What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at ‘The End of History’ | Odd Lots

0:00 I feel like you could go in two directions, and we've done episodes on both these scenarios. You could have one where people just become even more nihilistic and filled with ennui, so to speak. Or you could maybe have a sort of utopian world where AI is doing all the work for us, and we get freed up to pursue some of our cultural pursuits. Yeah, actually, that was John Maynard Keynes, his vision of the future, that productivity would increase so much that we'd have, you know, we'd only have to work.

0:28 Ten, 20 hours a week, and the rest we could pursue hobbies and so forth. I don't I don't think that's going to make people happy in the end. I mean, the same problem with universal basic income. And the reason for this has to do with this concept of thumos. So megalothymia media comes from the Greek word thumos. which is spiritedness or pride that in addition to material needs, human beings want to be recognized for their basic human dignity. And, quite frankly, a lot of our dignity.

0:59 Dignity comes from the work we do. The fact that you are paid to do a job means that somebody in society thinks that what you do is valuable enough to give you, you know, money for it. And I think that that's why this, vision of a society where everybody is just, you know, selling trinkets on Etsy, but not really, you know, doing the kind of work that we're used to doing is not going to make people happy, because it doesn't give them a sense of pride and accomplishment.

1:33 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, both of you and I did international relations at University College, as you would say, and at college at uni. And yeah, helped us a lot. It got us where we are here right now. Yeah. I think today's guest pretty much anyone who did any sort of political science or PR degree or maybe even, I don't know, some undergraduate syllabus or something like that with this author.

2:01 This person was definitely on the syllabus in the early 2000s and probably still is, right? Almost certainly still is. And I you know, I did all the reading back when I was in college, you know, wasn't even though I was I did get a degree in it technically, by the way, I don't know if I've ever said this. Technically in Texas, the degree was called government, which included poli sci and I are. You've been lying to me.

2:24 It's just sort of a little subtle. I had no choice. That's what it was called. Insight into Joe's upcoming political ambitions. That's right. But, you know, like a lot of the stuff, including, the work of our guest today, I like, went back and reread several years ago because I guess at the time, early 2000, it felt a lot like theory. And then suddenly, like over the last several years, it's like, oh, this is just this might help explain the world or a thing is going on in the world that I need to revisit, and changes are afoot, etc.

2:53 so revisited the work and so, even though it was a long time ago, feels fresh in my head. Yeah, so I've already given it away. But today's guest is in fact Francis Fukuyama. He is a professor of Stanford, author of the new book In the Realm of the Last Man and author of famously, both an essay and a book called The End of History and The Last Man. And the last is really a key, which is really which is key.

3:18 So a lot of people will think about the end of history is this idea that like, well, liberal democracy has won out and we're never going to have wars or conflicts or struggles ever again. And that wasn't quite know the message. And we should talk about why it kind of, I don't know, got framed in that way. But I think this whole topic clearly is very relevant at the moment. We just had a local elections in Germany over the weekend, and it's kind of a reminder that there is this lingering feeling or possibility that maybe people, maybe people don't actually like the liberal order, maybe they don't want it totally.

3:56 It certainly seems you could point to a lot of things. We don't need to go down the list, but various ideology is known. Call like illiberalism of some form or another seemed to be on the march. And there's this sort of anxiety about why and whether the people who have spent a lot of time like upholding the various institutions that we associate with Western democracy or liberal democracy entities like the EU or free trade agreements, the degree to which, you know, it feels like people, it feels like people are exhausted, like that.

4:28 There is this effort to hold it up, but there is this sense of exhaustion, maybe resignation and so forth. The one other thing I'll say before we get into it, you know, like, I remember I mentioned this once or twice, but this is a thing that sticks out to me like in middle school or maybe my first year of high school learning about the Cold War. And it was taught in US history classes. And you know we're talking like 93 here.

4:52 Yeah. It might as well have been World War one. It was already taught as like Catholic history or windows. And now look at 20 you know from 20 to 26 I was like oh, that was literally just the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. but already by that point, so many of these global questions were being taught as if they had finally been settled. Clearly, nothing is settled. No, that was the total view in the early 2000, right?

5:16 I was just sort university. It was done. And yet here we are in 2026 and it seems things are very much not finished. So without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you so much for coming on. All thoughts long. Thanks very much for having me. So when you look at something like the German local election over the weekend, so the far right party alternative for Deutschland, alternative for Germany got a majority, do you.

5:43 So how do you fit something like that in your framework? Is it. Well, this is a natural rejection of liberal democracy, of the sort that I write about in this book, in the realm of the Last Man. Or is this just a sort of bump along the the evolution of liberal democracy? Well, I don't think anybody knows which of those alternatives is, it's the right one. I think that liberal democracy has had some pretty bad moments, earlier in the 20th century.

6:14 The 1930s was pretty bad, with communism and fascism both threatening it. The 1970s and the oil shocks also led to a lot of pessimism about the future of democracy. So it could be that we're going simply through a period like that. I think probably the discontent is a little bit more extreme. This time. Freedom House says that the aggregate level of freedom in the world has declined now for the last 20 years, since about 2008 or so.

