Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JOSH'S TAKE On Trump's Win

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JOSH'S TAKE On Trump's Win · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get A.E. Humans, welcome to a live video sub-stack.
• 0:07
  I've given some of my thoughts about the election yesterday.
• 0:10
  I'm in Cambridge, England, which is a delight on a cloudy gloomy day, perhaps reflecting some of my feelings today.
• 0:19
  The first thing to say is congratulations to Donald Trump and to everyone who supported him
• 0:25
  and you now have the ball in your court, folks.
• 0:29
  It's your job to now convince the rest of us that we were being hysterical nines
• 0:33
  in thinking that this might be a disastrous four years
• 0:37
  and to prove to us that he will be a competent and caring and unifying figure
• 0:42
  who will in fact reduce the things that you want him to reduce,
• 0:46
  like, I don't know, workness and the craziness of the left, the work mind virus,
• 0:51
  inflation, militarism, and that he won't jeopardize American democracy.
• 0:59
  The second thing I would say is it's going to be okay.
• 1:03
  It's probably going to be okay.
• 1:05
  I can't say for certain it'll be okay, but I tend to concur with what the economist magazine said
• 1:11
  in their last editorial about this, which was the reason for opposing Donald Trump
• 1:17
  is not necessarily because he will be a catastrophe, but because the tail risk,
• 1:22
  in other words, the worst case scenario is so much worse in the case of his administration
• 1:28
  than a Harris administration would have been.
• 1:31
  So let's just hope that the tail risk doesn't come true.
• 1:35
  One of the things that the economist said was, okay, so suppose that he is serious about tariffs
• 1:41
  and he imposes radical tariffs and that this then contributes to inflation
• 1:48
  because produces pass along those prices to consumers.
• 1:53
  And then in order to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates,
• 1:58
  but he doesn't like that.
• 2:00
  So suppose that he installs a new person into the Federal Reserve.
• 2:03
  He can't really get rid of the chairman until 2026,
• 2:06
  but you could install like a shadow deputy who basically tries to seize control
• 2:10
  and politicize the independence of the Fed.
• 2:13
  Then that would cause markets to crash because the Wall Street would not like that kind of uncertainty
• 2:19
  in the strength of the US dollar or the independence of the Federal Reserve Bank.
• 2:24
  And he would run around with his pants on fire because he likes the stock market being high
• 2:29
  and that would sort of rein him in.
• 2:31
  This is like one scenario where the natural checks and balances of a free economy
• 2:37
  and of America's systems might be able to sort of pull him back as he blunders around.
• 2:42
  But you can equally imagine it turning into a catastrophic dispute between him and the Supreme Court
• 2:48
  and the Federal Reserve and causing inflation, high interest rates,
• 2:55
  and him not really understanding what he's doing.
• 2:58
  So I think those sort of moderate tail risks where it's not the end of the world,
• 3:02
  but it's certainly not business as usual, the likeliest ones,
• 3:06
  unless just cross fingers and pray that something much, much worse doesn't happen.
• 3:11
  If I was a betting man, I would say we're going to be okay.
• 3:15
  He's an amazing figure.
• 3:17
  I mean, to have done this for the first time in over a hundred years
• 3:21
  to win an election and then lose an election and come back and win an election
• 3:24
  does say something about the power of that man.
• 3:29
  It's also the case that we're living at a time when governments all over the world
• 3:34
  are being voted out of power.
• 3:36
  It's perfectly normal for a party to be voted out of power in America
• 3:40
  when voters are replying to the question of whether they're better off or worse off
• 3:44
  the way that voters have been.
• 3:46
  Trump would start every rally by saying you're better off than you were four years ago
• 3:52
  and that's a poignant question.
• 3:54
  Prices are high.
• 3:56
  Inflation is going down, but that doesn't change the fact that the prices
• 3:59
  are still going to stay as high as they've grown.
• 4:01
  Inflation going down doesn't bring the prices back down.
• 4:04
  It just reduces the rate of growth.
• 4:07
  So given that the population, not just in America,
• 4:11
  but all over the joint feels like they're not necessarily better off than they were four years ago.
• 4:16
  And given that a lot of Americans respond to the question,
• 4:20
  do you think that the country is going in the right direction or the wrong direction
• 4:24
  with a wrong direction answer?
• 4:27
  It is not that surprising in hindsight that the incumbent would suffer.
• 4:32
  They're suffering everywhere.
• 4:34
  So we don't need to necessarily read into this more than it means
• 4:37
  and conclude that Americans are all racist fascists.
