Max Meyer Launched a Print Magazine in 2024. Here’s Why. (Ep. 245)

"The new needs friends"

My guest today is Max Meyer, the proprietor of Arena Magazine, a new quarterly publication exploring technology, capitalism and civilization.

Arena’s aim? To “make it okay to dream in public again.”

Max and I discuss why he launched a print magazine in 2024, WTF happened to legacy media, the wisdom of Ratatouille and MUCH more.

We’ve shared some edited highlights below, together with links & a full transcript.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

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Highlights

The Brain Drain in Tech Journalism

“As the internet came along, people who were smart enough to write about technology would rather just be technologists. And so you have this sort of diverging path between the technologists and the people that are writing about it. Where there's almost this parasitic relationship where even some of the mid-level technologists are making a lot more money than the best technology writers. And so, there's an unhealthy dynamic there, and it just means that the talented people have all gone into the industry, which leaves others behind to cover it. It's not to say that there aren't brilliant journalists or people that want to write about technology, but I think that that's a huge dynamic.”

Advertising and the Race to the Bottom

“I mean, we charge the readers quite a lot. This is an expensive magazine. It's printed on extremely high-quality paper. It'll last for 150 years on a bookshelf, and we're charging about $100 a year for a subscription. Most magazines historically were subsidized by print advertising. Print advertising is the most opaque form of advertising. Nobody really knew whether it was working. There was no reliable way to measure the metrics. And magazines were being sold at a loss because the advertisements were paying for it, selling at a loss relative to the cost of the paper, the cost of distributing it. That's why they can put it in an airport. It's unbelievably expensive to fulfill these things all over the place, but if it's so chock-full of advertisements, then you can do it.

We decided, ‘Let's do something that's a higher price where people are paying not to be spammed.' People are paying not to be treated like children or treated like members of a mob, which is how most of the advertising driven firms have to treat their readers. They're trying to rile them up, they're trying to turn them into members of the mob to go after the next scapegoat.”

The Wisdom of Ratatouille

“At the end the animated movie, Ratatouille, the sort of vampiric looking food critic, Anton Ego is talking about how negative criticism is really fun to read and really fun to write, but that the real work of a critic, then the real risk that a critic takes is the defense of the new. And that's sort of where we get that idea. I think that that's basically it is that it's more fun to be devastatingly witty. And as a person who's been a writer for all my adult life, I understand the temptation. And if you go back to my old columns in the Stanford Review, some of them were brutal. I was tearing apart these different activist movements and thinking of funny jokes, and that's like a normal mode for someone who is talented at language, the wordcel. The challenging thing is to reverse that and write stuff that's really fun to read that's also sort of reverent to the principles that we hold dear.”

The Sad Story of NASA

“I think that that's the really sad thing about NASA over the course of the last 40 years is that Congress has exercised simultaneously too much control, too many demands, and too much scrutiny. You can't have those three things all at once. For example, the Space Launch System, which is this NASA-heavy rocket, hypothetically competing with the Falcon Heavy and the Starship, it's a complete disaster, multiple years delayed. And part of it is because they're trying to make all these launches perfect, because if the Space Launch System does a launch and it blows up on the first time, again, it's like congressional hearing, threatening you. And so there's this urge to never fail. But the truth is, if you aren't allowed to fail in little ways where you learn, then you don't get to the big successes. And I think that this is also true in, it's true in a lot of areas.”

This is Water

“It's like this metal tube that's going to take me to another continent today is 30 minutes late. It's going to take me what used to take six weeks on a dangerous boat a little more than seven hours, and I'm very angry about that. Its affluenza. Once you have the new thing, it starts to wear off and you expect it to always be like new. And as David Foster Wallace wrote in his great essay and graduation speech, This is Water. You have to sort of constantly remind yourself, "This is water. This is water. It's amazing that I can do this." Stay in tune with the reality in front of you, which is not the baby crying on the plane. It's the fact that you are able to hurtle above the Pacific at 600 miles an hour to Asia, thanks to technology and thanks to capitalism.”

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Transcript & Links

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YouTube

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Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I have been looking forward to today's guest for a long time. Because he and I think a lot alike. It is Max Meyer, the founder and editor of Arena Magazine, which Max, by the way, the physical copy, which I'm holding up for people watching us instead of listening, is absolutely beautiful, so congratulations. You are the founder and editor-in-chief of this magazine. You're also the former editor-in-chief of the Stanford Review, and you're a writer at Joe Lonsdale's 8VC, welcome.

Max Meyer:

Thank you.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I mean, my first question is like, duh, what has happened to all of the legacy media tech publications? And when I heard that you were doing this, I'm like, "Fucking hey, right. It's about time." What's going on with the legacy tech people?

Max Meyer:

There are a few stories that I tell. I think that the main one is that as the internet came along, people who were smart enough to write about technology would rather just be technologists. And so you have this sort of diverging path between the technologists and the people that are writing about it. Where there's almost this parasitic relationship where even some of the mid-level technologists are making a lot more money than the best technology writers. And so, there's an unhealthy dynamic there, and it just means that the talented people have all gone into the industry, which leaves others behind to cover it. It's not to say that there aren't brilliant journalists or people that want to write about technology, but I think that that's a huge dynamic. And then over the course of the last 15 years, Facebook and Google have upended the digital advertising model that existed for the first 15 years or so of the Internet. Google and Facebook now make all of the money on advertising and banner advertising, which used to subsidize these online publications has just collapsed.

Max Meyer:

And so, the people who figured out how to either do high-end advertising or subscriptions have survived, and the ones that are still relying on very poor advertising revenue are really, really hostile.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

That makes sense. But what's your economic model? How does it differ from those?

Max Meyer:

I mean, we charge the readers quite a lot. This is an expensive magazine. It's printed on extremely high-quality paper. It'll last for 150 years on a bookshelf, and we're charging about $100 a year for a subscription. Most magazines historically were subsidized by print advertising. Print advertising is the most opaque form of advertising. Nobody really knew whether it was working. There was no reliable way to measure the metrics. And magazines were being sold at a loss because the advertisements were paying for it, selling at a loss relative to the cost of the paper, the cost of distributing it. That's why they can put it in an airport. It's unbelievably expensive to fulfill these things all over the place, but if it's so chock-full of advertisements, then you can do it.

Max Meyer:

We decided, "Let's do something that's a higher price where people are paying not to be spammed. People are paying not to be treated like children or treated like members of a mob," which is how most of the advertising driven firms have to treat their readers. They're trying to rile them up, they're trying to turn them into members of the mob to go after the next scapegoat.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it in that context. The collapse of the old business model was an accelerant of the race to the bottom of pessimism, anger, rage?

