Jack Goldstone

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 do think it's important for Americans, ordinary people who work nine to five, who are on the job to say what's happening in the world is going to affect me, and if I'm concerned about losing some of our freedoms or being absorbed by hate, I need to actively work against that. Even if you are not inclined to go out and march for freedom, just try and use some compassion when talking to friends and family. Try to listen to different points of view. Try and press yourself to say, Am I really looking at different sides of this?

Am I looking for the best in other people? Today on the Puck, I'm joined by Jack Goldstone, the Hazel Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and director of the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions, and Policy. Jack is one of the world's leading scholars on revolutions in social change and has advised the National Intelligence Council, the World Bank, and the US state and defense departments. His latest book is Revolutions, a very short introduction. We cover the big ideas that have made him a leading voice on political and social transformation.

There's a lot to unpack, so let's get to it. Jack Olsen, welcome to the Puck. Thank you. Glad to be here. So as we get started, I mean can you take a minute and tell us a little bit about yourself, but also importantly how you found yourself interested in this issue?

Sure. I'm an academic. I've never been in a government or policy position and I've always tried to stay objective. I haven't taken on any classified work. I've said I'm going to spend my career studying revolutions, why they happen, and I'll talk to anyone who's interested in it.

What brought me to this actually was a concern for why things go wrong. I know a lot of people come to the study of revolutions from a social justice point of view, and I think that's great. But for me, I was seeing governments do what I thought were a lot of dumb things in the sixties and seventies, and I was curious about that. So I said to myself, what are some of the really dumbest things a government can possibly do? That way I can really study how things go wrong.

And I thought if a government gets itself overthrown by its own people, that's the ultimate failure. So I got interested in revolutions, started studying them in all different kinds of times and places. I've visited a few places. I was in Egypt in, 2010 to see what was happening there. So it's been a kind of lifelong study for me.

So I was gonna ask you why revolutions happen. If I pick up on what you just said, it's when governments really screw up. Is that fair? Yeah. I think that is fair.

People like to believe that they can overthrow a government by sheer effort, will, solidarity, mobilization. All of those things are essential, but it's also essential that the government have some weaknesses. Unfortunately, no popular movement can stand up to a modern military if it remains loyal and is ruthless in defending the government. Sadly, you know, we've seen the result of that in everything from Tiananmen Square in China to the suppression of popular protests in Iran in 2009 and again recently. So what's critical is that the government loses the ability to count on its own military, its own administration.

And that's because military leaders, political leaders, business leaders, come to the conclusion that the government is no longer serving the interests of the country, and in particular, their country. They feel that they're actually going to lose out if the government keeps doing what it's doing. So they may initiate a military coup, or they may take advantage of popular protests and kind of support them, let them go along, or they may simply get out of the way. There are a lot of situations where the military simply stays in its barracks, stands aside, deserts, but refuses to defend the regime. So when you look at warning signs today, I mean you look at our government shutdown for instance, you look at polarization, you look at the deficit and the inability to get our debt under control, which seems to be an issue that everyone acknowledges is something we should be doing.

Are there warning signs that you see that are that are not just kind of classic things that all governments go through or are there things that we should be worried about today? I'm sorry to say that yes, very much. I think it's important to distinguish between the immediate triggers of a revolution and the long term pressures that build up that make a revolution possible. With earthquakes, pressure needs to build up on fault lines, and then it's hard to say exactly what triggers and releases the explosion, but we know where the fault lines are, and we can actually measure the pressure. Something similar is true for revolutions.

We can identify what are the long term pressures that lead to revolution, even if we can't tell you exactly what week or what month a trigger is gonna come along. Now in The United States, I've been saying, really for the last couple of decades, that we're on a trajectory that historically looks like other times in American and other world history where pressures are building up for some major state crisis. So debt you mentioned. Government has been rolling up debt. That's not unusual.

It happens during wartime. It happens during economic crashes. It was necessary during COVID. But what's different is The United States has been running a deficit of about three percent of GDP for the last forty years. It's now reached over a 100% of GDP.

And a funny thing happens when your debt equals your the size of your entire economy. The interest on the debt can actually grow faster than your economy grows, getting you deeper and deeper in trouble. Now in the short term, you can try and borrow your way further. This is what's happening now. It looks like The US debt will be five to 6% of GDP.

