The Urgent Need to Uncrazy America

subbasement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to Deep State Radio, I am David Rothkoff and I am joined by three of our very, very favorite friends. One, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, a law center,

“who is at an undisclosed location, how are you doing, Rosa?”

I'm fine, David, but I think you tell everybody on the podcast that they're your favorite friend. That is not true and I can prove it. Next, Edlo's, now I'm here.

Yeah, it's just a joke, Ed. But of course, it's Edlo's of the financial times.

How are you doing Ed? I'm doing fine in spite of being on your podcast. Oh, that's painful. Now I didn't mean that. Don't, we're going to come back to your public positioning recently in a minute and then we have max boot of the council and foreign relations. How are you doing, Max?

“I'm trying to stay sane in a world-gallon mad, David. How are you?”

Exactly the same. Did you see, Max by any chance it's changed that Edlo's had with Elon Musk? No. No, it was, it was a classic Ed and I'm so glad you shared it with me earlier recently. Yes, well, it's changed might be the wrong description. It was just my comment on, you know, Musk returning to his old chestnut of Hitler was a socialist. The left wing is Nazi, et cetera. And so I mean, I thought, I mean, he's been reasoned with on this

completely crap on an obnoxious misinterpretation of history many times before, because he's posted and offered in remarks this Hitler view on many previous occasions and being schooled to know effects. So all I put in him a friend of a unsocratic way was you are a very stupid man. And, you know, he is a classic billionaire in that he thinks because he had skill or luck in one area. He's a genius in every area. He doesn't need to know anything,

do any reading, apply any brain cells whatsoever. And I'm afraid he's stumbled on perhaps the most obnoxious example of that, which is Hitler was the left wing on him. Yeah, well, he's, you know, it says something about our society that here is Elon Musk, who has invented nothing, who got to invest in a couple of things. One of his companies Tesla is fallen far behind Chinese leaders in EVs. Then he joins the US government. He destroys

“a lot of agencies in ways that they should not have been tampered with. Did a terrible job?”

God run out of the job quickly. It was, you know, noted for his Nazi and white nationalist proclivities throughout is now, you know, gotten into lawsuits which get thrown out of court. And then despite all of this screwing up, just gets stronger and richer. And now his company SpaceX is about

to go public. And he's going to become the world's first trillionaire. And so I just don't

think your text out, your post to him is going to really rock his world that I'm sorry. I think this is the beginning of the end for Elon Musk. I think it is told him off and you will not be able to stand the shame of going on its society again. Yeah, well, that was the intention. Well, good for you. All I can say is good for you. You know, there is a temptation to, you know, go back and talk a little bit about the Ron Moore which is not over and shouldn't have been started and

is not really getting any closer to an end. And certainly looks like it will not have any end that's a good end. But I would like to pull back the camera a little bit because I've got you three here and frame this in a way that's just sort of struck me and just allow me a moment to frame it. Because I saw a story today about Trump deciding to withhold certain kinds of aircraft and naval vessels from NATO going forward, which are necessary in the defensive

parts of the U.S. government that fight Russian intelligence efforts and efforts to

“undermine our economy, our government here. It's sabotage efforts. It was a Canadian story”

that are compounding prior efforts to do this last year. And I started thinking about, you know, well, you know, there was an election interference and then things got so bad in Ukraine that our ambassador pulled back and said, "We've switched sides and we've cut a cut off aid to Ukraine." And we've been -- we humiliated Zelensky. We threatened to attack a NATO ally. We pulled troops out of Germany. We're pulling this equipment out of NATO cutting back this stuff. We're reducing

sanctions and Russian oligarchs. We're reducing sanctions on Russian oil as part of the Iran thing. We've offered, apparently, one point to make Russia the interlocutor with highly enriched uranium, which seems a little off to me. Of course, Trump on a regular basis,

puffs up Putin and never says anything bad about Putin. And we've aligned with the kind of

