Jared Cohen Returns

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Monica Monsoon.

Hi there.

I got to make an introduction to someone on an email with you, and I took so much pleasure in listing you as all your many acronyms. Yeah. Not acronyms, your pseudonyms. Pseudonyms. Pseudis.

You called me Monica Monsoon, Duchess of Duluth.

Duchess of Duluth, Miniature Mouse. Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually, what I did is I combined a couple things, because I did Monica, Monsoon, Padman. I made a new thing, basically, which is like the monsoon was in the middle with quotes. Yeah.

Like you, were a boxer.

Sure.

Like Iron Mike Tyson, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, Monica Monsoon Padman.

When I, in college senior year, we had senior shirts and you would put a fun name on the shirt, on the back of the shirt. Okay. And mine was Monster.

Oh, really? Tell me more about that.

Because Mon.

Yeah, of course. I see the phonetic connection. Monster. That's fun. Were you a little monster?

Well, I am a little monster. Oh, okay. In a good way.

Right. Okay. I'm gonna work on that. Maybe I'll bring a monster. Okay.

Okay.

Today we have a returning guest who's a friend of ours, Jared Cohen. You'll probably remember, the last time he was here, we talked greatly about his collection of presidential hairs. That's right. So fascinating. He's obsessed with presidents, and I love it because he keeps writing books about them, but under different lenses.

The book that he's here to talk about is really interesting, about legacy.

Yeah, Life After Power is the name of the book. Two previous books are The New Digital Age and Accidental Presidents. Jared is a businessman serving as the president of global affairs and co-head of the office of applied innovation at Goldman Sachs. He's held a bunch of different titles. He used to work with Eric Schmidt, who we've also interviewed at Google.

He really can and he's such a nice guy.

He is. You're gonna love him. Please enjoy Jared Cohen. We are supported by Sleep Number. Oh, mattresses can be a pretty big purchase.

It's ubiquitous, which is really nice.

Yes, and you get cash back.

I also like it because you can send money with PayPal to friends.

Oh yeah.

Which means going Habsies when your BFF visits this summer. or Callie and I live in the same city, so she's not visiting, but we are going on a trip. And so we're going to have to do a lot of splitsies.

And fire money back and forth to each other.

That's right.

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He's an object man.

He's an object man.

He's an object man.

Oh, is the air on? Are you okay? Are you comfortable? I feel great. Money, how do you feel in your sweater?

Oh, hot.

Thank God, okay. Now we're getting somewhere.

I never say it, but it's the truth.

Oh, thank God.

Dex, I feel like you look more ripped than when I saw you last time.

I didn't go back and look. I often do, but how many years has it been?

So I last saw you in Montana.

That was three years ago.

Your jawline's good.

Oh, well, thank you. You know what that might be a result of? When I was there, I was in my big boy phase.

What does that mean, by the way? I started nodding as if I knew what it was.

I had been a medium boy my whole life, medium build. And then I decided I wanted to be a big boy. So I went up to about 215, 220.. So when I was there at that time, I was like 215, 220.. And probably my jawline disappeared a bit.

I thought about wearing chin putty to look kind of extra sexy for you guys.

That would be for posters, because you already have, you look like you could definitely be the coach of an NFL team.

But I want one of those 19th century chins. It's like a little bit of Habsburg descent, but not too much Habsburg descent.

Right, where it's like a good 40% of the total vertical space on your face.

Yeah, like maybe he comes from totally defunct monarchy that squandered power a couple hundred years ago.

Yes.

I have to ask right off the bat. Has your hair-?

President hairs? Yeah, has it grown?

Has your hair collection grown since we saw you?

Monica, I'm so glad you asked. The answer is yes. And I've added additional oddities to the mix. By the way, I last saw you all when I came on in 2019.. Since then, there's an opportunity to collect two additional presidential locks.

Feels like jinx-y or something.

So, since I saw you last, I got Eisenhower's hair, which you might say is ironic, because he was bald. Oh, with an extra. Very small pieces of hair. I've got a whole blob of John Tyler, obviously. It's great.

I've got these weird- I don't think I've ever heard John Tyler. That was a president?

So John Tyler was the 10th president. You want to hear a wild fact? He was born during the term of George Washington, and he has a grandson who's still alive.

Whoa. Oh, doesn't that compress time in a way that's weirdly scary?

I've spoken to him on the phone. He's super old. So basically, he fathered 15 children, the eldest of which he fathered in his late 70s. And then that kid fathered, I think, like another, somewhere between 12 and 15 children, the last one in his late 70s. And then that kid is like 102 or something.

Okay, so for either of those men to have fathered children in their late 70s, clearly they had either mistresses or had remarried, which seems a little unusual in the 1800s.

John Tyler was a widower president. He famously, as president- Killed his wife. He did not kill his wife. He famously got remarried while he was president. So he was the first president to get married.

A White House wedding?

The wedding itself was held in New York. Have you ever been to the restaurant Indochine? That's where the after party was. Wow. Yeah, surprised you didn't know that.

It's so funny that this isn't Jared's occupation. I know. None of this pertains to his job. Anything he does. Other than maybe some guiding principles when you are in vastly different situations.

They're legitimate. Look, he was just very fertile.

Well, clearly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A virile man.

Yeah, very virile.

But that means he had a wife in her 30s, presumably.

Yeah, younger. There was a Delta. Okay. Sure. The precise word, Delta.

I mean, 30s, is being very generous. I'm sure she was like 18..

Sometimes when I say this, I had mentioned that one of our guests, who was born in the 70s, I said their mother was older. Oh, Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer of Green Day. And I said, well, your mother was pretty old when she had you. And people got really mad about that. What is old?

It is a late pregnancy.

