← The Beat with Ari Melber
The Beat with Ari Melber
BONUS: Melber & Fukuyama on billionaires, U.S. decline & if public trust is ‘cooked’
00:45:06
BONUS: Acclaimed author and professor Francis Fukuyama discusses his seminal works “Trust” and “The End of History” and how they apply today, and to an era of mounting distrust and conspiracy theories in the new Trump era, in this extended conversation with MS NOW's Ari Melber. Fukuyama also analyzes Elon Musk’s “oligarch” politics, and shares his passions beyond academia - woodworking and drone building.
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MSNow Daily Newsletter Host
Stay up to date on the biggest issues of the day with the MSNow Daily Newsletter. Each morning you'll get analysis by experts you trust, video highlights from your favorite shows.
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Interviewer / Host
Voters weighed in. Donald Trump's dismissal of their concerns has
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Francis Fukuyama
been weighing on his political standing.
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MSNow Daily Newsletter Host
Updates on our latest podcasts and election coverage, plus written perspectives from the newsmakers themselves, all sent directly to your inbox each morning. Get the best of Ms. Now all in one place. Sign up for Ms. NOW Daily at Ms. Now.
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Interviewer / Host
When big things happen, there's usually a rush to find causes or explanations. The fall of communism spawned years of debate over who in the west might get credit for that and how to explain what was the greatest geopolitical shift of at least 50 years. The COVID pandemic stoked urgent questions about its natural or lab causes. And again, for many who to blame? Politicos know elections are obsessively explained. Was Biden's 2020 win a rejection of Trump or just recoiling from that same pandemic? Was Trump's 2024 win a MAGA embrace or more of a revolt over that era's high prices? Well, nowadays there are more sources offering explanations more quickly than ever before, from the news media to podcasts to people posting theories online. There is of course no monopoly on truth, but if we're talking about claims regarding why things are happening, well, they can be tested against facts over time, and a lot of quick takes can be proven, incomplete or wrong. Some splashy claims or big ideas in print ultimately flame out, while other carefully researched books sometimes prove correct. To get specific, here are four history books that have advanced knowledge and stood the test of time, which can be instructive as we now try to make sense of volatile conditions. Now one of these books you see on the screen is by the acclaimed professor Francis Fukuyama, known for several influential nonfiction books, including Liberalism and Its Discontents and Trust, a now 30 year old exploration of that idea of trust in modern society and economics and issues that certainly apply to United States sense of distrust with right now. He also wrote the Acclaimed and controversial book, the End of History and the Last Man. Translated into over 20 languages. Influential around the globe. Required reading in many courses about the Cold War. Fukuyama is an intellectual force who has probed politics, culture and economics. Also known for a crisp, pretty dispassionate approach to making sense of history, as well as challenging orthodoxy.
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Francis Fukuyama
Human history can be understood in a certain sense as a form of recognition. Contemporary nationalism is not driven by any kind of economic motive. It's driven by the nationalist desire that his nation, you know, his group, his ethnic group, whatever, be recognized as a nation, among others.
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Interviewer / Host
Fukuyama's ideas continue to drive debate. In fact, I could show you recent headlines that are still discussing things he has explored, written and proposed decades back. These are all in our current era. He got his PhD at Harvard, worked on strategy at the US government's Rand Corporation, did policy at the State Department, and now serves as a Stanford professor and fellow and director of Stanford's International Policymaster's Program, and joins us for his debut on the Beat. Welcome.