• 4:42
  A lot of them just didn't like the alternative.
• 4:46
  Which brings us to that alternative and the mistakes that the Democrats have made.
• 4:51
  I wouldn't put this all on the shoulders of Kamala Harris.
• 4:54
  She is not a brilliant political figure.
• 4:57
  She's no Obama, but she was dealt a difficult hand in hindsight.
• 5:02
  I think history will judge very harshly.
• 5:05
  Joe Biden's decision not to step out gracefully much earlier in the cycle
• 5:10
  to allow for a proper primary.
• 5:13
  And clearly Kamala Harris was put in place originally as vice president
• 5:18
  on the admission of Joe Biden himself because of her race and because of her gender.
• 5:24
  And that meant that that pool was exceedingly small.
• 5:28
  She wasn't the strongest candidate in 2020.
• 5:31
  You know, in addition to Joe Biden, there were other candidates who he could have chosen
• 5:35
  who would have been more electable than her in this cycle.
• 5:39
  But such is the price we pay for the social justice movement of four years ago.
• 5:46
  I do have a sense that the White House is about to be taken over by people
• 5:51
  who really don't have an interest in governing.
• 5:54
  They don't have an interest in policy minutia.
• 5:57
  They're not wonks.
• 5:59
  You know, the scenario that I just articulated about a possible clash
• 6:04
  with the Federal Reserve and the importance of the independence of the Federal Reserve
• 6:07
  and the impact that tariffs could have on inflation and the way that inflation relates
• 6:11
  to interest rates and the way that interest rates and an attack on the independence of the Fed
• 6:16
  could then shake markets and the faith in the US dollar.
• 6:20
  Like all of these things I don't think are being scrutinized deeply by Trump's economic team.
• 6:26
  In some respects, it just feels like he's a kind of person who calls plays at being president
• 6:32
  and the people around him cosplay at governance.
• 6:35
  There's this sort of, I don't know, Elon Musk and superhero coming to save the day fantasy
• 6:42
  that I find deeply unseemly as someone who prefers wonks and nerds to people who posture.
• 6:49
  But this is democracy and you're allowed to vote in cosplaying superheroes if you want to.
• 6:56
  It is worth noting that during the campaign, I had started feeling in recent weeks
• 7:01
  that Trump's message was at least clear.
• 7:05
  And this is a problem that the Democrats always have.
• 7:08
  They do tangle themselves up a little bit, don't they?
• 7:11
  I mean, Trump stood for immigration, cost of living and crime.
• 7:18
  And what did Kamala Harris stand for?
• 7:23
  It was a bit hard to tell.
• 7:25
  She didn't do a lot of interviews.
• 7:28
  You know, I go back and forth about whether it would have been worth her time to do a show like Joe Rogan.
• 7:34
  But my inclination is that it would have that she needed to seem more human.
• 7:39
  She needed to seem less unreasonable.
• 7:42
  And she needed to be more overt about distancing herself from the social justice craziness of the past of her past.
• 7:51
  But it's fundamentally important that the left is able to reclaim its historical appeal to the working class.
• 7:59
  It was supposed to be the working person's party.
• 8:02
  And Republicans were supposed to be the fancy high hat rich guys party.
• 8:07
  And the idea that this billionaire, this billionaire trailing a history of lawsuits and bankruptcies behind him,
• 8:19
  who has always represented himself as the gold plated top end of town, self made American success story that he is not coding among the American electorate as being the rich elitist, but that he's the every man.
• 8:35
  And that the left has become so clumsy at being able to articulate a vision of working class values that it now codes as the elite party is a real tragedy, a real shame.
• 8:48
  Someone asked in the comments on my sub stack about what I thought of Bernie Sanders.
• 8:54
  And I love Bernie.
• 8:56
  In some respects, I think in 2016, if the Democratic party had had a real primary instead of anointing Hillary, which is a sort of parallel problem to what we've had in 2024, the anointing of Kamala Harris and the anointing of Hillary leaving voters feeling like there wasn't a real race.
• 9:13
  Like there wasn't, they didn't have a real say in who the Democratic candidate was.
• 9:17
  And also just depriving the Democratic candidate of the experience that they need in going through a proper, proper primary.
• 9:23
  In some respects, Bernie Sanders could have been a more formidable candidate against Donald Trump the first time because the environment was so anti-establishment and was so populist.
• 9:35
  But whatever it is, whatever you think of Bernie Sanders, the fact that he has been relentlessly committed to working class values.
