What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at 'The End of History'

Francis Fukuyama's essay “The End of History?” was published in the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essay's argument — that liberal democracy would not only defeat communism, but that its partisans might, in victory, miss the “courage, imagination, and idealism” that defined the ideological battle — lives on as one of the most cited pieces of political theory in the last three decades. In his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, he revisits “The End of History?” and for today's episode he talks to us about how his essay's argument has evolved in a world now defined by the intense technological change brought on by AI and by the many electoral defeats liberal democracy has suffered as of late. We also talk about how the Internet and social media are helping fuel the listlessness that “The End of History” brought about, how he uses AI, and what, if anything, will come after liberalism. Read more: Trump’s Midterm Plan Centers on Tax Cuts, MAHA and Himself https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/trump-s-2026-midterm-strategy-puts-himself-at-center-of-gop-campaign?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Iran Ready to Escalate War Trump Says Will End After US Election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/iran-ready-for-more-intense-war-and-won-t-relent-official-says?srnd=phx-india?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News http://bloomberg.com/ subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

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• 2:02Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:06Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:07Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, both you and I did international relations at university slash college, as you would say.

• 2:13Joe Weisenthal?

  And at uni, and yeah, helped us a lot. It got us where we are here right now.

• 2:17Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I think today's guest, pretty much anyone who did any sort of political science or IR degree, or maybe even, I don't know, some undergraduate syllabus or something like that. With this author, this person was definitely on the syllabus in the early 2000s and probably still is, right?

• 2:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Almost certainly still is. You know, I did all the reading back when I was in college, you know, wasn't, even though I was, I did get a degree in it. Technically, by the way, I don't know if I've ever said this, technically at Texas, the degree was called government, which included poli sci and IR.

• 2:51Tracy Alloway?

  You've been lying to me.

• 2:52Joe Weisenthal?

  It's sort of a little subtle. I had no choice. That's what it was called.

• 2:56Tracy Alloway?

  Insight into Joe's upcoming political ambitions.

• 2:59Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. But you know, like, a lot of the stuff, including the work of our guest today, I like went back and reread several years ago. Because I guess at the time, early 2000s, it felt a lot like theory. And then suddenly, like, over the last several years, it's like, oh, this isn't just, this might help explain the world, or a thing is going on in the world that I need to revisit and changes are afoot, et cetera. So, I revisited the work. And so, even though it was a long time ago, it feels fresh in my head.

• 3:26Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. So, I've already given it away, but today's guest is in fact Francis Fukuyama. He is a professor at Stanford, author of the new book, In the Realm of the Last Man, and author of famously both an essay and a book called The End of History.

• 3:42Joe Weisenthal?

  And The Last Man.

• 3:43Tracy Alloway?

  And The Last Man.

• 3:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Which is really key.

• 3:45Tracy Alloway?

  Which is key, which is key. So, a lot of people will think about the end of history as this idea that like, well, liberal democracy has won out and we're never going to have wars or conflicts or struggles ever again. And that wasn't quite the message, and we should talk about why it kind of, I don't know, got framed in that way. But I think this whole topic clearly is very relevant at the moment because we just had local elections in Germany earlier this month, and it's kind of a reminder that there is this lingering feeling or possibility that maybe people don't actually like the liberal order. Maybe they don't want it.

• 4:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. It certainly seems, you can point to a lot of things. We don't need to go down the list. But various ideologies, they would call like illiberalism of some form or another, seem to be on the march. And there's this sort of anxiety about why and whether the people who have spent a lot of time like upholding the various institutions that we associate with Western democracy or liberal democracy entities like the EU or free trade agreements, the degree which it feels like people are exhausted, like that there is this effort to hold it up, but there is this sense of exhaustion, maybe resignation and so forth. The one other thing I'll say before we get into it, you know, like, I remember, I mentioned this once or twice, but this is a thing that sticks out to me, like,

• 5:08Joe Weisenthal?

  in middle school or maybe my first year of high school, learning about the Cold War. And it was taught in US history classes and it, we're talking like 93 here.

• 5:17Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Joe Weisenthal?

  As if it was like, it might as well have been World War I. It was already taught as like, like history.

• 5:24Tracy Alloway?

  Rear window.

• 5:24Joe Weisenthal?

  And now, look at 20, you know, from 2026, I was like, oh, that was literally just the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, et cetera. But already by that point, so many of these global questions were being taught as if they had finally been settled. Clearly, nothing is settled.

• 5:40Tracy Alloway?

  No, that was the total vibe in the early 2000s, right? At university. It was done. And yet, here we are in 2026, and it seems things are very much not finished. So, without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Oh, thanks very much for having me.

• 5:57Tracy Alloway?

  When you look at something like the recent German local election, the far-right party, Alternative for Deutschland, Alternative for Germany, got a majority. How do you fit something like that in your framework? Is it, well, this is a natural rejection of liberal democracy of the sort that I write about in this book, In the Realm of the Last Man? Or is this just a sort of bump along the evolution of liberal democracy?

• 6:24Speaker 05

  Well, I don't think anybody knows which of those alternatives is the right one. I think that liberal democracy has had some pretty bad moments earlier in the 20th century. The 1930s was pretty bad with communism and fascism both threatening it. The 1970s and the oil shocks also led to a lot of pessimism about the future of democracy. So, it could be that we're going simply through a period like that. I think probably the discontent is a little bit more extreme this time. Freedom House says that the aggregate level of freedom in the world has declined now for the last 20 years since about 2008 or so.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  And I think that one of the reasons for being more pessimistic is really what's happened in the United States. Because for the entire post-World War II period, the United States was the model liberal democracy. And my Chinese students 20 years ago all said they wanted China to be like the United States. They don't say that anymore. And I think that the rise of a populist movement within the leading liberal democracy in the world is a big signal that something deeper is afoot and that that discontent really reflects some underlying social changes.

