![[28-Maxwell_Meyer.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 28: Maxwell Meyer - Starships & Road Trips is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6b0RzvIo1I7nk1kySZQ5jh?si=7c28b8185a0c4f16), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/28-maxwell-meyer-starships-road-trips/id1780282402?i=1000724674404), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/W0K6fG6Yjhg), and all podcast platforms.* <iframe data-testid="embed-iframe" style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/6b0RzvIo1I7nk1kySZQ5jh?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/28-maxwell-meyer-starships-road-trips/id1780282402?i=1000724674404"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/W0K6fG6Yjhg?si=jqtnLDJfZlROeD5i" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Maxwell Meyer ([X](https://x.com/mualphaxi), [Newsletter](https://www.maxmeyer.blog/)) is the founder and editor of [Arena Magazine](https://arenamag.com/), an "American Propaganda" print and digital publication focused on technology, capitalism, and civilizational progress. Max also works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and is the proprietor of an Iowan farm, Henry Hills. He was previously the editor of the Stanford Review. Our conversation is about ideas Max is most interested in across storytelling and media, American values, technology and progress, capitalism, writing and craft, and deep love for his country. We start with critique, the media's tendency toward cliché, and defending the new while building trust with readers. Then we talk about American ideology: its radical founding myth, collective enterprise, and a nation of movers. Max makes a case that national character ought to be lived and formed bottom-up, and repeatedly argues that cultural pendulum swings are as old as time and we need not overreact to the swings of the day. He describes tech's brief abandonment of the rest of America and talks through how we might export Silicon Valley's outcome-oriented culture to government and other industries. Max argues that the foundation of capitalism is simple: "you can't kill your counterparty." We of course discuss Arena, magazines, writing, editing, and his ambitions there too. Above all else, Max makes the case for America, big and small: the beautiful, always-changing, rarely-agreeing, perpetually striving amalgamation of souls that stretch from sea to shining sea. You can subscribe to Arena here: https://arenamag.com/subscribe Full transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/maxwell-meyer # Timestamps - 00:00: Intro - 01:14: Elon, The Media, Cliché, American Collectivism, and Cultural Pendulum Swings - 09:07: Media, Criticism, and Defending the New - 17:49: American Ideology: The Declaration, Communal Enterprise, Americans as Movers - 28:20: Patriotism - 33:36: Learning from the Rest of the World - 40:27: A Case for Progress - 49:38: Tech's Separation from American Culture in the 2010s - 58:44: Tech Accountability and Engaging Normal People on their Premises - 1:15:23: Silicon Valley's Tiny Nations and Alex Karp's "The Technological Republic" - 1:21:19: The Frontier and the Core: Exporting SV Engineering Culture to Government - 1:28:46: Principled and Unpredictable Thinkers - 1:34:06: The Case for Capitalism - 1:43:07: Defending Critiques of Capitalism and Concerns of Concentration of Power - 1:49:37: Arena, Good Writing and Editing, Magazines as a Medium, Durability, Influences - 2:02:19: Big and Small America - 2:06:16: Joe Lonsdale - 2:06:50: Upholding Abundance - 2:11:39: Cooking and Bringing People Together - 2:12:38: The Back Half of the Brain - 2:14:02: The Places Between Places # Links & References - [The Man-Made Miracle of SpaceX - Max Meyer](https://www.thefp.com/p/man-made-miracle-spacex-starship) - [Max Meyer Launched a Print Magazine in 2024. Here’s Why. (Ep. 245) - Infinite Loops Podcast with Jim O'Shaughnessy](https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/max-meyer-launched-a-print-magazine) - [Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910](https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm) - [Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly - The New York Times | October 9, 1903 ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly) - [Declaration of Independence: A Transcription](https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript) - [Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16619.Democracy_in_America) - [Homestead Act (1862)](https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/homestead-act) - [William Jennings Bryan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan) - [America against America - Wang Huning](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59926435-america-against-america) - [The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why](https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html) - [How United Became an Airline - Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-united-became-an-airline-flight-dress-code-first-class-jobs-boarding-crew-c9f74c37?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAg089ryfdZJGPuchy8eRATanomBW1jk7xWPnZUHN3hP-1QUe5-rYNdKvF5zG3M%3D&gaa_ts=68b6758a&gaa_sig=X1hE1DaOtBJgL-cg-xruwGJx5juqOZEnKHrD9gxP9vwDfIY40sk0wJNSAIZhbm7m_4Mb__jtLzMN5-SFD9XiIA%3D%3D) - [The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman](https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity) - [Playing With Guns (and Phones) - Nadia Asparouhova | Arena Magazine](https://arenamag.com/articles/playing-with-guns-and-phones) - [Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media (Ep. 209) | Conversations with Tyler](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-anxious-generation/) - [The Emerging Democratic Majority - John B. Judis](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/638511.The_Emerging_Democratic_Majority) - [A Techno-Republic, If You Can Keep It - Maxwell Meyer | The Republic](https://therepublicjournal.com/book-reviews/a-techno-republic-if-you-can-keep-it/) - [The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce - Tom Wolfe | Esquire](https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html) - [Brian Schimpf: Engineer at War - Maxwell Meyer | Arena Magazine](https://arenamag.com/articles/brian-schimpf-engineer-at-war) - [To Save America, Restore Our Frontier - Joe Lonsdale](https://blog.joelonsdale.com/p/to-save-america-restore-our-frontier) - [Pace Layers - Stewart Brand](https://longnow.org/ideas/pace-layers-journal-02024/) - [Palantir’s Alex Karp Talks About War, AI and America’s Future - Maureen Dowd | The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html) - [The Earthly Miracle of the Grocery Store - Maxwell Meyer | Arena Magazine](https://arenamag.com/articles/the-earthly-miracle-of-the-grocery-store) - [A More Perfect Mediocracy - Leo Leibovitz | First Things](https://firstthings.com/a-more-perfect-mediocracy/) - [Meditations On Moloch - Scott Alexander | Slate Star Codex](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) - [This is Water - David Foster Wallace](https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/) - [California Sublime \| Love Letters to America](https://llta.com/california-sublime/) - [The Magic Water of Hot Springs \| Love Letters to America](https://llta.com/the-magic-water-of-hot-springs/) - [Welcome to the MAGA Hamptons! - Max Meyer | The Free Press](https://www.thefp.com/p/welcome-to-the-maga-hamptons) - [Joe Lonsdale](https://x.com/JTLonsdale) - [The Green Counter-Revolution - Max Meyer](https://www.maxmeyer.blog/p/the-green-counter-revolution) - [How To Kill A Country - Samantha Power | The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/12/how-to-kill-a-country/302845/) - [I Bought an Iowa Farm at Age 22 After my Brother Died](https://www.thefp.com/p/i-bought-iowa-farm-at-age-22) - [Places Between Places \| Love Letters to America](https://llta.com/places-between-places/) # Transcript ## [00:01:14] Elon, The Media, Cliché, American Collectivism, and Cultural Pendulum Swings **Jackson:** Max Meyer, we're here. **Maxwell:** Thanks for having me. **Jackson:** I'm very excited to do this. We started talking as I walked in, and I wish we were recording. That's probably a good sign. **Maxwell:** That's always some of the good stuff. **Jackson:** so it goes. I'm going to open with something you wrote about SpaceX. It's a piece about the Starship launch. You say, "Here's a story my future grandchildren are going to hear from me more than once. I was on South Padre Island on April 20, 2023 when SpaceX launched its Starship for the very first time from Boca Chica Beach. It will be essential that they hear it from me though, because this is how it was reported by the press at the time: 'Was the SpaceX launch really a 'success'?' 'Elon Musk's Explosive Day: First SpaceX blew up a rocket, then Musk blew up Twitter's verification system.' 'Elon Musk wealth plunges $13 billion as drama unfolds across empire in the span of 24 hours, Tesla's earnings disappointed, SpaceX rocket imploded, Twitter purged legacy blue check marks.' 'It's no surprise SpaceX blows up its rockets in Texas.'" There are several more, but I won't read all of them. If I'm honest, I have been very critical of Elon in a lot of ways over the past few years, sometimes getting overly frustrated. I've called him childish, and I think he candidly can be childish. Then sometimes I see things, usually related to SpaceX, and it's a wake-up call of how fortunate I am to be alive at the same time as this person. Reading these types of criticisms, particularly about SpaceX, or just hearing some people talk about Elon can be mind-boggling just how much of a gap there is. I have a multipart question to kick us off. Why do you think it's so hard for us to hold multiple things at once about a controversial person or a person who does many things? I think that is especially the case if there's anything remotely political about that person. Is it just an innate need for heroes and villains, or is it something else? My main question is, can you even conceive of a world where we could have a collective American celebration on the order of something like the moon landing again? Or is that just a thing of the past? **Maxwell:** The best way to summarize it would be an addiction to cliche. Cliches are the easiest way to tell stories, so relying on things you've already said is very easy to do. In the case of the media reacting to Starship, that was the easiest cliche for them. They saw the rocket explode, same as everyone else did, and they reached for the previous story, which was Musk being erratic or personally offensive to them. They conflated those two things rather than go a layer deeper. As for the idea of national celebrations, I don't know the answer. We do have national celebrations and consensus areas still, but they might not be obvious to people in this highly polarized information sphere. It's the things outside of that sphere where there's a super-consensus in the rest of the population who are not paying attention to the elite media or what's happening on Twitter. That's the last place I would look for evidence of such a consensus. It would happen more in other types of areas. We've had ups and downs for 249 years: people coming together, people pulling apart, super-polarized times, very unpolarized times. George Herbert Walker Bush won 49 states and then lost the next time in a three-way race where the vote was closely divided between Clinton, Bush, and what's his name? **Jackson:** Perot? **Maxwell:** Perot. Things can change quite rapidly, and usually these alleged one-way trends turn out to not be true. **Jackson:** That's optimistic. **Maxwell:** It's neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It happens to be optimistic because in this instance, the alleged one-way trend is a negative one. I'll give a few other examples. The birth rate declined in the US up until 1946. Then the baby boom begins—this post-war surge. You've never seen anything like it. And now we've had another decline since the end of the baby boom. Could it be that there are these one-way trends that never change? Maybe. The evidence does not suggest that that's the case. To go back to the Apollo example, we had a very steep decline in the American space program from 1986 to 2016, basically? In this 30-year period, the 1986 Challenger explosion really marks the beginning of the end. This was a huge public humiliation for NASA and a catastrophe for the spirit of the program. You have these astronauts dying. Then, 30 years later in 2015, SpaceX first lands a rocket on a barge. I tend to think that there will still be a celebratory atmosphere if and when Americans are on Mars, but maybe not around Elon himself as it would have been had he not ventured into some of the areas that he did. **Jackson:** I suspect it would have been a different reaction if this had happened in 2017 with Elon Musk, even compared to 2023, which is probably telling. **Maxwell:** I don't think that they would have been quite as vindictive about it, trying to connect the Twitter purchase to the SpaceX explosion, which in hindsight is so— **Jackson:** I've been really critical of the Twitter stuff, and even then, it's so ridiculous. **Maxwell:** It was ridiculous. It was Elon's very bad, no good, horrible day. One thing that people forget is that from 2006 to 2008, during the first three attempted launches of the Falcon 1, all three of them blew up on the pad. The fourth one succeeded, and now they've launched hundreds and hundreds of Falcons. Today, the consecutive number of successful launches is over 300. They've launched over 300 in a row without a single incident. Imagine if the journalists in the financial press were the adjudicators of whether SpaceX should continue after three launches. Or imagine if a congressional committee were in charge of it. If NASA had three rockets explode on the pad, there would be a congressional hearing and a circus. **Jackson:** What was going on with NASA in the 70s? Why was it different? **Maxwell:** The 70s were the end of the Apollo period. **Jackson:** Maybe the late 60s would be a better question. **Maxwell:** They had a dazzling fusion of public support, which meant that no one was going to sit around in Washington and harangue them. They were incredibly daring. Some very high-risk things happened—think of Apollo 13. All of the Apollo missions were very high-risk, but there was a daring nature. Some things start to slow down. Congress is more questioning of what values we're getting out of here. As the Cold War starts to come to an end in the 80s, there's pressure to do other things. **Jackson:** Part of it was that there was novelty in it. Wow, we can finally do this crazy ambitious thing. It's so new. Some of that would have come up with SpaceX too, in the early days. The early SpaceX days had more novelty. Then when Elon became established, it was easier to pick him off. **Maxwell:** Something has to be real and established for you to be able to criticize it. Otherwise, you're sort of... **Jackson:** Picking on David. **Maxwell:** Yeah. You can only pick on Goliath. It's only once something is sufficiently real and sufficiently big that it becomes a proper object of criticism in the mind of the proverbial critic—the person who fancies him or herself a critic or an observer. ## [00:10:22] Media, Criticism, and Defending the New **Jackson:** I want to talk about criticism. The first