Trump vs. Musk: One Big Beautiful Blowup | Lawrence Fossi

Episode 422 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/trump-vs-musk-one-big-beautiful-blowup-lawrence-fossi/ is the sixth episode in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with Lawrence Fossi, about the recent fallout between President Donald Trump and his biggest political booster, Elon Musk. This is a critical and sober exploration of the political and budgetary challenges facing the country. It spares no criticisms of either Trump or Musk and is not meant for politically sensitive or easily offended partisans. In it, we discuss Musk's failed efforts to address the budget, his support for the formation of a new third party, and what the future holds for the world's richest man. We also place an equally critical lens over the Trump administration, examining the president's time in office, the sum effect of his actions, and what the next three and half years could mean for the country. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespodFollow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 06/09/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. What you're about to hear is the sixth episode in a podcast series hosted by me and my co-host, Grant Williams, titled "The Hundred Year Pivot." In it, we speak with some of the smartest and most plugged-in people we know to help position ourselves, our organizations, our families, and our portfolios for the once-in-a-century economic, political, and geopolitical reordering that we believe is currently underway.

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  In today's conversation, Grant and I speak with former commercial trial attorney, portfolio manager, and longtime critic of Elon Musk, Laurence Fossey, about the recent fallout between the president and his biggest political booster. It's a critical and sober exploration of the political and budgetary challenges facing the country that spares no criticism of either Trump or Musk and is not meant for the politically sensitive or easily offended partisan listener. In it, we discuss Musk's failed efforts to address the budget, his support for the formation of a new third party, and what the future holds for the world's richest man. We also place an equally critical lens over the Trump administration, examining the president's

• 1:26Demetri Kofinas?

  time in office, the sum effect of his actions, and what the next three and a half years could mean for the country. The episodes in this series are published a week ahead of time on both the Hidden Forces and Grant Williams podcast subscriber-only feeds. If you want early access to these conversations, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed so you can listen to this episode and other subscriber-only content on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research-

• 2:10Demetri Kofinas?

  Analysis, in-person events and dinners. You can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this timely and sober conversation with our guest, Laurence Fossey.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Welcome everybody to another edition of the Hundred Year Pivot. Joining me as always, my co-conspirator on this journey, wherever hell it takes us into the deep dark woods, the brilliant Dimitri Kofinas. Hi Dimitri, how are you?

• 2:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Good. How are you doing, Grant?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I'm doing pretty well. I'm doing pretty well. It's been an interesting couple of weeks. I find myself in New York City briefly.

• 2:58Demetri Kofinas?

  I didn't know you were in New York. You didn't tell me that.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just literally for like 36 hours.

• 3:02Demetri Kofinas?

  When are you flying back?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  I'm flying down to DC.

• 3:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Oh, got it. Cause I'm leaving for our London dinner on Wednesday. So I was like, wouldn't that be fun if we were both on the same flight?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I was flying out of DC. So yeah, we'll miss each other. But yeah, it's funny. It's my first real trip. I spent a day in New York City before COVID and it's, it's interesting, you know, it's, I was thinking about this as I came in from JFK last night, which I'm sorry, it remains the worst airport in the world and the worst location in the world with the worst infrastructure in the world. It's just incredible to me. But it's funny, I was on my way in and I love New York City and I always believed that I would live here again. You know, I spent years here back in the nineties and early 2000s and loved it. And I always felt that I would live here again at some point, but I found myself landing at JFK,

• 3:51Speaker 01

  just everything being hassle and inconvenience and noise and disruption. And I got into the city and just driving from the Midtown Tunnel across, I'm staying over on 8th Avenue. Just driving across and seeing just loads of people lying around on the street. It just, it was really interesting to me, particularly given the nature of these conversations that we're having, that it almost felt like a through the looking glass moment. You know, I've, I've gone through and I'm on the other side in this weird New York that I don't really recognize. And I don't know if that's a change in me or a change in New York City, but it feels very, very different to me to be here right now.

• 4:33Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, New York has changed. I mean, I moved out during the pandemic, but I go, I go pretty often and the changes have been more gradual for me. There were some obviously stark changes that happened during the pandemic, but we've seen much worse in New York. I was born in 1981. We lived in Astoria, Queens on Ditmars, and I can remember what it was like back then. Of course, 1981 was the most violent year in New York City's history. There were something like 1700 something homicides.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 4:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Throughout the course of the year. There's actually a great documentary on this if people are interested. So, I mean, things could get much worse. If you looked at what the South Bronx looked like in the early 1980s, it looked like Gaza or like Dresden. You know, it was like dilapidated buildings, debris everywhere. So, you know, who knows what the future holds for us? Certainly the budgetary issues are a problem. What was it, 1976 or so that New York City almost went bankrupt?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:25Demetri Kofinas?

  And had to be saved by a collection that included the executives down in, in DC. I guess because of, and David Rockefeller was also involved. His brother Nelson was vice president at the time. So we've seen a lot worse in this country and I think one of the concerns is that we're headed in that direction. And I, I feel like a question that you and I constantly ask ourselves is, is there anything that we can do to get ahead of this problem? And then that's where we run up against the alignment issue, which is that, you know, do the incentives in our politics, especially today, align with preemptive solutions for the common good? And I feel like that's certainly one question that we're going to be interested in asking our, our guest, Lawrence, in this conversation.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I think that's such a great point. You know, it's funny, I hadn't thought about this until you just said that, but. The gentrification of cities like New York, whether it's New York or London, parts of London were exactly the same, you know, and they've all been improved from a physical infrastructure point of view. You know, there's all these amazing office towers and apartment blocks and all this sort of stuff. But as that's been repaired, it feels that the societal component of it has fallen. And that was the, as I came across Midtown Manhattan, it didn't look different. The buildings are all there and it didn't look like it was rundown or derelict, but there was just something in the air and the people on the streets and what I saw out of the window, the taxi, just felt very different. And it may just

• 6:51Speaker 01

  be because I've been away for, as you say, the gradual changes, these are big changes to me. But it definitely felt different. And I, you know, I don't know what to make of it. And I'm very conscious of the fact that it could be a change in me. But it felt very, very different.

• 7:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, I do think that maybe one of the, if not the single biggest impediment to solutions in our society is a lack of common cause, not even common identity, it's common cause, which is one of the reasons why wars bring people together and help expedite solutions to those challenges. But that's what I feel like, you know, there's a real discrepancy in the living standards. It was something that you and I've talked about many times, which is the disparity in wealth and income in this country, how it's grown. And that has created a two-tier society. And you can feel that in New York more than anywhere else, because New York is a city that has immense amounts of wealth and its distribution is highly polarized today.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. Well, we have, we have, we have a guest joining us, Laurence Fossey, who has written on Twitter and Blue Sky and Substack as Montana Skeptic. You know, I met Laurence during the early days of my ongoing fascination with all things Tesla and Elon Musk. I found him to be an incredibly astute analyst of the situation, not just the financial situation, but the personality situation. I found his work to be very, very interesting. And you and I were talking about who

• 8:14Speaker 01

  To have a conversation with at very short notice, given what we saw unfold last week between the White House and Musk himself. And Lawrence was the guy we both landed on. And fortunately, he was able to do this with us at short notice.

• 8:26Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm very excited to speak with him.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, knowing Lawrence as I do, and knowing the direction that you and I are taking with this and the questions that we're asking, not even the answers as such, but I guarantee you that if you're listening to this now, the conversation we're about to have, there will be pieces in it, which you, if you vote Democrat will hate, if you vote Republican will hate, if you're a pro-Trump guy, you'll hate, if you're an anti-Trump guy, you'll hate. We're going to dig into this and make no apologies about it. But I feel it's fair to give you a warning that you're either going to have to stick with us or wave the white flag early, I suspect, because I have no doubt we're going to get into some, some very choppy waters, as I feel it's our, our duty, Dimitri.

• 9:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Right. And if you can't handle it, don't listen. And I think you and I would both agree that learning how to have conversations and discussions and hear alternative viewpoints and is actually part of the way through. So if you're feeling adventurous and you want to better yourself, then here's an opportunity to do that.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well, let's welcome Lawrence to the conversation.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Lawrence, welcome to the Hundred Year Pivot. Thank you so much for doing this at short notice. Dimitri and I are delighted to get this chance to talk to you.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  It's a great pleasure to be with you guys. As we talked about earlier, I've talked with you alone, Grant, and with Dimitri alone. We've never really been able to have a discussion, a real discussion together. So.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's what the idea of this is, you know, Dimitri and I have been kind of on this little journey of ours. And they have been discussions and it's such a great treat to get different perspectives and this, this, instead of a back and forth to have a third person putting ideas in and mixing up things. And Dimitri and I've had a ball doing this. And I suspect this one will be as interesting, as engaging as the others. And the subject at hand really is the events of last week in and around the White House. And Dimitri and I were racking our brains to think about who we could talk to about this. And both of us kind of landed on you. And the reason for that is that it centers around Elon Musk. And there will be people who just believe. We're flat out Musk haters.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  But the simple truth is that you and I particularly, I think, have, I think Dmitry is a lot more even handed perhaps. But you and I have both kind of placed Elon Musk at the center of so many things over this this last several years of building insanity that he's always felt like this central character. And if there was a point in time where where he either melted down or Tesla suffered problems, there were an awful lot of things tied to that that we're going to go down with it. What what's been your immediate observations watching stuff play out last week?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Well, of course, in a way, the question is, who's now at the real center of things? Is it Elon Musk anymore? Or is it Donald Trump? And watching things play out last week. It was really, as a, you know, you're not a United States native Grant, but Dmitry and I are and we're citizens and to see this clown show in our country like this on both ends, you know, the Trump end and the Musk end. It's really disconcerting. So the first thing is it's sad and disconcerting. The second thing is, I think, you know, that in this battle between Musk and Trump, there's just no doubt about who's going to win the battle. I think it was Musk has just shot himself in the foot.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Has this been going on for a long time? It's been building up the damage he's done to the Tesla brand, to himself. But there's, in my mind, it's very clear who's going to win this battle. Whether there will be the unseemly retaliation that Trump is threatening, or whether Musk will now come grovelling back as he's already started to delete some of the tweets that were so inflammatory. We will see. But like you say, it's been the Elon Musk show for so, so long, and it's fascinating to see the dynamic change to become the Elon Musk and Donald Trump show. But I'm afraid what we're going to be finally left with is just the Donald Trump show.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty much how I see it as well. And it was fascinating to watch last week because, you know, you and I followed Elon closely for many years now. On my end, really out of morbid curiosity, you know, I haven't, I haven't traded in Tesla stock for a long, long time because it was just clearly a pointless exercise because it didn't, it never reacted how you would think it to. So I've just, I've watched this show unfold. And I think what you say there is really important because he's, he's been in these spats in public before, but never with anybody who can fire back with the kind of armory that Donald Trump has at his disposal.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and never with anybody who wields the constitutional powers that Donald Trump does and is not unafraid to wield unconstitutional powers that he would like to have. So watch out.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Dee, just, um, you know, obviously you, you've not followed Elon in the same way that Lawrence and I have, but obviously you've followed and paid attention. I'd be curious to kind of unpack your reaction, first of all, to that escalation last week and what was going through your head as you watched it play out.