That's the federal government budget debt. That doesn't count all the private debt, the state and local government debt. So we're deep in a pool of debt. And unless we start to climb out of it, we get more and more pinned in. So that's one element.

Now, why are we stuck in this? Well, historically, we find countries are unable to solve their debt problems when the leaders, the elites, become too focused on their own situation rather than how to make things better for the country. I call it selfish elites. Now, where does that come from? Well, what we see is when a country is trying to catch up with others, whether it's China or Japan, their target is their competitive country.

So if you're trying to catch up with The United States, you wanna lift your whole country up so that you get richer and stronger. But once you've become the top dog, it's easy to become complacent. Kind of since the end of the Cold War, US elites have felt, hey, you know, we're comfortable. All we have to do is accumulate capital. And they become more resistant to taxation.

Why pay taxes? What's the government gonna do for us if we're already the richest country in the world? So, elites end up competing with each other. You get different elite groups trying to spread an ideology, accumulate assets, take command of cultural and political institutions. And this is what I call elite factionalism.

And as it gets more bitter, we find that elites find it harder to compromise. The political polarization gets more stark. And that's what we're seeing. Right? I mean, elites are calling each other enemies rather than loyal opposition.

And of course, it's hard to make deals with your enemies. So instead of making deals to reduce the debt or deals to grow the economy, we see elites basically trying to cut their taxes, cut down the government, and that simply leads to more deficit spending because people still want the government to do things. Has to pay pensions. Government has to pay medic medical bills. That's a big fight right now.

But what we need to get out of this situation is for different elite groups to come together, look at our financial situation, and plot a way to reduce debt. You know, everybody talked about it for a while, but I'm not seeing it happen. And then the third thing that you need for revolution, if one is debt and the second is deep elite divisions that have become angry and bitter, the third thing is for the population in general to lose trust in the government. Instead of demanding that the government do the right thing, people have become so discouraged with government and the elites who run it that they say, maybe we should just blow it all up, tear it all down because what has the government brought us? Right?

It got us the the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, said there wasn't going to be any more recessions, and then boom, we got creamed. Did we feel more secure with the government managing COVID crisis? No. Kind of mixed messages, people continued to die, confidence drained away. And now, who are the leaders we look to?

It's become very confusing to distinguish what's true, what's false, who do we believe. And if you look at the Gallup polls when they ask Americans, do you have trust in congress? Do you have trust in the government? Do you have trust in the police? Do you have trust in the future of the economy?

A majority say no. And so, when people reach that point, they're often willing to follow a movement that says, we know you're angry. We know the government has let you down and we're going to change all of that all at once. And at that point, people don't even care so much who's the person who's doing it. Are they going to have a democracy or something different?

What people care about is, do you realize we're feeling bad? Do you realize we are worried, in trouble, anxious? And that's when you can get a movement for radical change. And I think in The US, we're pretty much far down that road. So it sounds like you think we're kind of at this tipping point down the the line.

Let me ask a question with respect to China. We seem to be waking up to the fact that China is a competitor that really has kind of gotten ahead of us, so to speak. And I think there's even in the last few months, there's really been a lot more talk about China versus The US. And for instance, on these minerals that are so important to manufacturing, for a long time, there was a certain arrogance that, you know, China needed us much more than we needed China, that we could win this trade war, and that we really didn't have anything to worry about. But when you really look under the hood, I do think the elites, people are starting to talk about the fact that we really have to get our ducks in a row and catch up or we are all gonna have a real problem.

Is there any sense that you see that the elites might come together around an issue like this like we did during the cold war in The Soviet Union? I would hope that that would be the case. It's not just China. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea have come together, and they are recruiting other countries. The BRICS group, which was originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, is bringing on other big countries like Indonesia.

So we've got a lot of countries saying, we don't need The United States. We'd rather follow this big China Russia block that controls all of Eurasia, Where you put China, India, Russia together, you have almost half the world's population. So it's absolutely true that The United States got cocky. We figured we could do whatever we want. The world needs us.

We're the biggest and strongest power. Well, if you're the biggest and strongest power on the block, what happens is other countries start looking at you and saying, hey. I need help. I need help so that we don't just have to do whatever that big bully says. So China's been reaching out and building alliances.