So I was really placating those people when I said she was in her 30s. 18.. If I had to bet my life, he probably was with a 24 year old when he was 70..

Again, the Delta. Yeah.

Okay, so you've written yet another book that involves presidents. This is book number five?

This is book number five.

And how many of them have dealt with presidents?

This is my second one about presidents. I actually have a children's book about presidents coming out in September. Don't worry, I'm not gonna hassle you to have me back on the show that soon afterwards.

Okay. But we'll talk about it now. Yeah. Okay, so that'll make three of six about presidents. And people who had heard your 2019 interview would know that this is a total hobby for you.

History and political science, a childhood passion in presidents, an adult passion for collecting weird presidential oddities and artifacts.

Yeah, oh, did you add the new item you're collecting?

So I have the vial of poison on a very high shelf because I have young kids, that Charles Gatteau, the assassin of James Garfield, that his sister sent to him in prison so that he could take his own life and avoid facing prosecution. Okay. And I recently acquired the pencil that he used during his trial. Oh, wow. And then a piece of the leather from the limo that JFK was riding in on November 22nd, 1963 when he was assassinated.

Which was a 64 Lincoln Continental?

I will confess, Dax, I have not committed the brand of the presidential limo to memory, but I can tell you that the leather seat was blue.

Okay, it was blue.

That's huge. That must be one of the biggest ones you have.

It goes with a lock of JFK's hair, which is pretty rare, that I've also acquired.

I don't want to be too morbid, but if you had gotten a lock of hair from that scene, I feel like that would be the most valuable.

So I have a lock of hair from Lincoln. It's drawn from the most famous lock of Lincoln's hair, with great provenance from the night of his assassination. It was taken by his physician. And I know the guy who has the lock, when I was younger, I got my first Lincoln autograph, and this was my kickback for overpaying for the autograph was. I watched him pull six strands of hair from the most famous lock of Lincoln's hair.

Oh, my goodness. And I know we talked about this last time, but clearly an option for you in the future is to clone all these humans when we have that capability. And you could be the father of all the founding fathers.

That's my hope. That's gotta be the ultimate. That's where this is going.

Cause you're not going to open an oddities museum.

Am I not going to open an oddities museum? We've all thought about it. We've all fetishized it, but I probably won't do it.

Okay. And then to add just a bit more accolades to you. So then also you are a Rhodes Scholar and you got a master's in philosophy.

International relations from Oxford.

International relations. Why does it say M.Phil?

They don't have masters from Oxford. It's called a master's in philosophy. It's just the British system. Same way with PhDs. It's a doctor in philosophy there.

Oh, that kind of answers a question I never thought to ask. Sometimes you say a PhD and sometimes you say a doctorate or doctoral.

At Oxford it's a DPhil, in the U.S. it's a PhD. They're both snobby about each other's systems.

And so then, in 2019, you had a different job. You, at that time, were the CEO of...

Jigsaw.

Jigsaw. Thank you, Monica. But you were also still working very hand in hand with Eric Schmidt, who ultimately we had on. And I think I text you, I put him in a category of like five other guests where, when it was over, I was like, I think that person sees the entire picture on planet Earth, which is a very rare thing to witness.

Eric has the widest angle lens of any human being that I've ever met. And you mix that with his own tremendous curiosity and his intellectual generosity, and you don't just get the benefit of his knowledge, you get the benefit of learning from him. I've been a beneficiary of that my whole life. If I think back to kind of the original reason why I got the idea to write Life After Power, I was working for Eric when he was CEO of Google, and he transitioned to executive chairman of the company and working hand in hand with him and partnering with him as he thought through what does it mean to go from being CEO of Google to executive chairman? What do I want next in my professional career?

Or even heartbreaking. Or even heartbreaking.

A lot of them ended up extremely depressed, isolated.

Insolvent.

By the way, most of the early presidents, remember they were a lot of slave owners, they were big landowners, they left office completely penniless. You didn't have presidential pensions until after Herbert Hoover.

Washington's whole plantation was in a total state of disrepair.

George Washington. I mean, imagine, people don't know this part of the story. So he leaves office, and he goes back to Mount Vernon. He never leaves Mount Vernon again. He spends all of his final years chasing down people who owe him money.

He does, he's endlessly kind and patient to them.

And he has no choice, and he's dealing with lawyers. And so this idea that you go from being the most powerful person in the world to, all of a sudden, just an ordinary citizen, it's the most dramatic retirement you can imagine.

That's a great point. And Eric is a good comp for that. Because you're climbing, you're climbing, climbing, then you get to whatever the end goal is of that. And then, I imagine, you start looking around and go, well, what's next? Nothing's gonna top this.

So it's interesting. This elusive question of what do we do next, we're all gonna ask it so many times throughout the course of our life. And you never know when you've achieved your greatest moment of power. I think if you look at Eric as an example, you would think that being CEO of Google is as high as you can get. I would argue that his journey and broadening into kind of unmatched public intellectual after that, with expertise on such a wide swath of topics, far eclipses what he achieved as CEO of Google.

We'll get to him at the end, but you chose seven presidents and they're spanning all the different eras, which to me seems a bit obvious, but they also span different parties. That was intentional, right? I imagine that you wanted this to remain apolitical and everything else.

It kind of worked out that way, but it wasn't intentional. So if you look at the 45 men who've been president 46 times, since Cleveland was president twice, you eliminate the eight that died in office, you eliminate the handful that died shortly thereafter, you kind of ignore the one who's sitting in office today or just left because too soon, and you canvas the rest of them. And I was left with seven by default, because there were really only seven that I thought were worth writing about. With George W. Bush, I looked at that a little bit differently.