6:43 And I think that one of the reasons for being more pessimistic is really what's happened in the United States, because for the entire post-World War Two period, the United States was the model of liberal democracy and spread. I mean, my Chinese students 20 years ago all said they wanted China to be like the United States. They don't say that anymore. And I think that the rise of a populist movement within the leading liberal democracy in the world is a big signal that something deeper is afoot, and that that discontent really reflects some underlying social changes.

7:20 I'm glad you brought up your student, because actually, that was sort of what I was going to ask first is having been a professor for several years, you know, setting aside international students or any students, you know, like I said, when I first learned that there was this thing called the Cold War, it's just like history. It was settled. It had come to an end, and I don't think we were taught in high school that history had come to an end.

7:45 But we were taught that this these big questions had kind of come to an end and kind of irrelevant, kind of like in the past. And I'm curious, have you seen you know, the evolution of your students taking your courses, what you've observed about how they view the, that that period of time, why they're interested in and if their interests have changed. It's discouraging, getting older. You know, the Cold War is history. 911 is history. Yeah.

8:13 Even the rise of Donald Trump now is history had happened, you know, when I was seven years old. So things move. But I think that the most important phenomenon that I hadn't anticipated is the importance of generational change for my generation. I think the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism was the big defining event. And that certainly what inspired, you know, me to write the End of history essay? The first one.

8:44 But now we've come full circle where a lot of people that actually lived through, or were in those countries now want to reverse that outcome, as in the Saxony-Anhalt, election. And I think that it indicates that liberal democracy actually is something that is easily taken for granted. You know, you have a couple generations since the fall of, the Berlin Wall that have grown up without any knowledge of what communism really was.

9:16 And I think that one of the biggest, things that makes people like liberal democracy is the opposite is living under a dictatorship. If you live in a communist dictatorship, you know, I mean, the joy that Eastern Europeans felt when communism fell was really tangible because they didn't like, you know, being surveilled and, imprisoned, you know, for speaking out. And nobody experiences that in Europe or the United States or it's not experienced that, certainly for the last generation.

9:44 And so it's very easy to assume that the good things about liberal democracy, the peace and the prosperity are just naturally there, and we don't have to worry about them. And therefore, you can think about, you know, the EU as the biggest dictatorship in the world rather than a real dictatorship. Can I just ask before we get into more current events, but the end of history? I touched on it in the intro, but a lot of people interpreted that to be quite literally the end of history.

10:13 So Liberal democracy one, globalization one, everyone was going to trade with each other and we weren't going to have any more wars or conflict and things like that. And I am certainly guilty in the past, on this podcast of using end of history as a sort of byword for globalization. What do you attribute that misinterpretation to? Was it the zeitgeist of the end of the Cold War at the time you wrote the book in 1992? Was it people just were too lazy to read the last six chapters.

10:43 What was going on? Yeah, well, it's a little bit of all of those. The end of history was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel, who understood history with a capital H. The way we understand today is something like modernization or development. And so the idea is that human societies evolve over time. And they evolve in a progressive fashion. So the question was, you know, which direction where they, evolving. And that's the end, its end in the sense of goal or termination point.

11:14 So the question of the end of history was what kind of society emerges at the end of this long evolutionary process? Now, for about 150 years, the Marxists took Hegel's concept of history and said, the end of history is going to be communism. By the late 1980s, after Gorbachev and perestroika, it seemed to me that they were never going to make it. You know, that communism was really off the table. And therefore, if there was an end of history, it was a stage just before you got to communism, which was what the communists called bourgeois, you know, democracy and, a market economy and capitalism.

11:52 And so for me, that was the resting point that we seemed to be arriving at. What they didn't understand in the title, and I guess this is my fault for picking these words, but, it was the end of history. And the last man, the philosopher Nietzsche was the one that talked about the last man because he hated the idea of there being an end of history, because for him, the victory of English liberalism would be a boring, flat world where nobody had aspirations.

12:24 Everybody was fed, clothed, happy, but content. And that's happiness. Just like a cow, you know, grazing in the field. And, he can seem pretty happy. Yeah, well, they are happy. But for Nietzsche, for a man is. Are you? Yeah. Human beings, you know, had a pride that shouldn't be satisfied. Just by, you know, peace and contentment. The you should want something more. You should want to dominate and so forth. And I think that's the unhappiness that I was talking about back then in that part of the book.

12:56 And I think that's what's driving a lot of the extremism in the world today. Joe, the first ever, essay I wrote when I was doing my international relations degree was we were allowed to choose our own topic, and I chose like a Nietzsche and an interpretation of international relations, which I thought at the time was just me being like an insufferable university student. But that. No, I'm sure you're right. You're right. I'm sure I was. But then I read End of History.

13:23 I remember the Nietzsche reference, and I was like, maybe I'm onto something. Maybe, maybe you're onto something. I have a question about, this idea of like, okay, one interpretation of many of the political events that have transpired, I suppose, is that people got bored. Right. And so there's obviously more than the German election or is the election of Donald Trump. And there's Brexit and actually, like a million other things that we could cite. What about the possibility like here's something like within the what we call liberalism we grew up with or learned to like, celebrate differences among people and that this was important, and pluralism and difference and diversity and all these things that were like internalized as positive.