pro-Russian anti-EU voices in Europe on a regular basis. And in fact, it's now our foreign policy to align with those voices and not the EU. And I thought, here is Russia, which is an enemy of the United States. And for years and years and years systematically, in new ways all the time, we weaken ourselves with regard to them. We weaken our allies with regard to them. And we get closer to them and we strengthen them and we advance their interests. And somehow, it's not a source

of national outrage. And I'm going to pull back the camera even further in a second. But I know Max, you've been a Ukraine recently. And you obviously have roots in Russia. And I just just wanted to get, like here you come from a very sound national security background. And what Donald Trump is doing in any other period in our history would be considered, you know, traitorous. And yet we're like, oh yeah, he does that. I just don't get it. I'm just wondering how it lands in your brain.

“I mean, I think that after a decade of having Donald Trump around, I think we've all been kind of”

habituated to his craziness and things that, I mean, I just speak for myself. I can't speak for anybody else, but just speak for myself. I know that, you know, things that would have had me, you know,

setting my hair on fire. If I had any hair back in the, in the first term. Is that what caused

the problem in the first, but add you set your hair on fire? In fact, I did set my hair on fire, which is why I'm now in my presence status. But, you know, I think the things that we see today, I mean, there is kind of a, you know, boiling the frog slowly quality, where I think we have become habituated to outrageous into actions that make no sense or blatantly corrupt, undermine American alliances, destroy US interests, harm the US economy to all those things. And we kind of

shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's Trump. What do you expect? And I'm probably as guilty of that as anybody, because it's just very hard to stay at the requisite level of outrage for an entire decade. And in fact, I think that's, you know, that's kind of one of his, one of his kind of self-defense mechanisms now is that the outrageous has become normalized and you just list out a few of his outrageous things. To stay up to date on all the news that

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better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR 26 for 25% off discount on sign up at the DSR network.com. That's code in DSR 26 at the DSR network.com/by. Thank you and enjoy the show. Well, I have, but there are only a few of them, you know, I mean, we have this Iran war,

even more than that. Economically, has harmed our allies, has harmed, you know, America's standing

in the world. You have not just what's going on with Russia and Ukraine, but you've got efforts that have undercut the economy, driven wedges between parts of American society, undercut our funding of science, undercut our funding of technology, undercutting the engines of our national security, strength, you know, kept away people who would come to this country who could lend their brain power to this country even today. There's new stories about new and

very onerous terms for getting a green card in the United States, drone closer to our allies, strength of the, and you know, there was, we used to have this thing here on this show, or periodically, I would say to Rosa, are we in a constitutional crisis yet? And you would go, well, not quite in a constitutional crisis, but this isn't good. And I look at this, as somebody has been immersed in

national security for my whole life. And I think for the first time, you know, typically we say,

“what's a national security crisis? It's a war. Typically, that's how we sort of, you know,”

we are attacked. There's 9/11, or there's some war someplace. But we're facing a different kind of national security crisis, where in every area that we get strength, we have become weakened, in every area where we benefit from alliances, we have weakened the alliances. And in every area where our enemies could potentially pose a threat to us, we have granted them advantages that they didn't have before. This to me is our first non-war national security crisis. And because, as back

says, it has come slowly, we don't view it as a crisis. But if you take the totality of all of these steps, we are much weaker and more vulnerable today than we were when he took office. And I'm wondering if you agree with that, or whether you want me to calm down again, as I is right, I do agree with that. And slash, but I would emphasize that it's not entirely the case that the national security community, particularly on the Democratic side, has restricted its

understanding of national security crisis to war. I think for many years, many of us, yourself included, David, have noted that everything from the quality of our public education system, to cyber security, to economic inequality in the U.S., all of these things clearly have very profound effects on our national security writ large. That to be a secure and prosperous nation, we need all kinds of things. We don't just need a strong military. We also need a population

that is educated enough to understand the threat environment is educated enough to be economically