issue of the magazine, Arena, is titled "In Defense of the New." Excuse me, it's... **Maxwell:** "The New Needs Friends." **Jackson:** "The New Needs Friends." Thank you. But it's ultimately a defense of the new. In a conversation with Jim O'Shaughnessy, you were talking about \*Ratatouille\*, and you said, "If you go back to my old columns in the Stanford Review, some of them were brutal. I was tearing apart these different activist movements and thinking of funny jokes. And that's a normal mode for someone who is talented at language, the wordcel. The challenging thing is to reverse that and write the stuff that's really fun to read and also sort of reverent to the principles that we hold dear." You've also framed Arena as "American propaganda." I'm curious why you spend so much time in media, and what your personal spectrum between propaganda and criticism looks like in the Arena context. **Maxwell:** Our point about criticism is really a point about trust. To use the SpaceX example, a lot of the journalists writing headlines that day thought their witty criticisms were more valuable than the exploding rocket. My firm principle is that the exploding rocket is a thousand times more valuable than one of those negative headlines could ever be. That's how we establish trust. American propaganda is the mission; it's not a process or a rule. It's the idea that there are some things so fundamental that we take them for granted. We're on America's side. We're excited about the country. That is the primary thing missing from the media landscape. The reason to do it in a way that emphasizes trust is that it doesn't need to be a low-quality, polarized rag--which is certainly an opportunity, maybe a very profitable one. That is a temptation people should resist in order to create better things. **Jackson:** On that note of trust, there is a difference between a puff piece and something that is high-trust, high-credibility, positive, and optimistic. You often toe that line in Arena. I'm curious how you think about it. Can we go too far in our praise? Is that a dilemma? **Maxwell:** It's very important to avoid cliche, which is both a negative and a positive phenomenon. The sarcastic, witty criticisms were an example of negative cliche. There is also positive cliche, exemplified by the epic \*Forbes\* cover with Elizabeth Holmes holding the vial of blood, where they let her dress up in the black turtleneck like Steve Jobs. That was another symptom of this addiction to cliche—the idea that she had to be Steve Jobs. **Jackson:** It's not about the new. It's about taking this new thing and saying it's credible, worthwhile, or meaningful because it resembles an older thing that we already valorize. **Maxwell:** Yes, and that is a cliché in a phrase: unable to describe things as they are. First principles. Marcus Aurelius: Look at the thing. What is the thing in itself? Tell us what it is. The fifth-grade example is "show, don't tell." People are suspicious of declarations, where as a writer, if you're doing something really well, can get to the thesis and the argument just by describing it. One of our very important rules is that it is sufficient to describe the work of entrepreneurs. You don't have to editorialize on it in order to make the reader understand why we think that something is important. The thesis should speak for itself. This is also intended to avoid any egg on our faces from having overly praised certain behaviors or characters. If you're grounded in just discussing the work and the missions, then that would not happen naturally. On the other hand, it's not a concern if companies doing good work that we cover go out of business. We're not putting money into these businesses. We're not investors, we're not fiduciaries. It must be said that one of the unique qualities about America that we're interested in defending is this high-risk, high-reward mindset. In Silicon Valley, there is an especially high tolerance of risk. It may be the only place in the world where people fail, where capital investments go to zero, and then they mount these big comebacks and the capital allocators in the area still believe in them. Where a journalist may ask if we're worried about speaking positively about businesses, the answer is no—unless we're lying. What we hate to see is this cheerleading for things to fail or for things to not work. That just isn't part of the American spirit, although it has been a part of the American discussion. There has always been this element. Teddy Roosevelt is the one who advised us to remember who really gets the credit. It will surprise no one that we get the name Arena from the Roosevelt speech. **Jackson:** It is funny thinking about the Elon example. In some sense, there's nothing more American than launching the rocket, and there's also nothing more American than the people whining about it. **Maxwell:** There was a great tweet the other week that I wish I had tweeted myself, which was, “America is an aerospace republic.” Maybe that really is the thing that totally changed and defines modern America. Compared to pre-1903, America is defined by the Wright brothers' flight, because then we're these innovators: the moon, the first flight, landing rockets, going to Mars, supersonics, atomic bombs. **Jackson:** And it was an American writer who, two weeks before the Wright brothers, wrote that it would take one million to ten million years. **Maxwell:** It wasn't any writer; it was in the \*New York Times\*. It was six weeks before the flight. They estimated that it would be one to ten million years. They were writing about a gentleman, a professor who was working on attempts at a flying machine in Virginia, who would eventually be the head of the Smithsonian Institution. The description that they gave was "plunk." They were making fun of the flying machine crashing in the river, and then literally six weeks later, the flight happened. There's a through-line from those \*New York Times\* critics to the witty headline writers today. The day of the SpaceX launch, they delayed the launch until the morning of 4/20. **Jackson:** Elon is distinctly himself. **Maxwell:** The problem is not that I think there is something extremely immoral about it. You have to have skepticism and criticism in any information landscape. The problem was that they were so biased, so naive, and so wrong that if you had paid any attention to them, you would be misinformed about the facts in a way that was totally unnecessary. There are biased media outlets where you can get an accurate reading of the facts. There are unbiased media areas where you can get a good reading of the facts. Being aware of what is fundamentally true is much more important than the relative bias of the institution that you're getting the information from. **Jackson:** At least it's nice to know that we're dealing with the same things they were dealing with 100 years ago or more. **Maxwell:** Everything has a season. ## [00:19:04] American Ideology: The Declaration, Communal Enterprise, Americans as Movers **Jackson:** I'd like to talk a bit about American ideology, which has a lot of different parts. We'll start with an idea that I'm keen towards, that what you believe about America can be defined by the myths you believe about America. I'd be curious for you to express the core American myths that you believe in. **Maxwell:** I would use the word myth as things that are stories, and I don't consider a myth to be an untrue story. They are complicated, but they are the truths that we share. I don't think there's anything better than the words written in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. While that has come under scrutiny as a result of the details around the edges, it misses the point that American society, culture, and government has been constantly reorienting itself around it. In this respect, it's not useful to point out the times when it wasn't true. That's what makes the myth true. That's what makes the story important. **Jackson:** Tested in some sense. **Maxwell:** Every exception proves the rule. There are all sorts of other elements of the American ideology that are unique, but that one is right there at the beginning. Part of the reason I associate with that one so fervently—and why all of the criticism that it wasn't true or that we didn't live up to it is so half-baked—is that nothing like that had ever existed. No government had ever written those things down. No government had ever declared itself based on those principles. It was such a rebellion against everything previously. Part of why excessive criticism is a lazy intellectual mode is the question: what was the great system before then? **Jackson:** It's like capitalism is the worst thing ever, but it's the best of the ones we invented. **Maxwell:** Frankly, the far-left answer nowadays is to look at hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous societies of the Americas and suggest that there was something more liberal, in a small-l liberal sense, more freedom-loving, or more American than the Declaration. These are revisionist lies. I'm more than willing to stand by the myth instead of accepting the revisionism and the political washing. **Jackson:** Alexis de Tocqueville--? **Maxwell:** De Tocqueville. **Jackson:** Thank you. You've referenced him many times. What is so inspiring about him and his thinking? **Maxwell:** Tocqueville is a French nobleman who visits the United States in the 1810s. This is in the first 30 years of the Republic. The Constitution is ratified in 1787, and he visits in 1813 while in New England. What Tocqueville finds is that Americans are obsessed with communal enterprises and participating in local governments and councils. In New England especially, which at that time was the most politically mature of the American states, villages were densely packed and had existed for hundreds of years. Massachusetts always had this legislative tradition with a big house of burgesses. He finds that Americans love enterprise and working together toward goals. They were much more willing to organize small polities, enterprises, or organizations between equal citizens than other groups he had seen, where rich and poor would work together or discuss things in a council. This goes back to "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." They believed it. It was not a constant professing of the dogma. They didn't have to say it out loud; they were honeybees building a hive. As a foreign observer, Tocqueville is one of the first people to describe this in a third-person sense—to see the Americans and ask, "What is the American? Who are the Americans?" His description of \*Democracy in America\*—that's the name of the book—is the first and greatest one. **Jackson:** Wow, that's really cool. I'm eager to look into that more. You have a line: "Americans are movers." There are so many ways to interpret this. One phrase from you is "seeking some kind of technological or elective edge," this ties to new frontiers, the highway system, and immigrants. I'm curious how that frame of "movers" has shaped your view of America and Americans. **Maxwell:** I love explicating this point. The people who built America and populated it for centuries afterward are all descended from people who left one place for another within the memory of 10 generations—sometimes more like 15 or 20. I don't know who the oldest stock in America is; it might be getting up toward 20 generations. Everyone left for somewhere. America is a younger society than most places in Europe or Asia. Japan and China have thousands of years of continuity. That's the spiritual point: everyone in America left somewhere for somewhere else. That defined the waves of immigrants who arrived—the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Jews. The original settlers in New England, the Pilgrims, were fleeing religious oppression in the United Kingdom. The practical observation is that Americans literally move around more than other people. This is a proven sociological phenomenon. Americans tend to move away further from where they were born compared to other countries. They're more likely to move in any given year, buy a new house, or go somewhere else. Part of this is historically the open frontier in America. When the Homestead Act got going in 1860, they could go out further west than they ever had. They could get land. There was this adventure. That was why it was literally possible to do that in 1860 in America. You could get a parcel of land in Nebraska or California. Think of it: getting free land in California. No one was there. **Jackson:** Mackenzie, who I just interviewed—this is the second time it's been brought up on this podcast. Back-to-back, the Homestead Act is getting a lot of favor. **Maxwell:** There was no extra land to get for free in Scotland, England, France, or Spain. These were existing places, so things tend to lock in a little bit. Americans are descended from the movers and proved to be movers themselves. Even now, after the frontier officially closed when the last Homestead Act parcels were gobbled up, we see this. The last time we added states was Hawaii and Alaska in 1959 and 1960. The last state added to the Union was in 1960. We could have future states, but Alaska, our biggest state, is the most recent to be admitted. And what do we do, three years later? We start the space program. We were like, "All right, we can't go out anymore. We've got to go up." That is a tongue-in-cheek point, but it's a myth that I wish to propagate. **Jackson:** Do you think most Americans still have that in them today? **Maxwell:** The statistics say that it's true. The statistics say that we're still quite a mobile people. We still have social mobility and geographic mobility. In certain respects, this has changed. In the 50s or 60s, one of the places people were going to was California. A different and smaller group of people are going to California these days. You don't have nearly the amount of migration taking place to California. But my supposition is that Americans will find the next place to move. Sometimes it can feel grandiose to call all of these frontiers, but they will find the next place. People are moving to the South. These public schools in the South are taking off, where kids from Massachusetts are going to Ole Miss, the University of Alabama, and Auburn like they never have before. So yes, I think it's still true in spite of the evidence that it's declined in certain areas. People are not able to pick up and be a hippie in San Francisco quite as easily anymore. **Jackson:** The people who are trying to do these network cities and network states—in some sense it's very American ideologically, and in some sense it's literally not very American. Do you think that's still capturing some of that? **Maxwell:** It captures the attention of a bunch of these Americans. But what tends to happen is once you remind the American that in order to do this, he has to leave the sphere of America. All I will say is that if you want me to believe that you're going to go start a new civilization in the far reaches of the world, the place you should not be currently living is New York City. Not this lotus-eaters' island where no one ever leaves. Go to Oklahoma. Oklahoma is the frontier compared to Manhattan. I'm in favor of all of these things succeeding, but I'm a little bit skeptical. ## [00:29:35] Patriotism **Jackson:** Where does your patriotism come from? **Maxwell:** I think