Max Meyer:

I think so.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Because unfortunately HumanOS is ruled, I think mostly by emotions. And I think that the king of those emotions is fear. And fear of the novel like we saw with COVID, it disheartened me greatly to see people literally being willing to act like sheep and follow orders that didn't have a lot of rationality around them. I followed them. And the aftermath, I think is going to be ... I don't even know, and I want your opinion, on what some of the outcomes are going to be over the next decade because of the lockdown and how badly it was handled. Not by the way, just by the United States, but globally.

Max Meyer:

I mean, it's sort of obvious at this point, but I think that trust in the media collapsed just because of the willingness to revise things that had been common knowledge, until they weren't. I mean, for example, if you had asked anyone at the NIH or the NIAID, which is the agency that Fauci was the head of, do cloth face masks work to prevent airborne viral transmission? For 20 years it was common knowledge that they do not. For the first month or so of the COVID public health emergency it was still common knowledge that they do not. And then all of a sudden they decided, "Yes, they do." And the media ran with it. And then you have another reversal with, is it safe to congregate outdoors in large numbers? Is it safe to congregate outdoors in large numbers? No, no, no, no, no.

Max Meyer:

And then you have a left-wing protest movement, Black Lives Matter that all of a sudden wants to do protests. And again, it was just reality was revised right in front of us. Yes, it's safe to go out there. Racism is a bigger public health emergency than the virus itself, and so you have an obligation to go out there. It was sort of this North Korean-esque revision of reality right in front of our faces. And I think it's unfortunate, because by the end of the pandemic the media was saying some true things, which is that broadly speaking, the vaccine will reduce your mortality if you're especially in an older age bracket or whatnot. But by that time they had lied so many times that it's the boy who cried wolf.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And the thing that dismayed me is, so I'm 64, I grew up, I went from 10 to 20 in the 1970s. Thank God that you're young and that you didn't go through the '70s. And so this probably gives me priors that are a bit more extreme about the idea of looking for evidence, looking for why are we doing this particular thing at this particular time? But back in the day all of the institutions that we kind of now see crumbling, we have an entire thesis about it here at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, we call it the Great Reshuffle. And essentially it's all of the old power centers are collapsing. Most of them are built on sand. And that causes a lot of anxiety among regular people, right? In the old days, if you looked at, do you trust the media? Do you trust the government? I mean, my God, we had Walter Cronkite, most trusted person in America, but if you dig, they were lying back then too.

Max Meyer:

Absolutely.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And they were just doing it better or easier, because they had three broadcast channels and basically two national newspapers that mattered, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And so much, much easier to do. And the internet blew that up. So, I think about one of the first things where I had an insight like, "Holy shit, this is going to be a whole new world," was a while back, I think it was Dan Rather ran a hit piece on George Bush. Spoiler alert, I was no fan of George W. Bush, let's just make that clear. But nevertheless, the hit piece included a letter that was said to be written about why he got out of military service or why he got into the particular branch he was in.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And I'm really not kidding you, Max, within an hour there was some guy who loved fonts and typography on, well, back then it was a forum, I guess, but it blew up and it was, yeah, no, the font on that letter wasn't invented when they say it was written, and boom. But here's my point, that had a massive impact on CBS news on Dan Rather, they were held accountable. It seems to me that the accountability has disappeared.

Max Meyer:

I think that the accountability is inversely correlated to the level of competition. Ironically, when there were just three broadcasters, if there was something obvious where they published fake news as we'd say, they would actually be held accountable. I mean, you had large swaths of the media that over the course of the last 10 years published in some cases outright fabrications about alleged Russian influence in the United States of the Trump campaign, stuff of that nature. But instead of those people being held accountable, most people realizing that that can't be done anymore just went to alternatives. They went to independent outlets. I think that's part of why something like a Substack is so consequential. It gave people an out. And I think that that's part of the reason why people are lashing out, is because there is this new kid on the block. And you have very successful, commercially successful news publications now that are totally independent.

Max Meyer:

And that is, I don't think it's threatening to the New York Times yet, just because the New York Times is like this behemoth. But for example, the Free Press, Bari Weiss' independent media outlet, I'm a small contributor there, they have 1% of the paid subscribers of the New York Times, they just crossed 100,000, the New York Times has 10 million. So, it's a fairly small publication relative to the largest one in the world. But the Free Press can still move the news, because the Free Press' 100,000 subscribers are A, extremely savvy, high fidelity to the publication. They know what they're a part of, they know what they're getting. And if they publish something shocking or aggressive on a Monday morning, it'll move news in Washington, in New York, in Los Angeles. And that's like a huge accomplishment. And they're making a fortune doing it, which is more than most of the media can say nowadays.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, and that was my thesis for would happen. But I'm still struck ... I mean, I totally understand. I have a elderly mother-in-law that lives with us and we care for her. And she didn't get the memo that the media is no longer completely unbiased. And so, I get the idea of older people who grew up in an environment, false as it was, that believed that what your political leaders, your media was telling you, what your institutions were telling you were all basically true things. And so, I get how it's easier to maybe get them to believe things that just ain't so. I also notice it among young people though, which really surprises me. What's your take on that?

Max Meyer:

I think it's TikTok brain, I think that there's something about the ... I think there's something ... You see this in young activists especially. When I was a student at Stanford, though I was the editor of the Stanford Review, while I was sort of up and coming in the Review, I was actually living in a left-wing, social justice, vegetarian activist cooperative house. This was totally voluntary. I was a vegetarian at the time. I was totally right-wing. I didn't subscribe to all the values of this house, but I had a few friends that were there, and so I moved in. And almost all of these people were sort of semi-professional social justice activists, protesting the university, protesting the police, going to all sorts of protests across the Bay Area. And it's interesting the extent to which Instagram is probably the most important activism medium that's ever been invented. And it's really short text and it's really short video.

Max Meyer:

And there's something about this form factor that I think lends itself well to believing narratives that are without merit, because it's dressed up in, in some cases sort of childish stuff, colorful fonts, quick transitions. And there was something about the person holding a cell phone looking into the front-facing camera that that's like the young person's Walter Cronkite. There's some sort of air of authority to it. I don't quite get it, but I think that's what it is. And you see TikTok and Instagram are sort of the places where made up narratives for young people are born.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

So, with the proviso that I will state that I am in favor of free speech, meaning I think everyone, even people who I think are absolutely 100% wrong, should be able to express their thoughts, should be able to protest, should be able to do all of those things. But it does seem to me that the naivete, I guess, would be the term I would use, where the evidence is just so overwhelming. Look at a satellite photo of North Korea and South Korea, and South Korea is all lit up and North Korea is shrouded in darkness. Every time one of these revolutionary things actually gets power and moves to a dictatorship, like Venezuela, good example, went from the richest country in Latin America to people in crushing poverty. Why is it so hard for people to get that memo, to understand that?