It's been trying to make its own economy much more autonomous and independent. And of course, it's looking for things it can use as leverage. Leverage against The US, leverage to strengthen ties with Russia. So it's certainly true that there's a big menace there. Now, is that gonna unite our elites?

You hope it would, but it's not quite a Sputnik moment. Because right now, there are China Hawks who see China as the biggest threat to The United States, but there are also America Firsters who simply say, let China have the Western Pacific. That's fine. Let China and India fight over Asia. We don't care.

As long as America is secure within its borders, as long as we can dominate in the Western Hemisphere, we don't wanna spend resources and energy getting into conflicts with enemies across the ocean. So as long as you have some people saying, yeah, China's our top priority, other people say, well, America domestically is our top priority, then you don't have that unity. That's fascinating. And I hadn't really thought about it like that, but you frame it pretty well because I do believe that there seemed to be a real consensus whether or not it was 70% of Americans, what whatever was going on with the evil empire and the fear of the Soviet Union. But you raise a really fascinating point, which is that within the Republican party, within MAGA, there are a lot of people that really want to isolate America, pull back from Ukraine, pull back from Iran, pull back from these conflicts.

From your perspective, is there room for us to influence the discussion in a way that gets people's attention? I mean, how do you frame this in a way that people start paying attention to it in a more meaningful way? Well, what I try and remind people is that freedom is a wonderful thing. We've always prized it, we've fought for it in the past, and we consider freedom essential to the way our capitalist free markets work, the way our democracy works. But it's also a burden.

And right now, people don't want any more burdens. And having The United States be the leading defender of freedom around the world, that's been expensive for us. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, going back, even Vietnam, it's not clear that we really benefited from pushing ourselves forward to be that global leader. We've had misjudgments. It's not clear that we backed the right horse in Iraq.

It's clear that we got bogged down for way too long in Afghanistan. So if we're gonna make these horribly expensive mistakes that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, a lot of people are saying, we should give up that job. The world doesn't need America to be its defend ultimate defender of freedom in every place. We don't, you know we'll help Ukraine a bit, but we're not gonna make big sacrifices to help Ukraine. We're not gonna stake our future on defending Taiwan.

I understand that feeling, but it's so dangerous. It's so wrong. Because once you start yielding to the erosion of freedom elsewhere, it strengthens opponents of freedom everywhere, including at home. And frankly, you know, one of the reasons the Republican party may be a little bit ambivalent about positioning America to be the ultimate defender of freedom around the world is they have an agenda here in The United States in which maximizing domestic freedom may get in the way. They're worried about protests.

They're worried about speech that is critical of the administration or some of its allies, like Charlie Kirk. I mean, his death was a tragedy, but to turn that into a reason to suppress the free speech of people on the other side, well, I again, I understand why people have widely different views. I understand why people look for something new. We don't trust the old elites. We don't trust the old government.

Still, at the end of the day, if we start to give up our freedom or stop defending freedom overseas, that is a gift to people like the leaders of Russia and China who have a vision of the world in which freedom is something that they enjoy, but not something they want their citizens to have. Have you given any thought to how social media and algorithms are playing into this at this point? And and if so, from a historical perspective, what do we do about it? Well, we're on social media right now, but we're only one of thousands of voices. I'm amazed, frankly, at how many people listen to podcasts.

I think it's a great thing that people are stretching their mind. But it's hard for people to distinguish what's true and what is just opinion. Does Goldstone really know what he's talking about, or is is he just an academic, unrealistic guy? People have to get a lot of different opinions and learn to judge them critically, And I worry that the social media universe doesn't do that to people. It encourages them to listen to people that have reassuring views.

It encourages coming together of people who follow the same conspiracy theories or the same ideas. It's hard to get a taste for the difference between truth and falsehood if you're stuck hearing one point of view most of the time. I struggle with the same thing, and one of the issues is these algorithms where, again, there we make money. Our whole capitalistic system is now reinforcing these echo chambers because you make more money telling people what they wanna hear or making them angry and afraid. I had a discussion with Frank Bruni about the importance of critical thinking, and I couldn't agree with you more.

The challenge is people are so stressed. They're so afraid because, again, they're being purposely triggered. You know, people are on their phones constantly. They're getting these, you know, the world's coming to an end. If you're on the left, you're being told the world's coming to an end.