• 7:40Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm glad you brought up your students because actually that was sort of what I was gonna ask first is, having been a professor for several years, setting aside international students or any students, you know, like I said, when I first learned that there was this thing called the Cold War, it was just like history was settled. It had come to an end. Now, I don't think we were taught in high school that history had come to an end, but we were taught that this, these big questions had kind of come to an end and kind of irrelevant, kind of like in the past. And I'm curious if you've seen the evolution of your students taking your courses, what you've observed about how they view that period of time and why they're interested in it and if their interests have changed.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  It's discouraging, getting older. The Cold War is history. 9/11 is history. Even the rise of Donald Trump now is history. It happened, you know, when I was seven years old. So, things move. But I think that the most important phenomenon that I hadn't anticipated is the importance of generational change.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  For my generation, I think the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism was the big defining event. And that's certainly what inspired, you know, me to write the end of history essay, the first one. But now we've come full circle where a lot of people that actually lived through or in those countries now want to reverse that outcome, as in the Sachsen-Anhalt election. And I think that it indicates that liberal democracy actually is something that is easily taken for granted. You know, you have a couple of generations since the fall of the Berlin Wall that have grown up without any knowledge of what communism really was.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  And I think that one of the biggest things that makes people like liberal democracy is the opposite, is living under a dictatorship. If you live in a communist dictatorship, you know, I mean, the joy that Eastern Europeans felt when communism fell was really tangible because they didn't like, you know, being surveyed and imprisoned, you know, for speaking out. And nobody experiences that in Europe or the United States, or has not experienced that, certainly for the last generation. And so it's very easy to assume that the good things about liberal democracy, the peace and the prosperity are just naturally there and we don't have to worry about them. And therefore you can think about, you know, the EU as the biggest dictatorship in the world rather than a real dictatorship.

• 10:12Tracy Alloway?

  Can I just ask before we get into more current events? But the end of history, I touched on it in the intro, but a lot of people interpreted that to be quite literally the end of history. So liberal democracy won, globalization won, everyone was going to trade with each other and we weren't going to have any more wars or conflict and things like that. And I am certainly guilty in the past on this podcast of using end of history as a sort of byword for globalization. What do you attribute that misinterpretation to? Was it the zeitgeist of the end of the Cold War? At the time, you wrote the book in 1992. Was it people just were too lazy to read the last six chapters? What was going on?

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, it's a little bit of all of those. The end of history was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel, who understood history with a capital H the way we understand today, something like modernization or development. And so the idea is that human societies evolve over time and they evolve in a progressive fashion. And so the question was, in which direction were they evolving? And that's the end, its end in the sense of goal or termination point. So the question of the end of history was, what kind of society emerges at the end of this long evolutionary process? Now, for about 150 years, the Marxists took Hegel's concept of history and said the end of history is going to be communism.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  By the late 1980s, after Gorbachev and Perestroika, it seemed to me that they were never going to make it, you know, that communism was really off the table. And therefore, if there was an end of history, it was a stage just before you got to communism, which was what the communists called bourgeois democracy and a market economy and capitalism. And so for me, that was the resting point that we seemed to be arriving at. What they didn't understand in the title, and I guess this is my fault for picking these words, but it was the end of history and the last man. The philosopher Nietzsche was the one that talked about the last man because he hated the idea of there being an end of history.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  Because for him, the victory of English liberalism would be a boring, flat world where nobody had aspirations, everybody was fed, clothed, happy, but content in that happiness, just like a cow, you know, grazing in the field. And he said-

• 12:41Tracy Alloway?

  Cows seem pretty happy.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, they are happy, but for Nietzsche-

• 12:44Joe Weisenthal?

  For a man, for a human, yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  Human beings, you know, had a pride that shouldn't be satisfied just by peace and contentment, that you should want something more, you should want to dominate and so forth. And I think that's the unhappiness that I was talking about back then in that part of the book. And I think that's what's driving a lot of the extremism in the world today.

• 13:07Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, the first ever essay I wrote when I was doing my international relations degree was, we were allowed to choose our own topic and I chose like a Nietzsche interpretation of international relations, which I thought at the time was just me being like an insufferable new university student. But then, I'm sure I was. I'm sure I was. But then I read End of History, or the Nietzsche reference, and I was like, ah, maybe I'm on to something.

• 13:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Maybe, maybe you're on to something. Okay, one interpretation of many of the political events that have transpired, I suppose, is that people got bored, right? And so there's obviously more than the German election, there is the election of Donald Trump, and there's Brexit, and actually like a million other things that we could cite. Within what we call liberalism, we grew up, we learned to like celebrate differences among people and that this was important and pluralism and difference and diversity and all these things that were like internalized as positive. But I sometimes wonder, is there like a contradiction in the sense like, we value pluralism and difference, but maybe some people really are different?

• 14:15Joe Weisenthal?