Max Meyer:

I think we've always had a contingent of young people that have been, in the case of something like North Korea sympathizers, what you could call a tanky. Tanky being sort of the reference to the famous photo from 1989 Tiananmen Square where there were tanks rolling down this promenade in China. And the man is standing there, most Westerners sympathize with the man standing in front of the tank with his grocery bags, one man in the face of tyranny. And then you always have some sort of group of young people that are into the hammer and sickle and side with the tank. I had a great professor at Stanford, Norman Naimark, who was a PhD student in the '60s. And back then there were actual Maoists on campus who would run around with their little red books. And Professor Naimark is a Sovietologist. And at that time at Stanford University in the 60s, the Sovietology department, the Russian studies department was considered very conservative.

Max Meyer:

The Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Stanford Russian department were always a bastion for dissidents from the communist countries. Alexander Solzhenitsyn actually lived in Hoover Tower for a few years. And so, Naimark is a PhD student and he's considered a conservative because he's inquiring into the nature of the Russian state, of the Soviet state. And he recounts literally being chased around by people waving the little red book, the sayings of Chairman Mao. And so, I do think that there is something that maybe is a bit of an accelerationist thing with Instagram and TikTok, but we've always had this. And so I don't necessarily think that it was like a before and after with social media. I think that maybe the social media is speeding things up.

Max Meyer:

But for what it's worth, the sort of steel man of Instagram, TikTok is that for the average American child going to a public school in a major city, TikTok and Instagram are going to be some of the only places where they can get any dissenting thought from the mainstream left. It's the only place where they're going to encounter Republican politicians. They're certainly not going to be shown that in their school classroom or whatnot. I mean, a lot of people could say that we need those things, even if it does prove useful for the crazy left-wing activists.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I had a theory, I didn't develop it too much, because I got too busy with other things, to be honest, but that social media maybe was actually quite a useful steam belt. And by that I mean people get pissed off, they get angry, they get fired up, in the old days they grabbed their pitchfork and their torches and they went around burning shit to the ground and killing people. And now they have these platforms where they can go on and just, you know… Have you seen the movie Network by any chance, made in the early '70s?

Max Meyer:

I don't think so.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I would highly recommend it to you. The protagonist is news anchor named Beale who essentially loses his mind and he gets on air and he gets up and he goes, "I am mad as hell about everything and I'm not going to take it anymore." And so literally he tells people to go. It's set in Manhattan, obviously, and he tells people to go to their window and shout that. And of course, in the movie everyone is going to their window and shouting, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." I kind of thought riffing on that movie, maybe social media actually does serve a reasonably good function in just that alone where people are able to spew their anger and then hopefully get over it.

Max Meyer:

We've always had the scapegoat problem. We've always had the need to relieve societal pressure when it gets to a boiling point. And I think I accept the argument that social media can be a steam valve. Maybe someone could say that it'd be better if we had actual confrontation every once in a while, because it would feel more real. But I think for most people, I think it's probably pretty good. And I, for one am a huge believer in the benefits of social media for most people in terms of just the raw connection that's become possible and the economic possibilities with it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

As am I, I'm a huge fan and have taken some criticism for that. I still believe, no matter what your feelings are about Elon Musk or Twitter X, I still believe, look, that thing is really anti-fragile. He took it over, he fired 80% of the techs and other employees, continued working just fine. But I had always envisioned and started writing about it like 2017 that Twitter was, in my sense, it was the lead horse on creating a global intelligence network where you can literally meet lots of people that you would under any other circumstance not have an opportunity to make any exchanges with.

Max Meyer:

I have about 30,000 followers now, which is, it's a good critical mass for regularly getting incoming. And my mom is always concerned when I'm saying that I'm meeting these people from Twitter when I go to different cities, but it's become a huge source of meeting new people professionally for me. And I don't think that there's anything like it. Because it's the level of ... I think the most amazing thing about it is just everyone's sort of playing on the same field. You have people with three, 400 followers that are engaging with some of the most prominent, richest, most powerful people in the world, and especially in the tech world those people have no qualm about engaging with random people on Twitter. It's not like politicians are going to be responding to the 500 or the 1,000 followers or whatnot, but Marc Andreessen is out there following 25,000 people. People will send him messages. And I think that especially the technology side of Twitter is really amazing like that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And I think that the more networked we become, you move towards creating the human colossus, right? Cognitive diversity, I think is very important. And being able to meet people who think differently than you do, who have different ideas about things is very refreshing. And I too, for example, I would say, I don't know, maybe half of the teammates I have at O'Shaughnessy Ventures I found on Twitter. And one of the great things about that is you can watch their account for a while and that builds up a body of work that you can ... A single interview. I very rarely do them anymore, simply because they're just a snapshot, and I'd rather look at the movie.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But the other thing I think that we should acknowledge here is, it's not just media. So, markets have been affected by this. There was a huge savings and loan crisis when George Bush senior was president in the late '80s. And guess what? Lots of people went to jail. They went to jail for a long time too. In other words, they were held accountable. In 2008 during the great financial crisis the thing that worried me the most and that I would not shut up about is, why is no one going to jail? What do you think? It's crazy.

Max Meyer:

I think that the end of the Cold War symbolizes this thing of like, we won. And then after that, there's more of a government willingness to just do things that are kind of fake zero interest rates. And it's not a mistake that zero interest rates happens right after no one goes to jail. It's almost just trying to reverse the last few rounds of a board game or something, being like, "Let's repair the original state." But of course, the bailout is almost like the least real way to deal with something and we can just play in a pretend world. And that's the things that you could count in pretend world are, let everyone go. Don't punish anyone for this huge, huge economic catastrophe, do a massive stimulus, do a huge bailout, then go to zero interest rates for the next decade and just start accumulating debt. It's just sort of this make believe.