If you're on the right, you're being told the world's coming to an end. And you somehow have to create this ability to rise above the noise and really, as you said, struggle to get to the truth. What's particularly worrisome to me about social media is that reading and talking and thinking is a logical process. When you go to the movies, you go for the thrill. And social media makes our interaction more like a thrill ride.

It appeals more to your emotions. And when you're being carried along by your emotions, truth and falsehood is secondary. What matters is how do you feel? Are you excited? Are you anxious?

Do you feel good? Do you feel scared? Sometimes it's good to feel scared, get energized by it, and doesn't matter if the stories aren't real. And that's where social media is taking us. It's taking us into a world of carefully woven stories to generate certain emotions, and moving us away from trying to be as reasonable and objective and thoughtful as you might be when you have to read a a long article or engage in a discussion.

How does it work when you have the country is evenly divided right now where it does seem like, you know, 50% fall into one category, 50% fall in the other. When you look at elections in terms of a landslide, the the idea that somebody could galvanize the country like a Reagan did. I mean, Biden, Trump, no nobody is is galvanizing and building this huge coalition. Is that help stay away from a revolution, or does it, do you think, pull us more towards a revolution? Well, it depends on why people are split.

Twenty, thirty years ago, people said elections are very close, but that just shows people don't really care whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge. They're all the same. Policies are pretty much the same. They're arguing over little differences in the middle. You know, 10% more spending on welfare, 10% less, 10% more on the military, 10% less.

But 90% is kind of an agreed upon platform. Now it's completely different. Now Republicans and Democrats fight over every seat in Congress as if it's the difference between America becoming communist or fascist. It's as if we've lost the fact that, hey, we live in a democracy. Our institutions are designed to help us get along and find common ground.

But if you treat every Democratic protest as terrorism, if you treat every exertion of Republican authority as fascism, you can't even talk anymore about what are the good policies to pull us out of the mess. Because you're so frightened that your opponent will gain a small advantage that all of your energy goes into fighting that opponent and fighting their supporters and scaring everyone about the outcomes. That I mean, revolutions are born in emotions. People don't go into the streets and protest because they've made a 10% plus or minus calculation. They go into streets to protest because they're scared that the future will overwhelm them if they don't get out and change things now.

And I see that feeling on both the right and the left today. And so that is the the frightening element of why I think we're in a revolutionary situation. Everybody wants to win so much that they feel their life depends upon it, rather than, we'll win today, we'll lose tomorrow, we'll come back and win the next day. Politics has always been give and take, but now there's not so much give and take. It's win and lose, and if you lose, you're sunk.

When you look at revolutions and what the revolutionaries are looking for, does it matter? Does there need to be an end goal? Like, for instance, in the Iranian revolution, there was this movement away from the secular world back to a more religious nature. In France, as I understand it, I mean, there was this incredible wealth inequality, let them eat cake. There were real, real financial struggles.

People weren't able to buy bread, and there was a real economic, you know, tragedy taking place. When you look at America today, what is it that is fueling this revolution, and does there need to be a conclusion or a ideology that people actually follow? It's a great question because what research has shown is when you ask people, why do you join a revolution? How important is the plan for the future? Here's what we find.

The plan for the future doesn't have to be that detailed. It's really not that important. What's critical is people feeling that the current situation is deeply unjust, unfair, intolerable, only going to get worse. And so they're willing to say, look, I don't know exactly where we're gonna be, but anything's gonna be better than where we are now. So I'm gonna fight to overturn the existing order, and then I'll trust the revolutionary leaders to guide us to the future.

Now that usually ends up with revolutionary leaders fighting among themselves over what future to build, and leads to different outcomes that people had planned. Right? Nobody really expects most revolutions to turn into terrible dictatorships. They that's usually what happens. But the people who are fighting are really just concerned to end a situation that they consider intolerable.

And The United States, inflation under Biden, that was awful, but so was the general drift of money ever more intensely to the credentialed and plutocratic elite. The real wages of non college educated men have stagnated for forty years, And that that's that's impossible, you know. Some people look at real wages and say, hey, we don't have a crisis in America. Real wages have gone up. Well, the real wages of women have gone up because they were getting screwed in the sixties and seventies.

