Saagar Enjeti: belief

Transcript context

…The grass is greener on the other side. Come join us. Okay. Whether it’s Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that that will be possible? Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t think slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people and its government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of our institutions. And I really encourage people… I don’t think people can quite understand what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after FDR. 90% of the people trusted the government. That’s crazy. When the president said something, they were like, “Okay, he’s not lying.” Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam, in particular, really broke the American character and its ability and its relationship with government, and we’ve never recovered faith in institutions ever since that. And it’s really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful, at least this time, is anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics, which got him elected. At this point, we can’t deny it. The McDonald’s thing is hilarious. It’s funny. It is. People love it. People like the podcasting. People like- Garbage truck.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.