• 13:31Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. I mean, I should say we, we did a lot of episodes back in 2017 and 2018 on Elon. I think probably the big difference is because of both of your backgrounds, you both probably focused in much more on the financials and on the business operations portion, though we certainly tried, I certainly tried on the show to do those things justice. I think where I have been more fascinated by Elon has been the cult of personality bordering on a new religion that he's cultivated and that has grown up around him, as well as his brilliant knack for product evangelism and branding, whether we're talking about the Cybertruck or the Optimus robot, or more recently with his foray into populist politics.

• 14:14Demetri Kofinas?

  What was your question again, Grant? I'm sorry. I feel like I got sidetracked.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  No, I was just curious to, as you watched last week, you know, begin and then escalate.

• 14:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  I was curious just that your thoughts as that all kind of unwound.

• 14:27Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, first of all, it was really predictable and I'm not the only one that said this was gonna happen. And in fact, I was way off on time. I said that in two years at most, he would be gone. I should have just said six months that they are falling out. I think they were just, their personalities are just both too oxygen consuming to be in the same sort of coalition together. Also, I think this is again, it's not a popular view. It gets lots of hate mail. It's but whatever. I mean, they're both narcissists. They're both very, at least, look, this is one of the things that I think also I wanted to explore with you guys because I was thinking about how to go about this conversation. And it's one of the points of frustration that I've just come to accept is that some people, like the three of us, see these two characters,

• 15:12Demetri Kofinas?

  have seen them for a very long time with a cynical lens. We view their actions as very, you know, selfish. And, and yet their, their fervent supporters think that they are patriots and that they're somehow uniquely aligned with the common good. And they're here to save the country or to save the planet or whatever it is. And that's just, it is what it is. It's a, it makes it very difficult to cover them. First of all, I just, I, my reaction was actually, I know a lot of people were tweeting about how they were entertained by what was going on. They were enjoying it. They were bringing out the popcorn. I wasn't. I don't think I had a moment of actually enjoying it. I found it really sad. I just think the state of affairs in this country is really sad. And I, I feel like to the extent that America ever was exceptional, you know, some people could argue that, that

• 15:56Demetri Kofinas?

  it was always a narrative. It feels like we're just like every other country now. And this is the kind of stuff that you would see in developing countries or in more authoritarian countries. Immediately, I thought of Mikhail Kordogovsky, the Yukos executive who was imprisoned by Putin for his unsanctioned foray into politics. Same thing with Xi Jinping and Jack Ma.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:17Demetri Kofinas?

  It just feels like America's becoming.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Jimmy Li, you know?

• 16:22Demetri Kofinas?

  Absolutely. Great comparison.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  The Crown Prince locking everybody up in the Riyadh four seasons.

• 16:28Demetri Kofinas?

  Hundred percent. I mean, we used to read about this stuff and we used to think about this as other, happening to other countries. And now it's happening to America. So I think it's sad. I don't know what stops this train. And I think that's sort of an interesting thread to pull on here with you as well. Lawrence, because of your legal background, I think that's something that people should be aware of. You have a long career working as a litigator and then also applying that experience in finance and also in the pro bono service of people who have been wronged by Elon Musk. So I think this is an interesting thread for us to pull on today.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  I would ask you to consider this. To me, you know what you said about all the hate mail. I'll get hate mail, even though I'm, as you both know, I'm kind of a traditional conservative. I get hate mail all the time from people I thought were my friends and allies as conservatives because I'm skeptical, to say the least, about a lot of what Trump is up to, even though I support a lot of things he's done too. But the Trump hate mail will continue unabated because Trump is who he is and he hasn't changed. Elon has gone through this very interesting arc, okay? You have to remember in 2016, he said it was embarrassing, the Republicans had nominated Trump and he spoke out against Trump and said it would be a mistake to elect this guy and kind of, you know, went in for Hillary.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  And that was at a time when he was a hero of the left because even though I have a lot of problems with the underlying narrative, I think that it was flawed in many ways. The narrative was that electric vehicles were going to save the earth, that Elon Musk was going to be the great pioneer of the new era of EVs, that he was an enemy of fossil fuels and that we would be able to, you know, go home and plug in our car to the plug on our house, which had been charged up from the solar panels overnight and it was all going to just be this big, beautiful thing. And a lot of people on the left really love that. And after, you know, he moved over to the right, suddenly the people on the left began

• 18:31Speaker 02

  protest, a lot of them on the left realized, hey, we don't like this guy at all. And then when he attacked Trump, now the people on the right who who suddenly had embraced Elon as this great figure who was going to save the country through Doge and Musk's big ally would primary any Republican who wasn't sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Now they don't know what to think of Elon anymore. Now he's Trump's enemy again. And that's the thing about Trump, you know. Um, if he if he says the sky is blue today, Trump, he say the sky is blue and tomorrow he says it's green, then it's green. And if the next day it's blue again, well, now it's blue again. So so Trump is the same.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  It's Musk who has in do, you know, doing this radical shift in his worldview and political ostensible political philosophy, created the problems for himself, his shareholders, his brands, I think.

• 19:27Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm. And also, it's an aesthetic observation that I think is interesting to consider along the lines of that tracks Musk's political evolution, which is that, you know, used to be, used to think of the typical Tesla buyer as a liberal, a progressive, well-to-do progressive who could afford a Model S. And now you see these Cybertrucks around and I have a, I went from thinking, you know, seeing someone driving a Tesla, thinking they're a certain type of person to now when I see someone in a Cybertruck, I think they're a very different type of person. I think that tracks with people's experience. The political that, in other words, that the brand became highly politicized, which obviously wasn't good for the business.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Right. But now, if you're on the right, do you want a Cybertruck anymore, even?

• 20:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Great question.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. By the way, I see lots of them stacking up everywhere, even in remote places here in New Mexico.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's interesting what you what you said there, Lawrence, because this idea of being able to switch sides and being able to instantly, just by nailing your colors to a certain mast, gain an incredible strength of following from that particular group and you can flip-flop, you can go back. And one of the big points, I think, that really helped Dimitri and I decide to do this particular podcast was to try and understand how things have shifted. And I think this is a huge shift, that we've gone from a world where the community and the office of the presidency and, you know, all these institutions and all these kind

• 20:56Speaker 01

  of sometimes nebulous things were really what bound people together.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  And in this kind of slide into narcissism, it's all now become about the personality. It doesn't matter their politics, your politics are completely and utterly interchangeable. You'll turn red if your guy's on the red team, you'll turn blue if he's on the blue team. You know, I've already seen the articles coming thick and fast about how the Democrats are now looking for a way to bring Elon back into the fold after his fallout with Trump.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  You know, there's a decay in the importance of any kind of value, any kind of moral center, any kind of almost tangible principle that people can actually know who you are and what you stand for, rather than who they think you might be in your social media posts. So I'm curious as to how you kind of, it's a kind of long me having not even really a question, just a whole lot of observations, but I'm curious as to your take on that.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  So let me stop being so depressed about agreeing with you about a lot of that. I mean, okay, so Trump is clearly the most unprincipled president of my lifetime. There's nothing principled about his governance. He's not interested really in policy. It is a cult of personality and personality only, and the only principle is loyalty. You must be unquestionably loyal to Donald Trump, loyal when today he says that, as I say, the sky is blue and loyal again tomorrow when he says it's green. That's what Trumpism is. And I, I don't see that as an enduring thing. I think without Trump, that falls apart. But it's so sad that we've gotten to this point.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  It's really disconcerting, to say the least. I don't know what comes next. And, you know, Dimitri mentioned that I was a trial lawyer, a civil trial lawyer doing commercial cases, yes, but you know, I went to Yale Law School and learned very little law there. I learned a lot of philosophy and, you know, the Constitution was what we spent our time with. And I really care a lot about our constitution. And it is just in such terrible danger in so many ways. Congress has utterly abdicated its responsibilities, utterly. There are so many things Congress could do to rein in the executive, which it needs to. The people who are supporting Trump now, they forget that if the next president's a Democrat

• 23:24Speaker 02

  and says, hey, I can do just what Trump did, they're not going to like that one bit. Nobody's thinking about these larger things. And you both know that I care a lot about the judiciary, which I think is the only really functioning branch of our government right now. We can get deeper into any of that, but I don't know if that answers your question or helps forward our discussion.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Well, no, I definitely think it does. And I think the judicial aspect of this is going to be worthy of a discussion of its own later on in this conversation, because I think ultimately, I can't help but think that somewhere, somehow, that's where all this is going to end up. We're heading towards a point where the Supreme Court, the justices are going to have to either make a stand for the Constitution. You know, we had Neil Howe on here in our first episode, and we talked about the fourth turning and this dismantling of institutions that were no longer fit for purpose. And we've seen that with the WHO through COVID, we've seen it with the UN, we've seen it through NATO. But Neil brought up the point that the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, are institutions

• 24:31Speaker 01

  in a way. And here we are on the eve of the 250th anniversary. And I hadn't thought about those being even potentially torn down. But ever since Neil's said that to me, I cannot get that thought out of my head.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  No, they're being taken apart. I completely agree about that. They're really crucial glue that holds our country together. And if you undermine the legitimacy of those, what's left? We are a banana republic.

• 25:01Demetri Kofinas?