So they've caught up quite a bit. The real wages of blacks and Latinos have gone up because they were also really getting screwed in the sixties and seventies. Things have improved for them. And the wages of people in the college educated professions, lawyers, doctors, even professors, but certainly, people in finance, professional managers, their wages have gone way up. So if you put all that together, it looks like wages in America have grown.

But if you separate it out and say, what happened to the non college educated men? Their wages have fallen, and they've fallen behind everybody else's. So there's a real crisis there. And you can't blame people for saying, we gotta change this. So based on your research and looking at history, without a crisis, and even with a crisis, are there ways that countries have come together and solve these issues in a constructive way without without the revolutionary fervor and violence?

I hate to be pessimistic, but the forces that have accumulated in America of inequality, lagging wages, forty years of accumulated government debt, partisanship that has grown more intense over decades, and a kind of aging and failure of new leaders to emerge, there's not a lot of grounds to say, oh, yeah. We can turn this around. Now, it does happen that countries get out of messes like this, but it takes kind of a creative leader to build a new coalition and force the kind of radical, forces who want destruction into the background. I mean, right now, if you look at who are the leading groups in The United States, you've got hardcore MAGA supporters who are very open about saying, we want to dismantle the government. We want to have a revolution.

We wanna destroy everything that was done by the elites and the deep state and everything that was all awful of leading America down the road to hell. When you hear President Trump talk, much of his speech is focused on trying to persuade people that the status quo, how things are in The United States today, is intolerable. Whether he's looking at Chicago or Portland and calling them carnage and hell holes and intolerable, or saying Washington DC is a place where you can't walk down the streets. I live in DC. We do it all the time.

It's not that bad. Or saying that Biden was the worst president in history. The Democrats will destroy the country. All of that language is the language of revolution. It says the the status quo is so terrible.

We can't let it go on. We need radical change, which means you need to empower new leaders like me to change the rules of the game so we can make it all different. Now, can we get back you know, I like to say, you don't make progress by going backwards. So we're never going to go kind of back to a simple model of the old mainstream with the kind of Democrats navigating between business and workers, and Republicans navigating between kind of farmers and country club people. The political landscape has changed.

The American working class is up for grabs. Men and women are moving in completely different directions, so that young women are very progressive. Young men have become very, right wing conservative. And the credentialed class, the kind of university and professional lawyers, doctors, the people who kind of said, we we have the expertise. We can tell you what you should do.

I hate to say, people like me, we've lost all credibility with the population at large. That's our fault. I don't wanna go into that now. I simply simply say, it's clearly a reality. So that creates an opening for someone like Zoran Mandami.

You know, someone who seems completely off the board, but it it but he's been effective in telling people, I hear you. I feel that you're in trouble. It's kind of the old Bill Clinton, I feel your pain. But he's done it effectively in New York. He says, I know what you care about.

You care about the crazy cost of housing. You care about the cost of living. You care that you're worried about if your kids go to school, is there gonna be a future for them? Another sign of revolutions is when social mobility slows down and people feel like they're getting stuck in their roles and held back. Well, in The United States, we had fabulous social mobility after World War two.

But for the last thirty years, it's literally been cut in half. It's much harder for youngsters to move up in the world today, than it was twenty, thirty years ago. And that kind of frustration also builds a rejection of government, a rejection of the status quo. So, we need people who can lead us in a new direction, but a positive direction. One that says, let's try something different, but let's come together.

Let's overcome our differences and head in this new direction as a team. And I think that's what helped, BamDami come to the fore in New York City, because people in New York got totally fed up with mainstream politicians. They got fed up with people who represent the past, and they said, I don't know if he can deliver on all these things, but it's a different future. I'm willing to follow that different future wherever it leads. As what I said earlier about revolution, it's not the detailed plan that wins people over, it's a rejection of the present and a deep demand for something new.

So it sounds like we we should hope that these leaders, so to speak, succeed at uniting people. That if he wants to do these things, that he's able to bring the cut elites into the process and try to come up with a win win. Because it seems to me if we don't figure out a way to meet in that middle, that what will happen is that the far far left and the far far right will actually merge and come together. And is there any sense to that? I mean, in other words, when you look at these revolutions and you look at the anatomy of them, I see the Republican party falling apart not being the, quote, three stool Republican party anymore.