• 9:44
  I mean, this is why I sort of liked Tim Walls as well that there was this sense that they reconnected with the word the heartland that the left has abandoned in its pursuit of identity politics and social justice in recent years.
• 9:59
  Another person asks on the on the subject comments, Evan asks, what do I think the 2028 Democratic platform will be or should be?
• 10:07
  And I would just hope that they can find a way of reconnecting to the heartland, reconnecting to the values of working families, as you're supposed to call them, instead of seeming like they're overly concerned with gender identity and racial identity.
• 10:25
  It's clear that majority of Americans are just not as possessed by those issues as they are by bread and butter issues and the cost of living.
• 10:35
  It's also amazing that Kamala Harris, when she was on the view on the 8th of October, was famously asked what she would have done differently than the Biden administration and couldn't think of anything.
• 10:49
  That was an opportunity for her to say, well, the border was a mistake. I'm going to be much tougher on the border than we had been.
• 10:58
  And pulling out of Afghanistan the way we did was terrible. I'm going to be my own president.
• 11:05
  And that was also an opportunity for her to have a speech. I mean, she should have done it not just on the view, but also on the campaign trail and done what Barack Obama had the insight to do when he gave his famous race speech during his election campaign, where he really got his fingers dirty, trying to wrestle with the complicated fact of his being a person of color running for the presidency and the conflictedness about race relations in America.
• 11:34
  And I could imagine Kamala Harris having given a speech about social justice and a wokeness in the same vein where she courageously stood up to the left and tried to articulate a vision that didn't seem quite so smart and quite so polished.
• 11:50
  But where she said, look, life is long and I've made lots of mistakes and I've been back and forth through the trials and tribulations and it hasn't been easy and there have been periods where I thought that what I was doing was was right, but I realize now that we were sort of in a little bit of a kind of a collective echo chamber and a thought bubble, you know, and that and that some of those extremes of social justice are not where my heart is that instead.
• 12:17
  She has been able to be portrayed as a kind of a mentoring candidate who might be deeply woke deep down, but you know would smuggle it in another great question on the on the subject comments was where was it it was about oh yeah so Dave said I've said in the past that the Democrats should have run Mitt Romney in this selection campaign only half ingest.
• 12:47
  Because you know the Democrats just have to run a sensible centrist and that person would beat Donald Trump I still think that's true but Dave says in the subject comments well that doesn't this election disprove your your thesis Josh because they sort of did run a Mitt Romney in the sense that Kamala ran a campaign that was extremely centrist you know she wasn't going or going full work.
• 13:10
  No it doesn't just prove it all because what I'm saying is you know the electorate wants to buy an orange so give them an orange and you're saying well here's an apple that we've painted orange and let's just hope that that works it doesn't work that way you know you can't just take someone who four years ago was saying incredibly social just to see nonsense babble about race and gender and transgenderism and then.
• 13:40
  Then get them to mouth platitudes about how militaristic they're going to be and just try to dodge that question whenever it comes up in the hope that people forget about it or think they've changed their mind without actually grappling with it that's not what I mean by running a Romney I don't mean pretend to be Romney I mean actually get Mitt Romney actually do it now the question of whether or not you would lose too many people on the left is another one but surely there is a plurality of Americans who are willing to.
• 14:10
  To vote for a sensible centrist candidate they just feel frustrated that they don't have one Eli Lake makes an interesting point on in the free press about four indelible images from this campaign that tell us everything you need to know about Trump's acumen and success as a political monster the first with his mug shot which he managed to turn from being a shameful photo into a photo that represented.
• 14:37
  I suppose the elites attacking him you know he would say at rallies that they're not coming for me they're coming for you I'm just standing in their way and this kind of narrative about this but I suppose a cabal of lobbyists on K street and and Wall Street types and and Congress people who have their own interests at at front of mind but don't really care about the American people is a very enticing one this sort of populism.
• 15:07
  It's very popular world over we're seeing a lot of it in in Europe as well and South America and yeah it's it's a it's a problem that Trump is so good at being able to harness that and being able to present his indiscretions and his misdeeds and indeed his criminality.
• 15:28
  As part of him just being a regular bloke and the dark forces that are coming for all of us having come for him the second photo that Eli Lake points out is the photo of the shooting not much more needs to be said about that but his defiant reaction the fist in the air the blood on his face the the chanting of fight I mean whatever you think about the guy.
• 15:52
  That was an instinctive moment at which you saw something of what a relentless character he is the third photo that Eli talks about is the McDonald's drive through you know this is tapping again the image of this being a working class campaign.