Is that him or that's lucky for him that the world took a turn where we now look back and think, oh my God, he was so great. I mean, just circumstantially.

It's an astute observation, Monica. I think it's a combination of the two. So one, he has this unique ability to move on. I went and I spent two days with him in Kennebunkport. I did hours and hours of interviews with him.

Can I ask quickly, was that a hard interview to get?

Yeah, I had known him over the years. I worked in his administration. I think it was a hard interview to get, only insofar as he hadn't given any interviews about his post-presidency before, certainly at this length. I watched him paint for hours.

Yeah, he loves to paint. He said this is a crucial part of his finding purpose.

Look, I think Bush has this psychological uniqueness where he's not introspective. What he says is, you know, when it's over, it's over. I don't miss it. I genuinely believe him. To sort of understand how a human being can detach in that way, it's like a psychological thriller into, like a powerful and ambitious person's brain that is counterintuitive to everything that we know.

He didn't do anything during the debates when Trump was blasting Jeb.

He said nothing publicly. So it's a remarkable discipline. So I think that Americans appreciate that reverence for the Washington principle. It's aged really well in the era of Trump. And it's not that he doesn't have ambitions and causes he cares about.

How's he doing it with the painting?

So he paints, he had a painting instructor who told him, paint the portraits of people you know who other people don't know. And he said, I've known a lot of veterans over the years, and he just started painting them. I've known a lot of great American immigrants. A lot of them served in my administration. A lot of them have gone through the programs of the Bush Center.

Yes, well, I think he has a touch of what McCain had, which was. I obviously was on the different end of the political spectrum than McCain, but he had these moments where he displayed great character and integrity. Just these moments where you're like, whatever our differences, I can tell this is a good man. And I think that burbles through with George W. Bush.

Well, what's interesting about Bush, one, he took several trips to Africa after leaving office. He had championed this PEPFAR program that has had a meaningful impact. PEPFAR? Yeah, the President's Emergency something or other that focuses on countering HIV, AIDS, and malaria and tuberculosis. And it really moved the needle in terms of reducing the spread of those viruses across the continent.

Yeah, there's been 45 of them.

And yet, when you delve into their post-presidencies, you feel this connection and relatability to them, which is what got me so excited about it, because it's counterintuitive. The fall from power, whether it's being fired by the American people or just being termed out, it's a greater fall than just about anything else. And there's a vulnerability that comes with that fall that I think all of us find more relatable. You know, in each one of them, there's some question that they grappled with, that I found relatable. And in Bush's case, it's this whole question of what's our legacy?

Well, right. So I'm always trying to understand why. I think most people think about a legacy. It doesn't interest me at all, because I'm not gonna be here to observe it. And then I wonder, is it part of me being an atheist, which predisposes me to that?

No, I just had a thought for the first time.

Oh, my God, how did you enjoy it?

It's so rare to have a new thought that I have to share it. I think Bush is maybe the only present, definitely in my lifetime, that maybe has no ego or very little ego and little narcissism. I think some narcissism is the reason these people come to power. Like. I think it might be part of it and that's okay, as long as it's managed.

I think that's right. The apathy about the judgments that get levied in his direction mattered very little to him as president. They matter far less in his post-presidency.

I'm a Buddhist.

Well, I think it has to do a lot with where you come from. And I'm gonna argue that his transition was aided in this in a weird way. So the lanes in his family were taken. The dad was the head of the CIA. He knew all things.

There's two things there. One, I think, George W. Bush, personality-wise, again, each of these seven presidents I write about, they found purpose in the post-presidency for a different set of reasons. Sometimes by design, sometimes they knew exactly what they wanted to do, and being done with the presidency unshackled them from other burdens. In the case of Bush, he's just kind of a chapter guy.

He's 33 years old. when that happens.

33 years old when he co-founds the republic. He doesn't wanna be in service. after that. He tries to retire three times and he has to serve as secretary of state, he has to serve as vice president, he has to serve twice as president. There's only three things etched on his tombstone, author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.

Listen, this is the great hack. I watch it with my wife all the time. My instinct is to, when there is a rabble, when there's crazy teenagers, they need to be dominated. Some alpha's gotta step in and control this. And I've watched the kill them with kindness approach, and it is shocking.

I feel like an asshole.

And then I'm sitting in my car and I'm an asshole. And if they're really nice about it, I feel like even more of an asshole. But if they start honking and flipping me off, then I'm in it with them. And so I'm like, that's gotta be my new policy. But yeah, what an unforeseen outcome for him to just be emotional and vulnerable and saddened by the whole thing, and that that elicits that response.

Well, and you compare and contrast that with today. I love this story because it's a reminder that authority matters. And who sits in the seat of power matters, not just because they have power, but they command such a level of respect that you don't end up with this tyranny of the majority against the leadership, whether it's at a business or a university. And this is why I love history, because everything that we see today, as crazy as it seems, we've seen some version of it before. And a lot of the clues and the ingredients that tell us how to navigate it and tell us to calm the heck down because we're having a present day, freak out, they exist in these powerful anecdotes that are lost in the annals of history or sort of stuck in the footnotes of history.

We are collectively living the same way we live individually, which is, we rediscover the same fucking epiphany every six months. Like, I don't know about you, but Monica and I talk about it all the time. I have a realization, I'm like, oh my God, of course, that's what I gotta do. And then my second thought is, oh my God, I knew that eight months ago and I forgot it. We had this great comedian and actor, Rami Youssef, and he was telling us that the Arabic word for human is forgetful.

Yeah, and social media has not just compressed the volume of content that human beings are willing to consume. It's made us impatient to dig into the facts around the present, and it's made us lethargic about reflecting back yesterday, let alone several hundred years. And to go back to this question of legacy and burden, so much of how we pursue a legacy, whether we're a very important person in our own mind or in reality, is a function of the burden that we feel. And so John Quincy Adams is another interesting example.