I don't see the Democratic party as being the party of the working class anymore. It seems to me everything is up for grabs, that somebody could come together and pull everybody together and say, look. Here's the way you unite the 70%, and they're successful at doing that. But to me, the other alternative is that the, quote, 20% on the far, far fringes of either side, they come together, right, in this system of burning it all down. And that to me is what I'm it seems to me that's what I see happening.

Does that tie in with how revolutions come about where in a sense these disaffected on both sides come together because the silent majority has not been able to hold the middle? To a large extent, yes. What we see in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, people realize there are problems and moderate politicians, even reforming politicians who say they're going to make change, end up creating kind of half measures that don't really solve the problems and they continue to get worse. And then the extremists on the Left and Right get stronger, the Middle gets squeezed out, and you have a kind of sharp confrontation for power that becomes ruthless. And then the more radical forces are the ones that win.

Sometimes it's the radicals on the left, in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution. Sometimes it's the radicals on the right. In the Spanish Civil War, it was General Franco and the authoritarian conservative right that defeated the Republicans. So I can't tell you which side is gonna win, although it's pretty clear now that in America, the right has the momentum and they have a compelling charismatic leader who dominates the media. And the Democrats don't, really, at at all.

And, you know, this is why the Democrats are concerned about Mamdami. He seems to be the one person who dominates the media, is gaining support, but his policies are more extreme than most mainstream Democrats feel comfortable with. It still begs the question, can anybody get to 60 or 70% or a working majority? I mean, you and I can sit here and we can say the left is scary. We consider and say that the right is scary.

But, ultimately, the American people are gonna decide which direction they wanna go in. And, again, whether or not Trump and his coalition in Vance are successful at bringing the independence into their coalition, it seems to me is up for grabs. And in New York, I mean, he's set out some very ambitious things to accomplish. If he accomplishes those things, you can see where he would build momentum for the left. Looking at the large cities that have also had these more democratic socialistic policies, I I have not yet seen anyone be successful at at at bringing people together and improving.

Their popularity seems to be going down. San Francisco is moving in a more conservative direction. I think the jury is still out in LA, Chicago, but I don't see anybody yet being successful at really building a coalition. What what what's your perspective on kinda where we are today versus giving us a sense of of who's winning? In terms of America's drift into a revolutionary situation, The biggest issue has been the great shift in wealth and income from the average working person and their family to the financial professional elite.

It's been extreme at the high end. You know, the tech bros and the plutocrats have made hundreds of billions a normal fortune for a successful entrepreneur, and the rest of us are struggling behind. In order to correct that, we need someone who is dedicated to saying America's economy has to work for everybody, if it's going to work for anybody. And it's not fair that the marginal tax rate on Buffett's secretary is higher than what he pays. Now I'm not saying that we need to scalp the rich, their problems with wealth taxes, but if everybody just paid 25% of their income in federal taxes, which is what most of us pay already, but most of the rich don't, we could solve the deficit problem.

Because right now, we basically are spending 25% of GDP at the federal level, but our tax revenue is only 20% because of all the various corporate breaks and evasions and other programs that are designed to accumulate capital, which is a good thing, but not if it drives the entire country into debt. Now I'll say something that's probably not popular. I think Joe Biden was on the right track. If you say, what do people want to see? They wanna see someone who can get things done by bridging Democratic Republican differences and saying, I don't care about parties.

I just care about doing things that are good for the country. And he was able to do that with a couple of big bills that help promote chip construction and promote infrastructure and better balance the tax system. Now, like a lot of presidents, one term is not enough to complete those things, and part of the tragedy of, Biden's presidency is that he really should only be a one term president. He was getting old. It was a mistake for him to try and stretch it out.

But the basic policies made sense. They were designed he got elected in part because people had a feeling you know, he really does care about the ordinary working Joe. He is at some level Joe from Scranton, and he was able to make deals with Republicans in a way that other presidents have not. Now the inflation, that was the hangover from COVID. It came and went, but it was awful.

He screwed up on the borders. Again, there was a reaction to COVID, where after closing down, people poured across the borders, and they were late to react to that. So if you ask me what were people scared of in the election of twenty twenty four, they were scared of high prices, and they were scared of wide open immigration. And I think the Democrats should have said, yeah, we screwed those things up, but look at the other things, and we're gonna get those things under control. But the timing timing was off.