Max Meyer:

And the 20th century was real, and when things are real, you get dictators. Weimar, Germany had tons of inflation, and then Adolf Hitler has made Chancellor, and it's like, "That's super unpleasant. Let's do things that are fake rather than things that are real." Just because we had so much real confrontation in the 20th century that zero interest fairyland sounds kind of nice compared to it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I was smiling, because we had that very conversation at dinner last night, and that was my thesis. My thesis was, if you look, prior to the Cold War ending, the political parties in America at least had to basically agree on one thing, which was foreign policy. And so, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, they might have hated each other about a bunch of other stuff, but on foreign policy they usually walk pretty lockstep. And then when we won the Cold War, they were free to no longer continue that kind of at least agreement on that one particular thing. And each of them went off the reservation, so to speak, in terms of who they were appealing to. But it's also, like I want to get into the magazine now too, because your manifesto, The New Needs Friends, I loved the piece. I thought it was really, really well-written, but it really bummed me out.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

How is this possible that all of these incredible innovations and wonders that are making human life vastly better, saving lives, enriching lives, all of these things, and you got to start a new magazine so that we can say, "Yeah, yeah, progress." And yet, you bring it up too, and I use this example a lot. It's not like this is anything new. I mean, the New York Times classic editorial of October 1903 saying that it would take humans one to 10 million years for humans to achieve flight. And then a couple of months later on December 17th, the famous Wright Brothers flew the flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. What is it that orients wordcels and or the chattering classes to pessimism?

Max Meyer:

Well, so for the readers that don't recognize the phrase, The New Needs Friends, did you recognize where that phrase is spun from?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yes, but inform our listeners and-

Max Meyer:

At the end the animated movie, Ratatouille, the sort of vampiric looking food critic, Anton Ego is talking about how negative criticism is really fun to read and really fun to write, but that the real work of a critic, then the real risk that a critic takes is the defense of the new. And that's sort of where we get that idea. I think that that's basically it is that it's more fun to be devastatingly witty. And as a person who's been a writer for all my adult life, I understand the temptation. And if you go back to my old columns in the Stanford Review, some of them were brutal. I was tearing apart these different activist movements and thinking of funny jokes, and that's like a normal mode for someone who is talented at language, the wordcel.

Max Meyer:

The challenging thing is to reverse that and write stuff that's really fun to read. That's also sort of reverent to the principles that we hold dear. So, I think that's basically it. It's fun. It's the most fun way to write, and it's why all of the so-called great writers always have something witty to say, Twaine, Tom Wolf, you name it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, Oscar Wilde would have killed on Twitter. And speaking of that movie, I always use the example where they give him the Ratatouille and he's immediately transported back to his childhood as an example of qualia and why it might be harder for us to come up with super intelligent computers if they don't have a sense for being able to understand that qualia. Maybe I'm wrong, but I love that scene in the movie, because I use it all the time when people say, "What do you mean qualia?" I always send them that clip.

Max Meyer:

Yeah, I think that it is always amazing. I watch that movie all the time, it's so brilliant. And the other sort of famous line from it, which is, "Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." It's like that's the best version of meritocracy and social advancement that we have. And it's amazing. I don't think that that movie could be made today, just because not everyone can become a great artist, is itself sort of, even though it's just the first clause in the sentence, it's still a rejection of the sort of leading egalitarian ethos, which is that everyone can get a perfect SAT, everyone can be a great artist, but the version that we have to hold onto is that a great artist can come from anywhere.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I completely agree. I think it's funny, the idea that wrong think is being enforced, and there's a great quote from the, I guess philosopher, I don't know really what he is, Jed McKenna that I really love. And he says, "If you're having a little tea party with Lord Lion and Lady Gazelle and someone comes along who doesn't quite buy your fantasy narrative, it's not that they're being negative, it's that maybe your little fantasy narrative is a little too fragile." And I love the line, because I see these fragile narratives, or what I think of as fragile. In other words, they have no empirical evidence supporting their claims. They have fact loads, truckloads of empirical evidence denying their claims, and yet they persist. What's your take on that?

Max Meyer:

Social dynamics among the people telling the stories. I think that's basically it. There's someone who's egging them on. There's someone who's telling them, "Yes, Lord Lion and Ms. Gazelle, very good dinner guests." It's not me telling them that.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I know. I definitely know that.

Max Meyer:

It may even be polarizing to them when someone comes along and is like, "No, that's not real." You saw that happen with the COVID story. You had sort of, I don't know if you remember, you had this sort of split of New York Times reporters. There were some of the New York Times reporters that were insane, and they were publishing stuff that was intended to demoralize the population and scare them. And then you had a few that were a little bit more sane. And when they try to say, "Look, this is wrong," then it's like, "Ah, you're far right," when this person is clearly not. And so there's an allergic reaction to being told you're wrong by the wrong person. And so, it's like we don't have functioning discussion like that anymore.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And it seems to me that I find it almost deliciously ironic that being in favor of free speech, rule of law, free markets, is coded right wing these days. Watch some videos of President John Kennedy and like, my God, what would they make of a John Kennedy today? Would they call him a far right politician?

Max Meyer:

I think the line would probably be, I mean, he'd be called an isolationist. He'd be distrusted for distrusting the military-industrial complex, just like Eisenhower, JFK is sort of the last president in that lineage of, "Let's be really careful about this encroachment of the state into everything and the fusing of civil and military affairs." I think that that would be the thing that would be considered. I mean, Donald Trump is considered dictatorial by certain parts of the media for wishing to exercise actual civilian control over the military as commander-in-chief. Take a look at Kennedy. There was no one who wanted to do that more than John F. Kennedy. And a lot of people believe that he was killed for it.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And yet, the other point about Kennedy that I like to make is, he was also a bit like Ronald Reagan, a spokesman for optimism, for progress, for all the things that made this country, in my opinion, the greatest country that ever existed on the face of the planet. And the speeches are really incredible, not only because politicians used to speak in full sentences, I know it blew my mind too, and quite eloquently. Then I always have the people, "Yeah, that was because he had Ted Sorenson." Okay, so maybe they had better speech writers back then, but he delivered it quite well.

Max Meyer:

It's not true. It's not the speech writers, it's not true.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I agree.

Max Meyer:

It was a different type of person. And look no further than John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who in May of 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy at that point, a United States senator from New York, he's campaigning for the presidency and he's in Indianapolis. And the news breaks that Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated, and all over the United States, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Little Rock, there are riots breaking out. People who are Black Americans who are just stressed. And in Indianapolis Robert F. Kennedy is about to address a majority Black crowd, and they don't know the news. He tells them the news and there are gasps. And he goes on to quote Aeschylus from memory, and it's actually a sort of funny mistranslation of Aeschylus, but it was poignant. It was beautiful, I encourage everyone to take a look.