  So Lawrence, politicians have always been interested in power and in the acquisition of power. But in our lifetimes, there have been institutional and cultural constraints on the methods that can be deployed in pursuit of power. And there have been gatekeepers in the media and kingmakers behind the scenes who have all played a role in shaping the outcomes of that political bargaining process. The weakening of institutions has, I think, emboldened people who may have been previously deterred or thwarted in their political ambitions to grab more power. Do you think that this is what motivated Elon to go all in on Trump in the summer of 2024? And you'll recall, this was after Trump was

• 25:44Demetri Kofinas?

  shot at that infamous rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. And Musk wasn't the only one. You know, I remember the same thing happened with Tucker Carlson, who also, this is so important to note, that a lot of the folks that are such big supporters of Donald Trump today, Megyn Kelly, also, great example, were openly opposed to him. I mean, I think there were some tapes that were released or transcripts of some really awful things that Tucker had to say about him in private. Of course, Megyn Kelly had plenty of awful things to say. As you mentioned, you said some things that Elon had mentioned, but they all went in for him after he was shot, presumably in part because they assumed that that was

• 26:24Demetri Kofinas?

  going to solidify his hold over the Republican Party. They saw the sort of cinematic. I think they were in a position to appreciate the cinematics of it. But what do you think was really, Elon was really after when he threw his support so strongly behind Trump in the summer of 2024?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  A couple of quick things here. First, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and that crowd were already all in for Trump before, you know, Butler, Pennsylvania. Tucker Carlson has been at this for a long time with all his, you know, Russian disinformation and Putin-loving and Trump-supporting and utterly distorting the facts about everything. So there was no big change there.

• 27:05Demetri Kofinas?

  I should say, you're right, and I maybe I should just make the point that they were all in at least on the narrative. I remember Tucker Carlson specifically making this point over and over. He was shot in the face, therefore he quote wins. And they really wanted to step in and lean in on the narrative that because he was shot, he showed courage, he's the leader. But you're right, I should have framed that better.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I don't, I didn't mean that as a big criticism.

• 27:27Demetri Kofinas?

  No, no, you're right. I'm glad you brought it up.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  What induced Musk to go so public? I mean, I, I'm puzzled by it. I think what happened really has a lot to do with Twitter. I think that when we see Elon Musk become very interested in Twitter, starting when, 2019, 2020, he starts posting more and more and the posts become just hypertrophic. There's, you know, hundreds of posts a day on Twitter and then he decides he wants to buy Twitter and gets in a big fight when he tries to back out of that, but ends up acquiring it, as we all know, in late 2022. And Twitter becomes this very weird alt-right sewer. And for whatever reason, Trump loved all the adoration he got

• 28:13Speaker 02

  there, the anti-media right, you know, and the right has always had its criticisms of the left-wing media, because the mainstream media in the United States has been largely left-wing all of my lifetime. But that became focused on, you know, Elon Musk is going to save free speech. And Elon just loved that idea of, you know, donning the mantle of the savior of free speech. And Twitter transformed and he loved getting all the support and all the followers and all the feedback and it became a real echo chamber for him. I don't know, I can't get inside his head and say to you, how could the guy who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 suddenly support Donald Trump in 2024, except the

• 28:54Speaker 02

  same thing that happened to so many Republicans, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, all these people who you thought were critics of Josh Hawley, principled conservatives, they weren't at all. And they suddenly became Trumpians. And they wanted power and they wanted access to power, or they were afraid of being primaried. I don't pretend to have the entire answer, but I think Twitter has something to do with it.

• 29:17Demetri Kofinas?

  And does it matter? Does having the answer to this question even matter?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  To me, no, no, no.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Lawrence, it's been interesting, as I say, you know, you and I have followed Elon closely, a lot more closely for a longer period of time than a lot of people who are kind of. Late to the party, if you will, and I don't know about you, but nothing I've really seen has surprised me. It surprised me in just how unhinged he's becoming and this seeming either lack of understanding of the limits of his power and his reach, or the increased recklessness. And we can speculate all we want, and there's been plenty of ink spilled in the last few weeks about these articles in the Washington Post about the ketamine stuff and all that. But you and I have followed him very closely for a number of years now,

• 30:07Speaker 01

  best part of a decade probably, for you certainly, and a little bit less than that for me. And again, there's nothing I've seen that I don't recognize from his period in Tesla and some of the stunts he's pulled during that time. Now, they've been magnified, and he seems to be getting either more confident, or less risk averse, or arrogant, or it's building. But the behavior I'm seeing, while magnified, is not out of character from what I've seen. And so that's been something that I've found very interesting, because I think back in the days of Tesla Q, for example, there was this thing that people called the

• 30:51Speaker 01

  realization, which was, you think Elon Musk is this kind of genius when he's talking about things that you know nothing about. But as soon as he steps into your world and starts talking about things you do know about, you view him in a completely different light. And that seems to be, to me, what's at the core of what's happened here. The liberals are seeing him in a completely different light now. Suddenly, the Republicans are seeing him in a completely different light now. And he's, by broadening his reach, he's also dramatically increasing the number of people who finally get to see.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  What's underneath the PR facade? And I think that's potentially catastrophic for him.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great, that's a great point. One of the things that really annoys me the most is when people write about Musk and they want to criticize him. We acknowledge he's a genius. Why is he a genius? I mean, he is a genius in understanding the zeitgeist. Or he was back when he did and started Tesla and became the prince of the environmental movement. He was an absolute genius at sucking up government subsidies, getting free land, tax abatements, all kinds of favors, promoting policies that punished his competitors with mandates and forced them to pay indulgences to him. He was absolutely the genius without which Tesla would never have been gotten off the ground. It relied very heavily on all that governmental largesse,

• 32:15Speaker 02

  which makes it ironic that he got put in charge of Doge, you know, to save, to help rescue the federal budget. I think Doge is such a great example of his arrogance. He knows nothing about the United States Constitution. He and Vivek Ramaswamy announced in November or December in a Wall Street Journal op ed piece that they were going to use executive orders could accomplish all these great cost savings. You didn't even need to involve Congress. And it was such an absurd and arrogant thing to say. It's so wrong. And he didn't bother to try to understand any of these agencies that they went into and started just wholesale firing people or changing the way they were run and cutting expenditures without understanding where that was coming from.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  It could have all been so valuable. It could have been done in a careful way. It could have been done involving Congress. It could have been done trying to, to develop around it some kind of public consensus about the real nature of the problems. But arrogantly, they jumped into it in that way. And it was so predictable that Doge would fail. They promised two trillion in savings. It's not clear to me that they've saved anything net net, but it's much, much less, even their claim savings are much, much less than that. And it's a tiny trickle compared to the increase we're going to see in the deficit. And when Musk did it, Trump had already said, I'm taking off the table entitlements. Well, there's no way you will ever, I mean, this gets to the larger problem we all face,

• 33:44Speaker 02

  which we can maybe talk about later, that Charles Calameres has talked with you guys about. But until you touch entitlements, there's no way you're ever going to do anything useful at all in terms of rescuing the United States from the impending debt spiral that threatens to undermine our entire system of government and our entire way of life.

• 34:06Demetri Kofinas?

  So maybe, I don't know how much, because I certainly want to have a conversation about the country's financials and where we go from here. Maybe to wrap up the more focused part of the conversation on Elon, I have at least one more question to ask, which is, what do you think happens now to Elon post-blow-up with Trump? He's suggested that he might want to start a third party. That wouldn't be surprising at all for him to do that. I don't know how successful he would be. I also question whether, at this point, he is just too volatile. He's always been volatile. As Grant so brilliantly pointed out, there's nothing new here, for those of us who have been following his career. But it's new to a lot of people, so maybe now folks like Trump and others realize, and other politicians realize, this guy's just too volatile.

• 34:51Demetri Kofinas?

  Actually, one of the memes that I tweeted when this happened was that, did you guys ever see Breaking Bad?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:57Demetri Kofinas?

  Remember that scene where one of the Hermanos Pollos guys, what was his name? Gus Fried told Walter White that you can never trust a drug addict? Because that, drugs plays a huge role here, obviously. What happens to Elon going forward? Will he start that third party that he's talking about now? Or will he just become irrelevant, in your view?

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I think Elon has already had a realization that he's in danger of becoming Mikhail Kotokovsky, okay? Because he's deleted that tweet about starting the third party. He's deleted the tweet about Trump and Epstein, and he's clearly nervous about what he's done. So. The question to me is, as we all know, maybe our listeners don't know, Tesla is already just so ludicrously overvalued. It is no longer an auto company. There's no way you to justify the share price based on the sale of autos, which is a shrinking market with shrinking margins for Tesla. So they've staked everything on this robot taxi business and on this Optimus robot, which I think are just crazy.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  So the business itself in terms of fundamentals has never been in worse shape, ever, since I've watched it. Not that that's mattered, and I know you guys always caution people that whatever you're doing is not investment advice. And please don't go short Tesla based on any of this. But the company is toast in terms of a business. And I think Trump maybe realizes that Musk's wealth, which he's enjoyed, derives mostly from Tesla, okay? SpaceX is very questionable whether SpaceX makes any money. Starlink doesn't make money. Those government contracts are crucial to SpaceX, but whether there's any free cash flow there is doubtful.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  And Elon Musk's real wealth is Tesla, and that is very illiquid. And if you suddenly have a collapse in the Tesla share price as reality sets in, the left is fed up with him, the right is fed up with him. The competition is just so much better than Tesla cars. And unless these robot taxis or Optimus change the game, which I can't imagine happening, but maybe I lack enough imagination, Tesla's done. And a poor Elon Musk is less important to Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump really does become retributive about the damage that Musk tried to do to him, it will get uglier faster. So I think that Musk has sealed his fate. I just don't know how quickly it'll happen.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  A lot depends on whether Trump lets him come crawling back into Trump's good graces and keeps... The government contract's coming for his non-Tesla enterprises, but I just don't see how he can ever undo the damage he's done here. Does that answer your question?

• 37:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Yes, and just one quick follow up. Are you have you seen that Steve Bannon's calls to have Trump nationalize Starlink and SpaceX?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:53Demetri Kofinas?

