. You've long argued that liberal democracy represents a kind of endpoint in ideological evolution.

Now the counter to that point is that authoritarianism is efficient. And in a world facing new authoritarian challenges, do you still see democracy as the ultimate goal for societies? And if you do, why? Well, that was really the essence of my argument about the end of history that, you know, liberal democracies could go forward, they could go backwards, there could be more, there could be less, but what I didn't see anywhere in the world was a coherent systematic alternative to liberal democracy. That is to say, another type of regime that, would actually be more powerful, successful, more popular than liberal democracy.

And I have to say that, you know, thirty five years after the publication of that book, I still don't see one. I think, you know, the most obvious challenger is China, but, you know, I actually don't see that many countries rushing to emulate China, and I think very few of them are actually able to. There are certainly many countries that are either poor, corrupt, imperfect democracies. What I don't see is what the Marxist used to present. I mean, they said, what they call bourgeois, capitalist democracy is the kind of ultimate stage of history.

And there's another stage beyond that, which is, you know, communism. And that was the, you know, for them, the real end of history. And I just don't see anybody positing a higher stage of civilization. You know, you can retreat, you can go back into older forms of political organization, but I don't see articulated anywhere, you know, the, you know, the next great thing beyond liberal democracy. We've seen rising populism and nationalism across many democratic countries.

Where do you think the primary threats to democracy are coming from today, and how might democracies respond effectively? Well, that's a big topic, and right now there are so many different types of threats to democracy that you have to disaggregate them, because there's not a single thing that needs to be done. So one challenge is on a geopolitical level. You have the rise, in recent decades of both China and Russia, which are pretty well consolidated authoritarian alternatives to democracy. In 2014, Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, which turned into a full scale war in 2022.

And so there, I think the challenge is just a straightforward military one, you know, that that if you wanna defend, democracy in Europe, I think you have to defend Ukraine. You need a stronger NATO. Right now, we're seeing a lot of setbacks in that effort because The United States seems to have pulled out and changed sides in that struggle. In the case of China, it's a different type of threat, which I think is in a way much more challenging, because China is a an economic juggernaut. It's much more successful economically than Russia ever was.

And, you know, there is kind of a multifaceted, competition. But I also think that China is not the risk taker that Russia is, so in a certain sense, you know, they're they're a little bit easier to live with. So that's one category of challenges. On the domestic front, I think what we're seeing is the rise of a lot of illiberal, populist political parties in many established democracies, including The United States, and I think Donald Trump is the leading, you know, example of this. As far as I can see, he has very authoritarian instincts.

He really does not care about constitutional checks and balances or the rule of law, and, you know, he is acting more like a monarch than a an elected president, ever since he was inaugurated on, January 20. But other countries, you know, have shifted in that direction. You've got Turkey under Erdogan, Hungary under Viktor Orban, Poland under the former Law and Justice party, although they've turned around. And I think that gives you these formula for how to protect democracy in countries that are still democratic enough to allow a vote, which is you vote. You, you know, you mobilize and you use electoral politics to elect parties that are committed to liberal democracy.

And that's really what all of us, I think, need to devote ourselves to if we wanna hold on to liberal democracy. If we are trying to hold on to liberal democracy, what do we do with respect to the drastic levels of income inequality in America today? Well, I think that, again, there there are different dimensions to an answer. So in terms of economic inequality, I think that the situation I mean, there that you certainly have growing inequality over the past thirty, forty years. You have the rise of a whole layer of oligarchs, basically.

People like Elon Musk or or Mark Zuckerberg or, you know, these other tech billionaires, multi billionaires that exert undue influence. I think that, you know, the traditional answer in most democracies has been some form of social democracy, meaning, you tax them, you redistribute, a lot of that wealth, you provide services like health and education to ordinary people. What we've seen, you know, beginning in the nineteen eighties was a concerted ideological attack on that formula, you know, and that that ideology can be based in a kind of libertarian view that the state doesn't have the right to tax people, or that, you know, it's not actually going to solve the problem, and, you know, whether it's going to be you know, probably the most powerful argument against that is that you need oligarchs and billionaires because they're the ones that create wealth and value. They're the ones that, you know, gotten rich because of, their entrepreneurship, and there's something to that argument. But I think that, you know, ultimately, the formula has to be something like that kind of redistributive system.