Max Meyer:

And it was the only major city in America that didn't have any unrest that night was Indianapolis. Because Robert F. Kennedy had literally used the power of English to soothe people. You almost can't imagine that today. It's not just the full sentences. There was a study that was published, the average grade level of English that presidents have used over time, and it's like, I think we're down to third or fourth grade. I think it's disappointing. I think that people still could be inspired by great oratory, but I don't know.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I agree. And Martin Luther King Jr. hero of mine, I mean what that guy did, not single-handedly obviously, but he, speaking of the power of the English language, he almost had no peer during that time. And I Have a Dream, that speech, I learned the other day that he did improv on more than 30% of that speech, which I didn't know that. But I watched it a lot, because it is such an optimistic and good message given during a time where it was really shitty to be a Black person in America.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that's the other thing that bothers me. It's like if you look at all the countries in the world, yes, America has a ton of problems. There's no question, there's no debating that even. And yet, can you cite a country that has changed more in the last 50 years? Many of them not for the better, but changed. For example, when in 1971 where I'm going to lead you next because of the context of the progress, 1820 through 1971, something happened ... There's a website even, what the fuck happened in 1971?

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But the idea that we have not made, I'm the youngest of my family, in 1971 my sisters couldn't get married and keep their maiden name, unless they went to court. It was a law that women had to take their husband's last name. It was a law that a woman couldn't get a credit card without her husband's permission, which I think is, I mean, just like I was alive when that was actually happening, I was alive when the country had a lot of really bad things in place.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And so my point is, we've changed, look at the old campaign videos from President Obama. He was anti-gay marriage officially. But the fact that that also changed. I mean, if you really are a lover of progress, directionally a lot of, like I say, I'm not trying to say that everything that changed was great, but directionally I don't see a country that has adopted more and better ideas and laws, et cetera, for people. Can you think of one?

Max Meyer:

No. I think that historically most people in the United States have been broadly better off than any other place that they could be. There are caveats to that. But thank goodness that the sort of economic setup of the United States means that minority citizens are better off here than anywhere in the world. And I think that it's undeniable that there's been lots of social liberalization over the course of the last 50 years. And I think that America was set up well with mechanisms for gradual and steady change.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I agree. And I still think we were just incredibly fortunate to have our country founded at a time of the enlightenment and the idea of understanding that we humans are an interesting bunch, but our entire government is engineered to take into consideration that essentially people who claim, I guess this is Mencken, I'm just winging it, but he said something like "Anyone who claims that they want to save the human race, it's almost always a false flag for them wanting to rule it." Which also brings me back to, there's really not a lot new here in terms of the optimist versus pessimist debate. You go back to the times of Malthus, you who said, "Everyone's going to starve because they had a fixed mentality." And one of my other favorite authors, David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, Julian Simon, who wrote The Ultimate Resource. According to Professor Simon, the ultimate resource is we humans.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

In fact, he made a very famous bet with a scaremonger of the environmental movement who wrote a book called, The Population Bomb. And the book essentially was saying what Malthus said, right, "We're all going to die. We're going to starve to death." Julian Simon is like, "Yeah, no, I don't think so." And so the guy's name was Paul Ehrlich. And so what-

Max Meyer:

Ehrlich is still an emeritus professor at Stanford.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I know, I know. And that's what I wanted to get your opinion on, because here we have this setup back in 1980. He's very famous. He's paid a lot to make speeches, Paul Ehrlich I'm talking about, and Julian Simon comes along and he goes, "Listen, man, I will bet you," I can't remember what the monetary amount of the bet was, but it was made in 1980. And what Simon said to Ehrlich was, "I'm going to let you pick the medals that you say are going away, and I will take the side that 10 years from now they will be cheaper and more plentiful than they are today because of human ingenuity and innovation." And so Ehrlich picked nickel, tin, tungsten, copper, chromium, and I think that's all five. And of course, Simon won. He won the bet. And like crickets, is it just part of our human operating system? As you were mentioning earlier, pessimists sound smart, optimists create the future in my opinion.

Max Meyer:

And optimists make the money too. I think that you could almost take optimist, pessimists and create this dichotomy, and then also put people who are allocating capital to new things, hoping to make money on it, versus people that are writing about why those things won't work. And it's like the person who writes that this will never work. The best outcome that they could possibly hope for is a best-selling book where they make a million dollars if they're really lucky. The moderate outcome, if you're right and you're super optimistic and you invest a bunch of money into this cool thing, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars.

Max Meyer:

I'm an Iowan. I'm from Iowa. One of our two statues in the National Statuary Hall in Washington from Iowa is of Norman Borlaug. Norman Borlaug was an agronomist from Iowa who basically invented the strains of drought-resistant wheat in the '60s that saved the world. Some people estimate that as many as a billion people were prevented from starving. Ehrlich writes The Population Bomb in 1968. Borlaug wins the Nobel Prize in 1970. He's basically ... Or maybe it was '80 when he won. I think it was '70 though. And he gives all these great speeches. He just totally proved Ehrlich wrong by doing it, but it turned out that there was no cost to Ehrlich to being so wrong. I think that his reputation has suffered, but Borlaug did it as an academic. There are other people who did it as businessmen. The richest people in Iowa are people who have invented new types of seeds. And so, the innovator is always going to be someone who's really hoping to be right, maybe hoping against hope, and they have a positive alignment to be right.

Max Meyer:

The pessimist is just sitting there. The pessimist has no uncapped outcome, if the innovator is actually right, but they have a small-capped option if they end up being right and it doesn't work. And I always sided much more with the innovator in this. And there's, for example, an article in the first issue of the magazine about SpaceX. I was down in Boca Chica on 4-20-2023 for the first launch of the Starship. And it was amazing. And I'd gotten a little tour from a friend who was working at SpaceX, and I saw the employee party after this rocket had exploded, and it was euphoria. And then the next day I read the headlines. And if you had read the headlines and believed it, you would have thought that this was a complete calamity. And those people don't have any positive outcome when SpaceX actually works.

Max Meyer:

And of course, it already does work. It's a $200 billion company. It's like they already won, and then you have one rocket explode on its first launch. People forget that the first three Falcon launches back in 2007, '08, and '09, the first three failed, and then they got the fourth one to work. Then it's like hundreds of consecutive launches. The people back then who were like, "Oh, it'll never work. This guy Elon can't launch a rocket." They don't have any incentive to change their mind. Whereas Elon made a lot of money by being right and optimistic, and that makes people bitter. It makes people bitter that nine months after the first Starship launch, or not nine, it's like six or seven, it's April, and then they launched again in November. And in November it blows up again, but it blows up much higher up and it was much more successful.