  In the sense that like, no, like they really want, they really like want a different order or they really want to live in a distinct culture that maybe is like less oriented towards the market, et cetera, really more energized by the idea of like cultural homogeneity or something like that. From the sort of liberal perspective, how do you think about like difference? Because things like migration, et cetera, seem to be like one of the through lines for all of this sort of illiberal, the rise of illiberalism.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  No, that's exactly right. I think right from the beginning of liberalism, one of the charges has been it weakens community. It weakens the sense of togetherness, you know, shared values and so forth, and that's deliberate. Liberalism got its start in the 17th century after the European wars of religion, when Christians were killing each other over things like transubstantiation or childhood baptism. And the early liberals said, look, we actually need to accept the fact that we don't agree on the highest things, let's just tolerate one another and live peacefully. And that's really the essence of liberalism. As you say, it accepts pluralism and difference. But I think that that's also what drives a lot of people crazy, is that you have to

• 15:31Speaker 05

  tolerate people you really disagree with. And you don't get this strong sense that everybody is marching in the same direction. And I think, you know, that's the origin of nationalism, that's the origin of religious politics. The trouble is that people forget that this sort of politics is what gets you into trouble. 20th century was all about really strong national identities and wanted to assert themselves and dominate their neighbors, and you had two world wars as a result of it. Today, you see that in Vladimir Putin, right? That he's not content just to have a peaceful, prosperous Russia. He also has this idea that, you know, Russia is this great, you know, country that includes

• 16:12Speaker 05

  Ukraine and Belarus and all these other territories, and he is not happy unless he's dominating all of that. And that is not compatible with a liberalism that says, you know, you got to live and let live.

• 16:23Tracy Alloway?

  So, setting aside multiculturalism for a second, which is a thorny problem for liberal democracies, I think you point to something in your book that to me is possibly an even thornier problem. It's this concept called megalithemia. Am I saying that right?

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Megalithemia, right.

• 16:38Tracy Alloway?

  Megalithemia, okay. Which is like the desire to be recognized as superior in some way. So people aren't just satisfied that they're all equal, they all have equal dignity, equal rights. People want to feel like they're special or superior in some way. And to me, Twitter, the fact that Twitter exists is like-

• 17:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, totally. That's exactly where my mind went.

• 17:03Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, you know, you have people like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who still wants a platform to be heard and feel superior to others.

• 17:10Joe Weisenthal?

  When I went and reread The End of History several years ago, all I could think about is, this explains why so many billionaires who have all the power in the world, what they really crave, deep down at the base of that Maslow's pyramid, is to be listened to and respected. And it drives them crazy that like they have everything, but they are still not as influential as like a typical like up end columnist. And I think this is the source of tremendous psychological angst, even for the most powerful people in the world.

• 17:41Tracy Alloway?

  All right, now imagine that on a society wide scale. Everyone wants to feel superior and recognized in some way. How are liberal democracies supposed to deal with that?

• 17:50Speaker 05

  So just as a footnote, I mentioned Donald Trump in the original End of History and the Last Man book. At that point, I said, the great thing about having a capitalist democracy is that there's a way of bleeding off some of that desire to dominate and be great because you can just get rich. And I gave Donald Trump as an example. Little did I know that just getting rich wasn't enough for them, you know, that he also wanted the political glory. So I don't think you can get away from megalothemia, this desire to be recognized as greater, because that's the source of any excellence. You know, if you want to be a great pianist or a great football forward or a great, you know, athlete or anything, you have to have this will to excel and to be better than other people.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  The trouble is that it oftentimes leads in bad directions where you simply want to be a tyrant. And I think you're right that, you know, if you're a billionaire, there's no material need that you have unsatisfied. What you don't have is the recognition of other people, of other billionaires. And I think that's really what's driving a lot of the competition, you know, in our economy. If it just stayed economic competition, that would be fine. But when it becomes politicized and turns into political ambition, I think that's where democracy gets in trouble. And I think that's really the challenge that we're facing. You're also correct that I think on a national level, people want this feeling of togetherness,

• 19:17Speaker 05

  they want a sense of national identity that is stronger than just tolerating everybody. And that is one of the reasons we still have, you know, conflicts in the world today.

• 19:41Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:07Speaker 01

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• 21:19Joe Weisenthal?

  When you think about the events of, I don't know, the last 40 years or 20 years, maybe, something that I'm very interested, I'm curious whether you think about it much, is the changing media environment.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And the degree to which, say, you know, for better or worse, you have a few monopoly media outlets, and that has this sort of effect of everyone having the same diet. And I'm curious, the role of digital media and social media, and you're an active Instagram user, in sort of regrouping people around, I guess might people say, like tribal lines?

• 21:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:54Joe Weisenthal?

  And this, but the way technology changes how we interact and relate to each other.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  I think it's had a really profound effect. One of the most dangerous for democracies is the fact that we no longer agree about simple empirical facts, because, you know, the old media really had certain journalistic standards. You couldn't just publish anything. Your editor would say, well, do you have a second source on that? And if you didn't, you know, it wouldn't get in the newspaper. Today, you know, we have the internet where anyone can say anything. And not only can they say anything, but that anything can be amplified. There's a, I think, very unhealthy dynamic in the online world where you get noticed. If you're an internet influencer, you say something sensible, rational, reasonable, you know, people will listen to you, but they won't.

• 22:43Tracy Alloway?

  This is my take. Bring back earnestness on the internet. It's so out of fashion. If you say something reasonable and earnest, it's like immediately consigned to the realms of internet, like garbage.