This one blew my mind, because to me, this is a lesson in one's ego. Because as much as we do repeat history, this is unimaginable in the current era.

Oh, yeah, I mean, so. John Quincy Adams' presidency was basically an intermission between two of the greatest acts in American history. The first one kind of top-down, architected for him by his famous parents, John and Abigail Adams, that kind of manufactured a president. And his presidency was a disaster. I mean, he almost drowned while skinny dipping in the Potomac, and had to ride back in a horse and buggy naked to the White House.

He's done a bunch of the legwork for Abraham Lincoln to walk in and take it to the next.

I mean, just imagine that a freshman congressman named Abraham Lincoln serving alongside this shrinking, frail, weird-looking human named John Quincy Adams, who's this living relic in the house. Where's that magic today?

Yeah, he becomes a real defender of free speech, in addition to helping forward the abolitionist movement. But the notion of Obama becoming a congressman for nine terms, I feel like ego-wise, that's unimaginable. I don't know if it's a different time.

Yeah, it feels like a big step down societally.

What you're kind of getting at, it's the story of reinvention. So part of this question of what we do next and part of what we learn from these presidents is there's an element of reinvention. And it depends on what they want. In the case of John Quincy Adams, he reinvented himself as a public servant and he got to experience something new. It didn't matter that he was in the House of Representatives and had been a president, is that this was a cause that he decided to take on, not that his parents decided to take on.

Right. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Yeah, I like that. Have you heard? the one, comparison is the thief of joy?

Yes.

That's a good one too.

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Grover Cleveland, I include him as the story of kind of a comeback. So if each of the seven presidents represents a different model, Cleveland is the only president who has recaptured the presidency. Now. that's obviously very relevant to today. It's increasingly looking like, for the very first time since 1892 and the only time since 1892, you're gonna have two presidents in a rematch as the nominees of the two major parties.

So he had won the popular vote,

but he lost the electoral college. And Cleveland represents a cautionary tale, because there's an interesting aspect to this. And Monica and I were in a very juicy way talking about this before. Cleveland becomes the second president to get married, while president of the United States. His best friend, Oscar Folsom, died in a very 19th century type of accident, which is a horse and bucky accident.

Textbook.

His daughter, Frances, Cleveland, became her official guardian, and huge age difference between them.

Back up. I got distracted by Monica's great joke. What a perfect timed classic. So his buddy dies in a horse and buggy accident. Then what happens?

So then he becomes the legal guardian of his young daughter. Her name is Frances. He calls her Frank. She calls him Uncle Cleve. He starts courting her when she was in high school.

The first term or the second?

It's the first term. Okay. He ends up falling in love with her. How does he have time?

He's running the country. He's courting a teenager.

Men always find time.

Well, by the way, just for the record, we'll get back to the story in a second, but just one tangent. Poor Grover. Cleveland is going to have his name resurrected because Donald Trump is likely going to be the Republican nominee for president. So there's a natural parallel. And while one might think, oh, this is great for Cleveland, people are going to finally remember him.

Well, courting someone you're the legal guardian of, it didn't go great for Woody Allen and age gap and a high school student.

No, this is going to be very uncomfortable.

Leaving high school, the secret service rolls up and the guy that's trying to take you out on a date, the president's at your high school.

Well, there's an amazing story.

And he's your dad, kind of?

He basically is her father. So there's an amazing story. So while he's president, he proposes to her by letter.

How old is he at the time?

He's close to 50 at this point.

And she is?

She's in her 20s. They started the courtship when she's a preteen. So he sends this letter of proposal and she accepts. And to get ready to be first lady, her mother takes her on a trip across the Atlantic to get refined in Europe. And the telegraph operator intercepts a love letter that he sends, and assumes that he's secretly engaged, to the mother.

Well, that would be the most natural assumption.

So the papers print this and he throws a tizzy fit. Why do they keep trying to marry me off to old women? Don't they know that I love her daughter? So he's offended.

I don't think God, they think it's the mom.

Well, look, eventually they were going to find out, right? So she ends up as the youngest first lady in history, 21 years old. That'll never be replicated. So he's happier than he's ever been. And when he throws away the presidency, all he wants is to retire, have children, have this happy family.

She's living out a kind of princess fantasy. at that point. The king married her. Also Stockholm syndrome. Yeah, sure, Stockholm syndrome, classic stuff.

No, he was disgusting. Big mustache, very heavy, kind of oafy. He doesn't get compared to William Howard Taft, just because Taft was the more enormous of the two, but he was a close second. Okay, wow, wow, wow.

So when he comes back, what's the second? go around like?

So the tragedy for him, so he decides to come back to the presidency, in part because she wanted it, but he was very worried that his successor, Benjamin Harrison, was going to take the United States off the gold standard, which was going to bankrupt the country. He was worried about a rising tide of imperialism, and he genuinely felt that he was the only one who could come back and save the country from economic ruin. So he gets elected again, so wins the popular vote for the third time. By the time he takes the oath of office, the country has descended into the worst depression in its history. A group of opportunistic settlers, along with the de facto U.S.

They are the exceptions to the rule.

Absolutely.

Okay, and then we have William Howard Taft. I like this one the most. He didn't want to be president at all, but his family very much wanted him to be, and his good buddy, Theodore Roosevelt, wanted him to be. But he had wanted to be on the Supreme Court originally. That was his dream.

Each president is meant to represent a category of problem that somebody's grappling with. So all of us know somebody, or maybe we include ourselves in this. We know what job or opportunity we've always wanted, and by the time it came our way, the timing wasn't right. There was a reason we couldn't say yes. Life was taking us in a different direction.