  What do you think about that? When I say, what do you think about that? How likely is that? I feel like I'm already answering my question. I really like I've been asking that question to myself for every time he does something. I'm like, how likely is this next thing he's going to? And he does it. And that's part of the state of affairs we're in today. Things get normalized and then we're constantly wondering whether the next thing will become normalized or not. But is that where this is heading? Are you concerned about this?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Well, I hope not, because the idea of a president nationalizing an industry, I don't care if it's the industry of my greatest enemy, is such a terrible idea. And it's so Steve Bannon, isn't it? Who is really much more a Marxist than anything else I can think of. Just a poisonous human being in every way. I don't think, as with Trump, it's very dangerous to say this will never happen. I can't imagine that happening and him getting away with it.

• 38:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Because of the economic and more importantly, the the financial market consequences of doing so.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  The markets would tank in no time if he tried to nationalize an industry so blatantly. He does it so subtly, it's more effective, but to do it so blatantly would just.

• 38:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Do you think that's been the biggest constraint on Trump's actions? Another example being his threats to fire Jay Powell? His concern about the market's reaction outweigh his concerns about the legal system and legal repercussions?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Musk's industries have already been nationalized. Okay, SpaceX cannot survive without government contracts. It's done. And as we know, Tesla is just about done. Its profits are shrinking to almost nothing soon. And its cash flow is going to shrink and its share price is in big danger. Thanks to a lot of the damage that Musk has done. I think a lot of what was sustaining the Tesla share price was the conviction among Tesla investors that there was always the Trump. Trump would save Elon no matter what, and they can't believe that anymore.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  As I watched this this last part, I want to come back to this political party thing, because all the things I've observed about Musk over the years and I've, you know, I've I've been clear in my beliefs, but, you know, I'm not a foaming at the mouth, you know, banging the drum guy. But as I've watched this, when I saw that poll, he put this poll out, you know, should I start a third party? What was fascinating to me about that, Lawrence, and I'll be curious of your thoughts on this, is that we've seen the way Elon uses Twitter, and he uses Twitter a lot of the time for validation, because he knows full well that he's got however many hundreds of millions of followers. And when he tweets any kind of poll, you know, he used this for

• 40:26Speaker 01

  his pay packet, he used this for all these Tesla related things. He says it because he knows that they're gonna say, well, what does Elon want? I'm gonna vote that way. And that's been very useful, and he's used it pretty skillfully to demonstrate a strong public backing for the things he wants to do, right? Now, we know that that backing is by people who are just, you know, loyal to Elon, or think incredibly positively of him, and will fall in line behind him. So this political party thing I found interesting, because the fact that he posted that, should I start my own political party? That 184 million people are all gonna read that Elon wants to start his own political party, I should

• 41:09Speaker 01

  vote yes. And I haven't seen the results of that poll, but I'm, I'd be pretty certain that there was a strong yes vote there. And so there is an element of being hoist by your own petard here, because if you go down that road, once you say that, and there's an overwhelming positive response to it, you're kind of, not forced, because we've seen him back down before, but it puts you into a corner where, well, why aren't you gonna start this party? It's clear, everybody wants you to start this party. And again, once he does that, forget the supporters of the Democrats and the supporters of the Republicans, you've then got politicians, the people making the rules and handing out

• 41:53Speaker 01

  the money on both sides, you've made enemy of all of those guys, because they don't want a third party, they don't want someone else going up the works, they don't want anyone taking their votes, particularly someone who's, who's perceived as being very popular like Elon. So, you know, I keep looking for the, for the, the step he takes, that is the one that is over the edge. And I think the Epstein tweet was certainly one of those. I think the stuff that he's deleted, as you say, clearly says that he maybe realizes, I've gone too far with this. But it seems very tough for him to walk things back because his ego is such that

• 42:33Speaker 01

  we saw this with the cave diving pedo stuff, right? He just refuses to back down. No matter how wrong he may be, he will just say, well, I've got all this money. I'm going to fight everybody in court and I will, I'm never going to back down. Is he at that point now where the hubris is going to coalesce around various different things and put him in a place where he, he literally has nowhere to turn at that point because he's kind of got himself out there and he's set fire to all the bridges behind him?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  That's a really interesting question. In my view, he's already backed down. I don't, and I was just going to ask you, do you know what the results of that poll were before?

• 43:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Yes, they were eighty twenty. And in fact, I question whether those were actually legitimate poll numbers because Elon conveniently told the story about how eighty twenty was the appropriate number for, I don't remember what it was that he was trying to say, but I was like, I'm sure that, I wouldn't be surprised if he either pushed some of his own proprietary bots to push that number up or who knows what. I mean, he owns the platform.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Here's the ludicrous thing about that. Okay. What is the platform of your third party, Elon? Now, you criticized the budget, the one big beautiful bill as being pork filled. That wasn't the problem with the budget. The pork is a tiny little part of the problem. It's inconsequential. The problem is it doesn't address what has to be addressed, which is a major reform of our entitlement programs. Most of the budget gets swallowed up by social security, followed by Medicare, followed by Medicaid and Veterans Affairs and Defense and then interest. Okay. And unless you're willing to address social security and Medicare and Medicaid in a serious way, you're not going to get there.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  You're just never going to get there. And interest is going to continue to swallow more and more of the budget. It's already bigger than the defense budget. So is Elon gonna make himself the most unpopular person in history by forming a party that says we're gonna take away, we're gonna reform your social security without first bringing the public along? I think these reforms have to happen, but you'd, any politician that just formed a party without bringing the public along first to understand the importance of these things is gonna fail. And Elon hasn't attempted that. In fact, he's pointed to pork as the problem, which it's a tiny part of the problem. So I don't see any third party being formed. This was a stupid poll for Elon to put up. And Grant, maybe he has nowhere else to go and he'll try it, it will fail, it won't

• 45:01Speaker 02

  go anywhere. But I think Elon has to know that his only hope of salvation at this point is to come crawling back to Trump. If he doesn't know that, he's even more arrogant and drug-addled than I imagined he was. And not that I think that crawling back to Trump is a good thing.

• 45:17Demetri Kofinas?

  Lawrence, were you old enough to vote for Reagan in 1980?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Yes, it was my second vote. That's how old I am.

• 45:26Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  I was at Yale Law School. And the professor, and New Haven was overwhelmingly, as it still is, Democrat and left-wing. And Yale was, except for Cuba, maybe, the last true communist country on earth. One of my professors, my tort professor, who's written a great book about administrative law, Peter Shuck, asked everybody in the class, in the torts class, to raise their hand if they had voted for Reagan. And there were three of us who raised our hand in a class of 170. And it was a lonely time. And they even shut down Yale for the, of the day after the election. They closed the school so it was a day of mourning and people could just meet in conclaves to discuss the coming American fascism. So, yeah, I was old enough and I did vote for Reagan.

• 46:10Demetri Kofinas?

  So I was just checking his age. It looks like he was 69 years, that's unbelievable, he was 69 years old when he was elected.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  People said he was too old, remember?

• 46:17Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, yeah. He must have been the oldest president ever elected at the time, right?

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:21Demetri Kofinas?

  The reason I ask this, and this is not a, I haven't thought this question through, but, you know, one of the things I always come back to whenever we're having conversations like this, a recurring thought is, who is in a position to either launch a third party, credibly, that could gain a sufficient number of votes, to either win a presidential election or at the very least be politically relevant and able to move the conversation in a particular direction? But essentially, who has the political credibility to be that independent voice in America today in a constructive manner? And I can't think of one. Now Ronald Reagan had sort of an independent public relations presence, for lack of a better word, because he was an actor. He was well-known.

• 47:05Demetri Kofinas?

  So he was able to kind of come from the outside in.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Well, he'd been governor of California.

• 47:10Demetri Kofinas?

  And he'd been governor of California. Great point. So obviously, he did that. He leveraged that to become governor of California. And he had, I think that the progression that led him there was his spots on General Electric Theater, during which time he developed some of his more libertarian views after reading the works of people like Hayek and Rothbard and some of the other Austrians and libertarians in the 1950s and 60s, when he was taking those long trips across the country on railroad. But what was different about that time, where someone like Reagan could motivate a large portion of the country to vote for him with a positive vision of America? How does that America compare to the one that we're living in today?

• 47:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Could we see a more unifying figure like that win an election? And is this also, I don't know, an ahistorical take on my part? I mean, because I'm describing Reagan as a unifier, but he was also divisive in his own way when he came to power. So how much of this is me misreading this? And, you know, are you following the question I'm trying to formulate here?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's a really good question, too. I don't think Reagan was divisive. He had, the left hated him. There are many more friends he has now on the left than he used to. It happens a lot. Ronald Reagan was a, was by no means as dogmatic as the left made him out to be, but he had principles, and he stuck to his principles. He compromised when he needed to. He worked with Congress. Remember, most of the time he was in office, Congress was Democratic.

• 48:36Demetri Kofinas?

  And he and Tip O'Neill had a very good relationship, apparently.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  They had a tense, but ultimately fruitful relationship. Yeah. He knew how to work with the other side. He knew that compromise is what is required under the Constitution. He was extraordinary man in that way. And remember that, who he ran against, Jimmy Carter. When's the last time in a presidential election we've had two really decent human beings running against each other? Jimmy Carter, for all his flaws, was really a decent human being. And Reagan was a decent human being. And Donald Trump, I'm sorry to tell you, is in absolutely no way a decent human being. Has the country changed so much that we don't, can't have a figure like that anymore? I mean, there are times I get up and I say, "I don't recognize this country anymore. It's not the one I grew up in. Maybe I was wrong about it all along."

• 49:24Speaker 02

  The Republican Party is plainly a sick party. Until it shakes Trump, it's gonna remain a sick party. I hope we can shake it soon. The Democrats, I wish they would get healthier, but they need to ditch a few of the things that have made them toxic to Americans. Some of the more radical elements of DEI just were never gonna sell with Americans. Some of the more radical elements of, you know, denying the biological reality of different sexes is kinda foolish. You can still be compassionate about gender and not be so dogmatic about that. I hope that they will moderate in some way. I hope that the Democrats would have the sense, as I've written before, to nominate somebody from the center.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Like, you know, you've got Fetterman, who's an interesting guy in Pennsylvania. You've got Jared Polis, who's an interesting guy in Colorado. You've got some possible candidates who could be more moderate among the Democrats, but they get pulled to the left. You know, part of it, Dimitri, we've really, the country has become intensely gerrymandered. The primary system has really undermined American constitutional health. Because the people that participate in the primaries in both parties are the most radical elements of both parties. And you get these radical candidates in safely gerrymandered, gerrymandered districts with very few swing districts, and it's been a poisonous thing, and you put that together with social media.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  We need to rethink how we do some of this stuff.