• 16:09
  Even the billionaire is a billionaire who's in touch with the common man and the fourth photo that Eli flags is the garbage the garbage man photo where after having been accused of holding a neo Nazi 1930 style rally at Madison Square Garden where his foul mouth comic Tony Hinchcliffe.
• 16:31
  A paraded Puerto Ricans for being garbage their Donald Trump was staging himself as the garbage man taking out the trash I mean the man is a shaman and he put on a good show and enough Americans bought it.
• 16:46
  It'll be interesting to know now whether or not Donald Trump suddenly does know what project twenty twenty five is and whether suddenly all of the things that he has been disavowing somehow make their way into his administration again I would say to his supporters.
• 17:04
  Now is your chance to prove to us that we were just conspiracy theorists when we were saying that actually he probably will do exactly what the Heritage Foundation wants him to do and he probably will try to get all of the knowledgeable people out of the public service and the American bureaucracy in order to staff it with cronies and hacks who are loyal only to him.
• 17:28
  The other point to raise also just briefly is about Palestine and Gaza it's too early yet to know exactly what impact that might have had on Kamala Harris the protest vote.
• 17:40
  From Arab Americans about calling Kamala Harris's administration potentially a war mongering militaristic pro-Israel organization well let's see how far free Palestine gets under a Trump administration.
• 17:57
  This is going to be one of the great tragedies I think of the next Trump administration look I could be wrong I was bad at predicting the impact of the first Trump administration on foreign policy I really thought as you can hear last week we dropped an episode the episode that I did at exactly this time at the last at the election before last when Trump first one.
• 18:20
  The morning after I sat down with David plots this was before technology allowed us to live stream video like now a lot changes in eight years so it's lovely to have you guys in the community and being able to comment and cat and see me live.
• 18:35
  But in that conversation I made a terrible prediction which was I said that I thought that in the first year of sorry in the first Trump administration that Iran would get a nuclear weapon because he would he would tear up the Iran nuclear deal and they would just race for it before anyone had time to respond they didn't do that.
• 18:54
  So maybe there is some aspect of his unpredictability which is useful in dealing with foreign policy but for what it's worth my sense now is that he will be disastrous for the long term prospects of the Middle East including the prospects for Israel because he will allow.
• 19:12
  Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right in Israel to do whatever they want to which is actually not in my opinion in Israel's long term interests Israel's long term interest is to be a sustainable state and to be a sustainable state you can't be a total global pariah I think Trump and Jared Kushner will enable the worst forces in the far right in Israel to be as anti democratic and militaristic as they as they want to.
• 19:39
  One small ray of sun sun shine maybe Iran i can't say that i'm entirely upset at the election results just in terms of foreign policy i mean in the long term i think it's terrible because it's important for allies to trust the United States and they won't trust Donald Trump it's also terrible in the context of Ukraine because.
• 20:01
  I assume now that Ukraine is basically screwed and that that Putin will will quote unquote win whatever that means I had a fascinating conversation yesterday in London with the historian Neil Ferguson which will be releasing in coming weeks on the podcast so.
• 20:17
  Be sure to keep an eye out for that and Neil was saying that he thinks that Iran is really if they if they if they flick the switch that only be a couple of weeks away from a nuclear weapon and that.
• 20:27
  The only response to that is to strike them first it I must say I am quietly more reassured that they would not.
• 20:38
  Do that under a Trump administration that I would be under a Harris administration.
• 20:44
  Because he's just so unpredictable so in some respects I think the situation is probably better on Iran much worse for Palestinians and for the long term interest of Israel and catastrophic for Ukraine and hence probably pretty bad for East Asia as well because if Putin is allowed to.
• 21:04
  Come to a stalemate in Ukraine that is advantageous to Russia that changes the calculus of China in thinking about whether or not it could take Taiwan Neil Ferguson was saying you have to make it absolutely crystal clear that there will be devastating consequences.
• 21:19
  If China were to be an aggressor against Taiwan and that's not the game that Trump plays you know he he talks a big game but he he revels in uncertainty he thinks it's sophisticated to keep people guessing about what you're going to do and in some circumstances that's true but when you're talking about deterrence it's actually not useful to to be cute it's useful to be crystal clear and one thing that Donald Trump is not is crystal clear.
• 21:50
  I think the left will now get more woke so congratulations to anybody who thought the Donald Trump was going to put an end to social justice madness I think the next four years will arrange the left.