But, you know, I have to say that a lot of the instability and polarization right now is not necessarily, driven by these economic inequalities. If that were the case, Bernie Sanders would be president today. Right? And instead, you've got Donald Trump, and you've got a lot of very powerful right wing politicians, who actually, you know, directly oppose that kind of redistribution. Their argument is more cultural, that the real threat is not economic inequality, it's immigrants, it's foreigners, it's, you know, different cultural influences that are undermining the American way of life.

And, you know, to fight that particular threat, I think, requires different tools other than economic redistribution. In the digital era where disinformation can spread rapidly and social media can be exploited by various actors, do you think technology ultimately helps or harms the democratic project? Is social media driving us into this polarized extremism? Well, I don't think that technology by itself is creating the issue. I mean, there are underlying social forces that are pushing things in that direction.

But I do think that social media has made things a lot worse. I would recommend a very good book by a former colleague of mine, Renee DiResta, called Invisible Rulers. She actually spent much much of her career looking at disinformation on the Internet. And, you know, I think that she points to the real problem, which is that today, you know, the real source of media power is not legacy media, it's it's influencers. And the technology companies have structured incentives in a way that push people towards more extreme positions.

You know, you you can see this, or I can see this, just in you know, I have my own YouTube channel called Frankly Fukuyama. And if I post a an interview that's, you know, serious with a serious person that goes over, you know, complex issues, nobody nobody cares. Nobody wants to listen to that. But the moment you try to say something edgy or, you know, slashing or, you know, that really has a lot of emotional content, all of a sudden you see that, you know, a lot of people like it, and they, you know, they wanna follow you. And I think her argument is that really what the social media has done is to create this ecosystem in which people are constantly outbidding each other, trying to get followers by putting up more and more, kind of outlandish content, and, you know, that's really what's driving a lot of the, a lot of the polarization.

And I think there's something to that. Like I said, I don't think you you'd still have polarization even without social media, but I think it's been unhelpful, and it's accelerated that trend. You know, back after 2016, a lot of people on the left said, well, you have to regulate social media, and that produced this gigantic right wing backlash that, you know, accused those people of wanting to censor conservative voices, and there is something to that. And so right now, I'm not sure that there's a clear way forward because I don't think you want the government to say what's, you know, fake news and what's not. I don't think you want the social media companies to define that.

But what what other alternatives do you have? And I don't see a clear answer to that. There's another problem that, we haven't touched on, which I think is actually key to a future politics, which is that in many liberal democracies today, and especially in The United States, it's very hard to accomplish things. There's an academic named Mark Dunkelman, who wrote a book this year called Why Nothing Works. And I think you can see this in something like, well, okay, take my native state of California, we have a gigantic housing crisis.

People are living in RVs on El Camino Real and Palo Alto because they can't afford to buy a house. And we have these other projects that are completely stalled, so they've been trying to build a high speed rail between LA and San Francisco for years. So they managed to get from, you know, Fresno to Merced, but they I I just don't think this is ever gonna happen. And these are both examples of governments that really can't solve, problems, you know. In the first one, affordable housing, the reason that you can't solve it is that there's just too much of a burden of rules and procedures that prevent the government from doing things.

This wasn't always the case. California built the Golden Gate Bridge, the federal government built Hoover Dam, the Bay Bridge. All of these things were constructed in the space of about three or four years in the early nineteen thirties. We couldn't possibly do that today because it's just too hard to accomplish things. One book, I am quite high on right now is this book called Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who talk exactly about this, this agenda that, you know, we ought to get back to building things, which would show people that actually a democratic government can accomplish things in a way that seems really stuck, at the present moment.

And I think it also it it's what really triggers Trumpism, you know, that Trump wants to slash through all of these rules and procedures and act like a dictator. You know, just issue one executive order after another. Do this, do that. No discussion, no participation, you know, not even Congress being consulted in any of this. And I think that's the wrong solution.

I think that you need more decisive government that is free to actually get things done in the real world, but remains fundamentally, a government with checks and balances. But we just need fewer checks and balances, and we need to streamline that process so that it's easier to accomplish things in a way that it was, you know, fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. So, okay. You have my attention. Tell me how then do we go about fixing this issue and getting real results?