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Francis Fukuyama
Thank you very much for having me. I have a lot less hair than that first picture you put up, but I'm still here.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, well, that seems to happen over time. We gave the extra introduction because while all people should be equal in Western liberal tradition, as you've written about, all takes and ideas are not. And we're in an era right now where there's a lot of different stuff swirling around. And so I wanted to set aside time to have this conversation with you. Let's start with the current, and then I plan to delve deeper into the history. But you're still at it. Recently you were looking at the Musk controversies in a broader global context, and you wrote that there's nothing new about oligarchs threatening democracy. In fact, you called it a basic thing. They exert, quote, undue influence, promote corruption. And you argue it's clear that we have a homegrown American oligarch in Elon Musk. What do you mean by that? And what can be gleaned from challenges like this in other places around the world?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, I actually think that the first oligarch in this tradition was Silvio Berlusconi, who became the prime minister of Italy. He was a rich business magnate. He acquired a media empire. He used that media empire to get himself elected prime minister, and then he used his political power to protect his business empire. And it seems to me that that's exactly the pattern that Elon Musk has followed. He acquired Twitter, which didn't seem like a great business proposition, but that's not why he wanted it. He wanted it because it would give him a lot of political influence. And sure enough, he becomes Donald Trump's sidekick. And now he's in great position to take care of his business interests in Starlink and Tesla. And so, you know, he's followed in the footsteps of not just Berlusconi, but a whole bunch of oligarchs, especially in the former communist world, that have trod the same path.
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Interviewer / Host
You mention why he wanted Twitter now X and that cuts against what classical economists or other analysts would say rational actors make money. The legal dimension, people say you have a fiduciary duty to get the profits. You're identifying something that cuts against all of that. Can you explain?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, first of all, since he owns Twitter outright, he doesn't actually have to report to a board or shareholders. But I think that, you know, when you reach that level of wealth, you're actually, if you get another hundred billion dollars, it doesn't matter. What you really want is recogn and power. And I think that that was his calculation in acquiring Twitter, is that this gives him an instant audience. What is it up to, 200 million followers now who hang on every word of his. And I think the satisfaction that he gets from that kind of influence has got to be a lot greater than, you know, just acquiring yet another, you know, few tens of billions of dollars.
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Interviewer / Host
You're an analyst, not an activist. But are there lessons to be gleaned for countering what you call that Italian Berlusconi style political project, which sometimes can be corruptive?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, you know, I was always in favor of more vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws. We kind of, after the 1980s, backed away from trying to break up big corporations, although I think we're now in a different situation. I don't see how it's possible to really push back politically against someone like Musk because he's so rich, he's got so much political influence that, you know, taking him down, I think would be really pretty impossible. And I think that, you know, maybe the solution is not to let people get that rich in the first place, but how you do that in, you know, in our capitalist society, I don't really have an answer to.
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Interviewer / Host
Do you think that that then speaks to his sort of potential permanence or endurance in the second Trump term? That other people, advisers may come and go, but. But he's sort of different in that way then. And harder for Trump to remove?
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Francis Fukuyama
Definitely. I mean, first of all, he's much more valuable to Trump than any of his, you know, Steve Bannon or any of the other advisers that Trump has had. But even if Trump decided to break with him, it would be hard to, you know, have him just fade into obscurity. I think he's got a political career, actually. Trump, I think, worried about this himself. He gave a talk once where he said, well, Musk can't be president because he wasn't born in the United States, which is a little bit of a guarantee against a regicide here. But, you know, I don't think he's going to go away even after Trump, you know, leaves the scene, because he has too much of a following and too much political influence. Hmm.
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Interviewer / Host
And not everyone has said that. I mean, you're an expert on some of these dynamics around the world. You're saying that once in to the US Body politic with a tech and money foothold, a beachhead, if you will, and control over the current Republican Party, you're saying, you know, administrations can change. The GOP is not going to just get rid of him.
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Francis Fukuyama
No, that's absolutely right. And it's really hard to see, you know, he's throwing money behind, you know, the threat of primary challenges against any senator or congressman that crosses him. And I can think of very few people, private individuals, that could wield that kind of power.
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Interviewer / Host
Wow, that's really striking coming from you. And that's sort of the current events. I want to go all the way back. You published this book, trust, about 30 years ago.