“successful. We need young people who are healthy enough to join the military. Remember that”

this seems so quaint. Remember, remember, there was a report put out, Rochosh, it must be 15 years ago by now. And I remember we put it out, but it was a bunch of senior retired military officials called to fight, noting the incredibly high percentage of young Americans who were too obese to qualify to join the military. You name it on any level, whether it's from scientific innovation to personal health and fitness to poverty levels and so on. For a long time,

we have been declining from that sort of happy post world war to everything is getting better. Public education is getting better. People are getting healthier. People are living longer. We've been declining. I think you're also right that under Trump that decline has been rapidly accelerated as both social programs and more directly national security link programs have been totally

“eviscerated. And I think you're also right going back to your conversation with Max that by”

I'm large everybody is going like, oh, yeah. But I don't think it's just because we're all habituated to Trump after a decade of Trump being on the scene. I think that's part of it, right? Part of it is that the total bonkers stuff he says and the horrific stuff he says on a routine basis has ceased to shock us because how can you be shocked when the shocking occurs three times a day? You can't, you can't sustain a permanent state of shock. You've got to go live your life.

But I think it's more than that. A solid 15 to 30% of Americans has always believed all sorts

that they're extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials walking amongst us who believes that the Earth is flat,

you know, it's you name it. You could come up with some bonkers belief and you will always find

about, you know, somewhere between about 15% of Americans and third of Americans who believe it, when you measure polls that look at public knowledge about things, particularly things with it, to our national security. What is NATO? I guarantee you that that, you know, a solid 60 or 70 percent of Americans really have no idea. They've heard the term, you know, maybe they remember it's got something to do with treaties and something to do with Russia. That's probably about as

much as they'll know and a third of them will just be like NATO, what's NATO, I don't know what NATO is, that doesn't mean anything to me. The other way, there is a brand new poll out on that today,

which says exactly what you're saying. Okay, right, they think it's, you know, like related to like

prenatal vitamins or something like that, you know, and so just across and that's, but that's been true for a long time. Both that, the general level of public ignorance is quite high and the willingness of a solid, non-producible percentage of the American public to believe things that are not just

“ignorant, but sort of manifestly crazy has always been there. And I think that what has happened,”

and this is partly the uniqueness of Trump's weird brand of personal charisma, it's partly obviously the information environment, we've talked about this many times, has just been that it is sort of supercharged that idiocy and conspiracy theories and ignorance, so that even if you're not generally an idiot, you know, and I actually think most of our fellow Americans are not generally idiots, but even if you're not an idiot, you're just an ordinary busy person trying to live your life

and most of your, most of your bandwidth is going towards, you know, what do I get for dinner, and can I, can I pay the mortgage and how are the kids doing and so on? You know, you've got tiny little bit of bandwidth reserved for thinking about the world beyond your immediate life, and your information sources are now corrupted and very, very poor, and that a big part of why people don't seem to care is not just the reuse to Trump and we can't stay shocked all the time. It's also

that that, you know, you've got, you've got the conspiracy theorists and the total idiots, and then you've got the vast majority of people who aren't idiots, but they don't get much information, and they don't have much bandwidth to care. So, you know, Ed Rose has talked about the general population. Here's where I have a real problem, is with the national security community,

“they ought to know better. You know, I think during the Biden administration there was too much”

concern about red lines with, with Putin, and not enough concern with if you elect Donald Trump again, he's going to do more damage than Putin is going to do. He's going to actually be working for Putin, and some of the people that we like, you know, and respect, you know, and as see in State Department of Suffereth, who are very thoughtful people, they just didn't worry about domestic threats to our national security. And they didn't take some of these international things as

seriously as they should. And having said that, we've just listed a bunch of things, you know, we didn't list, we didn't list that there is an Ebola outbreak in Africa, and our USA8 cuts have made it harder to contain it, put more people at risk. We went through a pandemic five years ago, and the person we put in charge of protecting us against a pandemic was last seen picking up a bunch of snakes and throwing them in the air. And as a complete lunatic who said, he doesn't believe

in germ theory, because he snorted cocaine off a toilet seat and was a heroin addict. Okay, and it's like,

“oh yeah, oh, come on David, you must be making that up. That can't be true. That can't be true.”