• 50:57Demetri Kofinas?

  And so like in rethinking that, how do we do that without leadership? I'm just trying to understand. I mean, the thing that I keep falling back on is like, how do we organize as society? And reform in areas where reform is needed? I mean, you brought up social media. I think that's that. And generally speaking, the information landscape and the intermediation of reality and how we sort of manage truth in the digital age. Like, that is a huge issue. It's a huge vulnerability for us as a society because powerful interests are in a position to moderate conversations and sort of manage our perception of reality in a way that they couldn't even do during the era of centralization in media. Like, is there some clear sort of path that you can see out of this? Or do we just have to let the cycle run?

• 51:42Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, to go back to our conversation with Neil Howe that kicked off this series and just kind of like, you know, have faith that eventually things will work themselves out?

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Grant, do you want to weigh in first?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  You know, I have some thoughts on this. I've been thinking so much about this and I'll do my best to form those thoughts into something coherent. You know, I think back 50 years, 40 years, politics was something that, for the most part, successful business people went into. You build a business, you did something, you made some money, you became a success, and you went into politics after you'd done something in the real world, to try and make a difference, to try and help, to try and give something back. And so you had people with real world experience who had become wealthy enough that they didn't need to work and they could use their time and their energy and their money to try and

• 52:36Speaker 01

  make a difference. And then at some point, politics became a career. People would go to school and study politics because they wanted to come out of school and they wanted to be a politician. And so that became the end, the end became to get into politics. And we all know that that ultimately changed politics from a way to give back and a way to improve things into a way to become powerful and ultimately post that a way to become rich. Because people saw the kind of wealth that politicians would accumulate. And it seems to me that the problem today, the big problem is this disparity in wealth that ultimately,

• 53:19Speaker 01

  however, the full turning goes, however, this resolves itself, it will need to involve a significant transfer of wealth from the top, pick your percentage here, to the bottom remaining percentage. That has to happen somehow peacefully or violently, I don't know, hopefully the former, worryingly, possibly the latter. And because of the fact that politics has now become a career and a way to get rich and a way to get powerful, you have an entire generation of politics right across the Western world who are in that

• 54:01Speaker 01

  top X percent and yet are being charged with making the decisions that will redistribute their own wealth into those that don't have it. And so the way that the system has evolved to me over the last 40 years is such that it's eaten itself from the inside and it's become completely unsuitable for purpose. And it attracts the kind of people whose incentives, not exclusively, but for the most part, from what I've seen, are misaligned with the objectives they're trying to achieve, i.e. they want to become powerful and they want to become rich. And more and more, sadly, they want to become famous because fame can

• 54:44Speaker 01

  come from all kinds of things and not necessarily good. So I feel like the way the system is, the only way that this resolves itself is it self-immolates. The system burns itself to the ground because you reach this point where People just, it's the network moment. I've had enough. I can't take it anymore. I'm not going to stand this anymore. And it feels like we are accelerating on a path to that. And when I think about a third party, a third candidate, I struggle to see where that person comes from, because it almost has to be, it's not going to be someone who's already rich, is already powerful, because they're putting themselves in the firing line.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  It almost by definition has to be a firebrand, angry, resentment fueled, stoking the antipathy towards the establishment. And I don't see how that ends well. So this sounds bleak, and I know, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I, I end up in this bleak place, but I'm hopeful and open to someone giving me a way through this that doesn't go down the road I've just described. And if either of you can do it, I would be eternally grateful to either or both of you.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  I was hoping you could do it. I mean, the level of corruption we've seen is increasing so fast. It happened under Biden, okay? And the Democrats all gave him a pass with a lot of the monkey business that his son engaged in and his brother buying influence and terrible, really, truly terrible. With Trump, it's just so blatant and out in the open. In fact, that's the defense of the Trump supporters. Well, you know, Joe Biden did this stuff secretly. You know, Joe Biden robbed the bank at night. We go in and rob it during the day. And we take 10 times more, of course, than Biden ever dared take. And you have the distressing spectacle of congressmen enriching themselves with stock

• 56:44Speaker 02

  trades when they have inside information. And it's horrible. I, I don't know. I don't know if we can be let out of this wilderness anymore. I hope we can. And I fear what you said. Is a is is a more likely scenario, Grant, that you're gonna have some aggrieved firebrand who's gonna say to the people who are tired of being screwed around by the politicians that we need to burn it all down and let me be your instrument of vengeance.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Well, interestingly, Lawrence, you know, Trump positioned himself as that, right? Which is, I mean, what a great trick to be a guy that wealthy that's coming in to drain the swamp, right? We all saw what happened.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  This guy imaginable. Since you lived in New York, you understood Donald. This is another myth. Elon Musk is a genius. Donald Trump is a successful businessman. Oh, Donald Trump was a horrible businessman. He went bankrupt five times. He he endlessly screwed his vendors when he was building buildings. He screwed his partners. He screwed his bankers. He screwed everybody. He was he was just a guy who was with the worst business ethics imaginable. And in New York, he was kind of a joke in New York City for years. But to the country, he was this guy on television who was a brilliant businessman who had wrote The Art of the Deal. He was a genius negotiator. Listen, one thing I would suggest, you guys ought to consider having on somebody named

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Yuval Levin from the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote a book called American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. And he has in there some ideas for real reforms that he thinks could help restore some of our constitutional health. For example, this is just but one of many. And he's a really thoughtful, deep-thinking, nonpartisan kind of guy. But increase the number of representatives in the House of Representatives, because right now it's the ratio for representative to number of people is mushroomed. And by doing that, you would dilute the ability to gerrymander. You would increase the number of swing districts. You would force people who run for Congress to be more inclined to compromise and find

• 58:54Speaker 02

  middle ground. And he has a lot of ideas like that. Whether we could ever get to those ideas and do those kinds of things without some kind of real leader with integrity, I don't know. I despair as much as you do, but despair is, in a sense, a sin. So I'll try to remain hopeful.

• 59:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So something we haven't touched on is the recent deployment of the National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles, is it?

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:22Demetri Kofinas?

  And so I think this also happened during the Rodney King riots in 1990, what was it, 91? Was the National Guard deployed at that time? So what are the legal precedents and potential political consequence of deploying the National Guard troops to control domestic immigration protests? And how might this shape future civilian military boundaries in US policing?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  I'm not fully educated on what Trump has done, but he has not, so far as I know, invoked the so-called Insurrection Act. So the actions he's taken are questionable and clearly, I think, more calculated to inflame the situation than to calm the situation down. And it's not at all clear to me that the California law enforcement authorities didn't have things under reasonable control when he did all this. And I think he's itching for an opportunity to invoke the Insurrection Act against his enemies. And so it's dangerous. We're becoming an unstable country with these kinds of actions. I fear them.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Now, you have to remember, this is massive roundup of illegal immigrants taking place, 99% of whom now are people who have jobs or working hard. They're here illegally, but they're valuably contributing, they're supporting a family, they're contributing to the prosperity of our nation, they're paying into Social Security when they won't get anything out because they have to do it with fake ID numbers so that their employers have a Social Security number to use. And it's really, there's so much human tragedy associated with that because we don't have any sensible immigration policies. The idea that you should expel all these people is so sad.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  A lot of them came here, of course, because Joe Biden said, "Well, all you people in Venezuela or Nicaragua or Haiti or Cuba, you can come and you're going to be fine here." And he did that with an executive order. He didn't have any right to do it. He didn't have any right to suggest to those people that they would be allowed to stay, but they relied on that. And this is, again, the toxicity of these executive orders by a president who should have involved Congress and didn't to accomplish these things. And now they're in the position of being expelled. I see it as dangerous in a word, Dmitry. I see Trump as really raising the stakes here and wanting to involve the military

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  in things that should be really civilian matters, and it's scary. And I hope that some people on the right speak out against this as well. The left can be counted on, and I don't know about how much we'll see on the right. The Wall Street Journal this morning has an editorial kind of warning about how dangerous this is all becoming, and I agree.

• 1:02:18Demetri Kofinas?

  So, the reason that I brought this up, or sort of the motivation behind it, is concerns about whether or not, and I know this is gonna piss some people off, and I should preface it by saying-

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  We've already pissed everybody off.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't worry. The haters are gone.

• 1:02:34Demetri Kofinas?

  When Trump, yeah, that's a good point, actually.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Left and right.

• 1:02:36Demetri Kofinas?

  They've left, they've left already.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:39Demetri Kofinas?

  When Trump was first elected, I wasn't one of those people that saw him as a threat to democracy. And, you know, I didn't believe a lot of the stuff about, you know, Russian involvement, for what it's worth. Now, I'm much more concerned, and part of it is just because I feel like Trump is in a situation where he can't afford to lose. He can't afford to go out of office. Or rather, if he does leave office, he leaves his fate in the hands of other people, J.D. Vance, or other allies potentially that he's created in politics to protect him and his family. And he clearly cares. I mean, he's trying to build a kind of familial empire through grift and corruption. What concerns do you have that Trump will try to use his power as president to remain

• 1:03:23Demetri Kofinas?

  in office, or to shape the legal landscape in such a way so that he and his family can continue to benefit from the largesse that government provides?

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Well, I, first of all, I agree with you. In 2016, I wasn't concerned about the nation devolving. And I felt like the Russian collusion stuff was really unfortunate. And it was largely false, and it helped him. It gave him oxygen, and it fueled all his resentments. But in 2016, he had kind of conventional Republicans who staffed a lot of his cabinet and a lot of the advisory positions. And they kept him from doing a lot of cuckoo things that he wanted to do. It's all together different now. He's learned his lesson in terms of who he's going to allow to counsel him on appointing judges, in terms of the people he surrounds himself

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  with. It's now a complete Trumpian echo chamber of unquestioned loyalists.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dmitry, what is, I don't see him trying a third term. But, you know, I don't see him invading Greenland either. But I could be wrong about both those things. His power's so crucial to him. I don't see him winning at the ballot box, but who knows what kind of monkey business he might try to engineer to, you know, manipulate and create a false election. I don't know. I put very little past him. But what fear does he have if he leaves office? Who's going to come after him? Do you think?

• 1:04:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, if the Democrats win, I mean, isn't there a risk that they'll try to prosecute him?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess. The presidential immunity decision kind of would make that really difficult. Which, that decision was issued at a time, by the way, when the guy who was in the firing line was Joe Biden, not Donald Trump. But now, more Trump.