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Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That seems like a much more innocent era in retrospect.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah. You say innocent, and it's interesting. I have something passages. And so we'll start, as we do with the text. That's what, you know, Antonin Scalia would want. Let's start with the original text of your book. But nerdy. Nerdy references aside, you refer to what was then the first information tech revolution, which looks very quaint compared to X. And what we just discussed, but at the time was talk of a, quote, information superhighway and a desktop in every house. And the idea was that would challenge authority. And the tech world said that was a good thing. And you wrote, the information age's most enthusiastic apostles celebrate the breakdown of hierarchy and authority, but they neglect one critical factor, trust and the shared ethical norms that underlie it. Communities depend on mutual trust and will not arise spontaneously without it. Does that apply as a fisher in today's tech standoff?
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Francis Fukuyama
Oh, absolutely. I think that the, the single thing that has really changed in that 30, 35 year period is the breakdown of trust. And it has several different dimensions. I mean, Americans never trusted government. But I think that the degree of distrust that is animating Doge and the efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy are just a kind of pathological extension of this anti state aspect of American culture. But you know, the more difficult thing is the trust between citizens. We were always had political differences, but as everybody's noted, the polarization between red and blue Republicans and Democrats has grown steadily since the 1990s. And this has led us to a world in which, you know, in a way, especially on the right, nobody takes seriously the stated motives of anybody. There's always a deeper, darker conspiracy that's actually motivating people to do what they do. Attacks are not attacks against policies and positions. They are attacks against the character and the motives of, you know, people that you don't like. And I think that that means that the country as a whole simply cannot, you know, act in a coherent way as a nation because we are this divided.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, you say that. And it's really interesting because your scholarship on this was pushing back against the idea of I guess what I would call a traditionalist business or economic model that says sort of, well, you know, you have a contract and you have a system, when in fact what you were pointing out, and you compare different countries and society traditions that how trust fits into that. Which makes intuitive sense when you think about what it's like when you walk into the town hall in a small town where everyone in the room knows a few other people in the room. That's very different than Madison Square Garden where you literally might not know anyone other than the New Yorker you walk in with. And you can run that test in many ways. But you talk about the perils of lower trust societies and you'll explain in more detail. But as I read that book, you weren't at the time suggesting that the United States and some of these other prosperous western countries were at the low end of that comparison. Now you're saying that's where we're headed. And here's how you describe low trust societies in general. They are a system that, quote, must fence in and isolate their workers with bureaucratic rules. People find their workplaces more satisfying if they're treated like adults who can be trusted to contribute to their community rather than like small cogs in the large industrial machine. How does that apply to declining trust in the U.S. well, I have always
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Francis Fukuyama
regarded trust as a kind of lubricant. We have a formal structure of hierarchies, corporations, organizations, the government itself. And you can get people to cooperate using those formal rules. But if people trust one another, if they have something that I labeled social capital, which is the ability to work spontaneously with other people, everything goes better. You don't have to have lawyers, you don't have to have lengthy contracts. You can take somebody's word on a handshake. You can do a business deal, and it makes things go a lot faster. Obviously, in politics, if, you know, in a liberal democracy, we assume that people don't agree with one another, but if they actually share a common belief in the fundamental values and institutions within which they're operating, then they can resolve those conflicts. You know, I mean, that's the whole reason you have a political system. You don't want to have to pick up an AK47 in order to settle a conflict. You can actually debate the thing in the legislature and in the courts and, you know, come to a resolution. And I think that that's really the thing that has slipped away from us. I used to. In fact, in that book, I described the United States as a high trust society. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French observer of American democracy, said that Americans really trust one another. They form associations much more readily than in his native France. And unfortunately, it's true. On one level, people do join organizations, they get online and they cling to one another. But. But between groups, the level of trust has deteriorated enormously. And so what you don't have is a larger framework by which Americans can understand and communicate with one another.
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Interviewer / Host
Right. And I think what's enduring about the work is that the lens persists even as countries, situations may jostle. The fact that by this lens we've fallen into low trust for some of the reasons you mentioned, including which populist movements are appealing to not a skepticism, but a type of cynicism is on point. Now. It's interesting to me because I've been thinking about all these things and I could tell viewers, you know, I was first reading you, like millions of other undergrads in college, comparing you to Huntington and other scholarship, trying to make sense of these shifts. Chris Hayes is our colleague here. You know, Chris is on msnbc. You might have seen him. He, like you, writes books and does work on the news. But he had this book, the Twilight of the Elites, that runs across some of the same ground and looking at trust. And we recently caught up with him about that. And as he was talking, I Just thought this is like he's going full Fukuyama because he was talking about how we're now in this negative experiment, this problem of democracy against the low trust. So I actually want to play for you in some extended form what he said.