14:08 But is there like what I sometimes wonder, is there like a contradiction in the sense like where we value pluralism and different, but maybe some people really are different in the sense that like, no, like they really want, they really like want a different order or they really want to live in a distinct culture that maybe is like less oriented towards the market, etc. really more, energized by the idea of like cultural homogeneity or something like that from the sort of liberal perspective, how do you think about like difference?

14:43 Because things like migration, etc. seem to be a one of the through lines for all of this sort of illiberal, the rise of Illiberalism. No, that's, exactly right. I think right from the beginning of liberalism, one of the charges has been it weakens community, it weakens the sense of togetherness, you know, shared values and so forth. And that's deliberate. You know, liberalism got its start in the 17th century, after the European wars of religion, when Christians were killing each other over things like transubstantiation or childhood baptism and the early liberals said, look, we actually need to accept the fact that we don't agree on the highest things.

15:21 Let's just tolerate one another and live peacefully. And that's really the essence of liberalism, as you say, it accepts pluralism and difference. But I think that that's also what drives a lot of people crazy, is that you have to tolerate people. You really disagree with. And you don't get this strong sense that everybody is marching in the same direction. And I think, you know, that's the origin of nationalism. That's you, origin of religious politics. The trouble is that people forget that this sort of politics is what gets you into trouble.

15:54 20th century was all about really strong national identities that wanted to assert themselves and dominate their neighbors. And you had two world wars as a result of it. Today, you see that in Vladimir Putin, right? That he's not content just to have a peaceful, prosperous Russia. He also has this idea that, you know, Russia is this great, you know, country that includes Ukraine and Belarus and all these other territories. And he is not happy unless he's dominating, all of that.

16:22 And that is not compatible with the liberalism that says, you know, you got to live and let live. So setting aside multiculturalism for a second, which is a thorny problem for liberal democracies, I think you point to something in your book that, to me is possibly an even thornier problem. It's this concept called megalothymia? Am I saying that right loosely? Megalothymia, right. Which is like the desire to be recognized as superior right in some ways. So people aren't just satisfied that they're all equal, they all have equal dignity, equal rights.

16:55 People want to feel like they're special or superior in some way. And to me, Twitter, the fact that Twitter exists is like, yeah, totally it off exactly where my mind went. Yeah. You know, you have people like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who still wants a platform to be heard and feel superior to others. When I went and reread The End of History several years ago, all I could think about is this explains why so many billionaires have all the power in the world, all the whatever in the world, what they really crave.

17:27 Deep down at the base of that Maslow's pyramid is to be listened to and respected. And it drives them crazy that like they have everything, but they are still not as influential as like a typical, like, op ed columnist. And I think this is the source of tremendous psychological angst, even for the most powerful people in the world. All right. Now imagine that on a society wide scale, everyone wants to feel superior and recognized in some way.

17:52 How are liberal democracies supposed to deal with that? Well, so just as a footnote, I mentioned Donald Trump in the original history in the Last Man book. At that point, I said the great thing about having a capitalist democracy is that there's a way of bleeding off some of that desire to dominate and be great, because you can just get rich. And I gave Donald Trump as an example. Little did I know that just getting rich was not it wasn't enough.

18:18 You know, that he also one of the, political glory. So I don't think you can get away from megalothymia, This desire to be recognized as greater because that's the source of any excellence. You know, if you want to be a great pianist or a great football forward or a great, you know, athlete or anything, you have to have this will to excel and to be better than other people. The trouble is that it it oftentimes leads in bad directions where you simply want to be a tyrant.

18:46 And I think you're right that, you know, if you're a billionaire, there's no material need that you have unsatisfied. What you don't have is the recognition of other people, of other billionaires and I think that's really what's driving a lot of the competition. You know, in our economy, if it just stayed economic condition, competition, that would be fine. But when it becomes politicized and turns into political ambition, I think that's where democracy gets in trouble. And I think that's really the, challenge that we're facing.

19:18 You're also correct that I think on a national level, people want this feeling of togetherness. They want a sense of national identity that is stronger than just tolerating everybody. And that, is one of the reasons we still have, you know, conflicts in the world today. Something I'm curious about when you think about the events of the last 40 years or 20 years, may be something that I'm very interested in. I'm curious whether you think about it much is the changing media environment.

19:48 Oh, yeah. And the degree to which say, you know, for better or worse, you have a few monopoly media outlets and that has this sort of effect of everyone having the same diet. And I'm curious, the role of digital media and social media and, you know, your active Instagram user in sort of regrouping people around, I guess maybe people will say like tribal lions, you know, and this but the way technology changes, how we interact and relate to each other, I think it's had a really profound effect.

20:19 One of the most dangerous for democracies is the fact that we no longer agree about simple empirical facts, because, you know, the old media really had certain journalistic standards. You couldn't just publish anything. Your editor would say, well, do you have a second source on that? And if you didn't, you know, it wouldn't get in the newspaper. Today, you know, we have the internet where anyone can say anything. And, not only can they say anything, but that anything can be amplified.