I always had it, but in the last 10 years, since I started reading more, it was based on having thought through the arguments and read the stories. That's the version of it that's thought out and that I can actually identify. I also have the sappy patriotism. When I leave the country and see the signs at the airport on the way back, "Welcome to the United States of America," I get emotional. When I see videos of September 11th, when they played the "Star-Spangled Banner" at Buckingham Palace in London, I'm a sucker for that. I'm a sucker for the Jefferson Monument. **Jackson:** I was in D.C. recently for the first time in 10 years and was walking around. It was emotional. It's a special place. **Maxwell:** I don't know how to give a good intellectual answer to it. I know that it moves me both in the front of my brain and in the back of my brain. My caveman answer is, yes, this one is good. **Jackson:** I'm curious what you would say, especially to young people, but maybe to anyone who is far from you on the political spectrum. Could you make a case to them for more patriotism? **Maxwell:** I am very outspoken in my views and have at various times been called a right-wing lunatic. I spent my life growing up in left-wing circles. Even when I was an undergraduate at Stanford causing all sorts of right-wing mischief, I was living in a vegetarian socialist cooperative house. I adore people who are on the left. You can't love America if you hate half of the country. One of the big mistakes that has become very prevalent online is turning your patriotism into a hatred of an ideology **Jackson:** Or a sports team. **Maxwell:** Could you hate William Jennings Bryan, who was this proto-socialist candidate running all the time in the 1910s and 1920s? It is plain as day to me that there's always going to be a left in America and a right in America. If you lose your mind every four or eight years, you're going to be in for a long road. Bush won 49 states, and then you have this chaos. After Barack Obama won reelection, there were people who thought that the Republican Party would never win another election again, and who came knocking at the door? These things are unpredictable. There's a solid contingent of Americans who are not politically crazy or politically predictable. You have to live with people. As for the actual case to make to left-wing people to be patriotic about America... **Jackson:** Or maybe young people who don't necessarily feel connected to their country at a basic level. **Maxwell:** Objectively, it achieves the goals of people across the spectrum better than any other system. For left-wing values, you have health, a relative sense of equality, welfare, and safety. Maybe safety is more a right-leaning thing at this point, but I think it's pretty fundamental. On the right, you would have religious freedom and intact families. What I would say to both groups is that despite some of the wrinkles, America is still better at achieving these ends than other systems. If people are not interested in taking high-risk approaches to life, then America can be disappointing at certain times. The challenge is always in finding the energy to take advantage of the opportunity. You can be a teacher in France and make a third of what an American gas station worker is making. We're here in Texas. If you've ever been to Buc-ee's, the car wash manager makes $130,000, gets unlimited paid vacation, health care, 401k, everything. I can't look at that and think anything other than that there's opportunity out there. But the frontiers have changed, the opportunities have changed, and it's not going to be a cushy corporate opportunity for every single person. ## [00:34:51] Learning from the Rest of the World **Jackson:** To invert part of that last point, what do you think Americans could most stand to learn from the rest of the world, specifically Europe and China? **Maxwell:** There's a fascinating book by a Chinese intellectual called Wang Huning. He's a member of the Politburo in China, one of the seven men who run the Communist Party. Many see him as the eminence grise, the intellectual advisor to Xi Jinping who has formulated a lot of the thought over there in the last 15 years. He was a professor and spent two years traveling in America. He spent most of the time in Iowa, where I grew up, and wrote a book called \*America Against America\*. He was describing the individualism and consumerism, trying to paint this picture that according to the communist theory of history, America would inevitably tear itself apart because of its consumerism and individualism. On the other hand, his descriptions of these rural Iowa towns are amazing. He is absolutely floored to see towns of five and six thousand people with functioning public libraries. He can't believe that people in these small towns don't feel the need to leave because they have this abundance. In China at that time—this would have been the 90s—they were still in the throes of industrialization, coming out of the disaster of the 60s and 70s. The only prosperous places you could imagine were the cities. The countryside was a total calamity. The calamity in the countryside is one of the defining things with China since the 30s. You have the disaster of Japanese imperialism, which was total carnage. Eventually, in the Chinese Civil War, you have this peasant revolt with the Communist Party taking over. Then villages fell apart during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, where they were smelting steel in backyards and turning farm implements into steel. It was absolute craziness. 50 million people died in a famine. Wang Huning, this intellectual who's now at the highest levels of the CCP, cannot believe that there's rural prosperity in America and that people will send books to a library, take books from a library, and put them back. I give that long-winded example because Wang Huning spent a decent effort trying to understand America. It was on his own terms. Things about his history are warped because of his ideology. I don't think there's a correct answer for what you can learn from these societies. You just have to study them and come to your own view at some point. My answer on China would be that there's this shared human story of people wanting to take their country into the spotlight and do great things. I've never been to China or Asia, but it's evident to me that there are a lot of great Chinese builders and characters who are really interested in earning their spot at the table, so to speak. That doesn't have to be a source of conflict, even where we have obvious sources of conflict that can't be denied. I don't think people should hate the idea of China wanting to be a prosperous commercial society. **Jackson:** That it's a national ambition. **Maxwell:** It seems to be. **Jackson:** Whereas we nationally have ambition, but we have less national ambition. **Maxwell:** The image of the furnaces in the backyard during the Great Leap Forward, the image of the Chinese going to the factories, or the Charlie Munger comment about the South Koreans going to the auto factories for 90 hours a week—he said, "How couldn't you lose to these people?" **Jackson:** Do you know about the South Koreans melting all their gold to pay back the debt? **Maxwell:** I've never heard this one. **Jackson:** A friend of mine is South Korean, and he was telling me about it. I think it was his parents' generation, maybe in the late 90s. They had so much debt from a UNICEF loan, but they had so much national pride that all the people took their jewelry and gave it to them. They were the first country in history to pay off the UNICEF loan purely off of the individual citizens' pride. **Maxwell:** The Chinese are among the biggest individual savers in the world. Americans are constantly in debt. It's one of the only countries in history where you have fixed-rate, long-term mortgages provided by banks, and the banks are backed up by the federal government. This is unprecedented. The American character is, we're going to get a credit card, put some money on it, have a house, and have a car. The Chinese are big savers and super spendthrifty. They do not want to drop big amounts of money on stuff. These behaviors can change. If you think about 1941 to 1945, when America was fighting a two-front war, you had Liberty Gardens and the auto factories in Detroit turning into tank factories. You had a society-wide mobilization. Then after the war, there was a society-wide mobilization that wasn't directed from the top to have children: the baby boom. It's one of the most fascinating phenomena ever. Was it a national identity or a personal identity that was associated with the nation? I don't know how to decide the difference between these two things. It's clear that any society can have true mobilizations of the people, and sometimes it doesn't. **Jackson:** My suspicion is that the Chinese ones tend to be more top-down, and the American ones tend to be more bottom-up or emergent. **Maxwell:** Maybe the difference between American ideology and Chinese ideology is that if you believe in the American ideology, you have to believe that the bottom-up stuff is more powerful. Otherwise, why not be China? **Jackson:** Precisely. ## [00:41:42] A Case for Progress **Jackson:** You write a pretty amazing magazine about progress. I think you and I are technology-adjacent or technologists who are very pro-progress, and that's a very common meme--progress studies, a lot of stuff in this domain. I'm not sure that most Americans are actually that pro-progress. I think that's more of an open question. Do you agree? If that's broadly right, how do we shift people towards being more pro-progress? I don't know if you've ever seen that Wait But Why graph of the arc of history and how much things change. At any given point, it feels like things are changing a lot, but if you zoom out, it's kind of flat. He theorizes that we might finally be at the bend in the curve where things are about to go totally vertical. The future ten years from now is going to look nothing like five years ago. With that in mind—this notion that we're about to rip up the progress curve—it seems pretty important to me that we get the average American's buy-in on this. What do you think? **Maxwell:** To get the average American's buy-in to amazing technology is one of the founding purposes of Arena. Part of that mission is to explain. Let's go back to the New York Times making fun of the flying professor—or the not-flying professor, rather. He was trying. The advent of air travel totally changed everything. We could go down the line with air travel, and I could give you a few great examples of it being totally upended. First it did not exist, then it existed, then it goes into warfighting, then it starts to get commercialized. One of the great stories of technological automation is United Airlines. They used to have literally thousands of ticket checkers employed in big offices in Chicago and Houston. Before the computer systems were invented—and this was not until the 2000s that these things were functioning properly—they would literally check the tickets after the flights had taken place to verify who had boarded the flights. **Jackson:** Oh my gosh. **Maxwell:** You have a pre-flight manifest and then you have the tickets. You're at the airport in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you've just sent a flight off to Denver. The ticket stubs that get ripped off the ticket get mailed from Santa Fe to Houston, where these people check the tickets and reconcile it. There's a great column in the Wall Street Journal from 2010 or so explaining this phenomenon and how United became an airline. When you stop checking tickets, you can have more flight attendants and more pilots, and you can be bigger. That's a classic example of the type of automation worries that some people have with regard to AI, which is one of the big, alleged changes that's coming up. I happen to think it's more a rhyme of history than a giant divergence. Think of what humans were doing 10,000 years ago. We were face down in the dirt. **Jackson:** Sam Altman has a recent essay where he talks about how if people 100 years ago looked at our jobs now, they would say we're all playing games. It's totally make-believe. **Maxwell:** While I was at Stanford, I encountered some activists who were hosting an activist from India. It's been six or seven years now, and her name escapes me, but she is an anti-industrial agriculture activist. **Jackson:** Okay. **Maxwell:** We may have some romantic attachment to women and children tending the fields or doing homesteading. I own a farm; I have a little apple orchard. There is a romantic quality to it. But if we're against industrial agriculture, what you're actually talking about is forcing women and children to go work in fields all day, forcing them to break their backs. This woman was an activist from India. In the global south, you have almost two billion people who are trying to get above poverty and into modernity. Who are we to say there's something romantic or charming about farming by hand? So we're going to send you back to the fields and you're going to have to do that. What we have is amazingly luxurious. All of these attachments to the way things were previously done can usually be overcome. Even if you ask people on the street, they may not be in favor of it. Their demonstrated preference is utterly clear. **Jackson:** Is there ever a time for looking back or trying to actively slow down? **Maxwell:** There's always a time for dialectic—going back and forth. You always need that in order to have progress. And the wrong tack for the go-go-go people would be to utterly discredit the slow-down people based on their let's-go-faster assumptions. What you actually need to do is switch the assumptions around and then argue against the other position. You need to accept the other person's premises: that they're worried about human meaning and change. If you reject the premises, there's no hope of having an actual dialectic between the two disagreeing sides. If you can switch out your premises and understand the other person's feelings, the values they're aiming toward, or the type of future they fear or want, then you can actually make an argument. So yes, there's always a time for slowing down, but it's as part of a conversation. **Jackson:** I largely agree. The cynical view would say that's all neat and cute, but the world isn't actually slowing down. So good luck. **Maxwell:** Well, I'm not sure that I agree. **Jackson:** Technology often seems to be a runaway train. The AI stuff is a perfect example. There's so much AI safety discussion, yet everyone is just going rampant. **Maxwell:** There is a present-times bias to think that things are more crazy now than they were. I like 2025 more than I like 1945 in a lot of respects, and I think that our ancestors would be curious to hear that we think it's going faster now. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't think that is a sufficient argument for a slowdown position. It has to be based on facts. It has to be based on concrete observations about what could happen, rather than a generic sentiment that-- **Jackson:** Like, "we're living through the craziest times." **Maxwell:** Think of the post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki coalescence of these nuclear scientists who were warning the world. That was not based on the idea that these abstractions are crazier than ever. It was actually based on super concrete facts and super concrete things. If the argument is just that you need to listen to me because I know something about the future that you don't in some abstract way—that the present is moving faster than the past did—I don't think people are going to win arguments based on that. You need to remain very concrete. You need to explain how things affect people's lives, both in the macro and the micro sense. With nuclear weapons, it's the easiest argument in the world. This is why we need to restrict the development of nuclear energy, and especially enriched uranium and plutonium, to a certain group of states and have a very strong relationship between the states. You have Russian and American military officers calling each other every single day throughout the Cold War, and you have Chinese nuclear officers who know all of the American nuclear officers. That was based on facts, not some abstraction. And so it worked. One of the mistakes that the AI doomers or AI skeptics—whatever label they want for themselves, I'm not interested in labeling them in a derogatory way—is that if it's too abstract, they're never going to win the argument. I don't really care about justice for their argument in some universal sense. I want them to get to the right argument for their own sake so that we can have the proper discussion. I would much rather have arguments based on concrete points than abstract judgments that the present is so different from the past that we have to throw away the things that made us prosperous in the past. Let's try it out. ## [00:50:52] Tech's Separation from American Culture in the 2010s **Jackson:** Changing gears a little bit. You've written in a few different places about the bleeding together of tech culture and American culture. You have a line about how, at least in the 2010s, "tech culture was aspiring to be above and without American culture." You go on to say "tech, like other institutions, decided to be disloyal to the country in the 2010s, control the population, censor them, not cooperate with the military, and build a bubble to ascend." Is that specific bit a byproduct of tech's growing power across institutions in the 2010s, or is it something else? **Maxwell:** I think something that naturally happens in both cultural bubbles and ascendant areas is they think things never change. It goes back to this idea about one-way trends. When Silicon Valley became this takeoff thing, there was the idea that they were going to rule every other element of things. I happen to love Mark Zuckerberg, but the tour right after 2016 to tour the country was the most naive thing in this regard. Even the concession to the rest of the country—which is, yes, you totally slapped us across the face by putting Trump in the White House—was this idea that he was going to go tour around. A trip to America, like he was a foreign exchange student or something. It's just a plain observation that every once in a while these places, whether it's Wall Street in the 2000s or Silicon Valley in the 2010s, can do things-- **Jackson:** Ah, yes. **Maxwell:** For what it's worth, I'm very concerned that the backlashes to these things will be genuinely bad for the society that does them. You have some nonsense on Wall Street in the 2000s, no doubt. But there are a lot of cases that I've read that I'm persuaded by that Dodd-Frank, the reaction to it, was genuinely bad in a way that we can't even comprehend because we don't know what would have happened—the opportunity cost and all these other things. My goal is to not have this huge backlash to tech narcissism by basically saying we're going to enjoin you from doing anything. I think that is the constant risk. Technology is full of people who are super talented and able to accomplish really dazzling things. There is a temptation to believe that they can do things like control public opinion or persuade people in a lazy way that just never works. There is always the risk that someone else is making a better argument than you, and it doesn't matter how talented you are. You have to get on people's level, accept their premises, and then argue against the conclusions. Because if the premises are totally different—like we don't care at all about the American military or whatnot—then there's no possibility of an argument. That sentence in particular was commenting about the idea that all we're going to do is build social media and we're absolutely never going to partner with the government, even if there's a demo-- **Jackson:** It's icky. **Maxwell:** Because it's icky. **Jackson:** Sort of, not exactly, but kind of. **Maxwell:** And it wasn't even some crazy right-wing government. This was the Department of Defense of President Obama, and Google declaring—based on the value judgments of its employees—that they would absolutely never build software so that our commander-in-chief could protect the country. I call it a cultural bubble because they believed that there was no cost to that. Nine years later, you have the absurd spectacle of Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Zuckerberg all standing behind President-elect Donald Trump at his second inauguration. That was a crazy mirror image of the other version of it. **Jackson:** That's a really great point. **Maxwell:** So Amazon not doing defense stuff. Google declared that they're not going to help with the drone projects. Then literally nine years later, Sundar Pichai is standing behind Trump at the inauguration. That may have been too aggressive a correction, but it was: get out of your bubble quick. Get out of it quickly. **Jackson:** This was the cost of this. **Maxwell:** This was the cost of being in that crazy bubble. There's a populist desire to say that social media needs to be regulated in some special way. I think that's untrue. If not a single academic consensus can find damages in this area, when they're extremely motivated to find them, then that's the first thing that people should look at. You have entire psychology departments and entire sociology departments at these left-wing universities where they're predisposed to hate entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg. If they can't find a statistically significant effect in their own biased studies, trying to paint social media as being damaging to children and teens, then that's the first thing to consider. They can't even find it. **Jackson:** What do you think about all the evidence that young people are more depressed and more lonely? **Maxwell:** I think it's one of these one-way trends that turns out not to be true when you look at things in the fullness of time. **Jackson:** Also, anecdotally, I and everyone I know feel this. This thing doesn't make me happy, I want to be on it less, and I don't know what to do. **Maxwell:** We had a temperance movement in the United States. We banned alcohol as a constitutional amendment for a decade. **Jackson:** [Laughs] **Maxwell:** I think that there's a present-times bias. People were drafted to be sent to Vietnam in the 60s. Could it be that there is right now this bowling alone trend where there's more atomization? Yes, absolutely. We have to think about positive, action-oriented solutions to it rather than making technological restrictions. I love the Tyler Cowen cut on it. For people that are interested in it, the internet can be a big connector. The problem with any rule is how do you write rules where it doesn't punish the good actors and the people who can constrain themselves, but that also protects the people with a lack of impulse control. This is why we have restrictions on gambling or alcohol. How do you write the rule in such a way where it doesn't put down people that are strivers and that are really looking to excel? I think that most of the restriction-based approaches fail in this regard. There's a desire to get rid of standardized testing because it does not advantage the lower 40% of the totem pole. It's really good for undiscovered talent, especially in rural areas or poor families who can do well on a standardized test. There's a desire to restrict it or pretend like it's some sort of problem. We have to look at things in a full way and consider the evidence. With the social media thing in particular, the evidence is mixed at best. There are so many counterexamples to it that all arise from things that are what I would call positive, meaning they're reasons why people believe in things. There are all sorts of cultural things that are very interesting to people that they gather around for. You still have these communal things, and you need people to be constantly doing those things rather than trying to restrict the other things. That's just my belief. China is trying to ban video games, but I just don't think that you can control behavior like this. You have to give people better options. The real crisis that I see is a lack of interest in starting these things. Rather than pinning the blame on Facebook, I'd rather look at why we don't do more of this. ## [00:59:59] Tech Accountability and Engaging Normal People on their Premises **Jackson:** Much of the answer you just gave rhymes with the argument Nadia makes in the piece she wrote for the first issue of Arena comparing smartphones and guns. She makes this excellent point about gun owners. She says, "While the national debate likes to portray the use of firearms as fundamentally irresponsible, the biggest gun safety advocates are, in my experience, gun enthusiasts themselves." She makes this case that if Silicon Valley wants to be at the big boys' table, it needs to be more accountable for its implications across a whole range of things. In the smartphone example, you might be right—we need more optimistic solutions. It seems that most technologists say, "I don't let my kid have an iPad," but are otherwise not so concerned. There's a broader Silicon Valley tendency that hand-waves things like UBI. When Sam and Dario talk about how this is going to be crazy and there's probably just going to be UBI at some point, there's a hand waving of the accountability on it. **Maxwell:** When they say things like that, they should be dragged to a high school gym, and I'll give them a lecture for 14 hours about how to talk to normal people and not make yourself the most hated person on earth. At any given time, based on the things they say, that could be Dario and Sam—both of whom I respect —could be based on what they're flirting with. **Jackson:** The root of my question is that it seems very important that technology leaders figure out how to not communicate, "Get on the train or you'll be left behind." Instead, they need to communicate, "Here's an outstretched hand, and we are going to go somewhere together." What is it going to take for them to be able to do that? **Maxwell:** It's our hope that we can help, because I happen to think it's true that it is possible to do this. You have to get out of the bubble. I don't think that they're going to be attending presidential inaugurations much more, but that's where you get accountability from. You just have to go find people. **Jackson:** Isn't that what Mark did in 2016? **Maxwell:** Yes, but he didn't listen to them. The bigger issue was that you had all these technology companies hand-waving to conservatives in '16, '17, '18, and '19. They were still hostile. Then in 2020, they became the arch-censors during COVID, which was a time when it really affected people. The two classic stories were the censorship of the idea that it came out of the lab and the stuff during the election. That was what re-collapsed the trust. If you believe that the other side has something to say, then you might be able to learn something. The problem is if you don't believe it and you're just hand-waving. As for the idea of the gun enthusiast or the phone enthusiast, I'm not in love with five-year-olds on iPads at restaurants. This goes back to the point: how do you write rules for a society where the people who are not following the rules don't cause a bunch of chaos? For parents who give their kids iPads at the restaurant, maybe the expectation should be a little bit different. This is clearly causing negative effects that are externalities, like kids not socializing properly. There's no macro evidence that these things that are allegedly happening are actually happening in a statistically significant way. It could be anything. It could be what we call wokeness or political correctness. It could be that we have political chaos. It could be some other thing. It's really difficult to get to specific answers in these overdetermined areas, especially on a short time horizon. With the gun and phone thing, if we're so against the iPad kid at the restaurant booth, I'm not willing to translate that into not letting a 19-year-old be discovered on the Internet for programming talent. There's clearly something hugely liberating that flattens the field of opportunity. **Jackson:** Greatest lever on agency ever. **Maxwell:** Exactly. You have to be able to see it. When Tyler was interviewing Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the "it's the phones" book, one of the funny things he suggested was the type of out-of-the-box thinking that Tyler's great for. It totally confused Haidt. I have no idea whether he's right about this. He asked, "Aren't the kids just going to have the AIs scroll TikTok for them at some point?" And Haidt had never considered this. Maybe it's stupid, maybe it's genius; I don't know. He compared it to when the Aztecs learned how to nishtimalize corn. Nishtimil comes from the Nahuatl language. When they added lime to corn, that's how you can turn it into masa. A corn tortilla has been nishtimalized, and then it's totally digestible. That's how you can turn corn into a staple food. The Aztecs just figured this out. **Jackson:** Five-year-olds of tomorrow are going to be so much better equipped for the dopamine hijacking than we are. **Maxwell:** It's this physics-based fallacy with history: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. That's not true at all with these historical things. People assume that trends are always going to continue. **Maxwell:** And then they're shocked, utterly shocked when things turn around. I love this hilarious book from the mid-2000s, \*The Emerging Democratic Majority\*. The premise was that demographic shifts were going to permanently enshrine the Democratic Party as the majority party in the United States. Then Trump wins every single border county in Texas, and they're all 80% Mexican American. These one-way trends do not continue. No kingdom lasts forever. And it's the classic narcissistic flaw to believe that you are an object in motion. **Jackson:** You're special. **Maxwell:** Or not even that you're special—that something you are associated with is special. **Jackson:** We're all narcissists. **Maxwell:** And that's not necessarily a moral failing. It's a classic human failure. **Jackson:** Yes. It's amazing how much this continues to come up in the conversation, and it's a clarifying point. **Maxwell:** Part of the reason I'm so obsessed with it is because the political example has been the most top-of-mind for a lot of the people I've known in my life. People who cannot cope with the idea that Trump became president, or that he lost in 2020, or that he won again. **Jackson:** It's a pendulum. **Maxwell:** Because America is so important to me, this one is very front-of-mind. I