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Chris Hayes
America is running an experiment in running a low trust democracy.
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Interviewer / Host
Hmm.
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Chris Hayes
And that's a dangerous and difficult thing to do. Trust is kind of the glue that holds democratic self governance together. We have to trust each other at a certain amount. There's a certain degree that you have to trust institutions and the leadership in them. And we've seen this country become a low trust country. We've seen politics in a really interesting way polarize around trust.
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Francis Fukuyama
Professor, he's absolutely right. I think that, you know, what's really defined modern American conservatism is distrust. It is really a belief in various conspiracy theories that, you know, if you take the red pill, you realize that nothing is what it seems to be. That, you know, the established institutions, whether they're corporations, the government, the other party, are actually not ostensibly what they say they are. They're really, there's somebody, there's an elite pulling strings behind everyone's backs. And I think that, you know, the, the worst thing, in a way, it extends to just what we believe about reality, where facts are not sufficient to convince people that they're wrong or that they need to change their views on something because they'll say, well, that's just fake news, and I don't trust the sources of information that you are using, and I've got my own, and I'll, I'll follow that. And so, you know, you don't really have a common basis for any kind of community or, you know, ability to deliberate under those low trust conditions.
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Interviewer / Host
How unusual is that as compared to other recent democratic democracy societies?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, you know, there are many societies that are highly polarized today. South Korea is a case of another democracy that is really divided against itself. I described a situation that's very prevalent in southern Italy or in Latin America, where people only trust others in their immediate families and everybody on the outside is a kind of enemy. And so there are different forms of distrust. I think that the kind we are experiencing now, however, is a little bit different because it's not deeply cultural. Americans used to trust each other. I would say 50 years ago. The levels of overall trust were much higher. This current situation seems to be driven a lot by technology. You know, you quoted that something I had written earlier. You know, when the Internet was first privatized in the 1990s I and many other people thought this would be great for democracy because basically information is power. Everybody had access to information and that would spread power out. It's done that. But it's also had this very unanticipated consequence of walling people off because all of a sudden, you know, we had alternative sources of information that could then erode the credibility of the sources that we took as a society in common to be trustworthy. And so now everybody's got their, you know, anyone with a large enough following on the Internet is believable because they've got enough likes. And, you know, that's the whole economy of influencer. And that's something I think genuinely new in modern democracies. And it really is the result of this technological revolution that's happened over the last 20 years.
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Interviewer / Host
Does that mean that in the course of your work you've become more of a technological determinist?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, it's not determinism. Technology creates the conditions that people then interact with. And so, for example, most European countries are not as polarized as we are. They've got the same technology, they have the Internet, they've got social media, but they're not, you know, they're not in this crazy situation of disbelieving everything that, you know, their opponents say. So the technology facilitates this breakdown of trust. But I don't think that it really explains the depth, you know, of the, of some of the divisions.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, that's interesting because you're drawing our attention to what we can learn. Americans sometimes are very much in our own parochial space, but there are real time comparisons to how it's playing out elsewhere. The other thing that I've seen, and you know, as a journalist who talks to people across the spectrum, both parties, I feel indexed or you might say overindexed in what the different folks are saying. And one thing I hear a lot is there are reasons, there is a basis, a foundation for this skepticism or cynicism. And you've seen that the pandemic was this at times horrific real world experiment where people said, but wait a minute, we've been lied to before. And you say, oh, trust the government. Well, which, which decade and which group has been, has been hurt by trusting the government? I wanted to get at least one lyric into this interview. So are you ready? Okay. You write about trust. Jay Z, speaking about how he had to armor himself growing up, said, trust. That's a word you seldom hear from us. We don't rest, we sleep one eye up. And he's not saying he likes being distrusting. He's saying he grew up in an environment where you could barely close your eyes to the dangers around. And so one thing I noticed that collapsed and I want your breakdown of it and if you can give us a way out. One of the things that I saw sort of collapse in a trans partisan or, or bipartisan way during pandemic was different groups saying, you're telling us that's the facts, or you're telling us the government doctor said that. But on the left, these marginalized communities were historically hurt. And we could list off the examples, there are many. And on the right there's of course a very strong and long running libertarian streak. You referred to some of that earlier. Some of it again, American history writ large. And so you had folks saying, not that they had the evidence for a given conspiracy theory about COVID but rather they had the history and lived experience of skepticism or more is valid. What do you say to that? And how do you, as someone, you're an empiricist, how do you acknowledge the reality of that, that lived reality, while also offering a strong counterargument to being cynical against everything equally as if that's a protective mechanism because that's not going to in a pandemic that's not going to keep your family safe.