You think that was calculated?

It's known to be calculated. Oh, wow. He gets lucky. in 1920, Warren Harding names him to the Supreme Court.

Well, first he loses an election in a very embarrassing way. He comes in third for his second term.

This is another tragic story of relationships. William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt were best friends, and Taft never wanted to be president. But when Theodore Roosevelt and he sort of split and ended up in this vicious feud that was really driven more by Theodore Roosevelt's desire to become president again, which required him to break the friendship, Taft decides to be zealous about trying to get reelected, to deny Theodore Roosevelt the chance to be president again. Theodore Roosevelt storms out of the Republican Convention and forms a new party as a bull moose, and he ends up splitting the Republican vote. Split would be conservative.

With an incumbent coming in third. Again, that's such a rare occurrence.

Not just coming in. third, coming into a distant, embarrassing. third. So Taft was politically destroyed, lost his platform.

Can I ask you to bring it into current politics? So the fact that Theodore Roosevelt stormed out and just decided, well, obviously the party's gonna run the incumbent, but I wanna run again, so I'm starting this thing. Obviously. we've passed this point, I imagine, but that seemed semi foreseeable for the Democrats, this go around. Because a lot of people don't want this incumbent to run again.

So it's very interesting. Like when I set out to write this book, obviously I wasn't thinking about the 2024 election, because writing books takes forever. And we find ourselves in a situation where two men, one who's an advanced septuagenarian and one who's an advanced octogenarian, both presidents are about to embark on a rematch. And we're in this situation, despite the fact that both of them have less popularity than last time, because you have two presidents that don't wanna give up power. We've never been in this set of circumstances where you have these two candidates that are so old and both presidents.

Anyone who is doing it to be like, oh, Biden's too old, but who's a Democrat is fucking us up. I mean, that is just the truth. We can't hand over anything to Trump at this point.

Well, again, and I just love seeing how often these debates funnel into, this is a very Kantian utilitarian argument. So if I'm a Kantian and I'm like, no, no, I will do the right thing. This is unacceptable. These are the two options. There's virtue in that claim.

But you say this a lot, right? You say, are we living in a world that should be or a world that is?

Sure, I do.

And we are living in what is, and right now what is is Trump and Biden. I know. We have to make decisions based on that. For four more years, that's it.

I have a fantasy, though, where, yes, it's Trump or Biden, but there's this enormous silent majority that is just participating because they believe in that. So it may turn out that 60% of the country, and I think that's probably accurate, doesn't want either of them. My pick wouldn't be a Democrat or a Republican. It'd be like a hardcore centrist that goes, no, no, I'm gonna split both these fucking votes.

I think the most dangerous third party candidate is the invisible candidate of not voting. This, to me, is the biggest wild card, which is given that both candidates are, let's just say, not young.

But hold on. Biden is not a terrible president. Just because he's old, he has done a good job. It is not fair to say-.

He went to Hawaii and looked at 3,000 people who had just had their entire life burnt to the ground, and he said he didn't know exactly what you went through. Our house burnt down, which wasn't even true.

But you're taking one sound bite, one thing that he said versus what he's done over the past four years, it's not fair, especially compared to what was before that and what will happen again.

Here's what I think, Monica. He isn't even within the top 1,000 best options to run the country.

But are you even following?

Okay.

So to arbitrate between the two of you, it is a matter of fact from the polling that both of them are less popular. That is a statement of truth. So I worry about large segments of the population not voting. Not voting is, by the way, depending on what state you're in, is a de facto vote for one candidate or the other. In each state, there's one candidate where the voter turnout problem with certain communities is a bigger vulnerability.

Really quick, drill into that, because I'm from Michigan.

In and around Dearborn, a very, very large Arab American population, very upset with Biden's handling of the war in the Middle East.

Supporting Israel.

Exactly, and so if you're the Biden camp, there's a concern that you have that come November, if the war is still going on, and I assume the policy stays the same, that there's a risk of some of those voters not turning out.

The only hiccup for that logic, in my opinion, is Trump is even more pro-Israel than Biden.

So that assumes a level of rationale. I mean, I think there's a recency bias that we find with a lot of different parts of the electorate. And look, it's very hard to get in the heads of the electorate as well. I mean, the one thing we know about polling is it's consistently wrong, and yet we continue to put it up on this pedestal as right. How many times do the polls have to be incorrect, where we basically just declare they don't matter?

Yeah, we do the best we can. We poll, that's about all we can do. But I interrupted you, so that's what's currently on the table. We okay? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, we got sidetracked with William Taft. When he does end up getting appointed to the Supreme Court as the Chief Justice, what is his career like then?

William Howard Taft is a fascinating case study in what it looks like to defer a dream and finally achieve it in the last chapter of life. His last 10 years of life, where he's Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, are by far the happiest years of his life. And so look, it's an incredible story of persistence. And it's a reminder that the most powerful position we may achieve in our lives is not necessarily the one that makes us the happiest. He's the only president to serve at the top of two branches of government.

And was he a better Chief Justice than he had been a president?

Oh, he's a much better Chief Justice than he was president. I would describe him as a boring, but very important Chief Justice. First of all, he believed that the Supreme Court needed its own building for proper separation of powers. I mean, imagine if the Supreme Court used to be in the basement of the Senate. So talk about meddling from the legislative branch.

What I take away from that is ego, basically, kind of like what we were already talking about, that you have to step over the notion that you're demoting yourself, that your greatest happiness might be a job that was under, in quotes, the one you previously had.