• 22:55Speaker 05

  But there's an inevitable dynamic that happens where the moment you start saying something unreasonable, you know, you insult somebody or you say something that's just ridiculously untrue, it sets off, you know, a big uptake in your followers. And then you say, okay, we got to top that by saying something even more extreme. And I think that that explains a lot of the extremism in our politics, because people are living in an online world, and they also don't agree on basic facts.

• 23:23Tracy Alloway?

  Since we're on the topic of, I guess, new media and technology, can we talk a little bit about AI? Because I knew.

• 23:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Speaking of the last man.

• 23:31Tracy Alloway?

  Speaking of the last man.

• 23:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Tracy Alloway?

  I knew there was an AI chapter in your new book, and I thought it was going to be more about, I guess, like the existential threat of AI and what it means for the whole bored last man concept. But you talk about it in a sort of state administrative capacity way. Why did you decide to take that line as opposed to, I don't know, arguing how AI would fit into the socio-political economy more broadly?

• 23:56Speaker 05

  Well, no, I think that what I said was that the most dangerous aspect of AI is agentic AI. That is where human beings delegate to machines the power to make decisions. And I spent a lot of time thinking about human hierarchies. And I know that we often over-delegate authority in organizations, in governments. But I think we're beginning to do that. I think this hugging face incident that OpenAI got into, where they had developed an AI agent that broke out of its playpen and then started getting out into the internet and breaking into other computers. That's what agentic AI is all about. And that's what I think the whole loss of control fear is related to, is that you're

• 24:41Speaker 05

  going to create these agents that are powerful. And the thing about modern AI is that the people that create them don't really understand what's going on underneath the hood. You know, classic computer programming, line by line, you know, it's very deterministic what the computer is going to do. With these new AIs, they don't really understand why it's behaving the way it is. And if you then delegate authority to a machine where you don't really know why it's thinking what it's thinking, I think that's what leads you down the road to some real doomer scenarios where, you know, they can kind of act as if they've got their own volitions and really no human being is going to be able to control them.

• 25:21Joe Weisenthal?

  You're like a, you're a famous tinkerer. And you like building stuff, and you do woodworking, et cetera. Do you tinker with AI? Do you play around with it the way you play around with like making bookshelves or working on a car engine or something like that?

• 25:35Speaker 05

  Well, ever since the early 90s, I built my own computers and I've written my own software. And I use Claude Code a lot. It's just an amazing thing. I mean, I had written some fairly complicated programs, but I got stuck.

• 25:49Joe Weisenthal?

  What kind of stuff were you building?

• 25:50Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, mostly it was, I have, I maintain a few big databases on some servers that I keep at home. And I wanted to migrate it to a different system, and Claude Code just did it, you know. You don't, I mean, it helps to be a programmer because you can then correct things where it makes mistakes. But, yeah, basically, it's just an amazing system.

• 26:12Tracy Alloway?

  There's a picture in the book of one of the tables that you made, and it looks really nice. It looks like a legitimate table. It's beautiful.

• 26:20Speaker 05

  What is it? It's legitimate. You can really, you can really sit at it. So I, when I was in the State Department, the Secretary of State has a suite on the eighth floor that's beautiful. It's furnished with these antique federal-style, American classic furniture. And when I was delivering memos up there as a young official, I really admired that, and I wished I could have that in my own home. So basically, I taught myself how to.

• 26:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  Build this kind of furniture.

• 26:48Tracy Alloway?

  I love that. I upholstered a chair recently for similar reasons, but I have yet to get to the actual woodworking of the chair itself.

• 26:55Joe Weisenthal?

  We could just talk woodworking and upholstery for the rest of the time.

• 26:57Tracy Alloway?

  Could you do a Chippendale chair, you think?

• 26:59Speaker 05

  I don't like the Chippendale style that much. I like federal because it's a little bit cleaner, but.

• 27:05Tracy Alloway?

  Cleaner and simpler.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Still decorated. It's, you know, got inlay and, you know, I think that's about my favorite, you know, style of furniture. When you get into things like empire, you know, then that becomes really a different level of skill because you have to carve all these, you know, dragons and faces and things into the woodwork. And that, that's, that's something I never got into.

• 27:27Tracy Alloway?

  All right. At the risk of turning this into an interior design.

• 27:30Joe Weisenthal?

  No, sure.

• 27:31Tracy Alloway?

  Episode. No, okay, serious question, just going back to AI. But what, what does AI actually mean for the, the last man concept itself? Do you see, because I feel like you could go in two directions. We've done episodes on both these scenarios. You could have one where people just become even more nihilistic and filled with ennui, so to speak. Or you could maybe have a sort of utopian world where AI is doing all the work for us, and we get freed up to pursue some of our cultural pursuits.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, actually, that was John Maynard Keynes's vision of the future, that productivity would increase so much that we'd have, you know, we'd only have to work 10, 20 hours a week, and the rest we could pursue hobbies and so forth. I don't think that's going to make people happy in the end. I mean, same problem with universal basic income. And the reason for this has to do with this concept of thumos. So megalothmia comes from this Greek word thumos, which is spiritedness or pride, that in addition to material needs, human beings want to be recognized for their basic human dignity. And quite frankly, a lot of our dignity comes from the work we do. The fact that you are paid to do a job means that somebody in society thinks that what

• 28:44Speaker 05

  you do is valuable enough to give you, you know, money for it. And I think that that's why this vision of a society where everybody is just, you know, selling trinkets on Etsy, but not really, you know, doing the kind of work that we're used to doing, is not going to make people happy because it doesn't give them a sense of pride and accomplishment. You know, that it's, you could spend your whole life playing video games. And I think part of the reason that you got this manosphere that is so, you know, restless is that's what they do. You know, they're online all the time. They have all these fantasies about being, you know, superheroes. But in real life, they kind of know that, you know, there's this basic emptiness there.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  And I think that that lack of work that gives you dignity, that ordinary people can feel, is one of the things that may be destroyed by AI because it's so capable of substituting for that kind of human labor. And I think that's really one of the big dangers, because either people will be perpetually lonely and unhappy, or they will rebel against that, and you'll have a lot of political turmoil.