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think it's a matter of having some sense of proportion. No. So you're right that distrust in government was driven by real things. By the way, it's not simply something that conservatives have promoted. If you think about a lot of
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Dish Network Announcer
the
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Francis Fukuyama
progressive causes going all the way back to the 60s, Ralph Nader unsafe at any speed. A lot of people on the left were saying the government has been captured by big business. The auto industry is in cahoots with the regulators, the polluters are allowing terrible levels of pollution because they've captured the government. And so there's a left wing version of this as well. All of this has a basis in fact. We did make mistakes during the pandemic in terms of evaluating the efficacy of masks or the lab leak theory and so forth. I guess the thing that's missing is an awareness that sometimes those mistakes can be made and the government can screw up, but that on the whole it is performing, you know, a really critical function. And if you don't have a certain basic level of trust in what it's saying, you're what are you going to replace it with? You know, are you going to replace it with any notion that you simply pull off of the Internet because, you know, Some influencer said it. And so I think that we have to go back to try to reestablish the credibility of certain institutions. I'll tell you one thing I'm worried about right now. People, by and large, trust economic statistics. You know, GDP growth rates, unemployment rates. These are produced by something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is a federal agency run by a whole bunch of eggheads. They're all statisticians, and it's been regarded as an apolitical office. One of the things that's happened is that the current administration is trying to replace all of the heads. They're protected by what's called for cause removal. So you can't just fire them because it's a new administration, because they are regarded as sources of credible, nonpartisan information. And if you start politicizing those kinds of functions, you know, noaa, the weather, that produces all the weather forecasts and hurricane forecasts and warnings about heat waves, you're going to. We're going to be in even deeper trouble than we are now. And this has happened in other countries. In the 2000s, you had a populist regime, a left wing populist regime in Argentina that was stoking very high levels of infl. And what was their solution? Well, they cammed ahead of the Statistics Agency and made the Statistics Agency report, you know, better numbers. It made them look better. And you don't want this to happen because there are some still credible sources of information, you know, in this society, but, you know, it's something that we gotta hold onto and bolster rather than, you know, disparage.
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Interviewer / Host
Right. And I think our viewers and listeners are very aware of how many efforts there are on the career civil service front and the facts front, or the Gulf of Mexico, all of that. I want to turn now to what you memorably called the end of history. This is a short answer. And then we'll go long again. Would you use the exact same term if you could do it over?
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Francis Fukuyama
Yeah. I've been asked that question quite a few times in my career. Yes. The answer is yes. Yes.
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Interviewer / Host
All right, so let me bring people up to speed. But it's hard today, I think, to fully absorb what a profound shift it was to have the Cold War, which was lived as an existential threat to humanity across both sides of the divide for decades, rather abruptly come to an end. So because we have tv, you have scholarship and words and research, but, you know, we have the archives. So I just want to briefly remind everyone of that moment.
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Francis Fukuyama
Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall,
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Chris Hayes
tens of thousands of people crossing into West
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Francis Fukuyama
Berlin, pouring through the Berlin Wall, which opened today such an astonishing moment in history.