20:47 There's a, I think, very unhealthy dynamic in the online world where you get noticed if you're an internet influencer, you say something sensible, rational, reasonable, you know, people will listen to you, but they won't take bring back earnestness on the internet. It's so out of fashion. If you say something reasonable in earnest, it's like immediately consigned to the realms of internet. But there's an inevitable dynamic that happens where the moment you start saying something unreasonable, you know, you insult somebody or you say something that's just ridiculously untrue.

21:24 It sets off, you know, a big uptick in your, followers. And then you say, okay, we got to stop that by saying something even more extreme. And I think that that, explains a lot of the extremism in our politics because people are living in an online world, and they also don't agree on basic facts. Since we're on the topic of, I guess, new media and technology, can we talk a little bit about AI? Because I think even the last man, speaking of the last man, I knew there was an AI, chapter in your new book, and I thought it was going to be more about, I guess, like the existential threat of AI and what it means for the whole bored last man concept.

22:03 But you talk about it in a sort of state administrative capacity way. Why did you decide to take that line as opposed to, I don't know, arguing how I would fit into the socio political economy more broadly? Well, no, I think that what I said was that the most dangerous aspect of AI is the is a gigantic AI. That is where human beings delegate to machines the power to make decisions. And, I spend a lot of time thinking about human hierarchies, and I know that we often over delegate authority in, you know, organizations and governments.

22:39 But I think we're beginning to do that. I think this hugging face incident that OpenAI got into where, they had developed an AI agent that broke out of its playpen and then started getting out into the internet and breaking into other computers. That's what agenda AI is all about. And that's what I think the whole loss of control fear is related to is that you're going to create these agents that are powerful. And the thing about modern AI is that the people that create them don't really understand what's going on underneath the hood.

23:11 You know, classic computer programing line by line. You know, it's very deterministic what the computer is going to do with these new AI's. They don't really understand why it's behaving the way it is. And if you then delegate authority to a machine, where you don't really know why it's thinking what it's thinking, I think that's what leads you down the road to some real doomsday scenarios where, you know, they can kind of act, as if they've got their own volition and really, no human being's going to be able to control them.

23:42 You're a famous tinkerer, and you like building stuff, and you do woodworking, etc.. Have you in corporate? Do you tinker with AI? Do you play around with it the way you play around with like making bookshelves or working on a car engine or something like that? Well, ever since the early 90s, I built my own computers and I've written my own software and I use cloud code a lot. It's it's just an amazing thing. I mean, I had written some fairly complicated programs, but, I got stuck.

24:11 What kind of stuff? Rebuilding. Well, I mean, mostly it was. I have I maintain a few big databases on some servers that I keep at home, and I wanted to migrate it to a different system, and cloud code just did it, you know, you don't. I mean, it helps to be a programmer because you can then correct things where it makes mistakes. But, yeah, basically it's it's just an amazing system. There's a picture in the book of one of the tables that you made, and it looks really nice.

24:39 It looks like legitimate table when I. What is this is that you can really you can really sit at it. And so I, when I was in the State Department, the secretary of State has a suite on the eighth floor. That's beautiful. It's furnished with these, antique federal style American classic furniture. And when I was delivering memos up there, as a young, official, I really admired that. And I wished I could have that in my own home.

25:08 So basically, I taught myself how to build this kind of furniture. I love that, I upholstered a chair recently for similar reasons, but I have yet to get to the actual woodworking. Oh, we can share woodworking and upholstery for the rest of it, do you think? Could you do a Chippendale chair? I don't like the Chippendale style that much. I like federal because it's a little bit cleaner, but cleaner and simpler still. Decorated. It's, you know, got inlay.

25:32 And, you know, I think that's about my favorite, you know, style of furniture. When you get into things like Empire, you know, then, that becomes really a different level of skill because you have to carve all these, you know, dragons and faces and things into the woodwork and that that's that's something I never got into. All right. At the risk of turning this into an interior design episode. No. Okay. Serious question. Just going back to I.

25:58 But what what is I actually mean for the last man concept itself, do you see? Because I feel like you could go in two directions and we've done episodes on both these scenarios. You could have one where people just become even more nihilistic and filled with ennui, so to speak. Or you could maybe have a sort of utopian world where AI is doing all the work for us, and we get freed up to pursue some of our cultural pursuits.

26:25 Yeah, actually, that was John Maynard Keynes is vision of the future that productivity would increase so much that we'd have, you know, we'd only have to work ten, 20 hours a week, and the rest we could pursue hobbies and so forth. I don't I don't think that's going to make people happy in the end. I mean, the same problem with universal basic income. And the reason for this has to do with this concept of thumos. So megalothymia media comes from its Greek word thumos, which is spiritedness or pride that in addition to material needs, human beings want to be recognized for their basic human dignity. And, quite frankly, a lot of our dignity.

27:04 Dignity comes from the work we do. The fact that you are paid to do a job means that somebody in society thinks that what you do is valuable enough to give you, you know, money for it. And I think that that's why this AI, vision of a society where everybody is just, you know, selling trinkets on Etsy, but not really, you know, doing the kind of work that we're used to doing is not going to make people happy, because it doesn't give them a sense of pride and accomplishment, you know, that it's, you could spend your whole life playing video games.