Max Meyer:

And then by the third one in March, which is when I wrote this article, the third one in March is just full colors. They passed everything. It was brilliant. And if you had actually believed the people back in April, you would have been completely shocked when this thing worked. But of course, the people writing about it actually had no idea.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that is always been kind of one of my North Stars, which is, I don't know whether it was Wittgenstein, I think I heard Naval quoted, but the idea that the truth ought to be predictive.

Max Meyer:

Yes.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And what you see is, I'm working on a piece right now called, Failure is a Ladder, scaling the line from Game of Thrones, "Chaos is a Ladder." Because failure really is a ladder. If you look at all of the greatest businessmen, but it goes to everything, like Genghis Khan. I didn't know this as I started writing the piece, he was exiled from his village. He was like, and I kind of imagine, as I was thinking about what I was going to chat with you about, I imagine if there was, it's like that Larry David Super Bowl commercial where they invent the wheel and he's like, "Nah, never work." I don't know whether you saw that one or not. I thought it was really hysterical. But I was thinking about history if for example, D-Day, D-Day was a shit show. It was as the people in the military would say, FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. And can you imagine if the journalists back then were like now? Maybe a completely different outcome.

Max Meyer:

I mean, I think that there's no better example of the failure as a ladder, as SpaceX. SpaceX is the first private entity in world history to launch a rocket. And the first several launches all fail. If it had been a public agency or someone that relied on public funding to do that, you can imagine there would have been a congressional hearing called, and you would have moronic showboating representatives of the United States hauling this person in to be like, "Who are you? Why did you do this?" We're outraged, banging the fist. But Elon Musk had his own money. He had money from Founders Fund, he had money from investors that believed it was possible, and they didn't call a congressional hearing. They figured it out, and SpaceX pioneered this iterative rocket testing process.

Max Meyer:

And if the journalists on 4-20-23 had known anything about that, they would have understood why SpaceX was so excited seeing this rocket blow up. They were thrilled. I mean, would they have liked everything to work perfectly on the first time? I don't even know if the answer to that is yes, they're really interested in how these things fail. Because if you understand complex systems, you want to know why things fail. I think that that's the really sad thing about NASA over the course of the last 40 years is that Congress has exercised simultaneously too much control, too many demands, and too much scrutiny. You can't have those three things all at once. For example, the Space Launch System, which is this NASA-heavy rocket, hypothetically competing with the Falcon Heavy and the Starship, it's a complete disaster, multiple years delayed. And part of it is because they're trying to make all these launches perfect, because if the Space Launch System does a launch and it blows up on the first time, again, it's like congressional hearing, threatening you. And so there's this urge to never fail.

Max Meyer:

But the truth is, if you aren't allowed to fail in little ways where you learn, then you don't get to the big successes. And I think that this is also true in, it's true in a lot of areas. I think that the SpaceX one is particularly interesting just because of how grand an achievement it is, and the contrast with the people that rely completely on government funding and government bullying as a result.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that brings to mind, there's a great book called The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism by the author Howard Bloom. And he makes the point that no other system in human history, even though every religion, every political movement from Christianity to Marxism has promised, "We are the answer. We are going to take you to the Promised Land." And of course, all led to disasters. There's one system, one and one alone that over a 300-odd year period improved human life's in numerous ubiquitous ways, and that are free markets and capitalism. And yet, everybody just, that's the disconnect that is so hard for me in my mind. If I was young, for example, I started O'Shaughnessy Ventures, because I share a lot of your views about we've got to be optimistic, and I have six grandchildren. I want the future to be great for them. And so, I was just getting so tired of, what did William Sapphire call the press? "Nattering Nabobs of Negativism?" I thought that was kind of funny.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

But the point that Bloom makes in his book, which I also agree with, as an economics major, my economics degree did me zero good in my previous career in asset management, because it invents all these dehumanizing concepts like utility maximization and homo economicus, and ceteris paribus, which is other things being equal. Other things are never equal. And the idea-

Max Meyer:

That's a classic one. All these assumptions, never assume, that's the thing.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah. Well, it's a flaw in the logic too, right? Because all men are mortal, all men are green, therefore all green men must die. Well, okay, logically consistent, but all men are not green. So, the planted axiom runs riot in economics. And what Bloom wants to do is just acknowledge the fact that the reason markets work so well is they respond to human emotions and desires. Total demand could be renamed total desire, and it would mean the same thing. And also, markets, like almost anything in a natural system are complex adaptive systems. And so, this idea that you could have a committee of wise people up here, to go back to your point about what would happen if NASA had done the crashes in a row. That some committee of wise people up here is a better way to run an economy is just beyond flawed and wrong. We have centuries of evidence that this is true, and yet-

Max Meyer:

It never dies. I wrote a piece for Labor Day for Arena Magazine that people should check out. It was called, The Earthly Miracle of the Grocery Store.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I read it.

Max Meyer:

And I live in Texas. I'm a Midwesterner, but I'm an adopted Texan. And it was 35 years ago this month that Boris Yeltsin went to a Randall's grocery store outside of Houston and he's just amazed by the availability in the grocery store. And yet, 35 years later we still cannot kill the government urge to have, as you said, the committee of very wise people determining what's in the grocery store, and what it should cost. And that urge is never going to go away. And it is surreal, because we have this 300-year record, and we have all of these examples. For me, my basic definition of capitalism, the one rule of capitalism, you're not allowed to kill your counterparty. And I think that this is the one thing that distinguishes it from all other systems. It's like before capitalism, if I want to barter or trade, I go kill you. I go kill you and I take your stuff. I raid your village and I take your stuff.

Max Meyer:

And what capitalism by saying, the one rule is you can't kill your counterparty, you have to negotiate. Some people are still very offended by the idea of people making decisions. For example, we will never run out of people that think that charging interest on loans is predatory. And that no one is mature enough to agree to an interest rate or whatnot. And it's like, in the old days, if you want to lend someone money and they don't give it back, then you just go kill them. Now you can just charge them interest and they agree to it, and you get the money back. And oftentimes you don't. But it's like what capitalism normalizes is, let's make a deal instead of me being violent toward you, your family and your country.