• 22:02
  I would encourage you to stay off social media not just now but how about for the next four years or 40 years or the next 400 years really it's going to be assessment more than it currently is it's not worth trying to follow the ins and outs of his every tweet.
• 22:17
  You know play the long game and if if he if he says something that isn't worth making it into the Saturday New York Times or into the pages of the economist it's probably not worth having worried about in the first place.
• 22:32
  Nonetheless that won't stop the social justice types from being as hysterical as they possibly can and so I think this is probably set back the prospect of a return to sanity on the the left.
• 22:46
  Some want at least culturally but I hope that institutionally and politically in terms of the actual democratic party they will have learned their lesson and will will see a more working class and more reasonable democratic party than we've had in recent years.
• 23:04
  It is just a bit depressing really the way that elections I mean look democracy is kind of depressing yeah I was thinking to myself as I was driving through the English countryside this morning.
• 23:17
  What do voters in Pittsburgh know about the federal reserve and the importance of the independence of the federal reserve like when they're going into their polling booth how can we be outsourcing such complicated decisions about things that matter so much about strategic international alliances and the impact of monetary policy and the dependence of fiscal policy and monetary policy on the blah blah blah blah blah to people who.
• 23:42
  Really just regular Joe's and then I call myself and thought well yeah that's what democracy is like that's what democracy means it means you don't outsource everything to elites it means.
• 23:55
  People get to have a say even if they don't know what's best and because nobody does know exactly what's best.
• 24:03
  That sometimes yields weird results but it's a it's a system that gave us Barack Obama and it's also a system that has given us Donald Trump getting to another couple of questions that people have asked on on the sub stack Matthew asks whether or not I think that this really breaks down to voters being either intelligent or unintelligent and he seems to imply that people who just watch 24 hour cable news and Viagra ads all day are the problem and that people who spend.
• 24:33
  And more time investigating things and doing their own research on social media.
• 24:38
  Better informed and thus presumably voting for Kamala Harris I don't buy that distinction I mean a lot of intelligent people have thrown their weight behind Donald Trump.
• 24:48
  You know the Peter teals and the Elon Musk's of the world and not you know they're not dumb put it that way I think they're heedless I think they're reckless I think they're overly paranoid about the deep state.
• 25:01
  And I think they are captured in echo chambers that encourage them to exaggerate the threat of the work mind virus.
• 25:11
  And I think they're yeah they're basically two risk prone you know the risk prone in a way that works in business but in a way that doesn't work in international relations and that doesn't work for American democracy.
• 25:24
  But I don't think they're unintelligent so no I don't see the cleavage that way.
• 25:31
  So I've mentioned Romney what were the other questions here I'm just looking at the questions oh yeah good question from Connor who says which sides supporters misunderstand their opponents more.
• 25:45
  That's an excellent question and it's why I often try to ask myself and check myself with.
• 25:50
  Because traditionally I have believed and I think I still do believe that the left misunderstand the right more than the right misunderstand the left that people on the left think that like let's just talk about traditional leftism and traditional conservatism right.
• 26:08
  Because things have become a bit scrambled due to social justice on the left and Trumpism marketism on the right.
• 26:17
  But when it comes to like traditional small sea conservatism versus progressivism in my experience most progressives think that conservatives are just mean.
• 26:26
  They don't want to give money to poor people they don't want to help people and they find excuses and fancy reasons in order to not be generous and community minded.
• 26:39
  I think conservatives understand that conservatives don't tend to think that progressives want to drive their country into a ditch and turn it into a communist dystopia they tend to understand that progressives want the right things and that their heart is in the right place.
• 26:55
  conservatives just think that the tool of government is an unwieldy thing to use to help people and that progressives are reckless in establishing bureaucracies and too much red tape and that they don't really understand how wealth is generated and that they're too willing to compromise economic productivity without really understanding it.
• 27:17
  And I think that is closer to a true critique than the progressives critique of conservatives is so in this case now, you know, I think most people most Trump voters probably are misguided about what they're opponents think because they probably vastly exaggerate the wokeness of the left.
• 27:39
  They probably think that most people who vote for Kamala Harris want to see the family structure the family unit to disintegrate want to attack people on the basis of their religious faith want free abortions for all up until the 50th trimester want, you know, transgender pronouns to be taught to five year olds in schools.
• 27:59
  And so they probably do think that that boogie man is more real than it actually is.
• 28:04
  But similarly, I think, you know, the left is deeply misunderstanding of Trump supporters and is likely to have a perception that Trump supporters are thinly veiled racist to a fine with a fascist destroying American democracy just so they can get a tax cut or just so they can keep immigrants out.