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Interviewer / Host
We stand at the threshold of a brand new era. That confrontation is now over. The nuclear threat, while far from gone, is receding. Eastern Europe is free. The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is an area of your most known and controversial scholarship. Can't think of a bigger human topic for that era, starting there. What happened and what was your argument about why it happened and where we were headed through the decline and the end of that Cold War?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, the word history did not refer to just the occurrence of events one after another. I was using history with a capital H. The idea that there is a progressive narrative that you can elaborate about the development of human institutions over long periods of time. And in my view, we had progressed from primitive hunter gatherer societies to agrarian ones, to feudalism, to modern capitalism and democracy. In the 1980s, there was another big group of people that believed in history in that sense, and they were called Marxists. And the Marxists also believed that there was progress in history. That was what Karl Marx really wrote about. But they believed that there would be a higher stage of history other than capitalist democracy. It would be a communist utopia. And a lot of the fighting in the 20th century was over them trying to push things forward to replace what they called bourgeois capitalism with communism.
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Interviewer / Host
So maybe it was just missing an adverb, the end of Marxist history.
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, yeah, and I think that. But it does apply more broadly because really the question that I wanted to get at at is the question of history itself. Is there progress? You know, are societies really changing in fundamental ways over time? Are we just doomed to repeat the same, you know, political forms over and over? In my view, it is impossible to deny that there is history with a capital H in that sense. I think that the people that live in rich societies like the United States or Europe need to travel to, you know, parts of the developing world which are at a different stage of history where you can't assure your children surviving, you know, into adulthood, in which you have, you know, incredibly high levels of misgovernment, corruption, you have political violence, you don't have stable institutions. You know, these people are suffering from a lack of modern institutions. And, you know, for anybody to say that, and there are certain advantages obviously to living in other than a high tech modern society. I think people did have deeper personal relationships in many respects in that kind of a society.
- [31:51]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah, you're not playing. Let me jump in to read how you Put it then, this was 1989, witnessing, you said, not just the end of the Cold War, but the passing of a period of post war history, the end of history as such, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. The concern now is that a certain type of market capitalism may have overtaken most of the earth, with most of the human production being subservient to it, but not the liberal democracy part. Is that a fair concern?
- [32:32]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, it's a concern because I think the biggest challenger to my, my thesis is really China, which is an authoritarian country that employs, you know, market economics to some extent. But in defense of the original assertion, I would say that what is not so easily reversible is the basic concept that was embodied both in the American and French revolutions, which had to do with the equality of dignity or the equality of rights, that all human beings, regardless of their national origins, race, you know, so forth, were entitled to protection of the laws and the respect of their rights. Now, obviously the United States did not live up to that, you know, remotely in 1789 at the founding of the country. But progressively there's been this expansion of rights to broader and broader groups of people, and they've been included in the definition of who's a human being, whose rights need to be respected. And what I don't really see is a challenge to that principle that would say, no, no, that's wrong. Actually there are hierarchies. There's a certain class of people that, you know, should rule by, by, by nature. Communist China doesn't say that. The Russians don't say that. You know, there are many people that deny rights to their citizens. But the principle is one that I think is actually pretty durable. And I don't see it being replaced by an alternative principle right now.
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Interviewer / Host
Does that have to be delivered by what we define as a democracy?
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Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that there's not a sharp break between, by the way, it's not just a democracy, it's a liberal democracy. It's popular choice, governed by rules, by checks and balances and so forth. And I don't think that there's a clear dividing line where you say this is a democracy and this is, is not. You can have mixtures. So, for example, Singapore is oftentimes thought of as a, as a liberal autocracy. You don't have free and fair elections, but you've got a pretty strong rule of law. What we're seeing in Hungary and other places are illiberal democracies where they have elections, but they've got a very weak rule of law. And so, you know, you've got these different variance. And there's no question that there's been backsliding over the past more than 20 years at this point, where especially the liberal part of liberal democracy has been under severe challenge. But again, you know, in principle, I don't think that anybody has articulated, you know, a different form of government that would actually be superior to, you know, a liberal democracy based on those principles.