Max Meyer:

But some people still do have this primal urge that the government should be showing up to the grocery store. And if you don't set your price here, then we take over your grocery store, which is violence, expropriation. This urge will never die. But that's why it's so important to defend the basic logic of capitalism, which is that peaceful trade, voluntary transactions, it's the biggest promoter of human welfare ever, and the biggest suppressor of mass violence.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Amen is all I can say. And I used to joke, there's a Rodney Dangerfield joke where he's making fun of, I can't remember the political candidates. He's like, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy." I think it might have been in Caddyshack. But I feel like that sometimes. And we were on a team meeting the other day, and I don't know if you're a Star Wars fan, the original three, not any of the others, but well, I was, it was my Matrix back when I was a teenager, right? We'd never seen anything like that in 1978 or whenever it debuted. And so I said, as unbelievable as it seems, we're kind of the rebel alliance here, and we're going after the empire with its Death Star. And yet, we have all of the evidence that the shit we want to do works really, really well and is really, really fair to everyone involved. And yet, how are we losing?

Max Meyer:

I think it just is the temptation of controlling other people, the temptation of central planning. And those things, it's intuition, the mass intuition of the people. You see this in something like in Argentina or Venezuela. If you ask people what's the best way to control the price of rent, literally control it. Literally cap the rent, don't allow the price increases. And what happens? The price goes up. We know this. And the ultimate sort of Rebel Alliance leader, Javier Milei down in Argentina, he gets rid of the rent control in Buenos Aires, and immediately the rent is in a free fall, which is just hilarious given that you've had three decades of so-called rent control. There's a great quote, "The system is what it does." So, rent control is not rent control. Rent control is rent increase, government mandated rent increase because it constrains supply. There's the famous American Enterprise Institute graph of inflation since 2000 or so, and it's cumulative product inflation.

Max Meyer:

And you see that all of the most regulated sectors are the ones that are by far the most expensive. There's no real government regulation on how to build a television though. And so televisions are one of the things that's come down in cost, in absolute terms. Not even in inflation-adjusted terms, in dollars televisions are literally cheaper today than they were 20 years ago. And it's like, "Oh, there was no government interference. There was no TV price control. There was no TV cartel. It was just, oh, we figured out how to make a cheaper product, and people were interested in buying this still." The urge never dies, because we have failing human systems. Humans do believe in some cases that the neighborhood grocer is out to extort them. Or that a landlord relationship with a tenant is inherently predatory. It's just this age-old mistrust of free people making free decisions.

Max Meyer:

I don't think it's ever gone away, but I think that someone like a Milei is very inspiring in fighting that fight, just because it can be a bit more tangible than sort of unending policy studies and explanations. That can sometimes tire people out. Milei is more fun, and he makes it, he's got the crazy mutton chops, the hair, the dancing. I think that that's a perfect model for how people should talk about these things.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I agree. I love him. And you're absolutely right. And I had the same insight about him. He's entertaining as hell, and he's making the right arguments, in my opinion. But if you just drone on and drone on and drone on, people are going to tune you out really, really fast.

Max Meyer:

And I mean, I think the perfect dichotomy, interestingly enough is, Milton Friedman himself versus Milei, one of his now most prominent sort of acolytes. Milei is much more fun than the late Milton Friedman. And of course, Friedman was a genius, and he actually was, as far as Libertarian economists go, a fairly effective communicator with the TV program and whatnot. It wasn't good enough, and Milei, it just took it to another level. And the willingness to treat these sort of group consensuses as a joke is one of the things that's very valuable, and say, "No, rent control doesn't work. No, this socialism doesn't work. It's destroying you."

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And that was the driving force for the various verticals that we have here at OSV, right? If you want to change people's minds, you're not going to do it with statistics and position papers and whitepapers and think tanks having debates with each other. You've got to be like him. You've got to actually be provocative, be entertaining. You'll get people's attention.

Max Meyer:

And I think that it's interesting. Milei is one of the, probably the best modern example of someone who's managed to take the populist intuition of, we need to mistrust someone and actually channeling it to the right villains, at least in a strict sort of, who's making things more expensive sense, which is the bureaucrats. We don't have an effective person like that. Even Trump is sort of ... Some people would like to imagine. I think he's pretty ineffective at that. And Milei very effectively took the populist urge, the desire for, blame someone, and was actually like, what if it's us? What if it's the people who thought we knew better? What if it's the people who thought we knew better than markets? What if it's the wise old committee? And no one is really sort of effective at pointing out that, that it's this urge to control it in the first place that is causing it to malfunction.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And I think though that I do see some green shoots around that even as well. Because right now the classic corporatees or bureaucratees speaking in the passive voice with word salads that don't mean anything. And I think a lot of people are just like, "You know what? Fuck you. I would much rather get back to, let's get back to TikTok. I would much rather see somebody entertaining and making an actual case for something than listening to you drone on and drone on and drone on." And yet, the frustration for me is, man, it's like, when you look at human history, not a great place. It's like people who romanticize the past should maybe take a look at what happened in the past.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Because just my personal experience, all of my sisters would have died in childbirth, because they had complications that were resolved by medical advances. My daughter, both of my daughters actually, would have died in childbirth. The world was not a really great place. And this romanticizing of the past to me seems like, obviously, you're not remembering it the way it actually happened. You're remembering leave it to Beaver and Wally and, "Gee, Beaver, let's do that." But that was false even then. And so, you're conflating things that really never happened. And yet, I understand. One of the other things that makes this like it's never going to end is our, in my opinion, fallacious need for certainty. The world is an uncertain place. We are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic universe. And hilarity or tragedy often ensue.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And it's just like, it goes all the way back to good old Aristotle, right? Yes, no. Black, white. Zero, 100. Deterministic labeling of things. It is either true or false, like life is maybe, in my opinion. And only people who understand that are going to try those things. If you're like that New York Times editorial and you're talking about, "Well, clearly this will never ever happen and here's why," you're not going to even bother looking, right?

Max Meyer:

I think maybe is also sort of at the core of capitalism, it's why you have to go back and forth. This might happen if we can find a price. Whereas the logic of central planning is it like, "Yes, it's going to happen because we say so." You're taking it for granted that things weren't. I will say, I'll defend a little bit of the appeal to the past, which is just people wanting things to work better that they perceive don't. And that doesn't necessarily mean, in fact, it doesn't mean that you should go back to the way that things worked in the past, or get rid of the things that have changed scientifically. I think it's actually incumbent on people like us to better communicate how to actually make things work better.

Max Meyer:

For example, how do you explain to someone why airplane travel is better today than it was in 1975? You've got all the famous photos of they're carving the turkey by the seat and it's like these massive seats. And I could explain to someone, "All right, we don't have the turkey by the seat anymore, and I'm sorry, and the seats are now synthetic leather instead of this ridiculous upholstered cloth that is straight out of Downton Abbey or something." But the tickets in inflation adjusted terms are much cheaper and because of the hub and spoke system that we invented with hub airports like Dallas-Fort Worth, or Atlanta Hartsfield, now you have much more connectivity around the world. And a town like mine in Iowa can be connected with just one connecting flight to Chicago O'Hare airport, basically anywhere on Earth in the course of 24 hours. And that this is like a huge innovation. There's a great Wall Street Journal column back from 2010 by Andy Kessler called, How United became an Airline.