• 29:53Joe Weisenthal?

  There's so many different things sort of working against. Quote liberalism, et cetera. And there are people arguing for it, right? Like, there's communities of people online who like, try to like, argue about these things and argue we should be building things and appreciate markets and appreciate prosperity. But it's all a little hollow. It doesn't seem like really sat, fully scratch that itch. Like, we can get there intellectually, okay, these are good things, but it doesn't supply that sort of like spiritedness, et cetera. Is anyone out there have conceptions of like, what a positive vision for liberalism

• 30:34Joe Weisenthal?

  or counter illiberalism looks like, other than, no, look, GDP goes up, look, actually, things haven't been getting worse. Actually, despite what you see online, wages have, real wages generally have been rising. These arguments may or may not be true, but they certainly don't seem to like satisfy many people. They don't excite people. It's not something that you really get behind enthusiastically. Do you see anyone or any path of like, oh, this is like what a reinvigorated vision looks like?

• 31:03Speaker 05

  Well, there are some possible futures where you actually do face real threats, where the society really does have to mobilize. I think we felt something like that in the 1930s with the depression and then, you know, fighting World War II, and that was very inspiring to many people. It was also very devastating. And the question is, can you recreate that sense of national purpose without having a war or pandemic or revolution? I think you can. I think that there are a lot of projects out there in the world that could be the source of a greater sense of common purpose. One of the themes in the book is indeed the fact that we don't build anything anymore. You know, I live in California.

• 31:48Speaker 05

  We were promised high-speed rail. They allocated money for it in the mid 1990s, and we have like 10 miles of track, you know, in the Central Valley where nobody lives. And I think that you could actually recreate some of that sense of purpose if you could get back to actually having projects that are big and visible. That's part of what the Chinese government has been doing. You know, they are really good at building infrastructure. They built these incredible bridges over gorges in the middle of the interior of China, but it actually adds to the sense that the society is moving forward and it's accomplished something. Plus which, I'd like to be able to get from LA to San Francisco in, in three hours. You know, it would be pretty convenient if you could do that.

• 32:33Tracy Alloway?

  As soon as you brought up America's lack of high-speed rail, I knew my next question was going to be about China. But talk to us a little bit more about China, because if we, if we think that liberal democracy has won in some way, it's the inevitable outcome of human evolution, people can still point to China and say, well, that's not a liberal democracy, that is something else. And it seems to be reasonably successful at this moment in time, at least when judging by infrastructure projects like high-speed rail.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I've been saying this for several decades, that the only alternative society that is not a liberal democracy, that looks like a plausible competitor, is China, because they are able to stay at the frontier of technology, they've maintained social stability, and they certainly have great GDP growth numbers. So the question is, is that going to be a sustainable model going forward? And I don't think the answer is fully in. I mean, right now, the US versus China, I mean, we don't look so good. You know, I think very few people around the world are saying, well, we want to be polarized and angry and, you know, at each other's throats all the time. And we, you know, they look at China and they do see, you know, the modern cities and

• 33:43Speaker 05

  infrastructure that's come up virtually overnight. I think, however, it is a little bit premature to declare that they've won that contest, because there are some big problems, both in the economic model and in the political model. As far as the economic model is concerned, I think Xi Jinping actually made a big mistake after he came to power, because instead of investing in the interior of China, in social services, in pensions and so forth, he decided to double down on this export-led growth, this time driven by high-tech. And it's destroying the manufacturing base of every other society in the world. You know, what happened to the United States in the early 2000s, the Europeans may lose

• 34:27Speaker 05

  their auto industry, you know, as a result of Chinese EVs, and it's producing a big, big backlash. And the rest of the economy actually is not doing well. They have this big property bust, and they're still not out of it. The amount of unemployment for Chinese young people is really pretty dramatic, and it's just going to get worse as they introduce AI into their economy. So we'll have to see. The political model has done better than I would have expected. You know, the idea is, as you get richer, better educated, you're not content simply to be, you know, a passive subject. You actually want to participate, you want to be able to express your opinion, and you can't do that in China.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  And I think that there still may come a point where that unhappiness is going to come out, expressed politically. It's a very effective dictatorship that right now can squash any signs of discontent. But, you know, that may not be the case forever.

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• 38:01Joe Weisenthal?

  We have no idea what the future holds, but here in 2026, there are a number of, China's the main example, but there are a number of places that are not, quote, democracies that seem to be stable, and some of the Gulf countries have obviously done extraordinarily well over the past couple of decades. Have you revisited any of your premises about this idea that an educated elite eventually really wants a say, that they actually want to be stakeholders in politics? Or is there a degree of like, if you have competent management, or if you're perceived to have competent management, maybe that just doesn't manifest as a problem?