I think a lot of the presidents that I write about did this. Jefferson, if anything, I think he felt the presidency was a blow to his ego and a waste of time and not necessary for him to ensure that the next segment of the republic was preserved. In the case of John Quincy Adams, the ego was in being hyperactively serving the country. In the case of Cleveland, he didn't lust after the presidency. Remember, he didn't want to come back.

So I was a child when Carter was in, but he's probably the first president I remember seeing on TV. And I guess my thoughts about Carter, if I had to summarize him, was that he was genuinely a very nice and good and principled man, and that maybe he proved the point that you can't really be so nice and principled as the president, because you're dealing with adversaries and enemies that are not playing by the same moral code as you are. He seems to be a test case of that. When he leaves office, the Iranian hostage crisis is in full swing. There's people in Tehran that are waiting to be rescued, that he doesn't really know how to navigate that, and the economy is in a fucking nosedive.

I think that's right. Carter leaves office, just about as unpopular as Herbert Hoover left office. And he spends his final hours as president working to finalize a deal to get the hostages out. And as one more insult to Carter, the Iranians don't sign on the dotted line until after Reagan's been sworn in. And Reagan very graciously sends Carter to go greet the hostages.

Carter was the longest living post-presidential chapter of his life. For 42 years, he was out and about after he left office.

Yeah, we have to say active post-presidency, because he's still alive. He went into hospice care almost a year ago. But you're right, though, his active post-presidency ends at 42 years. And what's interesting is you compare and contrast Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush.

He's always, to me, felt like Mr. Rogers. if he was a politician. Like, oh good, Mr. Rogers is there.

It's interesting, when I tell people that I wrote a book on seven post-presidents, the first name they always say is, oh, you must have included Carter.

Wow.

Why do you suppose?

I think some of it is, if you look at the age of Americans, most Americans today know Carter as a former president and never experienced him as a president. I was born in 1981.. I was born in the year Reagan was shot, not the years that Carter was president. So I only know him as a former president. So I think his longevity, the fact that he's not been an invisible post-president, he's the one that everybody immediately thinks about.

Now, you didn't include him, for obvious reasons, I guess, but where are we tracking Obama? Thus far, it appears to me that he has launched kind of a media business. He seems to be like a middle ground between Carter and Bush. And, by the way, I just want to flag, I admire both qualities. I admire that Bush has such reverence for the office that he has proceeded the way he has.

So far, if I look at Obama's post-presidency, it's very TBD. And I say TBD because we wouldn't be talking about William Howard Taft if he hadn't eventually gotten to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. So sometimes they arrive at it late.

What if Obama goes back to the Senate? Wouldn't that be mind-blowing?

Obama left office, a pretty young president. He left office still relatively popular, which is unusual. A historic figure with a real following. I would argue that there's been two follies so far. One, I think his post-presidency lacks definition.

I think it's kind of an unfair level of expectation we have too. It's like, by all rights, he should be able to hang in Martha's Vineyard and ride out the rest of his life. He aged himself 16 years within eight years. The dudes deserved it. And yet, I do feel this weird thing of.

Yeah, I think it's because we love him so much and we miss him actively. because of the way things have gone. I think we're feeling a little bit desperate. But he is, though. Did you guys see the movie, the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali?

Mitigate the divide.

Cautionary tales, yeah.

That's what I would want him to do.

I think he's trying to do it without doing it in the political arena, because the political arena is ridiculous right now.

Part of the problem is he's sort of straddling the Carter and Bush model. So he's injecting himself enough into the debate to not be able to absolve himself of responsibility and say, I just wanna hang out at Martha's Vineyard. But he's not diving into a set of issues in enough of a way to drive that agenda. I accept the fact that there can be something in between Bush completely moving on and expressing himself through painting and Carter never going away. There's every reason to believe Obama might get there.

There's no conclusion for you to really draw yet. But the book does draw conclusions. And through these examples, there are lessons in managing stress and in transitioning jobs, shifting from someone who lives to work to someone who works to live. Tell me what philosophies you walked away from and which ones you cherry picked a la carte that you hope to infuse into the sadly second half of your life. We're almost there.

I'm 42 years old. I found at times myself sort of tortured by writing this book. It's a weird thing for somebody who's 42 to obsessively spend three and a half years digging into the last chapter of life. You're left feeling quite insignificant because you realize these people achieved a level of influence and impact that you'll never achieve. And a lot of them struggled in that final chapter of life.

Why did you take that job? Because that's where you're at currently.

Almost all my friends, plus or minus their 40th birthday, made a decision to either not just change jobs, but change careers, or double down on what they're doing.

Post COVID or 40?. What's more relevant?

I think the combination of the two forced a lot of us to reflect.

It turned out perfectly for you to not know.

Yeah, which is which. And it's funny, when you're working remotely, you kind of tell yourself this story that I'm living the dream. I see my kids all the time. I can be on my own schedule. And only when I started at Goldman did I realize there's a set of rituals that I was missing.

To give you a compartmentalized life that maybe you missed.

Yeah, and so that was sort of interesting.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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So, I'm the president of Global Affairs, and I also co-head innovation at the firm.

Because every time I've emailed you in the last year, you've been in a dramatically different time zone, and we literally can't get on the phone. You've been in the Middle East for the last three months, and you were in Africa at one time. Obviously, something international's afoot with this job.

Part of the reason I went to Goldman Sachs was it's not an intuitive move. You would think the other direction would be more intuitive. I had always been interested in this relationship between business and geopolitics. Geopolitics has always been my passion, and basically, until COVID, unless you were at a tech company or an energy giant, geopolitics didn't really impact business that much. You had a tech competition between the US and China, but it hadn't turned into this very, very complicated relationship.