27:36 And I think part of the reason that you got this manosphere that is so, you know, restless is that's what they do. You know, they're online all the time. They have all these fantasies about being, you know, super heroes. But in real life, they kind of know that, you know, there's this basic emptiness there. And I think that that lack of work that gives you dignity, that ordinary people can feel is one of the things that may be destroyed by AI because it's so capable of substituting for that kind of human labor.

28:09 And I think that's really one of the big dangers, because either people will be perpetually, lonely and unhappy, or they will rebel against that, and you'll have a lot of political turmoil. There's so many different things sort of working against, quote, liberalism, etc.. What it like, does anyone have any idea? And there are people arguing for it, right? Like there are communities of people online who like, try to like argue about these things and argue we should be building things and appreciate markets and appreciate prosperity.

28:45 But it it's all a little hollow. It doesn't seem like really fully scratch that. It's like we can get there intellectually, okay. These are good things, but it doesn't supply that sort of like spiritedness, etc.. Has anyone is anyone out there have conceptions of like, what a positive vision for liberalism or counter liberalism looks like other than no look GDP goes up. Look actually, things haven't been getting worse actually, despite what you see online, online wages have real wages generally have been rising.

29:20 These arguments may or may not be true, but they certainly don't seem to like satisfy many people. They don't excite people. It's not something that you really get behind enthusiastically. Do you see anyone or any path of like, oh, this is like what a reinvigorated vision looks like? Well, there are some, possible futures where you actually do face real threats, where the society really does have to mobilize. I think we felt something like that in the 1930s, that with the depression and then, you know, fighting, World War two.

29:53 And that was very inspiring to many people. It was also very devastating. Yeah. And the question is, can you recreate that sense of national purpose? Without having a war or pandemic or revolution? And I think you can I think that, you know, there are a lot of projects out there in the world that could be the source of, a greater sense of common purpose. One of the themes in the book is indeed the fact that we don't build anything anymore.

30:24 You know, I live in California. We were promised high speed rail. They allocated money for it in the mid 1990s. And we have like ten miles of track, you know, in the Central Valley where nobody lives. And I think that you could actually recreate some of that, sense of purpose if you could get back to actually having projects that are big and visible. That's part of what the Chinese government has been doing. You know, they are really good at building infrastructure.

30:53 They build these incredible bridges over gorges in the middle of, you know, the interior of China. But it actually adds to the sense that the society is moving forward and it's accomplished something, plus, which I'd like to be able to get from LA to San Francisco in three hours. You know, it would be pretty convenient if you could do that as soon as you brought up America's lack of high speed rail, I knew my next question was going to be about China.

31:19 But talk to us a little bit more about China, because if we if we think that liberal democracy has won in some way, it's the inevitable outcome of human evolution. People can still point to China and say, well, that's not a liberal democracy. That is something else. And it seems to be reasonably successful at this moment in time, at least when judging by infrastructure projects like high speed rail. Yeah. Well, you know, I've been saying this for several decades that the only alternative society that is not a liberal democracy that looks like a plausible competitor is China, because they are able to stay at the frontier of technology.

31:55 They've maintained social stability, and they certainly have great GDP growth numbers. So the question is, is that going to be a sustainable model going forward? And I don't think the answer is fully in I mean, right now the US versus China, I mean, we don't look so good. You know, I think very few people around the world are saying, well, we want to be polarized and angry and, you know, at each other's throats all the time.

32:20 And we, you know, they look at China and they do see, you know, the modern, cities and infrastructure that's come up virtually, overnight. I think, however, it is a little bit premature to declare that they've won that contests because there are some big problems, both in the economic model and in the political model. As far as the economic model is concerned, I think, XI Jinping actually made a big mistake after he came to power, because instead of investing in the interior of China in social services and pensions and so forth, he decided to double down on this export led, growth, this time driven by high tech.

33:00 And it's destroying the manufacturing base of every other society in the world. You know, that happened to the United States in the early 2000. The Europeans may lose their auto industry, you know, as a result of Chinese EVs. And it's producing a big, big backlash. And the rest of the economy actually is not doing well. They had this big property, bust, and they're still not out of it. The amount of unemployment for Chinese young people is really pretty dramatic, and it's just going to get worse as they introduce AI into their economy.

33:33 So we'll have to see the political model, has done better than I would have expected. You know, the idea is as you get richer, better educated, you're not content simply to be, you know, a passive subject. You actually want to participate. You want to be able to express your opinion, and you can't do that in China. And I think that there still may come a point where that unhappiness, is going to come out, expressed politically. It's a very effective dictatorship that right now can squash, any signs of, discontent.

34:06 But, you know, that may not be the case forever. Is it surprising, though? I mean, we have no idea what the future holds, but here in 2026, there are a number of China's the main example, but there are a number of places that are not democracies that seem to be stable. And some of the Gulf countries have obviously done extraordinarily well over the past couple of decades. Do you have you revisited any of your premises about this idea that an educated elite eventually really wants a say that they actually want to be stakeholders in politics and or is there a degree of like, if you have competent management or if you're perceived to have competent management, maybe that just doesn't manifest as a problem.