• 38:45Speaker 05

  I think that I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that there are different models. Certainly, the American one, compared even to other rich democracies, has a lot of problems in the way we organize our institutions that have led to some of the instability that we see. I think that the question about real authoritarian alternatives, you know, Singapore is the one that's brought up all the time. I'm perfectly happy to admit that the Singaporeans govern themselves pretty well. But the question is first, can you actually export that model to other countries? You know, if, if you had a regular source of Li Kuan Yew that you could call on to

• 39:28Speaker 05

  run your authoritarian country, that would be great. But most authoritarian countries end up with a Lukashenko or Putin or, you know, a really bad leader. And that's the problem with that kind of concentration of power. The longer-term question is the one that you pointed to, is, are people simply willing to be passive, you know, consumers who are satisfied with, you know, just the stability offered by a Singaporean-type government? And that's where I think you do get into this last man question, because Nietzsche would say, no, human beings want to aim higher than that. You know, they want to struggle for things, and eventually, they're not going to be happy with, you know, the kind of peace and prosperity that an authoritarian government can offer.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  At least in our liberal society, we can have an active civil society, so you can believe what you want, you can get together with other people, you can, you can pursue all sorts of ambitions, as long as they're not ones that want to dominate, you know, the rest of the society. And in a place like China, that's much more limited.

• 40:34Tracy Alloway?

  So on China specifically, there's an anecdote that you describe in your book, where you get to meet with the former Vice President Wong Chi-sen. And that's super interesting, because it seems almost like you were summoned over there to talk to him, and then he ended up just talking at you for about an hour. But what's your theory of what you were doing there? Was China trying to understand more about liberal politics? Or were they just trying to, I don't know, was it some sort of like internal CCP political game?

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know the answer to that. He definitely wanted to talk to me. He had read my book, and, you know, so he was credited as being a genuine intellectual. Apparently, Xi Jinping was not all that happy with him, because he was entertaining some... Rather heterodox ideas. He wanted, however, to talk to me. He was leading at that point this big anti-corruption campaign that Xi had unleashed, where they actually executed some very senior ministers and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Communist Party officials were sacked, put in jail as a result of this. So he was the second most feared man and most powerful man in China.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  But I think he wanted to indicate that he was still open to the fact that a more liberal China might be possible in the future, but he still had to demonstrate his loyalty. It's a little bit of a contrast because the other dictator that I had encountered at that point was Muammar Gaddafi, who also invited me to Libya to talk to him. And the, I mean, it kind of explains why Libya is a mess and China is one of the great powers in the world because, you know, Gaddafi's head was totally uneducated. He really is somebody I felt in the end should have gone to college and actually gotten a decent education.

• 42:29Tracy Alloway?

  His son famously went to LSE.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  Well, his son was given a degree by LSE, whether he really went to LSE. And in fact, the chancellor and his thesis advisor had to be sacked.

• 42:40Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, Howard Davies, I remember this. I went to LSE.

• 42:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that dictator was just, his head was full of conspiracy theories and, you know, he believed that he had come up with the big alternative to communism and capitalism as a way forward, which was, of course, nonsense. But, you know, Wang Qi Xiong was a serious intellectual. He actually introduced Alexis de Tocqueville to China. So in Tocqueville's old regime of the revolution, he explains that the French Revolution occurred not because of deprivation, but because France had started to reform itself in the generation before the revolution. Things were actually getting better, both economically and politically, but expectations

• 43:27Speaker 05

  were rising faster than the regime's ability to accommodate these new expectations. And that's why you had the revolution. And, you know, Wang Qi Xiong's lesson was China shouldn't start down this road to liberalization the way Gorbachev had, because that's just going to get, it's going to spiral out of control and the regime will fall. And that's what they did. And we have Alexis de Tocqueville to thank for the fact that they're still in power.

• 43:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Amazing. I want to talk about the neocons for a second. You've talked about how the sort of the aftermath, the war in Iraq and the aftermath led to a break between you and people who you may have seen as friends or ideological allies, et cetera. And yet, it seems to me that if we like go and look at the sort of like cohort of people that we associate with like the neocon era and the early 2000s particularly, many of them today are some of the biggest defenders of, I guess, normal liberalism, you know? You think of like Dick Cheney, who, you know, like, I don't think he supported Trump,

• 44:36Joe Weisenthal?

  or Bill Kristol, who basically became a Democrat, et cetera. What do you make of this cohort that you could say 20, roughly 25 years ago was like, there was a schism, they had like complete terrible judgment, et cetera. And yet today, when you look at them, they are probably fairly aligned with you in terms of the sort of institutionalism and support for sort of the stability and the institutions that allowed America to thrive for a long time.

• 45:08Speaker 05

  Well, to go a little bit into the intellectual history of that movement, a lot of people that were neocons back in the early 2000s had been second or third generation students of a German Jewish philosopher named Leo Strauss, who encouraged his students to think seriously about philosophy and about the philosophic ideas that, you know, were at the base of Western civilization. But the Strausians actually split into two different camps, East Coast and West Coast. The West Coast ones were followers of a student of Strauss named Harry Jaffa, who in the end, I think, could only be described as American nationalists, because Jaffa regarded

• 45:50Speaker 05

  the American regime as the apotheosis of Aristotelian virtue. And those people went in the opposite direction. They became big Trump supporters. So Michael Anton, you know, the author of the famous Flight 93 article that served, you know, in both Trump administrations was, again, a product of that intellectual tradition. Bill Kristol, and as you mentioned, you know, Dick Cheney and especially his daughter Liz, were very different and I think were more authentic believers in a constitutional tradition that said that government power ought to be limited. And that's what is really surprising to me about a lot of the conservatives that ended

• 46:33Speaker 05

  up supporting Trump, because, you know, they had built their ideological foundations around the idea of a rule of law and limitations, constitutional limits on government power. That's what it meant to be a conservative. And yet, you know, once their guy gets into power, they want to take all those limits off and do everything through executive orders, flout the law if that's necessary to achieve their objectives. So I, you know, in the end, it's been a big puzzle to me why some people react to the same events with the same kind of educational background, but end up going in different ways. The only way I can explain it is in a way socially, that you are not an objective scientist

• 47:17Speaker 05

  looking at facts, you are actually embedded in a social circle and you're going to believe the things that people in your social circle believe.