And this is like five years after a pandemic that killed a million Americans wake up and so

our economic sources of strength, social sources of strength, to say nothing of democracy and our institutions or alliances, you know, are weakening and we're aiding our allies and, you know, we're entering into crazy wars. And the solution that Trump seems to be suggesting now for this crazy war, which is going to have some bullshit solution that is going to end us worse off than February 28th and worse off than the JCPLA, is going to be some other war with some other

poor undeserving country, Cuba, Panama, Greenland, some other kind of thing. And so we're just spiraling down. And yet, you know, I follow things at the council on foreign relations and foreign policy where I used to work and so forth. And people are writing thoughtful things about, you know, strategies, security and all this other kind of stuff. And they're not, you know, they're not,

hair, Ed? What about yours? Um, well, my daughter would daily love me to diet back to whatever

“color it was. I can't even remember what color it was before I went to. Either do I. And when we”

started doing this, it was a different color. It was a different color. I might have been like purple. Purple. Yeah. Did you, did you ever in college die your hair, purple? There was no, but what I was at a many times aforementioned ghastly boarding school in deepest rural England. I did put a whole bottle of peroxide on my hair and got into trouble for it. But I thought I looked pretty, pretty nifty as we said it, right, pretty nifty. But the blue phase I can't, I don't think I can recollect,

but that's no evidence that it didn't happen. But it's, the only good thing to say about my hair

is that it's still there. Yeah, well, well done more than I can say. That's for sure. Well, well,

“well done. And now that's shifting this back to this, for serious topic, I just, the National”

Security community in the United States seems to sleep at the switch. That's, it does, I mean, you know, if you go to, it doesn't really matter whether you're talking about an ally or an adversary or the majority of countries that are neither. There is a unanimity today around the world that you engage with the United States with this administration in order to minimize risk

and engage as little as possible. You'll pay a little bit of a toll just to sort of keep

Trump quiet. That toll might be self-abasement. It might be financial. It might be some other form of inducement. But the only aim is exposure minimization to enable to secure damage limitation. That is the approach to the United States around the world from everybody. And that's a pretty extraordinary situation. And that is on Trump. That is unique. I refer you, you know, to the, the ex post I made about Elon Musk, you know, many respects. This is a very stupid man. And you know,

in the middle of attempting, for example, to secure some kind of an exit ramp in a piece talk deal with Iran, he posts an AI meme on truth social showing Iran colored with the stars and stripes. This is a very stupid man. He does have this sort of diabolical charisma. The enables him to get elected and to appeal to many, many tens of millions of Americans. But that doesn't alter the fact that there is no art of the deal there. There are no deals that he's brought off. He's, he's done

precisely the opposite of securing deals. He is about to have some kind of a deal with Iran that leaves him, the world, and everybody other than the Iranian regime, worse off, way worse off than before he started this war. So we're, we're in a situation where the world is ticked towing around America because it's, um, liable to lash out. It's unpredictable, um, and it's, can only bring bad news. Sustain engage with an America is not the way anybody, it wants to go. And that's an

extraordinary situation to be in for the world's greatest power. Um, at the same time, America is growing more than any other developed economy. Now we can, you know, debate why, I think the AI boom is more than half of it. Perhaps, perhaps two thirds and therefore some of this will vanish. It's a shimmerer. They're based on valuations and investment returns that, you know, are going to be extremely hard future expectations of returns, extremely hard to redeem. Uh, nevertheless, America has this

sort of exorbitant subsidy, um, of, you know, having, um, the, what, still having the world's reserve currency still being a benefit for now for now. I mean, it's declining as the world's reserve currency, but there is no obvious substitute. And so America has this margin of error that nobody else