34:57 You know, I think that I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that there are different models. Certainly the American one, compared even to other rich democracies, has a lot of problems, in the way we organize our institutions that have led to some of the instability, that we see. I think that the question about real authoritarian alternatives, you know, Singapore is the one that's brought up all the time. I'm, perfectly happy to admit that the Singaporeans govern themselves pretty well.

35:32 But the question is, first, can you actually export that model to other countries? You know, if if you had a regular source of Lee Kuan Yew that you could call on to run your authoritarian country, that would be great. But most authoritarian countries end up with a Lukashenko or Putin or, you know, really bad leader. And that's the problem with that kind of concentration of power. The longer term question is the one that you pointed to is, are people simply willing to be passive, you know, consumers who are satisfied with, you know, just the stability offered by a Singaporean type government?

36:11 And that's where I think you do get into this last man question, because, Nietzsche would say, no, human beings want to aim higher than that. You know, they want to struggle for things, and eventually they're not going to be happy with, you know, the kind of peace and prosperity that an authoritarian government can offer, at least in our liberal society, we can have an active civil society. So you can believe what you want. You can get together with other people.

36:36 You can, you can pursue all sorts of ambitions as long as they're not ones that want to dominate, you know, the rest of the society. And in a place like China, that's much more limited. So on China specifically, there's an anecdote that you describe in your book where you get to meet with the former vice president Wang Qishan, and that's super interesting, because it seems almost like you were summoned over there to talk to him, and then he ended up just talking at you for about an hour.

37:09 But what's your what's your theory of what you were doing? There was China trying to understand more about liberal politics or were they just trying to I don't know, was it some sort of like internal CCP political game? Well, I don't know the answer to that. He definitely wanted to talk to me. He had read my book and, he wanted, I think, to explain, you know, so he was credited as being a genuine intellectual. Apparently, XI Jinping was not all that happy with him because he was entertaining some rather, heterodox ideas.

37:45 He wanted, however, to talk to me. He was leading at that point, this big anti-corruption campaign that she had unleashed where they actually executed some very senior ministers and, you know, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Communist Party officials were sacked, put in jail as a result of this. So he was the second most feared man, and most powerful man in China. But I think he wanted to indicate that he was still open to the fact that a more liberal China might be possible in the future.

38:19 But he still had to demonstrate his loyalty. It's a little bit of a contrast, because the other dictator that I had encountered at that point was born, gadhafi, who also invited me to Libya to talk to him. And the I mean, it kind of explains why Libya is a mess and China is one of the great powers in the world because, you know, gadhafi's head was totally uneducated. He really is somebody I felt, in the end, should have gone to college and actually gotten a decent education.

38:51 But his son famously went to live well, his son was given a degree by LSC, whether he really went to China. And in fact, the, the chancellor and his thesis advisor had to be sacked. Yeah. Howard Davies, I remember this. I won't tell you. Yeah. You know, that dictator was just, you know, his head was full of conspiracy theories and, you know, he believed that he had come up with the, big alternative to communism and capitalism as a way forward, which was, of course, nonsense.

39:22 But, you know, Wang Qishan was a serious intellectual. He actually, introduced Alexis de Tocqueville, to China. So in Tocqueville's old regime of the revolution, he explains that the French Revolution occurred not because of deprivation, but because China had started. I'm sorry, France had started to reform itself in the generation before the revolution. Things were actually getting better, both economically and politically. But expectations were rising faster than the regime's ability to accommodate these new expectations.

39:58 And that's why you had the revolution, and you know, Wang Qishan, his lesson was China shouldn't start down this road to, liberalization in the way Gorbachev had, because that's just going to get it's going to spiral out of control and the regime will fall. And that's what they did. And we have Alexis de Tocqueville to thank for the fact that they're still in power. Amazing. I want to about to the neocons for a second. You've talked about how the sort of, the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the, aftermath led to a break between you and people who you may have seen as friends or ideological allies, etc..

40:39 And yet, it seems to me that if we go and look at the sort of like cohort of people that we associate with, like the neocon era in the early 2000, particularly many of them today are some of the biggest defenders of, I guess, normal liberalism. You know, you think of like Dick Cheney, who you know, like, I don't think he supported Trump or Bill Kristol, who basically became a Democrat, etc.. What do you make of this cohort that you could say, say, 25 or 20 roughly 25 years ago was like there was a schism.

41:18 They had like complete terrible judgment. ET cetera. And yet today, when you look at them, they're probably fairly aligned with you in terms of, the sort of institutional ism and support for sort of the stability and the institutions that allowed America to thrive for a long time. Well, to go a little bit into the intellectual history of that movement. A lot of, people that were neocons back in the early 2000s had been second or third generation students of a German Jewish philosopher named Leo Strauss, who encouraged his students to think seriously about philosophy and about the philosophic ideas that, you know, were at the base of Western civilization.