• 47:26Tracy Alloway?

  Just going back to, I guess, the overarching question of liberal democracy. You sort of end the book, it's not on a down note, but it's certainly on an uncertain note. You know, it's basically, I'm not sure how to maintain liberal democracy or promote it, given that the message of liberal democracy doesn't seem to be resonating with a lot of people at the moment. So I'm just going to ask you directly, how should we, I guess, fix the PR of liberal democracy, or how would one go about actually doing that?

• 47:59Speaker 05

  Well, I think there's a two-fold answer. I think we need to remind people about the dangers of the absence of liberal democracy. And you can see it right in the present world. Putin invades, does a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and gets into a bloody, bloody war that's now in its fifth year. That's what happens if you have a dictatorship instead of a liberal democracy. And then, in a way, you know, Ukraine, I think, is incredibly admirable because they want to defend their freedom and they're willing to die for it. And so there are inspiring causes. I think that the other part of the answer is that liberals need to actually have a positive program.

• 48:43Speaker 05

  I don't think that you're going to beat back populism just by complaining about it, you know? Bad as many of its programs and policies may be, I think that you have to offer people some positive vision for how their future is going to look different. And this gets back into this narrative about building things, you know, that liberal societies, one of the big problems that I talk about at the end is they accumulate too many rules. Liberalism is about a rule of law, but you can actually have too much rule of law. So here in New York City, you know, rebuilding Wallman Link was almost impossible until Donald Trump took it over, because, you know, there are just too damn many procedural requirements that you have to go through.

• 49:25Speaker 05

  And I think if government could actually be more effective and could actually carry through on its promises, you know, in a reasonable amount of time, people would start thinking, yeah, actually, this is working for me.

• 49:37Joe Weisenthal?

  It's tough to build things in the US. One area that it hasn't been difficult to build things in the US is basically software and technology and all that. And you're, you know, at Stanford, you're kind of at ground zero for it. Granted, you're not, you know, in the computer science department, but I would just love to hear your perspective on how, you know, the culture of a university or the culture of students has changed maybe over the last couple decades with this sort of explosion of money and tech, et cetera, and how that, you know, how your students think about that and how that shapes the directions that they want to go in, and whether it sort of bled

• 50:18Joe Weisenthal?

  over into some of the humanities or social sciences in some way.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  First of all, Stanford is different from Harvard and Yale, because Harvard and Yale feed people into Wall Street, basically. You know, the smart, ambitious people all want to become billionaires through that route. At Stanford, they're more entrepreneurial, they want to do a startup that's then going to make them a billionaire. I think that in both places, it means that the humanities and social sciences are weak. You know, it's not, it's not the most favored route.

• 50:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Do you feel it in some way with the, either the students that are coming through those departments or the interests of those students? Like, has it changed the texture of like the professor-student relationship in some way in those departments?

• 51:04Speaker 05

  For me, I mean, I don't teach undergraduates anymore, so I have a little bit removed from that. But it's certainly the case that student politics has changed very dramatically, especially on the left, especially after October 7th and the Hamas attack. There's been a big radicalization of students and they're mobilized around, you know, that issue and others that, you know, we're seeing in our national politics. So that's certainly different. It's, you know, we went through this long period in the 90s and early 2000s of really student apathy. Everybody was too focused on getting a high-paying job and they didn't really pay attention to politics.

• 51:44Speaker 05

  Now they're definitely more mobilized, but in some ways, it's not a healthy mobilization because, you know, they're pursuing goals that I think are either unachievable or, you know, misguided, but they're definitely much more politically aware. I've got a number of students, you know, over the past decade that have actually gone into electoral politics, and I think that's great. I think that's what they ought to be doing.

• 52:08Tracy Alloway?

  Any advice for would-be international relations graduates?

• 52:11Speaker 05

  Well, I think that you need to think broadly, because right now, international relations is extremely complicated as a disciplinary field, because economics and sociology are absolutely at the core. You know, you want to know why you have global populism? Well, the sociology of most countries has changed, you know? Left-wing parties are no longer based in working-class populations. They've become basically parties of educated professionals who have very different political instincts than, than the working class. And part of the reason you got this polarized politics, both here and in Europe, is because of that change. And that's not something You know, in classical realist international

• 52:54Speaker 05

  theory, you don't look inside countries, you know, you just regard them as billiard balls. But if you don't see, you know, the domestic and the technological changes, and then, by the way, the geopolitics of AI is really going to hit us, I think, like a freight train, because that's going to be one of the determining factors, just like nuclear weapons in a previous generation, about how power is going to be distributed in the coming world.

• 53:19Joe Weisenthal?