• 1:05:19Demetri Kofinas?

  But his family could be at risk.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  They all, I mean, they all deserve to be in prison, in my opinion. They really do. Or at least disgraced and forever out of office and stripped of the ill-gotten wealth. But I would be happy just to see him crawl away and enjoy it for the rest of his life if he stayed out of politics. But you're posing a very dangerous thing here.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Congress, of course, has the ability to shut him down at any time. And Congress is closely divided. Maybe the midterm elections will create enough, will swing the House and there are enough senators in the Senate who still have a shred of integrity that would create a majority to do that. There's so many ways Congress could stop all this nonsense tomorrow.

• 1:06:06Demetri Kofinas?

  I feel like what we might have been talking about in the beginning of this episode with respect to Elon is the emperor has no clothes moment. Because, you know, for so long Elon's misanthropy and his degenerative behavior was kind of seen by his supporters as a sign of him being like real and being willing to stick it to Washington and being kind of cool. He's cool. He doesn't give a shit. He does some ketamine, goes on Joe Rogan, smokes weed, launches some rockets. He's cool. He's the man. And I think there's been a similar impulse with people's support of Trump. They like him. He just kind of, he says what he wants. He's crass. Who cares? And if this recent spat between Trump and Elon marks the beginning of the end of Elon's

• 1:06:50Demetri Kofinas?

  career as a sort of public persona, popular figure, a populist figure, I wonder if something similar could happen with Trump. But then the question is, is he just replaced with somebody else that shares those kind of values? Because at the end of the day, the problem isn't Trump or Elon. The problem is something's happened to this country. Something's happened to our values and our morals and we seem to celebrate. A lot of people in this country seem to celebrate figures like this. And there, if that's the problem, or if that's the primary driver, I don't know what fixes that.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Here's a partial fix. Trump is going to destroy himself, okay? Character is destiny, as Heraclitus said. And Trump has put these tariffs in place. He's created utter- Uncertainty throughout the business world about where we're headed. He's devastating the American workforce with these willy nilly deportations. Consumers are going to start to pay more. We're going to have inflation. We're going to have potentially a recession or worse. His policies won't work. If you read, and I mean, I I've read Milton Friedman, I've read Hayek, and I happen to believe they're right. And if you believe they're right, you have to know that Trump is going to fail.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  And it's going to be harmful to so many people. And it's going to undermine his political support. So there's hope in that. What the next step is, of course, as Grant has pointed out, that's where it gets really dangerous. But I think Trump is going to fail much as Elon is going to fail. They are their own worst enemies and the Democrats ought to stand back and let him destroy himself instead of doing things that give him oxygen. But I think that's going to happen. I don't see him reversing course on tariffs, even if he did. It's kind of late now. We have created so much havoc with them and the consequences are going to be terrible for the US and for the world. And that's a tragedy that can't be undone. It could be mitigated, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Do we, you know, what you said about Hayek was interesting there, Lawrence, because obviously the implication there is we travel down this road to serve them first. You know, before we before we get there and that, you know, that's the thing that kind of worries me. And it's fascinating as an Englishman, and God knows the UK has its own set of problems in some ways very similar in nature and other ways actually a lot worse than America's going through at the moment. But it's funny as an outsider and as someone who fell in love with America at the age of nine or 10 and has had this deep abiding love affair with the country ever since. I find it interesting that as an outsider, I look at what's happening inside America.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  And I have this faith born of that love and admiration for America that I don't think that Trump is going to run for a third term. I just, I have this ideological belief that America won't let that happen. You know, because it's America ultimately with all the stuff that's going on. As an outsider, you don't get the chance to feel it. You don't get the chance to be an American citizen, to have grown up pledging allegiance to the flag and to have grown up immersed in what it means to be an American. And so I found it interesting that. In conversations with many of my American friends, I seem to have more faith in the Constitution and the Republic than Americans do these days. And I

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  I found it interesting, and I've now reached the point where I find it immensely troubling, because I feel like these guys probably know better than I do. You know, I, I, I look at the child, there's no way Trump's going to run for a third term. There's just no way. He's just saying, it's just Trump being Trump, and there's no chance of that. And, you know, some serious friends of mine who, who, you know, don't have Trump Derangement Syndrome, they're thoughtful people. And as much as people might think any or all of the three of us have that, I think we've demonstrated in, in our acknowledgement and recognition of the flaws of Biden, as for example, and, and a lot of the awful things that happened under his presidency. I don't have Trump Derangement System. I have, I, I agree with you. I think he's a terrible

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  human being. And I go back to a conversation I had in his first term with some friends of mine, two of whom were staunch Democrats, and two of whom were staunch Trumpers. And this was back in 2017, 2018, I guess. And we, we were sitting in Las Vegas and sitting having a coffee, and we had this conversation. And the only thing that I could get them to agree on, the only middle ground I could find, was at the time, saying to them, okay, look, we seem to be able to agree that Trump is perhaps the worst human being to ever occupy the White House, but can you say unequivocally, he's the worst president? And even the Democrats

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  were forced to say, no, he hasn't been the worst president. So there's this, I think you have to be deeply skeptical of both sides. You have to look for the warts and the flaws on both sides. And depending on who's in power at any given time, you are going to be accused of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, or you're going to be accused of having Biden Derangement Syndrome. It just depends where you're on the cycle. But looking at it from the outside, the thing that really troubles me, as I said, is how many of my thoughtful American friends are incredibly worried about what happens from here, and how this could go if Trump does this, if Trump does Y. And they don't say that from a, I just can't stand

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Trump, I can't believe if he does this. It's what happens to America if the president Tries to run for a third term. It happens to be Trump. And I find that deeply, deeply concerning.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Well, let me give you a, let me be a little more optimistic. I like you. I love America. I really do. And I grew up with this affection for it and I haven't been able to shake it. I do think a lot of the support Trump still has is because Americans, many Americans, support his immigration policies. Biden was so reckless on immigration. This was such an avoidable problem. But he was so terribly reckless and so he took unconstitutional actions and showed events no concern at all for what was happening at the border. And you can't have healthy immigration unless you have some kind of border control. And we need both. So, you know, Trump is going to find support on immigration and will continue to, even though he's abusing it.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  But with these massive deportations, I think some of that's going to change. But beyond immigration, running for a third term, I think that there would be a considerable drop off in the support for Trump. There are, let's say, 20 or 25% people who will support Trump no matter what. But above that, there are still persuadable people who were Americans, who love America, who can see potential damage a lot of this stuff does. So I just remain hopeful there's a residual citizen virtue that we have. I hope so, though. So our education system certainly doesn't teach civic virtue anymore, or history, or so many things it should.

• 1:14:01Demetri Kofinas?

  Do you have an opinion on J D Vance and whether he would be a better option for the country? And especially for conservatives?

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  My fellow law school, Yale Law School graduate, J D Vance. I have an opinion of him. It's not a very favorable opinion. He's been willing to throw his principles overboard as rapidly as so many others. He's a lot smarter than Trump. He's hence a lot more dangerous than Trump. He's deeply ambitious.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  His tweet the other day about trusting Donald Trump as the leader of the movement was so weird. He is a manipulator and he's trying to line up with the Silicon Valley bros who are now starting to split from Trump. I don't think, and maybe I'm just wildly optimistic, I don't think J D Vance could ever be elected. I think without Trump, Trumpism is, it dies quickly. And I think J D Vance is too poisonous of a person to get elected. And I think the way he behaved in front of Zelensky in that dismal, abominable White House spectacle, if we see Ukraine run into problems and it falls, thanks to the US withdrawing

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  support, I think that's going to be very damaging to Trump and to Vance. And if on the other hand, Ukraine hangs on, I think that's also damaging to Vance.

• 1:15:25Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, that was quite a display. I mean, it's also telling that Trump hasn't been able to end the war. Turns out it's a bit more complicated than what his supporters claimed it was. But it was also remarkable. I mean, in generally speaking, the hate for Zelensky is remarkable. It's one thing to feel strongly that Ukraine's interests aren't in America's interests and, you know, we need to change our policy because it's not in our interest. But this hate for a guy whose country was invaded is rather remarkable. And to your point, J D Vance had a problem with Zelensky coming in his camo, not wearing a suit, but he had no problem with Elon Musk in a T-shirt and a cowboy hat, you know, strolling around.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Or that other clown, what's his name, that musician, Rock, Kid Rock?

• 1:16:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Kid Rock or Kanye West coming in with like, whatever. I don't even remember how Kanye West came in with his, you know, multipolar disorder.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  It's personal about Zelensky because during his first term, he asked Zelensky to go after Biden and, or he just, just fake it. And then Zelensky refused. So for Trump, you know, you're disloyal. That's it. You know?

• 1:16:25Demetri Kofinas?

  This thing you said was a super interesting and I'm, I wonder if Grant feels the same way. I hadn't quite thought of it. And I'd love for you to sort of elaborate a bit. You said, Trumpism without Trump will not survive.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:37Demetri Kofinas?

  Why do you feel that way?

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  There are no principles that are associated with it. It's strictly a cult of personality. It's built only on loyalty. I don't know of any such cult that has ever endured without a cult leader that has those characteristics. So the coalition supporting Trump is very strange, right? I mean, you can have strange coalitions. FDR had a strange coalition. He had urban blacks. He had the Ku Klux Klan. He had the labor unions. He had Jewish Marxists. That's a hell of a coalition. Trump has got the white nationalists. He's got the aggrieved farmers. He's got the Silicon Valley bros. And there's not a lot of glue holding those coalitions together in terms of their ideas about where we go.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  And so I don't see, already, I think the fact that Trump is splitting off and that J.D. Vance is saying these weird things that are all kind of aligning him more with the Silicon Valley people. It's an inherently unstable coalition and it can't be held together with Trump gone. That's just my view. I may be terribly mistaken, but... What would you say, what are the principles of Trumpism, besides loyalty?

• 1:17:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Does that mean you think Democrats will have an edge in 2028?

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  If they would stop being so stupid, yeah. My father was a Democrat, by the way, and he was elected first selectman in a town that was three to one Republican because he was a great guy. And I would like to see the Democrats put somebody in, in the middle. But if you think that Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Cortez...