“has and it's using all of it up, but it's still a vast margin of error. And I think that's why”

you know, or, or, pretty much any other democracy or non-democracy would if it had gone through these kinds of spectacular, um, mistakes, um, and, and, and, and betrayed, conveyed this degree of outside, collicular and corruption, almost any other system would have corrected by now, but

It's margin of error is vast. Um, and, uh, that might seem to be an advantage, but I think it's a

disadvantage because America's a society has not come to grips with just how dramatic this atrophy entropy and sort of dramatic decline is. And I think, and I think that's a really

“important insight because I think to understand something as a crisis, you need to create a sense of”

urgency. And you go back to Max's point about the frog test and, and us slowly boiling to death, the crisis is real, but because of this sort of bonus we get because our economy is, is, is driven by some real things and some, uh, things that may not be real, but at least we're benefiting from the moment, we don't have that sense of urgency. Uh, but just for a moment, Max, to go back to the foreign policy community, um, you know, George Cannon, I can show you that I'm a member of the

foreign policy community because I can quote George Cannon. George quit Cannon in the long telegram rights all about threat of Soviet Union and then at the end of it he goes, but the way to beat them is to focus at home, be an example to the world, invest in ourselves, etc. It's sorry, he, Italy's got it. He only devoted a couple of paragraphs to it. Most of the discussions I go to don't focus on these domestic issues and they also don't like to focus on issues that were not

considered, you know, for serious foreign policy people, people like you guys, let you like things that blow up. So AID, we didn't focus on it. We got rid of it. It, it has it caused the profile that it might, you know, fighting pandemics, fighting global climate change and so forth. That gets put at the children's table. But here's one that is even more relegated to the children's table because people don't even think in these terms. And that is the solution of what AID's talking about

is essentially that we need to un-crazy America. And when I talk to people in foreign countries, ministers and, and vice ministers and foreign governments, what are the things they talk to but talk about today is strategic continuity. They talk about the fact that the U.S. is vacillating and they don't know where the U.S. is going to be, which is what you expect from an erratic human being, right? So it's like, oh my god, I don't know whether I can count on them or not. And the most

important thing the United States is going to have to do when it, you know, regains its sense after Trump is somehow not just communicate to the world that we can be stable and dependent on again, but to actually become stable and dependable, which is, I mean, that's, you know, harder than invading a country. You know, but it seems to me that every alliance in the future, every international relationship in the future, the fate of the dollar, the fate of our markets,

all depends and trying to find a way to persuade the world that we are not going to have another nut case as president of the United States. Problem is, I'm not sure how you nutproof the office of the presidency of the United States. I mean, I generally agree with your comments. David, I will just say though, and maybe this is special pleading, because I am speaking to you from my office at the Council on Foreign Relations, which was once known as the, you know, ground zero for the foreign

policy establishment. I don't know what we are today, but I will say that, I mean, much as I might be tempted to go along with you in laying all of this blame at the feet of the,

“of the so-called foreign policy establishment. I think you might be giving us, you know, too much”

credit or too much blame or something, because I don't think we're all that powerful, frankly,

and most of the stuff you're talking about are things that I do think the Biden administration, you know, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, those folks were very aware of, and they were, I'm not, I don't have any brief for them. I think they screwed a lot of things up, including what you were alluding to. I don't think they did enough for Ukraine to help Ukraine win, which they should have done, but I mean, remember, it was Jake Sullivan, who was talking

for years about foreign policy for the middle class and trying to relate all these things to to domestic concerns for that matter, going all the way back to the Gulf War. Remember,

Jim Baker saying the Gulf War was all about job-stops, jobs. I mean, the reality is,