Anyway, let let me just skip ahead and say, whoever is the future leader, we need someone young. We need someone with a vision for rebalancing the economy so that it helps ordinary people and not just the rich. And we need someone who can talk across this Republican Democratic divide. If we do not get that, the future is increasing radical hatred on both sides that will lead us to more civil violence and will undermine the way our democracy works. I couldn't agree more with what you said with respect to kind of somebody that rebalances this economy.

Where I'll push back is I've tried to stay away from am I a Democrat or a Republican? I've always considered myself more in the middle, and I vote for the person as opposed to the party. But what's been very disappointing and candidly scary to me is that I don't see either the Democratic party or the Republican party willing to take on the economic issues that we're facing when it comes to really changing our tax policy. So for instance, whether or not you wanna debate the pros and cons of tariffs and whether or not you need tariffs to basically bring back manufacturing and and make us less dependent on things. There's positive things that you can argue from a tariff perspective, but they are very regressive from a tax perspective.

They are certainly not progressive. When you look at Joe Biden, he gave tax credits for green energy. He actually lowered taxes during his term. I have not seen anyone be able to step up to the mic and get 70% or 60% approval saying that, no, we can't tax our way completely out of this. No.

We can't scare billionaires all, you know, out of the country with a wealth tax, but we can come together and have a more sane balanced progressive tax policy. I haven't seen either party be able to do that in an effective way. The the closest thing to it was an angry guy named Bernie Sanders, and I think he was too angry. He scared people. He didn't do it in a way where he brought he vilified the rich.

I think sometimes Elizabeth Warren does that. But if somebody could come together in a holistic way and say, look. We're all on this boat together. Right? We're not gonna get out of this by just cutting spending.

We're not gonna just get out of this by raising taxes. We're actually gonna have to come up with a balanced win win approach. And what has been frustrating to me for literally over twenty years is I have not seen anyone get elected on that premise and be able to deliver. You're absolutely right. It's quite remarkable that GW Bush talked about being a compassionate conservative, bringing those two unusual terms together.

We don't seem to have smiling progressives. Right? The progressive side is all about anger. Hate the rich. Hate imperialism.

Hate these people. Hate that people. But neglecting the fact that people wanna be cared about. Even if you address the rich, I would tell our, you know, billionaires, look, Do you wanna go down in history for having the biggest yacht or the highest penthouse or for the person who did the most for their country and was the most loved by their countrymen? It's a different objective.

Amen. You know, a lot of people will still say, you know, I'd rather have the biggest yacht. And that way, when I sail into harbor in Nice, everybody knows I've arrived. But for some people, I think Bill Gates is one of these, he wants to be known for what he does for mankind, and he's giving most of his money away. I don't think you have to tax the rich, actually, if they would engage in more philanthropy, but you can't count on that, and a tax system at least has rules.

Right now, nobody has any faith that the tax system has rules, and that's only getting worse because we're dismantling the IRS, we're dismantling the anti corruption laws, and frankly, ordinary people don't wanna pay their taxes if they feel the rich are getting away with not paying theirs. So, again, we need to have a focus on building trust, being happy about doing the right thing, feeling good. You know, you saw this debate, again to bring up Charlie Kirk. His widow said, I forgive his murderer. That's a very difficult thing to do, but it's a beautiful Christian thing to do, and I hope everybody admires her for having the strength to say, even those who sin should be forgiven, and we hope they find God's forgiveness.

And then you have president Trump saying, I don't know if Charlie Kirk really loved his enemies. I hate my enemies, and I you know, Charlie, I know. I think he might have done the same thing. So if if our highest leaders in the land are encouraging us to use language of hate and enemies rather than forgive, share, work together, hey, that's a revolution coming. That's not gonna be a a love in.

Now like I say, it's possible for a progressive leader to do a kind of, FDR revival, a John Kennedy revival, and say, look, all of us, rich, poor, in between, we all have a responsibility for building this country, for keeping our institutions and ideals strong, and for not tolerating people who abuse our traditions and dispense with the law. But we all have to work together. We have to see the good in each other to do that. I don't know where the leader's gonna come from who can achieve that, but there are people out there. There are people working their way up, young people coming up through the system, so maybe someone will emerge.