So, really quick, give an example. that's so on the surface right now, is you have Taiwan, who's currently making all of the chips that we all need, and China very much believes Taiwan is part of it, and there is great fear that they are going to invade and claim it. And then, because they're holding this tech, Taiwan's gonna get a lot of international support, probably including us, that otherwise wouldn't be on the table. So, when you look at tech and finance, it's so intertwined.

It's so intertwined, but it's even bigger than that. So, when COVID happens, the geopolitical center of gravity moves from this kind of war on terror framework that we've been in for 20 years, to a competition between the US and China, where the US realizes, oh my gosh, we're completely relying on China for all types of supply chains, not just tech. China realizes, oh my gosh, it's a huge, huge problem that the US has such a dominant position with the dollar as the reserve currency. And, by the way, the two countries are basically locked in a battle for the world's technological infrastructure being built, and they have very different models. So, all of a sudden, this happens, and every single business, in every sector in geography, finds them caught in the crossfire of this competition.

And a DJ.

And a DJ. We'd been friends for 13 years, and we'd always get together once a quarter for a meal. And I remember we were each other's first dinner during COVID, where you could go to a restaurant. And he said to me, there's a huge shift with all the businesses that we work with, which is all they wanna talk about is geopolitics. And it strikes me that we need a machinery to offer them an opinion about where this is going, but we need to just commercially help them navigate it.

Right, or college or something.

It's a very unusual and precious experience.

But isn't it the most energizing, and it slows time down again for you? I find that to be a great gift, when you can submerge yourself in something that's completely out of the operating system, that's working in the background, your subconscious, forcing you to be present and mindful and thoughtful. The context can do that for you.

Someone I know you've had on a number of times, Adam Grant, who's a mutual friend of both of ours. I sort of somehow convinced Adam to be my unofficial therapist during COVID. I couched it as be my coach, which he sort of reluctantly agreed to. It really turned into therapy.

The medical board probably prefers that distinction as well.

But this is at a point where I felt so overcome by worrying, and because I could sense my platform shrinking, but I couldn't quite define it, I started to get very anxious about what's next. I was living to work, meaning my entire day was taken up by working for some sort of unknown outcome. And Adam encouraged me, he said, have some structured worry time. He's like, what are some things that you habitually do? I said, I love taking baths.

I love a bath. You're so unique with the oddity collection.

You're a very special person.

You are. I wanted to say, about nine times throughout this, the fucking recall of the names and the date, it's bonkers. It's like talking to Wikipedia.

Also, this morning, I was looking you up again and I saw the Goldman Sachs thing and I was like,

is this the same?

I got nervous. It was like, oh wait, it's a new Jared.

Right.

Because no one can transition industries like that, besides you.

What Adam taught me was two things. One, if you're a worrier, you're a worrier. Focus on what you have agency over, which is just give yourself some structured worry time. So when you work out, when you sit in hot water, just decide that's what I'm gonna worry about, shit. That's what I do.

We bring it up nonstop. Yeah, the more you can be obsessed in pursuing process over results, generally, the happier you're gonna be, because the results are completely unknown and out of your control, but the process is largely in your control.

Yeah.

Now I think there's a pervasive stereotype about finance people and even Goldman Sachs, I think, is a triggering word for a lot of people post-2008.. But I will say we've talked with Ray Dalio in particular. I think I went into that interview with one sense of what Ray Dalio might be. And then, after we met him, I'm like, this is one of the most spiritual, thoughtful, generous, creative people. Are you finding that to be the case where your own stereotype of that sector has been challenged?

I wouldn't say I had a dogmatic view of finance. I viewed it as something that I would never be interested in. Right. And finance as a topic in the abstract was never something that I gravitated towards. But in context, I find it really interesting because if you look at all the geopolitical tension, we're probably in the most unstable geopolitical moment in more than two decades.

I also think people are generally a bit naive about how much the economy plays a role in our overall social stability. When you look at times where unemployment falls below some threshold, that's when revolutions happen. It is such the bedrock we build everything else on, and it can easily be undervalued, but I think it's incredibly important.

If you look at every economic anomaly that you see today, it has some geopolitical explanation. If you look at every geopolitical dynamic, it has some economic explanation. And so what's interesting about being at a place like Goldman Sachs, you sit at the nexus of these two things. So I'm able to look at the world now through both vantage points. And sometimes I'm led to a conclusion about what's happening geopolitically by an early warning signal I see in the economy and vice versa.

So is it safe to say, your role right now is to be looking at the geopolitical landscape of different regions and or countries and trying to predict how stable that will be for business?

So that's part of it. There's like 12 questions that are persistent. right now. If you talk to any business, including Goldman, everyone's asking the same obvious set of questions about US-China tensions, supply chains, the war in the Middle East. It's a predictable set of questions.

How are you in the Middle East currently? You've been there for the last three months. What lens are you looking at that through? What are you seeing? that's really not being talked about?

In the last three months, I've been in just about every country in the Middle East and North Africa. I've met with the leaders of most of these countries, and the social medification of this war is unlike anything that we've seen before. There's more hours of footage uploaded to all the major platforms than there have been minutes of the entire war.

Oh, my God.

And it's being algorithmically targeted in ways that we've never seen it targeted before. It's creating an element of identity politics on the ground, but, more importantly, it's creating a reservoir of content that I believe is gonna risk radicalizing the next generation.

It'll resurface for the next 20 years.

And I like to remind people, the 9-11 hijackers, they were radicalized by watching far less footage that had no algorithmic component to it, coming out of Bosnia in the 90s. So this is on another scale.

Yeah, I just listened to a daily about the Houthis and I was really shocked to learn that all the recruitment, or a good deal of the recruitment, is happening on TikTok. And I guess my knee jerk was, how could that be allowed on TikTok? Why aren't there any guardrails?

