Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…ia, the way he might in China. Trump has spoken very openly of envying some of the powers these other people have. I think it’s a consistent governing philosophy that needs to be taken as that. Right? I think sometimes you describe… One of the difficulties Trump poses is sometimes if you just describe what he’s doing, I think quite neutrally, people say, “Oh, you’re criticizing him, you’re anti-Trump.” But I’m just describing what he’s doing. You can think it’s good or it’s bad, but the fact that he wants to arrogate power and find points of leverage and tariffs are one. What he’s doing through DOGE is another. What he did with the DOJ is another. It’s all very consistent. The question is really then just what your normative view is on Trump having that much power. Yeah. I have a question about DOGE, but before that, I’ll just say that I don’t think Donald Trump should have that much power because I think to this day, my biggest criticism and concern is that he is a person that denied the results of the election. And so I’m unwilling. I like George Washington. I like people that have the skill, the ability, the track record to walk away from power. And a person who’s unwilling to accept reality and is willing to bend reality to maintain a grip on power, even if what they’re trying to do is really good, maybe making a government more efficient makes me very concerned. But on the topic of DOGE is more on the Elon side. If we can combine DOGE and abundance as a topic, if DOGE succeeds the effort, let’s just forget DOGE, but the effort of making government more efficient, what does that look like before the next election and after the next election? If we can just look at success. I know I’m jumping again, but I’ll do something quick and then pass to you. I’m not a huge fan of the experiment framing because amidst this experiment, people are… Through USAID, as my colleague Nick Kristof has documented and potentially further and otherwise will die, lose homes, be scammed by things. So I feel like experimenting with the government at that level is very dangerous, but if assuming democracy survives, Democrats, they’re going to make the government work again, are going to have to become less rule-bound than they were. I have outlined that the problem with a personality type of the right is it’s autocratic now, and the problem with a personality type of the left is it’s bureaucratic. And I don’t want to see things going either to where DOGE is in terms of, I think, there’s a fundamental lawlessness to it, but I also don’t like the aims of it. But I don’t want to see things where Democrats were, which is such respect for process, that they will put the process ahead of getting their own things done. They will listen to any lawyer with any super intense interpretation of any law, and that’ll turn them all the way back. What DOGE has demonstrated is that the room for movement inside the American government, inside the state, as much wider than anybody gave it credit for both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may not be as wide, it probably isn’t legally as wide as what DOGE is trying to do, and that’s why they’re losing all these court cases. But it is wide. And you could also use Congress. You could pass statute to make it wider, and you should. There is no abundance agenda that works if the Democratic Party is as rule-bound and as process obsessed as it was in the last 10 years. It doesn’t work flatly. That is why so many of the stories we tell in the book are about process gone. It’s not process gone wrong because it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do, but it is process that has become antagonistic to the promised outcomes. And so I do hope there’s a kind of thesis, right? All the institutions are great. Democrats are the defenders of government. Antithesis, the government is a corrupt cesspool. It’s a ball of worms, and it has to be destroyed and taken over by a benevolent or non-benevolent dictator. And synthesis, which is that the government’s process has made it not a functional state. It’s non-responsive in many important ways, and it needs to be reformed at a quite fundamental level, but in a way that is lawful, in a way that is thoughtful, in a way that is running experiments that gathers information, and then can make adjustments, in a way that is respectful of the human lives, that it touches and affects, in a way that is not hostile to the goals of good government, but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process… …but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process the government has erected and evolved over time.…

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