42:03 But the Strauss students actually split into two different camps, East Coast and West Coast. The West Coast ones were followers of a student of Strauss named Harry Jaffa, who in the end, I think could only be described as American nationalists because Jaffa regarded the American regime as the apotheosis of Aristotelian, virtue. And those people went in the opposite direction. They became big Trump supporters. So, Michael, Anton, you know, after the famous flight 93 article, that served, you know, both Trump administrations was, again, a product of that intellectual tradition.

42:42 Bill Kristol, and as you mentioned, you know, Dick Cheney and especially his daughter, Liz, were very different and I think were more authentic, believers in a constitutional, tradition that said the government power ought to be limited. And that's what is really surprising to me about a lot of the conservatives that ended up, supporting Trump because, you know, they had built their ideological foundations around the idea of a rule of law and limitations, constitutional limits on government power.

43:16 That's what it meant to be a conservative. And yet, you know, once their guy gets into power, they want to take all those limits off and do everything through executive orders. Flout the law if that's necessary to achieve their objectives. So I, you know, in the end, it's been a big puzzle to me why some people react to the same events with the same kind of educational background, but end up going in different ways. The only way I can explain it in is in a way, socially, that you are not an objective, scientist looking at facts.

43:49 You are actually embedded in a social circle, and you're going to believe the things that people in your social circle believe. Just going back to, I guess, the overarching question of liberal democracy, you sort of end the book. It's not on a down note, but it's certainly on an uncertain note. You know, it's basically I'm not sure how to maintain liberal democracy or promote it, given that the message of liberal democracy doesn't seem to be resonating with a lot of people at the moment.

44:22 So I'm just going to ask you directly, how how should we, I guess, fix the PR of liberal democracy? Or how would one go about actually doing that? Well, I think there's a twofold answer. I think we need to remind people about the dangers of the, absence of liberal democracy. And you can see it right in the present world, Putin invades, does a full scale invasion of Ukraine and gets into a bloody, bloody war that's now in its fifth year.

44:52 That's what happens if you have a dictatorship, instead of a liberal democracy. And then in a way, you know, Ukraine, I think is incredibly admirable because they want to defend their freedom and they're willing to die for it. And so there are, inspiring, causes. I think that the other part of the answer is that liberals need to actually have a positive program. I don't think that you're going to beat back populism just by complaining about it.

45:21 You know, bad as many of its programs and policies may be. I think that you have to offer people some positive vision for how their future is going to look different. And this gets back into this narrative about building things, you know, that liberal societies, one of the big problems that I talk about at the end is they accumulate too many rules. Liberalism is about a rule of law. Yeah, but you can actually have too much rule of law.

45:48 So here in New York City, you know, rebuilding Wollman Link was almost impossible until Donald Trump took it over, because, you know, they're just too damn many, procedural requirements that you have to go through. And I think if government could actually be more effective and could actually carry through on its promises, you know, in a reasonable amount of time, people would start thinking, yeah, actually, this is working for me, something I'm curious. So like, okay, we it's tough to build things in the US.

46:19 One area that it hasn't been difficult to build things in the US is basically software and technology and all that. And you're, you know, at Stanford, you're kind of at ground zero for granted. You're not, you know, in the computer science department. But I would just love to hear your perspective on how, you know, the culture of the university or the culture of students has changed, maybe over the last couple decades with this sort of explosion of money and tech, etc., and how that, you know, how your students think about that and how that shapes the directions that they want to go in, and whether it's sort of bled over into some of the, the humanities or social sciences in some way.

47:04 Well, first of all, Stanford is different from Harvard and Yale because Harvard and Yale filled people into Wall Street, basically, you know? Yeah, Harvard business people all want to become billionaires through that route at Stanford. They're more entrepreneurial. They want to do a startup that's going to make them a billionaire. I think that in both places, it means that the humanities and social sciences are weak. You know, it's not it's not the most favored, route. Do you feel it in some way with the either the students that are coming through those departments or the interests of those students, like, has it change the texture of, like, the professor student relationship in some way in those departments?

47:46 Well, for me, I mean, I don't teach undergraduates anymore. So I have, a little bit. Yeah, that makes sense. But it's certainly the case that, student politics has changed very dramatically, especially on the left. You especially after October 7th and the Hamas attack, there's been a big radicalization of students, and they're mobilized around, you know, that issue and, others that, you know, we're seeing in our national politics. So that's certainly different. It's, you know, we went through this long period in the 90s and early 2000s of really student apathy.

48:23 Everybody was too focused on getting a high paying job, and they didn't really pay attention to politics. Now they're definitely more mobilized. But in some ways, it's not a healthy mobilization. Because, you know, they're pursuing goals that I think are either unachievable or, you know, misguided. But, but they definitely a much more politically aware. I've got a number of students, you know, over the past decade that have actually gone into electoral politics. And I think that's great.

48:51 I think that's what they ought to be doing. Any advice for would be international relations graduates? Well, I think that you need to think broadly, because right now international relations is extremely complicated. As a disciplinary field. Because economics and sociology are absolutely at the core. You know, you want to know why you have global populism. Well, the sociology of most countries has changed. Now, the left wing parties are no longer based in working class populations.