• 1:18:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Or the new guy running for mayor in New York who wants to put rent controls back on.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Yeah, some sanity is required here. And if they would just come to their senses. But, you know, I used to be on Twitter a lot. Now I'm on Blue Sky, not nearly as much. And there, it's so weird. I have, my followers are now Democrats instead of Republicans. And all the conservatives who used to follow me, some of them drop off when I say something bad about Trump. But some of these prescriptions for success for the Democrats on Blue Sky are so crazy and so out of touch. You know, most of the world doesn't live on Twitter or doesn't live on social media, fortunately. And, you know, at Twitter, they think, once they hash it out and Cat Turd says it's okay, then they've got it solved. And at Blue Sky, they think, once they have their prescriptions down for what the Democrats ought to do

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  and embrace more federalized education and labor unions and this and that. Unfortunate, I hope, but I need, we need the Democratic Party to get healthy because the Republican Party is so desperately unhealthy. We've got to have healthy political parties.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lawrence, we touched on this earlier, but I certainly want to make sure we talk about this before we close this. And that's, you've talked about the tightrope being walked by courts. We've seen pressure being put on judges from all the three main protagonists that we've talked about, Trump, Musk, J D Vance. And you've spent a lot of time writing about the Supreme Court. And so I'd be genuinely curious to get your just broad take, and then Dmitry and I can dive in on that tightrope, the problems being faced by the Supreme Court, and where they stand in this deeply politicized

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  environment.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Well, it's really important to have the institution of the judiciary respected. It's vital to the rule of law. It's vital to the prosperity of our country. The attacks on the court are very disconcerting, but they didn't start with Vance and Trump and Musk, did they? They started with, they've been going on a long time. But during the Biden administration, Biden would attack the court viciously. Sheldon Whitehouse attacked the court viciously. Chuck Schumer attacked the court viciously and even had to kind of walk back some of his threatening remarks. There was an assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh. Why? Because the justices were accused of being partisans. Okay, they're

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  not. They all have different judicial philosophies. And I respect them. I respect the ones on the left. I think that Sotomayor and Kagan and Katanji Jackson are very thoughtful people, and I respect the ones on the right. I don't always agree with them. But they're all coming from an honest place in terms of their opinions. And a guy who used to teach at Yale, Alexander Bickel, wrote a book called The Least Dangerous Branch about the courts. That's a quote from The Federalist Papers by Hamilton. And it is the least dangerous branch. They, they rely on the executive to enforce their orders. They have no power of the purse like Congress does. They just call balls and strikes and hope that the batter will not turn around and swing the bat at them.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  And the court has to be very careful about how it walks through where we are. And every single decision that comes out gets criticized, even when they shouldn't be. And they have to kind of keep their powder dry. I think, I think they've done a really good job. In the Wilcox case, for example, a recent order, it's not an adjudication, but it's on their emergency docket where Trump had fired some people in two federal agencies and it got to the court, could he do this? Well, they undid an injunction. They said, there's harm to the federal government if we don't allow Trump to fire these people. Go back and adjudicate this, but we're taking that injunction off the table while it's adjudicated.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  And they basically, in doing so, signaled that they're going to overrule or sharply limit a longstanding case called Humphries Executive about these executive agencies. That's a whole nother discussion we could have and a very interesting discussion. But it happens to be one where I think Trump is right. And where if you want to really reform the way executive agencies are handled, Congress should take back a lot of its power and have legislative agencies to which it appoints experts. So that these executive agencies, which are given so much delegation of discretion, stop undermining the president. And the president should have the power to fire people in the executive agencies, but those executive agencies should have far less power to start with.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  The legislature should take back that power. Congress should start saying in statutes what it means. Why do you leave it up to the EPA to decide whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant or not? That's crazy. That's a failure of Congress. But in that Wilcox decision, the court put some language in there, basically saying, we're not going to let you fire Jerome Powell, Donald Trump. He'd been threatening to do that. And they, and it's very clever how they did that. And I think that takes off the table, Trump's idea that he can go fire Jerome Powell. In an earlier decision, that Abrego Garcia decision, they had said, They basically ruled for Trump on the surface, but underneath they said these people have the right of habeas corpus. So Trump had wanted to not use the immigration courts.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Now he's stuck using federal courts, which are much slower than immigration courts because that's where habeas corpus petitions get used. So they have to do things that are clever, I think, and careful because they have to realize that without the executive to even protect them with the marshal service, it's dicey. You've already had Trump calling for impeachment of judges. He's attacked the Federalist Society. Crazy stuff. J.D. Vance, the same. Elon Musk jumping in. And all these people on Twitter picked this up. Those are dangerous things, too. I'm not sure I answered your question in any coherent way, but I fear for the judiciary, but I see John Roberts as a chief justice who's concerned about the institution and

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  who is going to be careful to try to protect and preserve the institution of the judiciary. And I see most federal court judges appointed by Democrats or Republicans as truly decent people trying to do their jobs in the right way. Of course, there are a few exceptions, but far and few. And it's the greatest thing about America right now, about American government.

• 1:24:24Demetri Kofinas?

  So throughout my lifetime, I was born in 1981, the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency. Throughout my lifetime, there has largely been a foreign policy consensus in America. Of course, every president, especially two-term presidents, have the ability to shape the direction of U.S. foreign policy or change it on the margin. Reagan, of course, did that, epitomized in some sense in his Star Wars initiative and his desire to confront the Soviet Union. George H.W. Bush, even though he was a one-term president and then subsequently Clinton, were instrumental in formulating a more unipolar policy of American sort of leadership across the world. Of course, Bush did that catastrophically in his own way, Bush, George W. Bush.

• 1:25:06Demetri Kofinas?

  However, there has always been a kind of baseline support by the American people for a bipartisan consensus on American foreign policy. And foreign policy was largely seen, again, throughout my lifetime as something that didn't particularly concern the demos. It didn't particularly concern the electorate. It was something that was managed between the elites. What concerns me about where we are today is that that consensus and that sort of set of assumptions no longer holds. And I worry about the ability to exercise foreign policy in that context. And I don't know if I would, while I had, if you had asked me, let's say, five years ago, did I believe the US needed to push its advantage in the

• 1:25:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Pacific and try its best to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, even if that meant there was a small chance that the US would have to actually go to war with China, I might have said, sure. I don't feel that way anymore because I'm afraid that we're not in a position to actually deter the Chinese in the Pacific, or we're not in a position to sort of maintain the boundaries of American hegemony. And do you think about that at all? In other words, do you think about the danger of this political moment, one that we've seen across Latin America and in other countries, that the danger is that this is happening in America, America, which is a global empire, which is the largest military power in the world, and that the mismatch between our politics and our, the sort of legacy infrastructure

• 1:26:33Demetri Kofinas?

  of our empire could lead to a catastrophic war?

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Well, yes, of course, I worry about that a great deal. The thing that gives me a tiny bit of hope is Trump has not pulled the American people along in his embrace of Putin. I think most Americans, so the public opinion polls suggest, still, and to a significant margin, feel like the Russians are the aggressors, that Putin is the aggressor, and that the Ukrainians are the victims. And I think there would be a big political cost to Trump if Ukraine falls. But what he's done is just like nothing else that's ever happened in my lifetime in foreign policy. Yes, all these things that you just mentioned with our president have been changes. And the United States has made errors. I mean,

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  George Bush is a good example of what you could argue are real errors in our execution. But the underlying philosophy was always there, that we were, in some sense, standing up for the victim of aggression, that we recognized that some people were dangerous to world order, and that we were going to do our best to act as the world's policeman, a role that we have assumed since World War II, whether we like it or not. And it's resulted in 80 years of relative... Relative stability. So it is scary. And would China be deterred? You know, J D Vance came out with that statement the other day. China better not try to take Taiwan. That's above my pay grade to know how all that's going to shake out. And what cost China would incur.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  And we can be thankful that China has its own internal problems, though those may provoke it to do something it wouldn't do otherwise. I don't know. It's I agree with you, Dimitri. We are in an absolutely new place relative to where we've been. And how it all is going to play out, I don't know, but it feels dangerous.

• 1:28:21Demetri Kofinas?

  Let me just clarify that real quick. While the bombing of Pearl Harbor united the country. I think there's a difference between being attacked. When you're divided and trying to maintain the boundaries of your empire. When you're disunited. And I think that I think that we're too disunited to exercise that level of nuance in our foreign policy. And I worry if if something were to happen, whether or not it wouldn't boomerang back and weaken our democracy even further.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Lawrence, I know you're keen to talk about what Charles had to say. And I think ultimately, when we strip away the politics, when we strip away the personalities. As you touched on earlier in the conversation, we get to that place. We get to that place of mathematics. And we can argue all we want about Trump or Biden or Musk or any of that stuff. You can't argue about mathematics. You know, there are some principles at least, thank God, that are inviolable. And much of them are contained in the laws of mathematics. So you know what Charles had to say? I think it was a it was a stark warning to a lot of people because there is always this idea that such and such will be fixed.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  We just need to get consensus to do it. The reality is, I think, and I, you know, I asked Charles about this and he seemed to agree with me. It's that nobody is going to make these decisions. This car has to crash into the wall. It doesn't stop. It doesn't. No one's going to pull the handbrake on. They will pay lip service to it. But ultimately, everybody assumes that the car's going to hit the wall when it's somebody else's watch. And so they kind of keep the game going. Where do you come at this issue of the debt? I know you understand its importance, but how do you come at it? Do you come at its insolvability? Do you believe that we are still have an ever closing window where we can do something about it?

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Do you think anyone will do anything about it? How do you kind of reconcile it all?

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I would encourage people listening to this to go back and listen to an interview Dimitri did with Calameres back on Hidden Forces on financial repression, if I recall correctly. And then to go listen to the podcast you two did with him a few weeks ago. Every time you have Calameres on, I listen two or three times because it's so important. And he is so astute, I think. And, you know, I agree with him that we are headed to a debt spiral. The question is, and the politicians themselves, who have done nothing about it for years and years, even though people have been warning about it. By the way, Dimitri, George Bush, who I know you dislike in many ways, tried to reform

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  social security and got pilloried for it back in his presidency. How much better would it have been to do it then than now? But of course, it didn't happen. But there's two possibilities. We crash into the wall, as Grant said, or the markets first raise such an alarm that politicians have to suddenly become alive to this problem, which happens first.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Aren't they the same thing though, Lawrence? Isn't the markets becoming that belligerent? Isn't that the crash into the wall? Because when I think about what that crash means, it means exactly that. You lose control of bond markets. You lose control of interest rates. That, to me, is the crash.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  Charles Calameres has done the, sat down and sketched it all out, different scenarios. I haven't. I don't know which one happens. I don't know if it's irrevocable. Okay?

