Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the time. He would always do stuff like, “Joe Biden, my friend,” and it’s like, “No, he’s not your friend. He stands for everything that you disagree with. Everything.” He’d be like, “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, but he’s not my friend,” but he would always be like, “Joe and I are great friends, but we have a small disagreement on this.” But like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn’t trust anymore. That’s what people really wanted. But the other side of this is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than 2016. Because by 2020, they full-on had TDS, and they were basically like, “We need to defeat Trump at all costs. We don’t give a shit what your name is, Bernie, Biden, whatever. Whichever of you is going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the knob.” 2016 is different because they didn’t full-on have that love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats have. Democrats just care about winning. The current base of the party, all they want to do is win. Republican base? They don’t give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it’s nice to win. But one of those where they will express their id for what they really want. Now, it’s worked out for them because it turns out, that’s a very palpable political force. But one of the reasons why you won’t see me up here doing James Carville 40 more years is there is a law of something called thermostatic public opinion, where the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually… So when you have a left-wing president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing president in power, the country goes left. Amazing. Right? You can actually look at a graph of economic attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became president after Donald Trump. So Republicans, Trump was president in the last year in office, the economy’s great. Two months later, the economy is horrible. That is a perfect example of thermostatic opinion. And I’m not counting these Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate to continue in Iraq. By ’06, he’s toasted. We have a massive midterm election. And by ’08, we’re writing books about 40 more years, and how there’s never going to be a Republican in the office ever again. So things can change a lot in a very short period of time. I think also for me, personally, maybe I’m deluded, the great man view of history, I think some of it is in programming circles, the term skills issue. I think some of it just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are, how good you are as a politician. I maybe disagree with this. I’d love to see what you think. If you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep winning. He would win 2016, he would win 2020, he would win this year, 2024. It’s possible. But I would flip it on you, and I would say Obama would never be elected if there were no term limits, because Bill Clinton would’ve still been president.…

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