So it sounds like what gives you hope or what should give us hope in the world in 2025 is that a leader emerges that essentially brings people together in in a non angry, but in a more, again, as you said, love your neighbor as yourself type of way, but presumably with a certain gravitas and lack of naivete and the strength to be able to pull people together. So it's funny to me. I know you mentioned it needs to be a young person. I I don't remember exactly how old Teddy Roosevelt was or Franklin Roosevelt was. But when you look at our founding fathers and you look at some of the wisdom that the Benjamin Franklin's of the world had, I'm not sure that it has to be a young person as opposed to, like, Moses, somebody who even at 120 still had that youthful energy and skip, so to speak.

And I'm wondering if what we're really looking for is a, quote, young, wise, older person who has the confidence, the gravitas to really wanna build a world for his grandchildren or her grandchildren. Well, again, I'm the last person to say we should discriminate against the elderly. I'm 72. But when I say young person, I mean someone who's not tainted by being up to their neck in the last two decades of conventional politics. So an outsider, if you will, doesn't have to be old young.

In my 1991 book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, I say that what America needs is ennobling leadership. That is, leaders who will make us feel good about sacrifice. Nobody likes sacrifice, right? But in the long run, you must sacrifice some things today to build a better future. If you use all your resources to maximize your wealth today, it feels great while you can do that.

But we know that that leads to bubbles and crashes. We know that if you don't plan for the future, you don't get the future you want. Right now, so much of the world is in denial. We're in denial about the fact that the Social Security system is going to exhaust its trust funds in just seven years, because baby boomers are now starting to really hit mass retirement, and we haven't provided for that. We're in denial about the accumulation of government debt.

We're in denial about some of the climate changes. I know it's contentious about what's going on, but it's clear that the climate is changing. We're gonna have to adapt one way or another to higher risks of fire and flood. There are a lot of things that we can do to shape the future, but only if we focus on what do we have to do, even if it means giving up a little bit today to feel good about it to build a better tomorrow, as opposed to being completely focused on what do we need to defeat our enemies today, and to humiliate them, and drive them into the dust. So if you're telling me what do we need, I mean, it's been obvious for a long time we need some kind of ennobling leaders to make to bring out our best.

And America has enormous capacities when our best instincts are called on. But revolutions fan the opposite feelings. Revolutions can be necessary too. I don't deny that there are times when it's necessary to smash an old regime that's ineffective, corrupt, gotten out of control. But if you can avoid that, if you have good institutions to build on, and if you have a a history of great accomplishments to work from, maybe we can find a way that doesn't require hatred, smashing, and dealing with enemies.

And instead says, let's try and find some common goals. What do we all think is important for America's future? And let's focus on how we get there, not on who's in charge or not so much who's responsible. Let's just say, what do we need to do? How do we help our children?

How do we get our learning scores improved? How do we help the people who are struggling against, restrictive social mobility? How do we help raise the productivity and the earning capacity of people whose wages have lagged behind? Because all of that is necessary to build stronger families, to restore fertility, to give people confidence in the future. There are a lot of things I think we can agree on if we bring them front and center, but it is hard when you're distracted by all the noise and all the passion and everything that the algorithms wanna dump in your lap.

Amen. I do think it's important for Americans, ordinary people who work nine to five, who are on the job to say, what's happening in the world is going to affect me, and if I'm concerned about losing some of our freedoms or being absorbed by hate, I need to actively work against that. Even if you are not inclined to go out and march for freedom, just try and use some, compassion when talking to friends and family. Try to listen to different points of view. Try and press yourself to say, am I really looking at different sides of this?

Am I looking for the best in other people? I think if we all do that, we'll start to move away from this harsh anger and hatred. I want people to realize you do have grievances. There are a lot of things that are wrong, but the response to those grievances in hatred is being driven from forces outside yourself. The environment is trying to create a response that can be manipulated for the benefit of others.

If you want to benefit and think about how do I overcome the problems in my own life, you need friends, you need a community, you need freedom to find your way forward, And sooner or later, we actually do need some support from government, whether it's healthcare or pensions or guarding the border or keeping a strong defense. We can't simply starve our government and dismantle it, or it won't be there when we need it. So try and keep a positive outlook. Use compassion, not hatred, and try and think about the future you'd like to build and bring yourself and your family there. I hope we'll all get there together.

Jack, it's a wonderful way to end in awesome sentiments, and I could not agree with you more. So thank you for your time today. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. The talk venture capital beyond is produced by CMG Advisors.

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