49:22 They've become basically parties of educated professionals who have very different political instincts than, than the working class. And part of the reason you've got this polarized politics, both here and in Europe, is because of that change. And that's not something, you know, in classical realist international theory, you don't look inside countries, you know, you just regard them as billiard balls. But if you don't see, you know, the domestic and the technological changes. And then, by the way, the geopolitics of AI is really going to hit us, I think, like a freight train, because that's going to be one of the determining factors, just like nuclear weapons in a previous, previous generation, about how power is going to be distributed in the coming world, a phenomenon of like, okay, the energy on the left coming from people who are not what people might have in a previous year call called like the working class that many people are actually, like fairly well-to-do and they're well educated, is there?

50:23 I mean, this is actually not even that new. I mean, right, like historically, a lot of left movements have always had a certain menu come from nobility or education or son of a wealthy business person, etc.. Is this just people are different and that draws them to that? Or is there some sort of stronger theory or, structural force that has sort of like reinvigorated the sort of, you know, educated, successful left? Well, if I may, I think this is why this concept of the last man is important.

50:55 You know, at Stanford, we had students that were living out in tents and in, in encampment after October 7th for six months. And you can't imagine a more privileged group of people than a Stanford undergrad. Right. But, you know, I think what was missing in their lives was the sense that they were struggling and sacrificing for a higher cause of social justice, and that was the part that was missing in their lives. They struggled to get into Stanford, but, you know, it was just for themselves.

51:26 And I think they wanted a more idealistic, thing to, you know, aspire to. And I think that that's really what drives a lot of people into that kind of politics, is that they want to be able to risk their lives for something noble. And, our liberal society doesn't give them a lot of opportunities for that kind of risk and daring. All right, Francis, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

51:51 Thanks very much for having me. So, Joe, that was a lot of fun getting to interview a sort of legend, a legend in, political economy. One thing that stood out to me, I find the idea of the last man and of see me, or just steamier in general, very compelling, because you look around you and you see that something does seem to be missing. Yeah, for a lot of people. And to me, it sort of boils down to, relativism versus absolutism kind of thing, which is like neo neoliberalism or liberalism in general is predicated on this idea of absolute gain.

52:27 So as long as everyone is kind of advancing, not necessarily at equal rates, as long as everyone is advancing in absolute terms, people should be happy. But my personal experience of life and the world and history is that actually people are very much relativist. Yes, in nature completely. And it doesn't matter if everyone's advancing, if they're doing so at extremely different speeds or in very different ways, people aren't going to be happy. And I kind of did you see that viral, media saying it was abundance, modern abundance.

52:59 I did see that where it was like, oh, everyone has a washing machine and a toaster now. Yeah. And in the end, they dreamed of this in the 1850s. You could have crisp bread. Right. And it's and it's all very true. Yeah. But clearly it's not enough for people in 2026 that you can have a toaster and a washing machine and a TV and things like that. You know, it's interesting. I forget who pointed it out, but someone pointed out like that, that viral thing.

53:23 Yeah. It didn't include like Instagram and phones because this is like one of the big things. It's not like, oh, and it's so great that we can now spend six hours scrolling reels all day, even though that is like one of the hallmark aspects of modernity. Yeah, because people know what's that good. And they know it's not satisfying and it's not something that ever like 100 years ago, yes, maybe your dreams don't have the relativism problem.

53:45 You're doing fine, but you're looking at a picture of, I don't know if someone on a yacht, you're not doing as well as them. Yeah, that that is, it's meaningless. It's, comparison is the thief of joy. All kinds of issues with that, but I totally this is why I always think about, like, the angry Twitter billionaires, because it's like these people who have literally everything, and yet they're, like, driven crazy because they see a headline in the New York Times that they didn't like or something that they didn't agree with.

54:12 And it drives them nuts. And I think that's just like, you know, there. But for the grace of God, it's like, oh, like you have all of this and yet you still can't find a way to achieve satisfaction because no one like, really, you know, you're not like, intellectually respected. Yeah, etc.. And you just see how that, drives people crazy. And this is interesting too. Like with, sort of utopian visions of AI like, and this sort of paradox of all work is we want to work to achieve something, but we don't really you don't want to finish, you don't like finish the goal, you don't want to actually ended because then you feel sort of then what do you do?

54:48 Well, I do kind of wonder, maybe I can solve the, the last man problem in the sense that maybe if we if like, if we have to feel superior and recognized as humans, maybe if we have offsetting AI agents and robots, we can feel superior to them. It's hard to feel superior to them. That's part of the problem is like, we're not going to feel that, for very long. But yes, we could certainly try ChatGPT solve the crisis of the last man, make no mistakes and see see what it comes up with.

55:20 All right, so we'll leave it there. Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me @tracyalloway. -And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me @thestalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez @carmenarmen, Dashiell Bennett @dashbot, Cale Brooks @calebrooks and Kevin Lozano @kevlloydlozano. And for more Odd Lots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at bloomberg.com/oddlots. -And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

55:51 And if you enjoyed this conversation then please leave a comment or like the video. Or better yet, subscribe! -Thanks for watching.