“you can make those arguments, and you can do some good things, even. I think some of the things”

of the Biden administration did with the subsidies for building, you know, chip factories in the

we're actually good things that would help the American position in the world if they hadn't been

blown up by Trump, but at the end of the day, I think my big takeaway from the last decade of insanity in America is that policy, good or bad, doesn't matter as much as we like to think, that those of us who are in the policy business, I mean, I think it's a fair criticism, fair criticism to say, okay, you're so focused on whatever policy you're helping, you're trying to analyze. And you're a mistake slide of the fact that, you know, the whole world is going crazy. You won't know,

you know, speaking for myself, I know the world is going crazy. I know that policy doesn't matter

“that much, but it's the only thing I know. I don't know how to uncraise the world. I don't know how to”

not proof the overall office. And frankly, I think what we've learned, I mean, my big takeaway as a

historian from the experience of the last decade is just how much charisma and personality matters so much more than politics and policy, the things that those of us who are involved in in this world care about. I remember working on foreign policy adviser to John McCain, Mitt Romney, and even God helped me, Marco Rubio, and helping the generous, nice job there with Marco, by the way. I take all responsibility. Have a good job, Max. But I remember working on these

probably somewhat tedious and convoluted policy papers because we used to have this assumption. And that's what it took to be considered as a serious presidential candidate. And then the circus arrives in town and the chief clown gets elected as President of the United States. And we realize, actually, people don't give a damn about our policy papers. They don't give a damn about good policy or bad policy. They want to be entertained and Trump is entertaining. Now,

“I think that prop that analysis is now being tested because as you know, as approval rating”

is in the outhouse right now. It's in the mid-30s. It's going down subtly because inflationism, gas prices are up, costs the living is up. He hasn't delivered any of the things that he promised to deliver on. But to the extent that there is not more of a backlash, I guess it's because we've been habituated to it. And because he is delivering in some sense, you could argue with the American people really want, which is entertainment, which is this stream of crazy. So in some ways,

a lot of Americans actually want that in the Oval Office sadly. I think it's hugely counterproductive. And I think it goes to the point that Ed was making that we do have a large margin for air. And you can kind of argue that we have these large strategic and economic reserves. But you know, we're burning through them. We're kind of testing how much margin we have for air because we're committing every air in the book. But again, to bring it back to your original point,

it's not the foreign policy establishment's fault. I mean, I think most folks in the quote, quote, foreign policy establishment, whatever the hell that is, if it even exists anymore, I think most of us speaking for you and me and Rosen and many others, I think we're all aware of

“what's going on. But what the hell are we going to do about it? Right? Well, that's what I was turning”

next to Rosen. Because Rosen will tell us what to do about it. Rosen will tell us what to do with that if there's one person I would turn to to say this situation's crazy. How do we un-crazy it? It's Rosen. Yeah, I don't think we can easily un-crazy it partly because as I said,

there's also a hardcore of crazy that is always with us and always will be with us.

But the asterisk I would add to Max is saying, you know, it turns out policy doesn't matter that much. It doesn't drive things that charisma, sort of entertainment value drives things. I don't think the asterisk would be that personal charisma of someone like a Donald Trump is enabled by a sort of media and information system. You know, this is sort of like a, you know, if the tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, a charismatic politician who's

presence and charisma is not communicated across media networks. Now these days mostly social media networks rather than certainly not the print media and not even old school, you know, network or cable TV, then it might as well not exist, right? So it's the conjunction of a charismatic person with a particular moment in human history where we've got a type of media environment that has succeeded in capturing big big segments of the American population. So so changing it is not going to come

through better policies as such, right? Changing it is going to require better policies that

communicated to the American people. I mean, there is a limit, right? And you articulated it in terms of Trump's approval ratings, this is the, this is the sort of, you know, Samuel Johnson, you know, exchange with Bishop Barkley saying, you know, nothing exists outside of human perception and Samuel Johnson, at least supposedly, you know, kicks a rock and says thus I refute you, you know, that inflation and prices at the grocery stores, that's the rock, right? And Americans will believe