Yeah. Well, that's I actually have a working group that is trying to lay out, we call it project Phoenix. We could have called it project twenty twenty eight, the way the Heritage Foundation had a project twenty twenty five, but, I think there's a clear reform agenda. You know, I liken it to a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk, and an ambitious politician could simply, pick it up and and use it. We have a law called the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, that was passed in 1971.

We allow people to sue public or private projects. Anybody, any one of the 40,000,000 residents of California has standing to do this. They can sue anonymously. There's no statute of limitations. And rather than being used primarily by environmental groups, a lot of times, it's business competitors, labor unions, NIMBY neighbors.

People use this as a as a tool to stop things that they don't like, and a lot of governments have tried to modify this law over the past that have some very powerful entrenched interests that wanna keep things the way they are, but, you know, that's politics. You oftentimes have to confront entrenched stakeholders that really don't want change because you gotta point out to people there's stuff that we could be doing. We could have, high speed rail. Not everybody's gonna be happy with it, but it's gonna, in the end, really benefit us, and it's gonna transform, the state. And then at a national level, you know, there there are similar kinds of obstacles, for the federal government doing things, but, you know, this is all democratic reform.

We've done it in the past. We've built, you know, Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge in much shorter periods of time. And so I think that we should be able to do this again in the future. You know, I completely agree with you. I I haven't had a chance to Google the the the timing of when we built those bridges or or that dam, but it does seem to me that things, like, even in Pennsylvania, like rebuilding the bridge that Josh Shapiro got done, it takes a little bit of a crisis.

And I understand that we, as a country, have been able to mobilize during these crises. I guess from a, you know, historical perspective, absent a crisis, are there other things we can do in terms of education and as as you look at the evolution of democracy that would would take something like CEQA that has been so hard to change and be more successful and effective in actually bringing about these changes? Well, I think that this, you know, requires several things. So you just need to leave lay the intellectual groundwork, and that's why I think a book like Abundance is so important, you know, that progressives have wanted to use the government to do stuff, but they've also burdened the government with so many, you know, rules and constraints that they actually can't make use of it. You know, one powerful argument I think that's out there is if we want to adapt to climate change, which is something, you know, all good progressives, seek to do, we actually have to be able to build things.

We have to be able to build transmission lines. Most of the alternative energy in The United States is produced in these red states, Texas and Oklahoma. The demand is in California, but it takes almost ten years to get the permitting done for transmission lines, you know, between there and here. And, you know, this is a political challenge that, you know, we need to meet, and I think the way you do it is you convince people that, first of all, they're not abandoning their progressive principles if they try to speed these kinds of things up. They're actually helping a progressive, cause.

And, you know, there needs to be a a a kind of you know, the the right is is really good at at despising government and criticizing the deep state, but there's a left wing version of this too that says, well, the government's been captured by, you know, corporations and, you know, moneyed interests and so forth, and they're the problem. We need to get back to a sense that we had in the nineteen thirties and forties, you know, really all the way through the end of the second World War, that actually the government can be a force for good. If it's democratically legitimated, if it operates within clear boundaries of law, that we need the government to actually do things to help the society as a whole, and we can't just do this from, you know, the bottom up. Sometimes you need to, you know, have, the government be the one that takes the lead. Well, and I'm always thought using the concept of project twenty twenty eight and and the idea that for those people that feel we're headed in a direction that they think is not good.

California being now the fourth largest state, what better testing ground to be able to say, again, hey. We fixed this in California. And and I think it's great that Gavin's got this new podcast, and he's willing to try to move to the middle and try to seek these answers. But it begs the question, he wasn't successful at solving those issues in California. In terms of looking at where we are in California today, trying to look going forward towards 2028, I mean, if you take homelessness, if you take housing, and if you take high speed rail, I don't see anyone in California effectively talking about ways to today fix those issues.

I I see a lot of money being spent on it. I see a lot of people talking about it, but I don't see anyone taking the bull by the horns and saying, okay. Here's the plan to fix California. What are you seeing out there? No.