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  In something I wrote recently at Substack, I cited work by Jessica Riedel, who used to be Brian Riedel. And she is brilliant and has a proposal for restructuring our entitlement programs that's sensible and it's not. It certainly would be painful for some people, but much less painful than what's coming if we don't do it. And I'm hopeful that somehow something like that can get adopted with enough political support. What's distressing right now is the Democrats are all criticizing the budget, but none of them wants to say, we need to reform entitlements. They're all screaming bloody murder about the relatively minor Medicaid reforms. Well, if you can't reform Medicaid in minor ways, how are you going to do anything with Social

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  Security or Medicare? Something's got to change. I don't want to be pessimistic because the alternative is just too terrible to contemplate, is it? And what happens when we crash into the wall, Grant and Dimitri? Do we default on our debt? Do we declare a jubilee? Does Donald Trump say, we owe nothing anymore? I declare bankruptcy? What happens? I don't know.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, who knows? But it's interesting what you said there.

• 1:33:06Demetri Kofinas?

  That would be quite, that would be very poetic, wouldn't it? If he presided over the bankruptcy of the United States.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  That's who we elected.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  But your point is an interesting one, Lawrence, this idea that you don't want to be pessimistic. And that's so core, I think, to the human experience. And it's so core to how I think people look at the world today, whether it be politics, or whether it be the debt, whatever it may be, there is this rider, this, I don't want to be pessimistic. So I'm not going to think about these things. And I have faith that someone will figure this out. And I have, you know, I think, I don't think of it as pessimism. I think of it as realism. For me, you know, I look at this and I, if I could point to an example where someone did do the hard thing and did do the right thing and did step in and take

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  the brickbets on a financial basis, we've seen it on a personal basis, you know, Gerald Ford's the great example in pardoning Nixon, right? I mean, he knew right there and then that his presidency, his legacy was gone forever. Day one in office, he's finished as a president. Everyone's going to look back at him for that. And he took that hit for the country. When he talked about that with Bob Woodward, when he was doing his autobiography, he explained that to him and completely changed the way Woodward felt about him. You know, he was cursing the guy when he pardoned Nixon after what he and Bernstein did with the Watergate investigations. But this idea.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  That anybody is going to step up and say, I choose to make myself the most unpopular person in American history by trashing social security and reneging on all the promises that every other president has made to you over the years. I don't think it's pessimistic. I think it's realistic to say, I just don't see a chance in hell of that happening. And I am, I will be delighted to be proven to be overly pessimistic. Nothing will give me greater pleasure.

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  Well, there's a way to do it. That, I mean, you have to bring the public along. You have to say, look, we are guilty, the Democrats and the Republicans, we're all guilty of policies that have put us in a terrible place, but we got to acknowledge where we are. Your children will have nothing, nothing, unless we reform this. You people who are in your 40s, even your 50s, you'll have nothing unless we reform this. So we've got to do it now. And, you know, people can pivot when the necessity happens, even politicians. So I continue to believe, you know, better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. And we just have to keep talking about it and writing about it and urging our elected officials to get real about it.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  But there may be a bit of second mouse getting the cheese with that. You know, the first guy over that breach who says that is getting run out of town on a rail, right? But at least you bring it to the public consciousness and you realize that it is a conversation that has to be had. And the sooner that happens, the better.

• 1:35:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Is it possible that Musk with Doge was the beginning of that process, Grant? And of all people, I mean, I can't think of a better one than Elon to take abuse from the public in order to get a, an issue, you know, brought before the public to think about.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  You know, there's a great question. It's a great question. And if I try to look at it in an even handed way, I think the targeting of fraud and abuse with government spending in a budget the size of the US is an absolute imperative if you're going to do anything to address the problems. But then I come back to the choice of agent. Yes, you make a valid point about someone taking the brick bats. But I also go back to the fact that the whole thing was named Doge, right? It's a wink and a nudge to the Bitcoin bros, right? It's something uniquely performative about the whole thing, right? Both in its conception, in its construction, in the man chosen to spearhead it. And, you know, say what you like about Ramaswamy.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  He's a much more savvy political operator than Elon and he stepped away from that thing just as fast as he damn well could. Having put himself in the spotlight with it, he shuffled offstage left and left Elon to it. So could it be the start? Yes, it absolutely could. But could it have been conceived any worse? I don't think so. It was never serious to me, you know, $2 trillion. Lawrence, you and I knew as soon as Elon said that $2 trillion number, we knew what was going on, right? We just knew. It was one of those pie in the sky numbers that he pulls out and it, it doesn't matter for Tesla because there's no accountability beyond him. But it matters when you say something like that about the government and about, because you're going to get blowback and hey, presto, we saw what happened.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  So, you know, I was applauding the idea of Doge, even though I wish it, you know, been slightly more serious in its institution, but I didn't really expect anything to come of it above what did become of it sadly. It was more confirmation to me that the problem is intractable and the choice of person to lead it was the wrong one.

• 1:37:53Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, I'm glad, I have to say though, I'm, and I texted Grant, it might've been around the time that we booked you, Lawrence. And this was after we had gotten a lot of positive, we've been getting a lot of positive emails from people and the most recent batch came with Keller Merish's episode because Charles brought up his own feelings, which I think aligned well with our own about the state of moral decline in America and sort of what, what's needed to. Bring us out of these dull drums. And I'm hopeful that conversations like ours and this effort that we're doing, and maybe this is an inflated sense of self-importance for us lowly podcasters, but I do feel like there's an important role that's been abdicated by the media. Because right now, so many of the storytellers, even someone like Joe Rogan,

• 1:38:38Demetri Kofinas?

  who I used to enjoy watching, and I thought his episodes were sort of nice everyman podcasts and conversations about interesting, different topics. I feel like so many of these people have just become captured, ideologically captured and morally compromised in their own particular ways. And I'm hopeful that maybe more and more voices will seek to speak to the nuance and have these conversations. And out of that, maybe something positive can emerge, or at the very least, it can be a positive force that, in some cumulative mass, can begin to move us in a better direction.

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  Good hope. By the way, I mean, Joe Rogan especially, not even Joe Rogan, but Charles Colomiris said, "I voted for Trump." And I think we have to respect that. We didn't have good choices. We have to not demonize everybody who supports Trump. We have to understand that the Democrats put up a candidate who really was not much of an alternative, and everybody should stop demonizing their opponents so much.

• 1:39:36Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, and also, the assumption that in order to speak ill of Trump, or to have a negative view of Trump's policies, that you have to hate Trump, or oppose Trump, or that you have to have voted for his opponent, isn't true.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:47Demetri Kofinas?

  I think some of the best criticisms of Trump have come from people within his own camp.

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I think the most cogent criticisms come from the conservatives.

• 1:39:54Demetri Kofinas?

  People on the right of center, yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  Well, guys, thank you. Thank you very much. It's been really interesting, and we'll see where it all goes.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Nerds, we're very grateful. We did this at short notice, and you've been a terrific guest. And sorry we kept you as long as we did, but this conversation, Dmitry and I started it, I don't know how many hours ago, and we're just scratching the surface yet. This is going to go on for a long time. And I'm grateful to you, and I'm grateful to everyone that's willing to share their thoughts with us, because... Making sense of all this is really, I guess, the first step to trying to figure out what happens next. So, thank you.

• 1:40:27Demetri Kofinas?

  And I also want to mention, you know, just like with Charles, I think you're also a good role model for people, Lawrence. You know, I've known you, Grant has known you longer than I have, and I don't know if it was Grant that introduced us, but I've followed your career for the last however many years, and I've seen the choices that you've made, including, I mentioned, the decision to help support legally folks who have been attacked or maligned by Elon. So I think we need more people like you, and I hope that, again, I hope that conversations like these also elevate the kinds of voices and the kinds of personalities and characters that I think we need to see more of. Hopefully, this is something that will be more celebrated in the future, rather than some of these other types of personalities that we seem to revere so much these days.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  As I get older, there are fewer things I'm certain about, so let's all continue talking.

• 1:41:15Demetri Kofinas?

  Amen.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks, Lawrence. Well, mate, I think we said at the top of the show that some people might get offended. What I probably should have said is that everybody at some point will get offended. I didn't, I didn't quite encompass it as much as I should, but I thought that was absolutely terrific. I really enjoyed that.

• 1:41:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, our, our goal here is to be equal opportunity offenders, so.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Demetri Kofinas?

  We think it's actually, yeah, it's actually, it's an honor to offend all of you. So Lawrence is great. I mean, he's at the very top of people I've met over the years and made friends with. I mean, people like you, Jim Grant, who I've known forever, Lawrence, Lawrence is up there in terms of having a moral backbone, having integrity, and being a man of his word. And I think, you know, I think there's something to be said about, and I'm just echoing what I said earlier, there's something to be said about not only the substance of conversations, but also the character of the people we speak to. And character matters, and it matters now more than ever, in my opinion.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Amen. I could not have said that any better. Well, thanks to Lawrence for joining us. You can find his writing at montanaskectic.substack.com and I would suggest you do that. His writing is always thoughtful, it's provocative, but it is grounded in a deep appreciation for many things, whether they be financial or judicial. That skeptic with a K, by the way, in case there are any people that spell it with a C out there. He doesn't write so much on Twitter anymore, but I think he is over at Blue Sky, but you'll have to find that. I think he's also on Threads. I think he's all over the place. But the main place to go is Substack and if you go to montanaskectic.substack.com, you'll be able to find all these other places from there. Dmitry, thank you, my friend. That was another fascinating conversation

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  and I've no idea where we go from here, but I know it's going to be equally interesting.

• 1:42:59Demetri Kofinas?

  My pleasure. It's always fun doing this. I just really love this venture with you, man. We've gotten such great feedback from people and it's also such a joy to connect with you every week or so and do these together. So, thank you.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  All right, my friend. We will do this again soon. I will see you then and take care of yourself in the meantime.

• 1:43:14Demetri Kofinas?

  You too.