Max Meyer:

United used to employ ticket checkers. After each flight, in order to check who actually boarded the plane, they would have to mail the boarding passes to Houston and manually check them against the manifests. There was no way to check onsite who was actually getting on these planes. And over the course of the 2000s, thousands of ticket checkers lost their jobs. Won't anyone think of the ticket checkers? It's like they're unemployed now, but of course, when you no longer have to employ 5,000 ticket checkers, now those people can be flight attendants. Now those people can be gate agents. Now those people can train to be a first officer if they want to, or work in procurement, and that's how United became an Airline, as Andy tells it is because these things improved. And so now the main complaint is that on these extremely convenient, extremely cheap, extremely prolific flights, the chairs are a little bit more uncomfortable than they were in the '70s when the inflation adjusted cost was 10 times as much.

Max Meyer:

And it's like, do I sympathize with the desire to go back to the carved turkey by your seat? Yes, I do. And the reason that we don't have that is because we have this sort of mass abundance. But if the regulators got out of the way, we could have roast turkey on certain flights. There's a new French airline called La Compagnie. And they do flights from Newark in New Jersey to Paris and London. And it's business class only. They have a series of long 737s, and it's like 75 business class seats. That's the entire plane. That's the equivalent of the roast turkey back in the day. And even that flight is cheaper than the 1975 roast turkey flight.

Max Meyer:

You have amazing amenities on aircraft now. You can fly first class to Dubai and get a queen-size bed for $25,000. That's better than the roast turkey was in 1975 when you have these dinky little planes that have to stop every five hours, I mean, for god's sake, the A350-1000, which is about to go into service between England and Eastern Australia. They're going to connect London to Sydney. Back in the day in the '40s during the second World War they'd fly from Australia to London on what they called the double sunrise. They were timing the flights to fly over Japanese territory at night and so they'd see two sunrises. They're calling it Project Sunrise where they're going to fly these A350s from London to Sydney. It's going to be like a 21-and-a-half-hour flight. It's completely ridiculous, but it's nonstop. And it's like, that's an amazing innovation. Yes, the seats are uncomfortable. You're going to want to get up and walk around the plane every once in a while, but do we really want to go back to roast turkey on a point-to-point flight that's extremely expensive?

Max Meyer:

I personally understand the intuition, but as I've just done, it's our obligation to explain why things work the way that they do and why they've improved in real terms, and how we can make them better through the same means.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I agree. And I am anything, I'm not panglossian in any way. I think that there's a lot to improve. And I think that we will make those improvements. And as we innovate, guess what? We'll have new problems. I think that there'll be new and better problems, but we will have new problems, and that's just part of making things better and better and better. I love your point about the airline travel. The other point you didn't make was, and guess what? All those planes back then, they crashed a lot.

Max Meyer:

They did.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And so, literally you were much more taking your life and your hands back then than you are today. And I sometimes think that's part of the problem. We get so accustomed to what in an earlier era would have been viewed as magic. Right like magic. And the great joke by Louis C.K, I think just really illustrates this point about WiFi in airplanes where he's saying, "Can you believe it? I am 30,000 feet above the ground and I can surf the Internet?" And then it goes off and you go, "What the fuck?"

Max Meyer:

It's like this metal tube that's going to take me to another continent today is 30 minutes late. It's going to take me what used to take six weeks on a dangerous boat a little more than seven hours, and I'm very angry about that. Its affluenza. Once you have the new thing, it starts to wear off and you expect it to always be like new. And as David Foster Wallace wrote in his great essay and graduation speech, This is Water. You have to sort of constantly remind yourself, "This is water. This is water. It's amazing that I can do this." Stay in tune with the reality in front of you, which is not the baby crying on the plane. It's the fact that you are able to hurtle above the Pacific at 600 miles an hour to Asia, thanks to technology and thanks to capitalism. You're not flying there on Air Koryo, the North Korean airline.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

One airline I would never set foot on, that one. And so, how has been the initial reaction? I love the magazine, I think it's beautiful. Any questions about why you chose to also do a physical beautiful magazine?

Max Meyer:

To us, we wanted something that would endure, and we thought that by doing something that would literally endure it would encourage us to do the type of stuff that 10 years from now will be really interesting to open up the magazine on the bookshelf and be like, "Oh, that was the picture of innovation in 2024." And so we think that there's probably, we need to revert. That is one good thing from the past. We're doing it differently. It's not a weekly magazine. It's not showing up at your door every single week. It's a bit more spare in terms of its circulation, but it's a bit more premium. It does represent this sort of part of the past that we admire, which is printed products feeling more ... Are almost like having more reference for the content.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Yeah, and the-

Max Meyer:

Reception's been great. We're doing well.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I'm so happy to hear that, because we need voices like this to make the case that we probably should have convinced people of more than a century ago. But alas, we can't. I know your time is limited. So first off, congratulations. I am delighted with it. I'm happy to be a subscriber and happy to be a friend. And wish you the very, very best with the magazine going forward. Our last question on this podcast is, I think fun, which is, we're going to make you the emperor of the world. That top down thing, right? Except lots of rules. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is not be all powerful, but you can be influential.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

And by that I mean we give you a magical microphone and you could say two things into it that are going to accept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next day is, they're going to wake up and say, "You know what? Unlike all the other times when I had these great insights and never did anything to act on it, I'm going to act on these two." What are you going to accept?

Max Meyer:

Simple answer, and it's one that I've already given. Central planning doesn't work. Trust in the ability of the market to get you good products at fair prices, and trust in transactions with other people. It's the best way. It's the best way for your health, for your country, for your population. And don't trust that people say that you need to control every transaction and control the economy. It would be to try to do my best to crush the undying intuition that capitalism is bad.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I love both of those. You do not get a positive sum society with attitudes that believe that all of those consensual, trustworthy agreements that people make between themselves, millions happen every day, and gosh, it works pretty well. Thank you so much. Where can everyone find you?

Max Meyer:

Arenamag.com.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

Perfect. Delighted to speak with you. I hope to have you on again when we have some more time, because I didn't even get to half the stuff on my list.

Max Meyer:

Anytime.

Jim O’Shaughnessy:

All right, thank you, Max. Cheers.

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