I think I would agree with you. I think that, right now, a lot of, certainly, on in the Democratic party, a lot of people are just stuck in the past. But like I said, you know, if you really do have a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk, at some point, you're gonna get some ambitious politician. You know, part of the problem with Newsom is that he comes with a lot of baggage and that people don't trust him to actually execute on a policy like this. So it probably has to be some, you know, some new face, but, given how powerful this kind of policy could be, to actually accomplish things, you know, I I I think that it could happen.

The other thing is that the Trump administration may actually be preparing the way for this. You know, their major objective right now is just to destroy things, You know? They wanna destroy the the deep state. They're gonna fire all these bureaucrats. They're gonna close down agencies, and it may actually persuade people that, you know, maybe the government isn't the big enemy.

You know? Maybe it's really not the thing that we need to destroy. Maybe, actually, it's important to be able to call your Social Security office and get somebody to answer your questions. You know? Maybe it's important for veterans to be able to get their health care in an expeditious way.

And I think that, you know, the absence of an effective government over the next few years may be, you know, in a way, a wake up call for citizens to say, hey. We really gotta rebuild these systems, you know, and we don't wanna do it the way it was before. We gotta have a new blueprint, for how to make a government truly effective. You know, this is something my group is looking at. We have a law professor at Stanford who tried to count the number of congressionally mandated annual reports that agencies, federal agencies had to file with congress, and he said that you can't count them because they're too many.

The number is something like over 10,000. So if you if you said, how can you make the government more effective? There's a really simple low hanging fruit that you could just pick, which is get rid of, you know, 95% of these reports, and you'll free up all this time on the part of bureaucrats to actually do things that will make a difference, you know, to citizens. So I think some of this stuff is actually pretty easy to do. It's just that nobody has really, you know, taken this particular bull by the horns and run with it.

Do you think that as we're sitting here today I mean, democracy in America has faced political polarization before. But from your perspective, is this a new level of division that you haven't seen? And and is it a a recurring part of our history to have these cycles, and and what can we do to break them? It's not unprecedented. So the first precedent was the civil war, obviously, which is not a good precedent.

Right? You don't have to settle this thing by a war that kills 600,000 people. You had a similar situation, not quite as intense in the late nineteenth century because, you know, at that point, the the parties were reversed. So the Republicans were the progressive party and the Democrats were the party of small farmers and, you know, western ranchers and that sort of thing. And they, flipped positions virtually every election cycle until the election of eighteen ninety eight.

And, actually, a lot of the issues then were similar because United States was just shifting from a agrarian economy to an urban industrial economy. Millions of immigrants were pouring into the country, and the country couldn't make up its mind as to what kind of society it was gonna be. And that eighteen ninety six election decided that know, the Republicans won, they stayed in power for the next twelve years, and, you know, that was a progressive era that really laid the basis for twentieth century American government. So it's not completely unprecedented for this to happen short of a major war or crisis, but, you know, I do think that, history kinda shows that war and crisis, oftentimes accelerates that, you know, that rate of change. Yeah.

For sure. And it it's interesting as a as I'm listening to you talk because, again, I had Frank Bruni, and one of the things we talked about was the importance of critical thinking and moving away from kind of this all or none mentality. And, you know, a lot of the things that Trump is trying to do are very offensive to people in in, you know, both in the Republican party and the Democratic party. But on the other hand, you've seen people like Mark Rubio talking about not having the big cuts at the state department. But one of the things they are focusing on is trying to get rid of a lot of regulations, for instance.

Are you seeing a movement in California emerging where there is a movement back towards common sense solutions where we can talk about these things and and see where there are certain things being done well on both sides and and and study that and take advantage of it? Well, I have to say that I don't see a lot of examples of this right now in California. Something like Ezra Klein's book, I think, is is laying the foundation for it because, you know, social change comes about at several different levels. One of them is just intellectual and conceptual. People have to have a vision of what a future world could look like that's different from what they're experiencing now.

Then you need grassroots mobilization, so people, you know, in the progressive era back in the eighteen eighties, nineties, you had a lot of patronage and corruption, and a lot of grandmothers were really outraged that this was happening. And they were, you know, the foot soldiers of the progressive era, and so that needs to happen. You actually need politicians that take the mantle of change. So you mentioned Josh Shapiro, and he's a great example of, I think, the kind of thing you need to do. When I ninety five was closed because of that tanker truck accident, You know, people were telling him it would take six months to get through all the permitting that that's needed, and he basically suspended a lot of the, you know, the rules, in order to you know, like, there's a rule about the kind of asphalt that you needed to pour and you couldn't get it.