plan to hopefully live to 2100 or maybe a little beyond. A lot of people are going to do a lot of things, and things are going to change a lot. If you have egg on your face every single time making these bold predictions, it's not going to be a pleasant trajectory. **Jackson:** If you were going to give advice to Sam and Dario, who are doing a lot of what you just described, what would you tell them? **Maxwell:** I would not communicate in any way that you're somewhat open to humanity going away. **Jackson:** [Laughs] **Maxwell:** That's the first one. No ambivalence about existence. **Jackson:** I think they've done a decent job of that. **Maxwell:** No, they have. **Jackson:** Some of the others haven't. **Maxwell:** But this is the number one piece of advice. The more intellectualized one gets about these AI issues—the more people write and think about AI—the more ambivalent they tend to become about existence. **Jackson:** Yes. **Maxwell:** Elon talks about how he thinks man may have evolved to get the silicon out of the Earth to build the superintelligence. That's the first thing: no freaky shit. The second is that there shouldn't be judgment about people's fear. You should turn it around and talk about the things that are important to them that are not currently being considered. I'll give an out-of-the-blue example. I'm somewhat sympathetic to Hillary Clinton's statements in 2016 that the coal mines did not need to be opened forever. I'm extremely in favor of maximal energy production, including fossil fuels, and I don't care at all about using natural gas and petroleum to power our society. In the case of coal, there was a pretty clear argument that it was really affecting people's health, especially the people who were mining the coal. Hillary did a god-awful job of communicating it because her big message was, "We're putting you out of business." That was the exact wrong thing to do, and it backfired massively in places she needed to win: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan—three big coal states. The argument could have been different. The two opportunities presented to the coal miners were to work on clean energy windmills—which are better than coal for the air in many respects, but environmentally questionable in other ways and not easy work—or to become software engineers. It was either "learn to code" or "go work on green energy." Both of these were dismissive of the premises of these people's lives, from which they had derived their identity: being in coal towns. On the other hand, it was really damaging to their health. So there's an argument that the humane thing to do is to create better opportunities. That does not rhyme with, "We're going to send you to some other lofty project," or, "Learn to code, you idiot." So, how I would communicate it is: Think of the opportunity. What if we solved traffic? What if you didn't have to spend an hour or more of your life in traffic in some of these cities? That's the promise of autonomy at scale. What if every child could have an amazing tutor? What if we could have really positive medical discoveries? In Sam's or Dario's blogs, they're always struggling to get to the concrete things that are good. Sam talking about how the next GPTs will influence scientific discoveries is itself an abstraction that should be avoided. **Jackson:** Right. **Maxwell:** You can just talk about things that are already good, things that are amazing. What about AlphaSchool? What about opportunities for kids or the self-driving thing? Focusing on the things that already exist is a really good way to make people optimistic about the future, not promising things that are difficult to falsify, difficult to recognize, or just distracting. **Jackson:** They're just not concrete in any way. **Maxwell:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Just directional statements that things are going to improve. **Maxwell:** It's the same reason the climate alarmist argument failed. It was because there were all these crazy predictions, and they did not talk about people's lives. They failed to recognize the immense importance of energy in people's lives. They lost the argument because, ultimately, we were going to want more energy regardless of the environmental stuff. The demand for energy was going to push us into areas where we would look to cut costs, so we did things like batteries. It was the rejection of the premise that what you care about matters at all that prevented people like Al Gore from making a sound argument. The AI people will not be able to make a sound argument unless they are willing to deal with the actual premises of the other side. And I hate to call it the other side; it doesn't need to be this oppositional thing. It's the regular people out there. It's almost everyone else. There are definitely some AI people who, if you're doing anything else, are like, "What?" It reminds me of the old John Updike saying: the mark of the true New Yorker is that he has to believe that anyone living anywhere else is in some sense kidding. It's just a joke if you don't live in Manhattan. **Jackson:** [Laughs] I think I've thought that more or less, once or twice. **Maxwell:** It's a joke if you're not working on AI. You must be kidding if you're working on any other thing. **Jackson:** It's a deeply self-oriented frame more than anything else, to your point. **Maxwell:** Like the true New Yorker. Again, everything rhymes with history. Homer, in the Odyssey thousands of years ago, described the island of the lotus-eaters. This is the place where you go and you never want to leave. It's back to the story of assuming that trends always continue and that no one can stop you. I don't know if you've read about the Waymo testing that's allegedly happening in Manhattan and Brooklyn next month. It's going to be eight Waymo cars with no passengers and a driver. So there's a driver and no passengers. I don't think Google ever thought the New York Taxi Union was going to be a big player in their technological supremacy. One of my big things that I've been saying—and I'm saying it tongue-in-cheek right now because I need to think a little more about the evidence—is that I think the FBI director is more powerful than the AGI CEO. The FBI director just sends an agent to the AGI CEO's house and nabs him. There are all these unexpected things that can happen. That one is a joke, but the New York Taxi Union is going to remain a very powerful factor in our technological lives, as are rural congressmen, vanity-obsessed senators, and teacher unions. The areas in which AI is least likely to penetrate are these areas where there are political forces that are so powerful. **Jackson:** They're not even necessarily powerful in terms of what they can do, but they're definitely powerful in what they can stop from happening. **Maxwell:** We will have total technological penetration in certain areas, and then there will be other areas where it is less prevalent. The people in the Northeast might not realize that there are hundreds of Waymos operating in most of the cities in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. My house here in Austin is on a quiet little street, and I see 20 or 30 Waymos every single night. I can hear the hum of the Jaguar EV engine, and it's all right there. The future is just unevenly distributed. ## [01:16:38] Silicon Valley's Tiny Nations and Alex Karp's "The Technological Republic" **Jackson:** You've talked about the export of Silicon Valley culture to other parts of America, largely in the context of the Alex Karp book that came out earlier this year. A quote from you: "Tech culture is the city on a hill version of what the American culture broadly should be, which is empowered citizens who can take risks, be accountable to the risks, but get the outsized returns of the risk." In the Karp review, you say "software dominance was grown in a culture that empowered individuals not always to be their most individualistic self, but to be extremely effective individuals within collective enterprises. Silicon Valley lets talented people feel like empowered citizens in 'tiny nations.'" There's one last bit from the Karp ideas: "empiricism is most possible in an engineering culture, they reason (Alex and his co-writer) because of the concreteness of the work. It either functions or it doesn't. There's nowhere to hide. They zero in on a connection between sensitivity to results and the abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be. The core value [at Palantir] is pragmatism." **Maxwell:** The first is "tiny nations." This is the Alexis de Tocqueville observation about America: there are a bunch of tiny nations, whether city councils or businesses, where you have citizens who are uniquely engaged. There is individualism, but the way we channel it is to participate in these other things. The most classic Silicon Valley example is the sequence of Shockley Semiconductor, then Fairchild Semiconductor, then Intel. This is how Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and the other forefathers created the Silicon Valley culture. At Intel, Robert Noyce, who grew up in a small town in the Midwest, insisted that everyone have the same size desk and that executives not have office doors that closed. This came from a Congregationalist outlook he developed growing up, and it was documented by Tom Wolfe in a great \*Esquire\* magazine piece about Noyce: "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley." At that point, Silicon Valley was still a strange phenomenon rather than something we take for granted. Intel is the classic example where Noyce had all of these superheroes working for him. Think about the cost if all of those people were in different places. You get uniquely valuable, trillion-dollar businesses by having all of these people in one place, owning a slice of the company, and relentlessly executing. Intel was one of the first enterprises to offer stock compensation. This is another Silicon Valley invention. It's difficult to think of a more classic example of the empowered-- **Jackson:** I think there was a legal or regulatory thing around that time, too. **Maxwell:** It may very well have been. California is also the one jurisdiction in the world that happened to outlaw the enforcement of non-compete agreements. This came out of random things in the early 1900s; it was a total coincidence. The idea of these companies as tiny nations is that you have a leader like Noyce, who is deeply enmeshed with the so-called citizenry of the country—his employees. They can talk to one another and be frank with one another. Wolfe describes meetings where everyone was expected to speak if he or she had something to say. Noyce would sit there, and when he spoke, everyone knew he was in charge, but he would take anything from anyone. He would take criticism or whatnot. There's something beautiful about that, where everyone has a voice, everyone is a citizen, and then there's a leader. That's the inspiring technology culture. Part of the reason why Silicon Valley is flying high is because you have lots of these empowered citizens working in these enterprises. It's really inspiring to work for 30 years at Nvidia and also be worth 80 million or a billion at the end of it. **Jackson:** Is the Alex Karp or Jensen—the classic, amazing, unique, Zuck-Elon hero type—absolutely foundationally important for this to be possible? **Maxwell:** The cultures and institutions have a way of shaping leaders, sometimes in an unexpected way. I'm not sure if people would have picked Noyce out of a crowd to be one of the great leaders, and I'm not sure that would be the case either with Elon or Karp. Elon is extremely autistic and extremely technical. Is he going to be the person to do the ride of the Rohirrim with tens of thousands of engineers to work on the most difficult problems ever? Let's launch a rocket and have it do a backflip or land on a drone boat. I don't think that these things are set from the beginning. **Jackson:** Daniel Ek made this point a few years ago. He said, what if Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg by way of building Facebook? **Maxwell:** Yeah. **Jackson:** The causality is in the other direction. **Maxwell:** Just study his behavior as an undergraduate at Harvard and ask yourself if this is a person who's going to be a chief executive officer. Nothing is set in stone. People change. There is something, some quality that they have. It's just a mojo, though. It's not something they've had from the beginning. They change. ## [01:22:34] The Frontier and the Core: Exporting SV Enginerring Culture to Government **Jackson:** At the very least, what you're capturing in that is a founder orientation. The root question is, how do we export more of this? Clearly, people are thinking about exporting this to government. **Maxwell:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Whether it be explicitly to the DOD or other things. You even referenced Kodak. In the Brian Schimpf article, the CEO of Anduril said they forget how to do the basics. **Maxwell:** Yeah. **Jackson:** What does it look like for some of this Silicon Valley engineering culture to get exported? There's no new founder in the government. There's no new founder of Kodak or a big, dumb, slow company. People even say Satya Nadella refounded Microsoft, and that's what has enabled him to be so effective. **Maxwell:** Yeah. You could say that Microsoft is a bit of a Theseus's ship that's been rebuilt. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Maxwell:** What are they still doing that they were doing back then? They still make Windows. **Jackson:** Excel. **Maxwell:** They make Excel. Excel is probably the through line. They have the cloud business. They did the foray into phones; it totally blew up and didn't work at all. By leaving that, the joke ended up being on Apple because Microsoft built this other huge business that Apple wasn't even paying attention to. The point about a Kodak, or why government is different from Silicon Valley and why some Silicon Valley people misapprehend how the government works, is related to this idea of an engineering culture. Concrete things are easier to prove or disprove. **Jackson:** Just look at the data. **Maxwell:** This is also tied in with the idea of the frontier, where you're really testing out whether things are or are not working. Joe Lonsdale and I have written about this conception of the frontier in American history, trying to connect literal cowboy culture and the spirit of technological experimentation. Some people will be skeptical of this connection, but I'll try to persuade them. On the old frontier, if you don't have your wits about you, you get shot, you get scalped, you get eaten by hyenas. There are lots of things that happen. Adventurers, if they survive, turn out stronger on the other end. The ideas that they're proving out on the frontier tend to be very resilient and very long lasting. They tend to be people or ideas that can solve new types of problems. Maybe there's a connection between the fact that California is this Pacific frontier. It's over the mountains, there are these valleys, there's this coast. It's the energy of the west. The other idea that Joe and I talk about is that the opposite of the frontier is the core. In any empire or civilization, you have a core and a frontier. It's a dialectic. They're both very important. You need the core to set the laws and give cohesiveness and unity, and you need the frontier to push it. **Jackson:** It's like pace layers—the fashion and the culture or the nature layers. **Maxwell:** It's a dialectic, and they need to remain in balance. A country or a civilization or some other organization can drift a little bit more toward the frontier. For example, the United States from 1789 when Washington became president all the way until 1861 when the Civil War started. It was just expand, expand, expand, expand. Then it was a little too "frontier-y," and we forgot the core was on fire—Civil War, et cetera. One of the arguments that we'd make right now is that America has been a little too heavy on the core. Washington, D.C. is now the richest place in the universe. The suburbs of Washington are the wealthiest place in the world. It's the craziest thing. You have all these laws piling up, all these federal employees, all this bureaucracy, and that is clearly not being battle-tested like things are at the frontier. There's no possible way for government programs to go away naturally. **Jackson:** There's no natural churn. **Maxwell:** Where's the natural churn? They're not forced to fight for their survival. If you can apply these principles of competition, the frontier, and the Karl Popper idea of falsifiability—if something's not falsifiable, it's not science—we should be trying to be more scientific or have a more engineering mindset. For that reason, I'm very pro-DOGE. There are some things that were more political reforms rather than implementing an engineering culture. But one thing the critics of DOGE got wrong is that they were never going to accept any cuts. As soon as the cuts got concrete, it was going to be on the attack. Karp does not talk about DOGE in the book. The book was actually written before 2024. **Maxwell:** It's the example of: can we apply this mindset? Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, has just been announced as the Chief Design Officer of the United States. They're clearly going to implement these ideas in various areas of the government, in a way that may not be less offensive to political objectors. Is there objectively a better way to design a website? The government says, "No, let's pay someone to do it." Silicon Valley says, "Yes, there's an objective way to do it, and this is why we have $70 billion and you don't." There was something provably, falsifiably true about it. You would know if we were bullshitters because it wouldn't work. In the government, there's no such competing pressure. There are no hyenas, there are no Comanches coming to rip your hair off. **Jackson:** You don't have the paranoia of the frontier. **Maxwell:** The paranoia of the frontier. This is closely connected to Elon's erratic personality, in that he's repeatedly taken these things to the utter limit, to the edge of the abyss. That is where you can learn. It goes back to how blowing up the rocket was more valuable to Elon than the people in the core could possibly know because he was testing something at the edges of what's possible. That is where you get to falsifiable results. Is this working or not? That's the engineering culture. There were political reasons why Elon was unpopular with some of these people. Could there have been a DOGE without some of the more partisan elements? Yes, and maybe it would have worked better. But part of the reason for the hatred of DOGE, the idea of it, and the hit pieces on the young men working on it is that there will always be a negative reaction from the established set if it threatens them. That's a natural human emotion, and I'm not necessarily attacking it. Sometimes there's a pendulum swing, and people need to accept it. ## [01:30:01] Principled and Unpredictable Thinkers **Jackson:** Speaking of Karp, I read the New York Times profile on him around this time last year. You wrote something that reminded me of it. You wrote, "At the risk of oversimplifying a complex thinker, I would call Karp a classical liberal and a left-aligned civic nationalist. It's that civic nationalist part that puts him at odds with the dominant activist part of the capital-L Left today and to many ears would make him sound right-wing. He insists quite credibly that he is not." **Maxwell:** Those are a great few sentences, I have to say. **Jackson:** Excellent. I was blown away by that piece. The most interesting part about it was that Alex Karp is the type of person where I could not tell you his views on one topic if I knew his views on another. I'm curious if you know other people like this and what types of traits are common among them. **Maxwell:** The most important example in the world right now is Trump. **Jackson:** That's not what I was expecting. **Maxwell:** Think about the 2016 election, where nothing in the Trump ideology could be classically mapped onto one side. If you knew he hates NAFTA, could you then predict his opinion on the minimum wage, tax cuts, legal immigration, or illegal immigration? It was all over the place. He is by far the most important example of that. Maybe he's gotten a little more solidified within the right-wing sense, but he was genuinely all over the place in '16. **Jackson:** My critique there would be that he was just winging it. Karp feels a little bit more principled in his range. **Maxwell:** Trump is not principled, but he's--this will sound ironic--steady in some of these views that have existed for a long time. He was clearly always pretty pro-choice. He was clearly always against mass immigration and especially against illegal immigration, which picked up in the '90s and 2000s. He was taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times in the '80s criticizing Reagan for liberalizing trade with the rest of the Americas. That was a 30-year continuity of criticizing trade deals, so that was not winging it. Trump is winging everything in certain respects, but there are some things that he's said for a long time that are classic examples of that political unpredictability. Because if you said he hated NAFTA, that would not also mean that he wants to raise taxes. **Jackson:** Things are bundled. What about the people who have this trait and are quite principled, as I'm assessing Karp to be? I think very principled people... maybe these go together, I'm not sure. It seems that for most people, even if they seem quite principled in some areas, the tidal wave carries them with the bundle of other associated views. **Maxwell:** I think about the way that the popes have discussed things like abortion. There's clearly been a wave, especially in Catholic intelligence circles, liberalizing on abortion. And you hear someone like the late Pope Francis, who is extremely liberal on issues of migration and even on certain parts of the LGBT discussion, talk about abortion in a way that would totally floor the average Democratic voter or liberal or pro-choice person. He talks about it in more concrete terms than even some right-wing American politicians. That would be a classic example of an institution that, for obvious reasons, has the power to assert its principles over some societal shift. It's not always the case. There are certainly times when the Papacy or the Church or the Vatican have fallen to these things. But it definitely is one of those areas. If you can pick out the Pope as an individual, there's someone with the power to assert principle over other things. There are other examples. Every once in a while, you have certain characters—Gorbachev. It requires a strong personality or temperament in order to do that, even at the small scale, like saying something unpopular in a dinner time conversation. Imagine dissolving your country. That's the Gorbachev example. It's a type of person who can do that. That would maybe be a support of the idea that there was always something in a Zuckerberg or a Musk—this action-oriented thing. It just might not reveal itself until the right time. **Jackson:** It's getting amplified to an extreme degree. **Maxwell:** Or it only came out because of that necessity. Jimmy Carter could have stayed a peanut farmer. He managed to become the President. What is that that turned it on? **Jackson:** It's a really interesting question. ## [01:35:20] The Case for Capitalism **Jackson:** You brought up Gorbachev. I wanted to ask a couple of questions about capitalism, which you are a big advocate of, to say the least. This is you: "For me, my basic definition of capitalism, the one rule of capitalism, you're not allowed to kill your counterparty. And I think this is the one thing that distinguishes it from all the other systems. And capitalism, by saying the one rule is you can't kill your counterparty, says you have to negotiate." Why is this such an important idea? **Maxwell:** Mostly to avoid mass killing. I happen to love this definition. I think it's one of the better things that I've come out with. **Jackson:** I think you said that on Jim's podcast. **Maxwell:** I should write it down at some point. For millennia, if I want this other thing that you have, I go and kill and rape and pillage the village. This is the way to advance your station in warring societies. not to defend everything that happens in a certain system, which is usually what the capital L Left, meaning the hardcore activist types, want to make the argument about. Do you defend every single thing that happens? Do you defend insurance companies denying claims? Yes, I would much rather have that than the commissar deciding, "I'm going to kill you." The insurance company has to negotiate over it. They had to agree with you in advance about how this was going to play out. If you disagree with them, then you can go to a court. While a court is not expressly part of capitalism, in practice it is. Capitalism can only emerge in a system where you can go to a judge. Think about Hong Kong. All the judges in Hong Kong were trained in British-style law schools. They all knew that even if someone's pressuring you to do something, you have to rule according to the law. That's a blessing that people take for granted. In capitalism, you get to negotiate with the insurance company up front. In a system where there's no such negotiation, it's everything that eventually leads toward murder. It's the derivatives of it. If we have a dispute with this other group of people, we go to war. If I don't like the price of your object that you're selling, we just threaten you. It is an intentional simplification. **Jackson:** You don't pay me back, I'm going to kill you. **Maxwell:** You don't pay me back, I'm going to kill you. It is an intentional simplification to say that the one rule of capitalism is "I'm not allowed to kill you," but that's ultimately what it comes down to. If you believe that people are free to negotiate, then you have it right there the reason why it's bad to murder. It's because you can negotiate. **Jackson:** Ah. There's a third option. **Maxwell:** If someone is trying to vote against communism, and you don't have to negotiate with them, then of course you have to kill them because otherwise they're going to kill you. The last circle of this is that there's always inherent suspicion of people making agreements with one another. This is one of the things that the capitalists always have to defend. The most devastating examples are the person making the deal with the insurance company, or loans and banks. With a bank, they have to negotiate with you. They have to establish this rate. Whereas if you have some Irish mafia bookie, you get in debt to him, and he kills you if you don't pay him back. That is the logic of all these non-capitalist systems: violence can ultimately be an answer. Whether it's expelling people from the country, putting them in concentration camps like they do in North Korea, taking away their liberty, or taking away their right to make money on something. You must lose money on this. **Jackson:** Sometimes it's metaphorical killing. **Maxwell:** I don't particularly care to argue with someone about whether the Great Leap Forward was mass murder. When there are X people alive here and then X minus 50 million people alive 10 years later because of what you did, I'm not here to argue about the definition. There can be degrees of killing. The system that we call socialism or Marxism or communism tends to, especially in the last century, result in quite a lot of it. **Jackson:** You have an excellent piece on the grocery store and Gorbachev, defending capitalism. You say, "Deciding that the basics like food and energy shouldn't be profitable is a certain recipe for a shortage of those basics." "Some people are still very offended by the idea of people making decisions," which I think is wrapped up in a lot of what you just said. **Maxwell:** There's this idea that if you're a luxury car salesman, you should be able to make money on that. But for fundamentals that matter to people, let's not make money on those. Let's just do them as charities. That is the most wrong. My ideal world would be to have higher margins on grocery stores and higher luxury taxes on Mercedes sales. **Jackson:** [Laughs] **Maxwell:** You need to be more capitalistic. You need to be brutally capitalistic and brutally orthodox about capitalism in the areas where it's the least popular—generators after a hurricane. It's considered the worst thing ever if you raise the price of a generator during a hurricane. **Jackson:** Let markets do what they're good at. **Maxwell:** Let markets do what they're good at. One of my favorite pieces is by Leo Leibovitz, an editor at Tablet. He wrote a piece in First Things magazine called "A More Perfect Mediocracy," and he's painting this picture of America as a fundamentally average place. The anecdote he gives is that he's driving with his wife in Italy. They're looking for caffeine in the middle of the night and can't find anything for miles and miles. Then 30 minutes later, they finally find a place on the side of the highway. It's one in the morning, and they have the best espresso of their lives. In America, on highways where I grew up, every few miles you have a 24-hour gas station with pretty bad black coffee, but it'll get you caffeinated. It's open 24 hours a day. The fact that we have that is because we were willing to embrace the idea that people should be free to make decisions about price and that you should be able to make money on a black coffee at midnight in Iowa. **Jackson:** There's a price someone will pay for that. **Maxwell:** You should be able to make money on gas. The easy position is that we're going to make money selling expensive things and have this sort of capitalism, but we're not going to have profitable grocery stores. This is Elizabeth Warren telling Kroger that they need to eliminate their cash margin because they're doing greedflation. That is what I'm identifying as a degree of murder. She is legitimizing the idea that you shouldn't be able to make money on helping people. This is the worst of all worlds because it's the idea that you can make money on stupid stuff but not on helping people. The whole idea with this definition of capitalism—that you have to negotiate with people instead of kill them—is that you're allowed to make money on helping them. The question should be: how much money are you going to pay? How much is this person going to make? Markets and competition are what drive down prices and make these goods more accessible to all. That's why you have power lines all over the US—because the person putting the power was allowed to make money on it. It's why you have these gas stations all over the place where someone who's hungry or cold in the middle of the night can get coffee and hot food. It's because the person is allowed to make money on it. The logical conclusion of "you are not allowed to make money on this" is ultimately "I'm allowed to kill you." Because if you're not allowed to make money on it, there's only one way that we can stop you in the end if you keep trying, and it's murder. That is why it's important. **Jackson:** Not to mention an intermediary step: a bunch of preferences will not be served by the government or by some non-market feature if you don't have this. **Maxwell:** The opportunity cost of that is so significant. It's what you see happen in these lethargic, socialistic societies, North Korea being one of the most acute examples. ## [01:44:22] Defending Critiques of Capitalism and Concerns of Concentration of Power **Jackson:** With all that said, at the risk of the very paternalism you just spent a bunch of time criticizing, there's a view that capitalism is very good at giving people exactly what they want. Which is part of what you just said. There are a few critiques. One of them, which is probably paternalistic, is that people don't always know what they want or what's good for them. Another is Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" as a commentary on the tragedy of the commons and an eventual race to the bottom. The third, and probably the greatest real risk, is capitalism trending towards an extreme concentration of capital and leverage in a very small amount of people's hands. **Maxwell:** That third one is by far the least true of all, and I am most interested in contesting it. I'll go back to an event that we've discussed a few times: the 2016 election. These alleged one-way trends are never true, and the concentration of wealth never persists. It also doesn't provide the leverage that people think it does. Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a factor of 10 to 1 in the election. The peasants revolted, the American people revolted—there are always balancing mechanisms. It is true in the classical libertarian sense that in order to pursue the level of equality that the Marxists or people earnestly concerned about equality are seeking, you have to suppress things that are good. The alleged remedies are always worse. The American system, where Elon Musk is worth $450 billion as of today, is by far more equal than the system that would violently take away his money and confiscate it. There are too many societies to count where this experiment has played out. **Jackson:** It's more about technological leverage than purely capital leverage. **Maxwell:** I don't know what that even means, technological leverage. I have the same iPhone as people that make a lot less than I do, and I have the same iPhone as people who are worth billions or tens of billions of dollars. Clearly, technology is one of the least relevant categories for this concentration or ossification. **Jackson:** What about Sam Altman's control? There's a possible world where a very small amount of people will have access to a technology that could end the world. It's like a corporation or an individual having a nuke. **Maxwell:** No, I love this. This goes back to my tongue-in-cheek point. The FBI director is definitely more powerful than the AGI CEO. You just go arrest the bastard. I don't worry about these things because if the suggestion is that we're going to do forced equality instead, that clearly presents a much more harmful opportunity for the corrupt concentration of power. That's how you get Stalin. That's how you get Kim Jong Un. That's how you get Franco. If it's based on singling out enemies and cutting the tall trees, that's the type of logic that is just murderous. Technological leverage reminds me of what the Obama people were saying in 2014. Obama was the first candidate to get on social media. He did it super well. They were using Facebook to mobilize. He won 365 electoral votes the first time and a little bit less the second time. Then who came knocking in 2016, tweeting? Trump. These things are not ever set in stone. It is only if people believe that classes are stagnant that they can accept the logic of Marx, which is that one group is the same over this period of time, and another group is the same over this period of time. That's how you could get to the idea that the peasants or the poor are going to revolt against the rich. One of the reasons socialism never came to America is because of social mobility, and because the poor, the working class, or the affluent are a constantly changing group. **Jackson:** By the way, back at the beginning of your conversation, there's a foundational myth that is internalized in basically everyone here: there's nobody better than me. **Maxwell:** People are very distrustful. Elon, bless his heart, tried to spend millions and millions of dollars in a local Wisconsin election, and it had zero effect. It did not work at all. People way overestimate their leverage, or they will overestimate other people's leverage in order to justify taking away their liberties. One of the most infamous recent Supreme Court cases of the last 20 years was the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court ruled that you could not restrict the ability of individuals or corporations to spend on political advertising with their own money. That's a super scary thing because of all this money. There are two reasons why it's a ridiculous thing to be concerned about and you should move on to more important issues. A, we've now proven over and over again that money is not the end of the story. And B, the fundamental issue in the Citizens United case was whether the Federal Election Commission could ban the showing of a movie that was critical of Hillary Clinton because of who had paid for its production. It always ends up justifying the most extreme thing if you're that concerned about it, which was literal censorship: "No, you can't show that movie. It's too critical of Hillary Clinton." That was a crazy thing. But it was based on this idea that the institutions and the capital always stay the same. That is the most false thing that has to be constantly disproved because it's one of the most common fallacies that underlie all the disastrous ideas. **Jackson:** Just: "this time it's different." **Maxwell:** This time it's different. ## [01:50:51] Arena, Good Writing and Editing, Magazines as a Medium, Durability, Influences **Jackson:** We can talk a little bit about Arena. **Maxwell:** Who cares? **Jackson:** [Laughs] The magazine specifically. What makes for good writing? **Maxwell:** Good writing is fundamentally good description that makes you understand or see something. Good writing paired with a good reader is two people thinking, even though they've never met one another. Someone gets to see how I think, and I get to teach them how I think. There's a relationship across the words. **Jackson:** What about editing? **Maxwell:** Good editing forces someone to question whether their first draft is the best possible one. That's usually quite a ridiculous question to ask someone: "Is the first thing that you wrote down the best possible version of this?" It's an iterative process and a fundamental recognition of our own failings. Editing is just humility. Am I the best? Am I the greatest? Am I always the best? Am I always the greatest? Do I have anything to learn? There's the David Foster Wallace "This is Water," where there are fish swimming along and: "How's the water?" "What the hell is water?" If you've been swimming for too long, you need to remember where the water is. It's a reminder of the most obvious thing ever, which is that we can always improve. **Jackson:** How have you gotten better at editing? **Maxwell:** The best way to get better at editing is to be more comfortable with being frank—to be more direct. This is bad. This makes no sense. Shut the F up. Stop trying to be so florid. If you can't get to the truth easily, then there's no hope for it otherwise. It's a thing that becomes more clear over time. The only way you would not improve as an editor, doing it over and over again, is if you were not saying what you actually think. Maybe this is an engineering culture: Let's get concrete. Let's be specific. I'll give an example that I like to do in editing. This is more of a process thing than a skill. I like to write a reverse outline of the piece I'm reading. It's pretty easy to do. You can go paragraph by paragraph and write a sentence summarizing it. If it doesn't make sense as a list of sentences, then it's probably not in the right order. You're probably not organizing your thoughts correctly. A lot of people are way too emphatic about grammar and syntax the first time they're trying to edit something. Writing is a process of thinking. If your thoughts are in the wrong order, that's the first problem. Then you can go another level deeper. Are they in the wrong order in this paragraph? Are they in the wrong order in that paragraph? How am I thinking? Think better. **Jackson:** Reverse outline. Meaning you're going to literally paragraphs backwards? **Maxwell:** Someone will send me a piece. Not reverse backwards. Instead of turning an outline into a piece, I'm turning a piece into an outline. **Jackson:** Totally. **Maxwell:** And I never outline. This is a divisive subject. But it's very useful to do the reverse outline. **Jackson:** Yes. Because you can teach people. You're compressing, almost. **Maxwell:** You can teach people. And if they've got their own outline, then showing them the difference between the reverse outline and the original outline can be very fun. Because you did not accomplish this goal at all. Here's what you thought you were doing, and here's what you actually did. Again, it's getting to honest criticisms, because that can be very sobering. Then there's the other phrase, "kill all your darlings," which any artist faces. For me especially, I am always obsessed with sentences. I will start a piece with a single sentence that I'm so convinced is the best one. You have to be most willing to move past that one because that was where you were the most wrong and the most set. **Jackson:** It got you here. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't kill it. **Maxwell:** Being more honest is always a useful tool in thinking. To the extent that writing is just thinking, getting more honest and more concrete is the best possible thing, whether you're writing for yourself or editing someone else. **Jackson:** Arena is a magazine. It's a literal object. It's also clear, being in the room with you, that you admire large, highly image-based books and beautiful reading objects. Unlike most of the text people read today—including books on Kindle, essays, and most written content—magazines in particular are distinctly not only physical, but textual and visual. What is it about that type of medium that is so appealing to you? **Maxwell:** It's a challenge and a puzzle. I'm not a professionally trained artist or designer, but I have always had a strong creative and mathematical intuition. Print design is one of those great challenges. It's something that's been very underrated in America and the world writ large over the last several decades. The one area where it's really been strongly emphasized is in technology, where there's an objectively better way to present visual imagery and information in the form of text. Your job is to crack the code and find a better way to do it. Writing is thinking, so it needs to be presented in a good way. That will make people enjoy it more and not hate it. The physical object version of it is a much more fun layer for me to add on top. It needs to be done in concert with the editing. You can edit something really well and then just publish it as plain text. Sure, that's a thing. Why not put it in paper? What are you so afraid of? That's the question that everyone else is begging when they're not adding a special thing on top of it. Is this really worthy of cutting down a tree, turning the tree into paper, and asking people to pay for it or open it in their homes? That's a big thing: How do you make a magazine that people actually want to possess and not just buy? **Jackson:** Yes. **Maxwell:** You can buy a rolled-up piece of glossy toilet paper known as a magazine at the grocery store. You can get The Atlantic or Time, which are storied papers with great writing in The Atlantic. What does it say about the great writing if it's being published on the cheapest paper that's ever been invented, where if it gets a little drop of water on it, it's completely soiled? It's been stapled together and it's so chock-full of ugly ads you don't even want to pay attention to it. What gives? In everything that we do, we're trying to do the opposite of that. We want to be as well-edited as the best magazines in the world, but we also take design, production, and art seriously, so that people think, "Oh, this is good. I like this. This is not expected either." **Jackson:** Why is durability so important in every sense of that word? **Maxwell:** The obsessive cost-cutting culture has reminded people that there's a reason why making things properly the first time is worthwhile. I don't know that I have a good intellectual explanation for it. I could tell you that with a book, I want to be able to hand it down to my son and his daughter and not have to replace it. Quality goods can make everyone rich because they're things that last. Tens of millions of Carhartt duck jackets are sold every year in the U.S. Yes, they're more expensive than some crap jacket that's going to fall apart. People are made rich by this phenomenon of things that last. It's another virtue of capitalism: turning every person into an aristocrat. One of the ways that you can do that is realizing, "Wow, I own things that will last a long time and that are high quality." In many cases, it's not that much more expensive on a marginal level to make things better. It's not that much more expensive to do a 100% cotton shirt instead of rayon. It requires more effort, but it creates more prosperity in the long run. Things that last—maybe there's a primitive reason why they're good. I don't know. **Jackson:** My friend Reggie calls these "universal luxuries." **Maxwell:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Especially for something that might be disposed of, not only will it literally last, but you're more likely to keep it. **Maxwell:** Consider the classic rolled-up toilet paper magazine. I call it glossy toilet paper because of how thin the paper is. Why would you want to display it on your coffee table? What does it say about you if you have The Atlantic sitting on the table these days? It's not communicating much. Having something that's high quality is a status thing as well. Everyone should be proud of the things that they're consuming, engaging with, and participating in intellectually. That's just rarer these days. **Jackson:** Are there any magazines or other types of visual-heavy books that were influential to you? **Maxwell:** I used to love getting Popular Mechanics when I was a kid, and all the mechanical children's books. I became a book obsessive at one point. My dad used to join these book-of-the-month clubs in the mail and would essentially dine and ditch them—you sign up, get the books, and then you don't do anything. He'd have