almost anything, but then at a certain point you go to the supermarket and you go to the gas station, you can't afford to fill your car, you go to the supermarket, you can't afford to buy dinner, that's the rock that we're kicking right now. And a lot of Americans are kind of going like, oh,

wait a second, maybe I've been sold bill of goods. But still not enough of them, you know, we still

got that whatever, 38%, the think Donald Trump is doing an awesome job. You know, either they haven't stubbed their toe on that rock quite yet or they are so, you know, so confused and baffled by the misinformation that they're getting, that they think that the rock was put there by George Soros, everybody thinks the rock was put there by George Soros actually, um, you know,

“or they're just part of that irreducible bunch of crazy who will always be with us, right?”

That, so what do we do? I mean, I do think right now, this is an emergency moment when all of us should be spending all of our time focusing both on safeguarding our election system and focusing on figuring out how to sort of unfuck our media environment. Because those are the two things, those are the enablers, right? If we can't sustain any kind of democratic system, then all of our brilliant and subtle policy ideas that will in fact make the world a better

place if only we can implement them, don't matter because we'll never have a chance to implement

them, we'll never have an opportunity. You know, dido, all of our amazing messages and messaging

and so on, don't have a chance if they can never reach anybody because everybody's in their own weird little corner of the social media universe. You know, that those two things, I think, you know, if anybody says, well, what should I be doing? And I've been having this conversation with many of my friends who work on, you know, more esoteric, important, but esoteric issues, I mean, I've talking to a colleague who works on alternative first response for policing.

You know, how do you make sure, especially when you've got mental illness involved and so on, that the first responders on the scene aren't just armed officers who may not be the right people, almost always are not the right people to do that. And you want to get training,

mental health professionals, more involved in the earlier stage. This is great. This is really

important. I was talking about sort of like, this is super important. But if I have any dollars to put into this right now, I'd be focusing on working with law enforcement about, you know, how do they support free and fair elections in the United States, right? Because if we don't have that, we don't have nothing. We don't, you know, there's no point in where's no point in having our brilliant plan to improve policing by 2%. You know, if we, if we don't have a democracy

that can enable us to do that, and I give that just as one of many, many examples that they're all,

“I think it's so easy for us policy people. We retreat into policy and we retreat into the”

world of the familiar cut because it's what we know. But we all need to be focusing every ounce of creative energy we have right now. I think on, you know, maintaining free and fair elections and on trying to figure out how we unflock the media environment. Yeah. I mean, you paint a beautiful picture, Rosa, because the idea of an un-crazy White House and an unfucked media environment is kind of appealing. And, you know, I don't remember it

from my own personal experience, but it's a, it's a, it's a appealing picture. But at least we've just two quick questions here for it. One, when you died your hair platinum, were you going for a Billy Idol thing? Was there a specific look that you were going for? Is Billy Idol the comedian on the pop star? Pop star? Well, obviously I was going for the pop star look, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I kind of figured that and frankly looking at you right now,

“I think it's very close to platinum again. And I encourage you to just go back there.”

That's the word for musical contributions. No, I meant your hair. Yeah. Okay. That was what I was thinking about your hair. But yeah. Oh, yeah, that's it. But of a monkey python, I get, I get my idols mixed up. That was Eric idols. That was a different idol all together. My favorite idol. That was the best idol. It's certainly better than American idol. But in any event, Ed Rosa in her area, Diteway brings up Samuel Johnson and Bishop Barkley and talks about the tone meeting

the rock. And I just from you as somebody who's writing also about American politics all the time.

it usually is. I don't care about the midterms. And last week you said, I don't care about the economy.