I think the challenge with all of these social media platforms is they're so vast, they are very difficult to regulate. The adoption is at such a scale by young people that you can't put it back in a box. It's become a seemingly intractable problem. I remember at the height of ISIS, I had interviewed a lot of former ISIS fighters. And when I was at Jigsaw, we spent a lot of time in Iraqi prisons interviewing incarcerated ISIS fighters.

Yeah, it has a self-accelerating quality to it.

To me, this is one of the seminal challenges of our generation.

And isn't that what Jigsaw was kind of addressing?

When I was at Jigsaw, and it's still thriving, but part of the reason I founded it was, I believed, as you added another 5 billion people to the internet, all the problems of the physical world would spill over online. And the only way to get ahead of that was you had to build technology to address the challenges that were destabilizing the internet. What we found is it's very difficult. If you look at dis- and misinformation, one of the biggest challenges with it is all the evidence suggests that once somebody has absorbed the disinformation or received it, you really cannot retroactively change their mind. This is why fact-checking doesn't work.

We have a bunch of experts addressing this. It does nothing. You will never out-fact somebody. You're not gonna hold up a book to them and get them off their position.

It's actually even worse than that, because all evidence suggests that when you try to interject, to tell somebody something's wrong or something's falsified, or you should double-check your sources, no matter how you slice it and dice it, that interstitial or that injection makes somebody more likely to share the falsity that they've absorbed.

It encourages them and fuels them to be even more virulent. Oh my God, Jared, you're so smart. I've had 20 minutes to think about, our little dust-up. And I wanna say, A, I apologize. Oh, you don't have to-.

I definitely understand that and I appreciate it. And I will say, and I include myself in this, everyone in this room is extremely privileged. We're so privileged that we get to look at the Maui comment or these little things that are just like- Fringe. These things that aren't that impactful for what they're doing. And I think that's just because of our privilege.

Yeah, something else is happening in my body when that topic comes up.

I get it. Yeah. It's hard.

What do you think about all this, Jared?

The country's at a pretty critical inflection point right now. And I think it's very easy to make it about Biden or make it about Trump. I actually think it does a disservice to the inflection point to focus on the people. At the end of the day, 70 million people roughly voted for each of them, and probably some version of the same will happen. Again, this election is not gonna be an election where one candidate blows out the other.

on the hood of the car. The car is the issue, but we're really hyper-focused on just the emblem that sticks out of the end of it.

People are really not just upset on both sides, but the polarization is getting much, much worse on both sides. And look, if you had asked me in 2019, and maybe you did, I would say we've been through polarized moments before. What's unique, though, is we've never been through such a polarized moment in an era of not just social media, but hyper-algorithmic targeting within these social media platforms. It's uncharted territory, because it's adding machinery into the mix that's guiding a lot of this polarization. You're right.

And even in my lifetime, I've seen these little swells of this issue or that that is divisive. But what is great is humans fatigue. And I think if there wasn't this intervention with the tech, naturally, I think it would dissipate a bit. I think we're all exhausted from it. But we have this thing that's smarter than us, that's hacking a region of our brain that is the cocaine that can keep you up past 24 hours.

This idea of mental isolationism, I think it just doesn't work, for the same reason that geopolitical isolationism doesn't work in an era of globalization. Yeah, every time I talk to people, the words I hear are, I'm overwhelmed, I wanna opt out. And it's just not pragmatic and it's not realistic. That being said, I do think that there's interjections that we have to make in our own lives. I had sort of a big transformative moment over New Year's.

You're in a dopamine deficit and you're uncomfortable, like you're an addict.

I'm certainly not trying to trivialize addiction by drawing a false parallel, but I think we are all addicted to our devices. And what I find is some of the solutions are actually very simple. Like I come home now and there is no reason for me to be on my phone from the time I wake up to the time I drop my kids off at school or from the time I get home in the two hours while the kids are awake before they go to bed. And I find it's actually not enough to put it out of reach. So my thing is, I put it in my coat pocket, in a closet, in a different room where I close the door.

Well, they're not competing. also for your attention, which has its own set of outcomes.

What's hard is then I go on a trip when I'm away from my family and I'm on my phone the whole time, and I come back just like heavily addicted to it again. Yeah.

Well, Jared, you're incredible. I think you've absorbed Eric Schmidt's most impossible landscape of knowledge, and even more impressive than last time. So I hope you'll come back. Yeah, thanks for coming. You're such a good guy.

Thanks, guys.

Stay tuned to hear Ms. Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. It's okay, though. We all make mistakes.

Yeah, and you're gonna go through the same ride.

I'm gonna go through the same.

No, no, the Cherries.

Oh, should they choose to listen to the cult episode of Armchair Anonymous?

But that was heavy.

Yeah, it was heavy.

What's your energy out of 10 right now?

It's low.

Could you give it a number?

Well, I'm on malaria pills.

Do you feel yours at all? Because I don't.

I feel a little funny, just a little bit, though. Not like crazy, which is good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's just hearing a bunch of stories of people being taken advantage of is hard.

Yes, it is, it is.

It's so sad. The worst thing you can do is take advantage of a vulnerable person.

Especially the ones that were born into these ones, where it's like, well, to leave, it is to leave every single person you've ever known or loved in your life.

Exactly, I mean, it's all bad. It's. if you're born in, you're losing everything. If you were recruited in, it's because you're vulnerable to that and you got preyed upon. Yeah.

That's coming your way. Maybe don't listen, though.

No, actually, I think this one is.

Should be mandatory?

Required listening.

Oh, wow, we've never done that.

Then I'm gonna.

Okay, so use it or lose it.

Use it or lose it.