all these books to fill the bookshelves, almost none of which he was reading: World War II, Catherine the Great, Russia, and ancient civilizations. It was considered good without explanation that you have all these things. The idea of beautiful objects like that is very influential to me. What I really dislike is seeing low quality all over the place because it represents this trend to cheapify things, which ultimately makes people not like them in the first place. You're less likely to be attached to an ugly book. You might find a love for books if you are introduced to beautiful books. **Jackson:** What does success look like for Arena on a five-year scale? **Maxwell:** A nicely profitable media enterprise that can make a lot of money and make it possible to do this type of creative work long into the future—to pay for writing and art, make beautiful things, and make money on it. I don't have a good answer on a civilizational scale. I think it's one of those "the score takes care of itself" things, where if you do things well, the positive effects are borne by the people we're affecting. It's not necessarily going to be direct things that we do. We had a grandmother write to the magazine shortly after the second issue went out. She wanted to buy four copies of the magazine for her grandsons before they went off to college. She's 86, in North Carolina, and said, "I'm probably not going to be around a lot longer, but I want them to know the example of entrepreneurship." Could I have given you an intellectual answer that was going to predict something like that? No. We focus on what we know: how to create beautiful things, how to have the discussions we want, and how to do the things we know well. Other people will pick up the torch for us. **Jackson:** Is there anyone or anything you would be particularly excited to profile? **Maxwell:** We want to document all levels of the great American story of entrepreneurship. There's obviously a list, but the truth is that part of the great fun is doing this at very high levels and very low levels—in reality, it's more like the underappreciated levels. There's no white whale that we're chasing. There's so much around us that we can't keep up. ## [02:03:34] Big and Small America **Jackson:** I have a grab bag of a few questions before we wrap up. **Maxwell:** Please. **Jackson:** You straddle what I would call an American high and low. Or maybe big and small—small would be more accurate. I don't mean to imply lowly. Which is to say, big dreams, capital, ambition, technology, and scale, and then also the story you just told, or the little stories about mom-and-pop shops in little places, or your love letters to Ojai and Hot Springs, Arkansas. How do those coexist for you? **Maxwell:** How could they not? I'm an American. The biggest result of getting out of a bubble is realizing that to become a person who only sees the bigger, important things and not the little things around you is the peak of ignorance. Maybe it's an antisocial streak I have. I am not as interested in big social circles; I like random places and what have been called "blue highways"—the unexpected roads. It's a personal fascination. Some of my favorite authors talk about the quotidian things in life, the everyday—Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe. The truth is that you see the big stories in all of the little ones if you look. You'd miss out on some great stories if you're not paying attention at both levels. Ultimately, that's what I am as a storyteller. I'm attached to these things. **Jackson:** On that note, what have you learned or what comes to mind when you think about traveling across America? **Maxwell:** The most underreported story is how prosperous random places in America are. One of the better pieces I've ever published was in the Free Press, called "Welcome to the MAGA Hamptons." It was about the Lake of the Ozarks, a man-made reservoir in central Missouri created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was a flooded valley, created around 1929. As a result of the shape of the river valleys, creeks, and hollers in that area, the coastline of the Lake of the Ozarks is longer than the entire Pacific coast of the United States. **Jackson:** What! **Maxwell:** It's 1150 miles of coastline. Imagine a 25,000-legged spider—there are so many inlets. There are 80,000 houses along the shore of this lake. It's in central Missouri, halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis. **Jackson:** Columbia-ish, or south? **Maxwell:** It's about a half hour from Columbia. **Maxwell:** It is the place where the Midwestern elites go, and you've never heard of these people. They're car dealers and electricians. They have these lake houses and boats, and they do not care at all what the rest of the country thinks of them. They're affluent. I called it the MAGA Hamptons because they're voting for Trump and doing Trump boat parades. Think about what a Trump boat parade is. It means that there are these people that are all in one place and they all own expensive boats in order to do a boat parade. That is the most underreported story that I'm constantly finding. People have variously called it mass affluence or whatever you want to call it. It's always hilarious to me to find the local maxima in these places. What's funny to me is the joy of telling people about places that they had never heard of before. Listening to New Yorkers and New Englanders read about the Lake of the Ozarks—oh, my gosh. I know all of this stuff that you don't, and I like that. ## [02:07:30] Joe Lonsdale **Jackson:** What have you learned from Joe Lonsdale? **Maxwell:** I definitely did not have a very entrepreneurial sense about me when I started working with Joe. I probably would have never started a media company or learned how to hire and manage people. Seeing Joe approach every problem through the lens of how to do this in a virtuous, profitable way where we're going to employ people and elevate them and figure out how to solve it better than other people is an unavoidable conclusion. ## [02:08:05] Upholding Abundance **Jackson:** You have a piece about Sri Lankan agriculture. There's a line at the end where you say, "The bottom line is that modern agronomy works. Are there ways to improve it? Are there negative environmental effects that we should address? What about unethical practices by agricultural corporations? Yes, on all accounts. But at a basic level, criticisms of modern agriculture are only possible in a country saturated with food. It is our material luxury in countries like this one, created by the extreme efficiency of our agricultural practices, that provides some of our most opinionated citizens with the requisite free time and sustenance to spend all day complaining about food systems." **Maxwell:** Oh my gosh. **Jackson:** Obviously a little tongue in cheek. **Maxwell:** I hadn't read that paragraph in a while. This is great. **Jackson:** My question is, it seems that we're moving towards a world of more and more abundance. Maybe your pendulum theory is true about everything. In that world, we will have the luxury to criticize the sources of that abundance. What guidance do you have? **Maxwell:** The pendulum theory is true because all these critics are winning in certain places. They almost ran out of rice in Sri Lanka. It's not at all a march toward the same thing over and over again. This goes back to the activists that I was confronting at Stanford who were promoting a woman who wants to go back to the land and have people farm by hand. No one would take this seriously if you were industrializing or just getting off the ground. It would be a joke. It really is this material situation that causes the opposition to rise up. The only reason why they have any air is because of this other thing. I think that tends to be a pretty strong trend. But populations are going to start to go down. There's going to be some zero-sum games that various countries are playing. There's not worldwide progress in these areas. They have to be constantly protected. Think of the Sri Lanka example. I'll go back 20 years, when Zimbabwe was forming as a country in the '80s. There's a great article about this in the Atlantic by Samantha Power, who was President Obama's ambassador to the United Nations and President Biden's head of USAID. She wrote an article about how when the white population stopped ruling Rhodesia and it became Zimbabwe, they still had the most prosperous agricultural economy in Africa. They were the breadbasket of Africa because the British settlers in Central Africa had planted corn and wheat in an industrial fashion, so the yields were much higher. This was a massively positive thing for the rest of Africa. Mugabe, the communist leader of the black nationalists in Zimbabwe, started confiscating the white farms one by one. It went from being the breadbasket of Africa to one of the most dependent countries on agricultural imports in the world. That's a very acute example. The reason why it's important to talk about the acute examples—whether it's Zimbabwe, North Korea, or Venezuela, where it used to be the richest country in the Americas except the United States and now they're eating rats—is because sanity, progress, civilization, order, and capitalism are all so fragile. They have to be constantly defended from these new heresies and ideologies that again only exist because of the material abundance that has been created. These professional activists have enough money and time to constantly agitate against our system because we've empowered them so much. For the anti-agriculture people, there was enough food in Sri Lanka to argue that maybe we should not do this agricultural thing, and then it was totally ruined. That one was prevented because of political realism. But in societies where they don't have an open discussion, like Zimbabwe, it was just a one-way street to hell. **Jackson:** You could almost make the same point we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation: a sign of a healthy society might be that you have the time and bandwidth for people to be criticizing even the most basic things. **Maxwell:** Americans are so wealthy that they're tweeting at one another all the time and then going out and buying F-150s, trucks, and SUVs. It has to be real in order to criticize it. That's one of the laws. ## [02:12:54] Cooking and Bringing People Together **Jackson:** On a totally unrelated note, you mentioned your brother Jackson was the athlete and you were the cook. I've heard from a few of our friends that you are particularly adept at bringing people together for meals. **Maxwell:** I can guess who that was. **Jackson:** What's special about doing that? **Maxwell:** I've been cooking since I was very young. I enjoy it, possibly because I'm super good at it, and it's an alpha that I have on other people. But it's a good way to bring people together because breaking bread has historically been a way to converse with people, especially people who are different from yourself. I don't have a better intellectual answer other than that it seems true. Experientially, it's true. **Jackson:** That's a good one. **Maxwell:** And I like flexing on people. I guess that's an area where I'm not going to bring them together by playing six-on-six basketball or something. ## [02:13:53] The Back Half of the Brain **Jackson:** I have an excerpt from a very emotional piece you wrote about your brother: "I didn't see it at the time, but wanting an expensive camera was Jackson's way of trying to commit himself to something he saw as big and real. This was bigger than competing with me, his brother. It was about his future. I know now that the stupid purchases are a privilege—no, a miracle. I know that behind every stupid purchase is a human being trying and maybe failing to find his way, to declare his values to a world that doesn't always listen. In this place (Max's Farm), I'm going to build my own world, a world big enough for all my memories. When people ask about it, I'll tell the story of how I learned that dreams shouldn't wait, that there is never as much time as we think, that sometimes making a stupid purchase is the only thing that makes any sense." What can we gain from foolish commitments? **Maxwell:** It is a half of our brain. There is a dialectic between the rational parts and the irrational parts. If you are too extremist about one or the other, then you don't tend to move forward in interesting ways. That's a commentary about understanding the back half of the brain. **Jackson:** That's beautiful. ## [02:15:17] The Places Between Places **Jackson:** My final question. In one of the letters to America, you ran out of gas. And you found yourself with this woman, Glenda, who was saving you. You say: "As I sat in her front seat, she complimented my glasses and told me that she had been an optician. I told her that I was thinking of getting rid of my glasses and having laser surgery to correct my vision. 'Are you nervous?' she asked me. I told her that I wasn't. The risk of surgery seems pretty low to me. She grinned and said, 'No, I meant sitting here with me in my car in the middle of nowhere.'" Later in that peace, you say, "In \*On the Road\*, Jack Kerouac asked the question, "What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plane till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too huge world vaulting us and it's goodbye, but we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies." One last bit: Driving through a place like Hope, Arkansas is a poignant reminder that America—the Republic and the empire—is a nation that doesn't need and doesn't have a Rome or London. In the places between places, things are happening. Bill Clinton became president. And love him or hate him, the story of the man from Hope is the one that compels love for America and its promise, and the promise of the places between places." How can places between places feel like home? **Maxwell:** I was telling the story of how I ran out of gas in Arkansas. And that was Glenda. I was sitting in the front seat of her car. Once you go to one of them, it is self-evident that it's Glenda's home. Glenda had a life in—I forget what the name of that town even was—but Glenda's life was clearly as big as anything. Only a fool would look at it and say that there's something less there. It's true, there's no opera house. There's no anthropic office or something. There are all sorts of ways in which you can tell yourself a story that only one place matters. It just doesn't turn out to be true. Hope, Arkansas is where Bill Clinton was from. It's a tiny little town on the road. You shouldn't underestimate such places. And there's always new things out there. As for the Kerouac thing, I think what Kerouac was getting at, that I feel, is that I spent six minutes with this woman, Glenda, in the front seat of her Cadillac while we were waiting for her boyfriend to go get gas to fill up my SUV on the side of the road in the dark forest in Arkansas on a late summer night. I'm almost certain I am never going to see Glenda again. Obviously it's always possible, but you go to these next things with literally the image of the people behind you in the mirror. What Kerouac is getting at is that there is a richness in those people that to a person who has not experienced it would seem sort of fanciful, but to me is the most true thing ever. And that's America. **Jackson:** Max, thank you. **Maxwell:** Thank you.