But I have this feeling that when the toe hits the rock, a lot of people are going to care and

“and I just wonder how do you think that's what's going to drive American politics. It is said”

that people form their view of the economy regarding an election in June of the election year. And so here we are, a few days before June, is the toe going to hit the rock and at least give us a chance of a reset. So, you know, I like to raise this reference to Barkley. I mean, the way the short version of Bishop Barkley versus John Hume, the idealist versus the empiricist was Barkley's philosophy of the world is believing is seeing and Hume's the empiricists view is seeing is believing. But I

guess what we have is a sort of twisted Barkleyism right now, where I'm believing is not seeing. And one of the most extraordinary things about the corruption going on all around us.

“The scale of it, the brazenness of it, the sort of buckled quality to the enrichment of Trump”

and the people around him, is that so many Americans think, well, they all do that.

The Washington is just corrupt, politicians are corrupt, and you know, the deep states are always

being the deep states as well. You know, we've watched all the president's man and fly to the Congress and all this. It is so steep to an American popular culture that everybody is on the take. And the the bureaucrats in there who have extraordinary Marvel comic levels that are powers over world events in our lives that they will believe anything. And I don't mean they as in the average American who bump into, but I mean enough critical mass out there, people who aren't playing

attention, and are therefore more susceptible, more vulnerable to being gullible is what we're

really talking about. It's not that people are crazy, but the collective outcome of a people who

are turned off from politics deeply cynical about it. Therefore highly gullible towards it. It isn't crazy. I mean, what do we do with crazy people? You know, we give them medication, maybe we have to institutionalise them. You can't do that to a democracy. It is a mixture of

“a mixture of qualities that will take a long time to sort of overcome. And I think only experience”

will do it. And if that experience means your toe is just continually bleeding from kicking that rock, which is beginning to bleed more or more, I think, you know, this economy looks good in terms of global macro growth, but it's very case shaped. Most of it's going to the top. Most people are actually experiencing declining real income because of the pickup of inflation. Then for sure, there will be a defeat to the incumbent party. And that'll be the Republicans.

There'll be a wave against it. There'll be bigger than any jerrymandering that the Supreme Court can allow them to do. It bigger even than that. And therefore the opponents of Trump and of those who pass on the slightly less insane side of society will get another chance to do the right thing and to try and decrisify this society. But it's a really, really, you know, it's a really small window that's going to come next year with a new Congress. And it's a really

sort of narrow chance with the presidential primaries to get somebody who's got the charisma, plus the sanity and the skill to begin and redressing everything we've been talking about on this podcast. And I will believe it when I see it. I want to give you an opportunity here, Max, to match the area addition of Ed and Rosa. Ideally, with a reference to some power of Russian philosophy, Solovia or Dostaevsky, or perhaps Tolstoy. I was thinking with Tolstoy, you could say,

every happy country is alike, but every unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, but perhaps you have a way that you would like to go with that. I actually don't have an area you'd like reference to trade with with Rosa and Ed. I just had a passing remark of faint optimism. I think the

that if you screw up a country long enough and if it still remains even a semi-functioning democracy,

eventually you will get voted out. The people will catch on that you're not doing a great job,

you're horribly corrupt, you're mismanaging everything. And eventually there will be a price to pay for that.

“So I think that's not too, if there's anything that can interrupt our gloom and doom and goodness knows,”

I often feel very gloomy these days. I think it is looking at what happened in Hungary or

before that in Poland where populist regimes have their contained their own downfall because

“populists, by definition, sort of ignore experts and rule in ways that are contrary”

to the national interests and eventually that catches up with you. Excellent comment. Excellent discussion. You guys are brilliant and great to talk to and make me feel

“better even as I feel worse, which so bad as good as I can do these days. So for now, thank you, Rosa,”

thank you, Max. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll have more each and every day on the crazy times we're in and periodically recommendations for how to un-crazy things are unfucked. So come here for more of that. At YouTube, you can subscribe. At the DSR network, you can subscribe and help support us as a paying member. Do whatever it is that works for you, but please come back. For now, thanks. Bye-bye.