  There's a phenomenon of like, okay, the energy on the left coming from people who are not what people might have in a previous year called like the working class, that many people are actually like fairly well to do and they're well educated. Is there, I mean, this is actually not even that new. I mean, right, like historically, a lot of left movements have always had a certain, many come from nobility or education or a son of a wealthy businessperson, et cetera. Is this just people are different and that draws them to that, or is there some sort of stronger theory or structural force that has sort of like reinvigorated the sort of educated, successful left?

• 54:02Speaker 05

  Well, if I may, I think this is why this concept of the last man is important. You know, at Stanford, we had students that were living out in tents and in encampment after October 7th for six months. And you can't imagine a more privileged group of people than a Stanford undergrad, right? But, you know, I think what was missing in their lives was this sense that they were struggling and sacrificing for a higher cause of social justice. And that was the part that was missing in their lives. They'd struggled to get into Stanford, but, you know, it was just for themselves. And I think they wanted a more idealistic thing to, you know, aspire to. And I think that that's really what drives a lot of

• 54:45Speaker 05

  people into that kind of politics is that they want to be able to risk their lives for something noble. And our liberal society doesn't give them a lot of opportunities for that kind of risk and daring.

• 54:58Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Francis, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 55:16Tracy Alloway?

  So Joe, that was a lot of fun getting to interview a sort of

• 55:20Joe Weisenthal?

  A legend.

• 55:21Tracy Alloway?

  A legend in political economy. One thing that stood out to me, I find the idea of the last man and megalithemia or just themia in general, very compelling because you look around you and you see that like something does seem to be missing for a lot of people. And to me, it sort of boils down to a relativism versus absolutism kind of thing, which is like neo neoliberalism or liberalism in general is predicated on this idea of absolute gain. So as long as everyone is kind of advancing, not necessarily at equal rates, as long as everyone is advancing in absolute terms, people should be happy. But my personal experience of life and the world and

• 56:04Tracy Alloway?

  history is that actually people are very much relativist

• 56:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 56:08Tracy Alloway?

  in nature.

• 56:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Completely agree.

• 56:09Tracy Alloway?

  And it doesn't matter if everyone's advancing, if they're doing so at extremely different speeds or in very different ways, people aren't going to be happy. And I kind of, did you see that viral media thing? It was abundance, modern abundance.

• 56:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, I did see that.

• 56:23Tracy Alloway?

  Where it was like, oh, everyone has a washing machine now.

• 56:26Joe Weisenthal?

  A toaster now, yeah. And they dreamed of this in the 1850s that you could have crisp bread right on demand.

• 56:31Tracy Alloway?

  And it's all very true.

• 56:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 56:33Tracy Alloway?

  But clearly it's not enough for people in 2026 that you can have a toaster and a washing machine and a TV and things like that.

• 56:40Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, it's interesting, I forget who pointed it out, but someone pointed out like that, that viral thing.

• 56:46Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Joe Weisenthal?

  It didn't include like Instagram and phones. Because this is like one of the big things. It's not like, oh, and it's so great that we can now spend six hours scrolling reels all day, even though that is like one of the hallmark aspects of modernity.

• 56:59Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Because people know it's not good and they know it's not satisfying and it's not something that ever, like 100 years ago, yes, maybe you dreamed of having a dishwasher.

• 57:08Tracy Alloway?

  The relativism problem, you're doing fine, but you're looking at a picture of, I don't know, someone on a yacht and you're not doing as well as them.

• 57:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that, that is, it's meaningless. It's comparison is the thief of joy. All kinds of issues with that. But I totally, this is why I always think about like the angry Twitter billionaires.

• 57:24Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Because it's like these people who have literally everything, and yet they're like driven crazy because they see a headline in the New York Times that they didn't like or something that they didn't agree with. And it drives them nuts. And I think that's just like, you know, there but for the grace of God, it's like, oh, like you have all this and yet you still can't find a way to achieve satisfaction because no one like really, you know, you're not like intellectually respected, et cetera. And you just see how that drives people crazy. And it is interesting to like with the sort of utopian visions of AI, like, and the sort of paradox of all work is we want to work to achieve something, but we don't really, you don't want to finish. You don't want to like finish the goal. You don't want to actually end it because then you feel

• 58:09Joe Weisenthal?

  sort of, then what do you do?

• 58:11Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I do kind of wonder, maybe AI can solve the, the last man problem in the sense that maybe if we, if like, if we have to feel superior and recognized as humans, maybe if we have offsetting AI agents and robots, we can feel superior to them.

• 58:30Joe Weisenthal?

  It's hard to feel superior to them. That's part of the problem is like, we're not going to feel that for very long. But yes, we could certainly try chat GPT solve the crisis of the last man, make no mistakes and see, see what it comes up with.

• 58:42Tracy Alloway?

  All right, shall we leave it there?

• 58:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 58:44Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 58:50Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at thestalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arm Dashell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these things 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 59:13Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the end of history with Francis Fukuyama, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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• 1:00:41Speaker 08

  For big business, AI opened up a world of promise, but that world of promise turned into a world of pain. Costs spiraling, data trapped, security and governance risks multiplying, and ROI out of reach. That's why enterprises turn to Boomi to connect data, apps, and AI, helping them operate securely, efficiently, and at scale. Boomi turns a world of AI pain into a world of AI gain. As Boomi says, we got you. Head to Boomi.com. That's B O O M I dot com. The world of business is constantly evolving and Comcast business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and

• 1:01:26Speaker 08

  millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 AM like it's 2 PM. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast business.