So he just said, let's just forget about that, you know, that rule. And so, yeah, you need more people like him, and I think instead, you're getting a lot of traditional you know, for example, LA is facing a similar problem with Pacific Palisades, and then, you know, the other communities were were burned in the, in the fires in January. And that would call for a leadership that could be like Shapiro and just say, look. We're gonna like, my my favorite candidate for this is Malibu. I used to drive through Malibu on my way to work, every day, and there's really no reason why all these rich people should take up all that shoreline.

It's all public beach. Everybody should have access to it, and so you could have a, you know, vision for a new Pacific Coast Highway that's really open to, to everybody, but it requires stepping on toes of a lot of, you know, rich people that, you know, are trying to protect their property rights. So, you know, like I said, I think that you can never predict when a visionary leader will, step forward, but that's that's the sort of thing that happens when people take these opportunities and run with them. Do you see examples of I mean, Teddy Roosevelt was someone that led a populist movement that that took on some, you know, big entrenched interest, for instance. Obviously, Franklin Roosevelt did it as well.

And I guess history will determine whether or not Donald Trump was someone that ultimately took on some of these interests, or or or was he just taking advantage of these of these partisan waters to actually become elected. Do do you see examples of modern day people again, you talked about Bernie Sanders. If he if he had a populist agenda from an economic perspective, changing Pacific Coast Highway would also have to take on rich entrenched issues. Do you see either I mean, any any room other than the far left talking about that? Well, you know, it's interesting.

I think that if you think about the class of tech oligarchs, Biden actually started that process when he appointed Lina Khan to be head of the FTC. This was the first time that anybody had gotten serious about antitrust in The United States. And what's really fascinating is that's the one part of the Biden legacy that Trump has not tried to dismantle. A lot of the suits that were launched against these big tech companies, by Democratic administration are actually, being carried forth as we speak, by the Trump administration. So maybe, you know, this is kind of under the radar, but maybe, you know, there is more of a consensus on these kinds of issues that, you know, our politics is too much dominated by these rich oligarchs and that we need to exert some democratic control over them.

So, you know, we'll have to see how that how that plays up. But it's it's really fascinating. You know, Trump has demonized virtually anyone that had any association with Biden except for even Khan, so we'll see. You also referred to, I think, your group working on some of these issues. Can you take a moment and tell us a little bit about what you are working on and and what you see as your role in the next few years?

I see my role as trying to intellectually lay the groundwork for, you know, essentially the abundance agenda, the ability of The United States to go back to actually building stuff and getting things accomplished in a much more effective way, and that takes place at two levels. So one is kind of a nitty gritty, you know, what's the legislative agenda? What rules, what statutes would you have to modify or get rid of in order to facilitate this happening. Right? So CEQA reform is is would fall in that category.

But the other issue is a higher level change in thinking. So the Republicans for the last well, really since the nineteen thirties, have been saying that the problem with American government is that bureaucrats are out of control, that, they're all liberals or progressives, and they all have an agenda that has escaped the the control of democratic so, I mean, how many times have you heard the term unelected bureaucrat? Right? Sure. Unelected bureaucrats are running running wild.

And I actually think that the problem is a little bit the opposite, that bureaucrats are over controlled. I'll give you just one straightforward example. We have something called the Federal Acquisitions Regulations that is several thousand pages of detailed rules about how any government agency needs to procure a computer system, an office desk, you know, a fighter plane. And the reason that federal procurement is so slow and so expensive is that bureaucrats spend all their time trying to figure out how do we how do we comply with, the FAR, these federal acquisition regulations, and not, you know, what's the cheapest, most effective thing that we can purchase in order to get our, job done. And so if you clear out some of that, or, you know, my students don't wanna go work for the government.

If there's a job opening posted, it's six months before they get an interview. Right? And it shouldn't be that way. There should be a pipeline for young people to, you know, with tech skills to get government positions, and it should be flexible. So if they wanna leave after a year, they should be able to do this.