• 28:27
  And one of the tragedies of our current moment, one of the tragedies of the echo chambers that we live in one of the tragedies of the way that algorithms work and one of the reasons why I have this show and why I'm grateful to you for supporting it is that is getting harder and harder for us to understand people who disagree with us.
• 28:45
  And hopefully, you know, through forums like this, we can try to inch ourselves just 10% closer to understanding what our opponents think and realize that actually most Americans do still want a better America.
• 28:58
  They disagree about how to get there.
• 29:00
  They live in an imperfect political system that does not permit them to express a la carte all of their preferences in an optimal way.
• 29:09
  So you have to choose between a binary and that's just the system that we live with the only way that we're going to be led to ruin is if we allow the darkest forces of division that Trump is so good at stirring up to to divide us like we have to find a way to
• 29:27
  turn the volume down on our reactivity to this man and hope that the institutions can quarantine him and isolate him and triage his actions in such a way that he does some good and that the downsides and harms that he might inflict are minimized.
• 29:47
  Peter asks, lastly on the sub stack, what went wrong? Was it that the Democrats didn't run a primary? Was it the economy? I would say yes and yes.
• 30:00
  There's no need to dramatically overthink this. It was a difficult situation that Biden and the people around him left the Democratic Party and the United States of America in Kamala was an unfortunate beneficiary of that.
• 30:16
  She didn't run a perfect campaign. I certainly wish that she had been more vocal about distancing us off from social justice craziness because it's easy to underestimate when you're part of the privileged class and you're part of the elite just how hard it is for people to deal with the prices of things.
• 30:35
  Things being really expensive is a total pain in the ass and people are entitled to be upset about that. It's small consolation when you say, well, actually inflation figures are going down and jobs figures are quite good.
• 30:48
  Yeah, that's fine, but the reality is in a lot of working class suburbs in the Rust Belt and in the Midwest and in the Sun Belt as well.
• 30:59
  Things are tough and people are noticing that things are expensive and that is obviously going to have some kind of ramifications for the people who are in power and that's true all over the world.
• 31:11
  So the fact that there was no proper sorting mechanism in the Democratic Party for to find the candidate who was most able to articulate those concerns and to connect with people and to sort of feel their pain.
• 31:25
  The fact that it was left up to a person who was obviously selected on the basis of her sex and ethnicity four years ago and just sort of inherited this thing at the very last minute was unfair on her.
• 31:38
  It was unfair on the Democratic Party and it was unfair on Democratic voters to give them that choice.
• 31:43
  So yeah, I hold an enormous enormous amount of contempt for the people around Joe Biden who essentially lied to us about his condition and it did not collaborate in forcing him out or convincing him to go much earlier.
• 32:01
  So there could have been an orderly transition of power through the process of a Democratic primary.
• 32:07
  It's certainly made the Democrats argument about the importance of democracy more difficult to sell when they seem to ride rough shot over it in the installation of Kamala Harris.
• 32:19
  It's a little bit hard to say that the most important thing is preserving institutions of democracy when you sort of just don't really turn the volume up on as many Democratic levers as as you could.
• 32:33
  But then yes, so the economy, the primary all of that.
• 32:39
  Anything else? Look, I'm sure there are lots more questions that I'm not going to get to right now. Those are my basic thoughts. I mean, I would just leave by saying, you know, keep your head on.
• 32:51
  It's not the end of the world. The there is basically now nothing for the left for we on the left to do. We lost. That's fine. That is democracy.
• 33:04
  It's now a waiting game. We will see what the administration does. We are the bigger party. We are the more moral party. I don't mean the capital P party, the Democratic party. I mean, group collection of people.
• 33:17
  Because we know that if the election had gone the other way, Trump would not be conceding. There would be riots. There would be who knows what.
• 33:27
  In this case, we're the grown ups in the room. So let's wait for the cosplaying toddlers to act up. And then we will call the calmly collectively defend democracy where it needs defending.
• 33:43
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• 33:55
  We'll be expanding the sub stack in 2025 and all kinds of interesting ways and doing lots more fascinating conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world live on sub stack.
• 34:04
  So please do join us. Yeah, happy election. Oh, and humans don't forget to check out magic mind. You'll be doing us and yourself a favor. Go to magicmind.com slash uncomfortable 20 and enjoy the mental performance that magic mind can offer.
• 34:20
  I'm about to go and get on a plane back to Australia. And I hope you enjoy some of the upcoming episodes that I've recorded here in London. Take care.
• 34:34
  You