Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:05:39 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:05:39] S0: How would you teach someone else his method? You've written a lot about this. I'm very curious how you framed it. He's an interesting president, no doubt whether you're for or against what he's been doing. How would you teach his method to somebody that was curious to learn how he operates? So distinctive. [00:05:55] S2: He really is a genius. He's discovered, I think, one of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is he's managed to turn fame into power, drama into power, and to do it in ways that leave him completely free to act. If you lie enough, the marginal cost of your ten thousandth lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second or third, the marginal cost is very high. All of the normal constraints on political figures, reputational and so on, he does not pay. In some ways I think President Clinton first discovered that shame only matters if you let it. Shame is an emotion that exists in other people's minds. A lot of people thought when the Monica Lewinsky thing came out, he would have no choice but to resign, this was so overwhelming, so dreadful. He basically realized, no, if you just keep putting one in front of the other, you just pass through it. The dogs will bark, but the caravan will move on. Trump has deployed that concept industrial scale. [00:07:09] S0: You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there?
00:07:09 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:07:09] S0: You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there? [00:07:13] S2: The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied the amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does, and we can say, global media and so on, but you know, it's very hard to think ever of a single ruler who just dominated everything. Anywhere you go in the world today, I don't care where it is, what you hear is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Some people hate Trump, some people love Trump, some people laugh at Trump, some people are astonished by Trump, some people spend their lives thinking about their contempt for Trump, but he remains the center of everything. And he sees that as the key to his unique power. A lot of people thought that when he lost in 2020, it would go away, that that was it. He was just about as dominant out of office as he had been in office. At what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle, but he is a major historic figure who has developed a new understanding of how power works in an era of mass communications and social media, and the rest of us are just trying to deal with it. [00:08:43] S0: How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it?
00:08:43 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:08:43] S0: How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it? [00:08:49] S2: Well, I think he has vastly accelerated the disintegration of this post World War IIpost Cold War structures. They're not going to be the same. He's not the only one who's done this, but I think we're entering an era of much more personal and much less bureaucratic politics. That is, I think for a long time in the twentieth century people got into the habit of thinking one person rule or a central figure should be downgraded and we should be run by institutions and bureaucrats and committees. I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again. So that in India you see a Modi, we saw Abe in Japan, Bibi in Israel and Erdogan in Turkey and Trump in The United States. Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping. We're back to an era of personal politics. [00:09:52] S0: If you think about the broader, longer arc of dominance or power leading up to this moment, I love the historical context. You're an amazing historian. Talk about why, whether it's maritime dominance or other major reasons that you think The UK and America up until, let's say, you know, the end of the Cold War or something had such an incredible run?
00:10:12 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:10:12] S2: Let's just start with The US China rivalry today. And what you see is the sort of two sides. One is a land based continental empire, China, which believes that it can match the technological and therefore military strength of the other power without all that political liberalism and messy democracy. Okay, great idea. The first, I think ruler in modern times to really embrace that was Louis the fourteenth, who thought that his technocratic government of the experts in France could beat those pesky English with all of that ridiculous, you know, every twenty years they kill the king or kick him out or who knows what they do. But it's utterly chaotic. The French idea was we can do that with a strong centralized system. From the time of Louis the fourteenth right up until now, you could sort of argue the dominant theme of global power politics has been this rise of this English speaking maritime commercial liberal order and then it's been contested successively by a series of great power continental states, France under Louis the fourteenth, again with Napoleon, Germany, Prussian World War I and then World War II, The Soviet Union, and that these contests have been incredibly difficult. There have been moments in every case where the technocratic centralized land power looked like it was just walking away and the ridiculous, confused, commercial English speaking maritime alliance was muddle lost, crazy, and yet somehow in the end, the hobbits keep winning. I should say that we stole our global strategy from the British, they stole it from the Dutch, who had been doing this earlier in the seventeenth century. And God and Gold, one of my books, I say that you could sum up the last three hundred years of modern history in 10 letters, UP, United Provinces, to UK, to US. Now obviously that raises the question to question mark question mark question mark. I don't think China has it in it
00:12:32 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:12:32] S0: to beat us. What is that strategy, the maritime strategy? What are these three entities done that's been so effective to let the hobbits win?
00:12:40 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:12:40] S2: I don't know if I can really reveal all this, the secret five point plan for global dominance, but okay. Why not? Right. I'm just going to ask everyone who hears this to kind of be careful with how they use this information. It'd be terrible if it fell into the wrong hands. Step one is have an open society at home. Think of the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Okay, everybody had these wars of religion. Well, the Dutch are pretty Calvinist, but they say, Well, you know what? These Lutherans, they're scum, they're going to hell, everybody knows that, but, you know, until they do, they could kind of pay taxes and contribute to the economy, and even the Catholics, I mean, of course they can't do their filthy idolatrous rights in the streets or anything, but yeah, live and let live. The Jews live and let live. If an intellectual scientist publishes some kind of scientific paper that the church doesn't like, well people will write nasty comments about it in other journals, but when Galileo doesn't go to the prison, there's no inquisition. And also, if you have an idea, you can try it. If you are the son of a peasant and you want to sort of try it as a merchant and you can find some people who'll let you do it, go right ahead. They come up with new ideas for government finance that we still use, the joint stock company, new seagoing technology, circulation of the blood, Locke comes to Holland and writes a lot of his best work there. That's step one, you have this open dynamic society and you've got the intellectuals are flocking there, your universities are flourishing. Step two is now with all of these products that you've developed and innovative technology, you take the show on the road, you trade globally. So you have, I think, were 10,000 seagoing ships coming from The Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and they're traveling all over the world, And what this does is it makes you stinking rich. I advise my students sometimes to go to the Met Museum here, or any number of places, to see the Dutch masters, not to look for, oh, like the brush strokes and the composition, it's so exquisite, all of which is true, but just look at like all the stuff that these people have in their painting.