But, you know, right now we've got this big regulatory burden, and so I think the first thing actually that needs to be deregulated is the government itself. You gotta get rid of all of these rules that, you know, make bureaucrats worry more about rule compliance than about actually getting results. You ought to reward them for taking risks, for actually doing things that, you know, make a difference. So this is kind of the agenda that we wanna lay out. So high level argument about, you know, what's the real problem in the bureaucracy, and then a more detailed agenda about, you know, these are the things that need to change.

This is what Congress needs to, you know, step up to do. This is at a state level, what needs to be done. Now on the federal level, isn't one of the things that people are talking about the growth of the essentially independent agencies and the fact that forget that they they've been given too much power? I mean, that that's at least and and is that what you're referring to that that you think that's misplaced? No.

No. Okay. No. I mean, I think you need independent agencies, you know, for continuity. A lot of them like the FCC or the FCC were designed as multi member agencies with a deliberate political balance, and I don't see any reason why, you know, you'd you'd necessarily want to you'd wanna change that.

No. What I think the problem is, at the federal level is just multiplication of rules. Like Right. These annual reports to congress that I mentioned. You know?

Congress every year mandates new ones, and they never get rid of old ones, you know, and that just takes up a lot of time. There's a annual report that somebody at the Fed has to file every year on the dollar coin. Right? What's the last time you spend a dollar coin? Right?

But, nonetheless, some bureaucrats gotta spend time, you know, writing this, report. And so I think it's just this, what's called sludge, you know, that that really gums up the works. And as I said, it's not just businesses that need to be t regulated. It's also the government itself. Makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things we're trying to do this year and and and expanding is really trying to focus on the big issues that we're facing, and you bring up the, you know, the issue of abundance. I am really trying to focus on the good that the Democrats are doing, the good that the Republicans are doing, and kind of balancing it together and trying to figure out a safe place for us to have real debate. Because when you talk about, again, what's happened over the last twenty years with the loss of jobs in America, there's a lot of reasons for that. We've got a lot of automation.

Well, we also have a lot of jobs that went overseas. We have different wage structures. But whether or not it's tariffs, whether or not it's build back better, having real discussions and thoughtful debates about how do we create more abundance, it seems to me that those are the kind of discussions we're hoping to have. Yeah. Well, more power to you.

I think, you know, we really do need to get away from, you know, the extreme, polarization where people simply oppose something because the other side is in favor of it. Yeah. You're never gonna get to effective government, you know, under those circumstances. The one thing I would say is that, you know, my overall perspective has been much more sympathetic with the left than the right, in recent years. But, you know, a lot of the threats to effective government are also coming from the left.

I think that, you know, the the right likes to demonize government and delegitimate it, but in a way, so do many people on the left. You know, they think that government's been captured. It's just a reflection of corporate interest. You know, we gotta sue it up and down, you know, in order to keep it, accountable. And this also, you know, has led to this general delegitimation and what Mark Dunkelman calls this Hamiltonian sense.

You know, Hamilton was the founding father that really felt that you actually needed a government and that it could do positive things. And I think that that's something that, you know, we have to revive a a a sense of that, you know, we do have collective problems that need to be solved by, you know, by somebody, you know, that that actually is accountable, but is also effective. Could not agree more. And the one thing I also like to point out to people is that we can really focus on the glass being half empty or half full. And when you look at giving each of us a time machine and saying, okay.

When would we go back to that would was better than today? And to me, you know, the fact that we are a multicultural democracy, the the fact that we can meet the way we are and have these discussions is pretty remarkable. And I and I think we do tend to focus on the negative too much, and I think the algorithms are leaning that. But that if we really have the perspective of we can do better, that the younger people are smart, that we do have I agree with you completely. Room for optimism, then I then I think we can get there.

So let's hope let's hope that out of, you know, the Yeah. Crumbling institutions and structures, you know, we build back better something, you know, that's more durable. When I was younger, I I was optimistic for a period of time, and then I went into that period where I I see it in young people today where it's like they can't buy a house, and it's easy to focus on global warming. And when I was younger, we worried about nuclear war and jumping under a desk. But I but I ultimately were still here, and I I do think that the the next generation help working with us can really make things better.

So I I I Prince, I'm I'm super excited to have had you on the puck. This has been terrific. Okay. Same here. Been a real pleasure talking to you.

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