- [35:27]
Interviewer / Host
Right. And so when you go through the macro histories, which some of them have become more popular lately, what you're really reminding people even amidst the current challenges which we've discussed at some length today, is that if you go back several thousands of years, you have savagery, you have religious or appeals to God based ruling systems that were negative or inhumane for the vast majority of people. Then you have this experiment with countries, but the first country systems were coming out of monarchies and were not this democracy model, liberal democracy. And then you have this model which not only joined with capitalism to counter communism and autocrats, but also is, you're arguing still the best thing on the block over what, tens of thousands of years of humans living in some sort of group settings.
- [36:25]
Francis Fukuyama
That's absolutely right. I think that people don't understand the historical background of our institution. So for example, why do you have this doctrine of liberalism? This is not liberalism in the American liberal versus conservative sense. It's a doctrine that basically says that human beings deserve equal protection of the laws. The reason that it arose was that after the Protestant Reformation, Europe spent 150 years of bloody warfare, Protestants killing Catholics and vice versa. And at a certain point they got tired of it and they said, look, let's not fight over religion. Let's relegate religion to private life. The state can be secular. What we need to do is come up with rules by which we can live with each other in peace. And I think that that is a innovation that remains absolutely critical today. We couldn't conceivably go back to religiously based polity the way some conservatives want, because we don't agree on those fundamental religious truths. And therefore, you know, we need to have a system whereby we can live peacefully with each other. But the point of all of this, this is that there's an evolutionary process that has been going on where there's social learning. We go through these very difficult periods and we realize that actually there are better forms of government in the 19th and 20th century. Religion was replaced by aggressive nationalism, and Europe was involved in two horrendous world wars. And at the end of that, they said, okay, maybe that's not such a great idea to have this kind of. Of national identity. Maybe we ought to substitute something like the European Union, where we can all have rules by which we can live peacefully next to each other. And that's why I think that, you know, although you have setbacks, you do also have progress as people learn from, you know, their earlier periods of history. Hmm.
- [38:32]
Interviewer / Host
Really fascinating. Before I let you go, since we set aside time here for you to join us on the beach, I wanted to just turn to the slightly more personal or fun stuff, which, best I can tell, is not like your go to kind of serious person professionally. But I'm curious. I'm going to ask you in closing on a couple points. You've become sort of a nerdy star, if you take that as a compliment. From what I can tell from reading your work, you didn't seek that out. You had ideas that the way they were presented, timing, maybe some luck. Early publications ended up blowing up in a way for nerds, not for everyone. Did that surprise you? Did you have to adjust to that? Do you like it?
- [39:22]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, yeah, I. It's funny. I do have this. I have a lot of hobbies. I like to build things. And what I've been building has changed over time. So I started out, you know, with furniture. I made the beds for all my kids, our kitchen table, this sort of thing. I got tired of that. I moved on. I learned how to put drones together, how to fly an FPV drone. That's been one of my more recent ones. And I love building computers. And so I build my own computers and I write my own software. This is probably the nerdiest part of my, you know, my. My Persona. But it's a lot of fun because you know what? I do like talking to you. It's all very abstract. It's all on the plane of these big ideas. And I find it really satisfying to build a table that. Your kid. Yeah, your. Your kids.
- [40:15]
Interviewer / Host
I guess I'm pushing you to ask. Do you like that following that acclaim? I mean, some professors say I write my stuff, I go home. Some. Some like the big classroom.
- [40:23]
Francis Fukuyama
Classroom.
- [40:24]
Interviewer / Host
Well, you've had a big global classroom following, if you will. Do you like that? Or you try not to think about it too much?
- [40:33]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, it's. Yeah, it's satisfying in a way that people will listen to me. Although I find that the smaller and less significant the country, the more I'm acclaimed. So I'm a big fish in the smaller ponds. But, you know, it's, it's okay. I mean, it's better than not being efficient.
- [40:51]
Interviewer / Host
Did you ever see in the West Village of Manhattan that they have like a furniture antique store called the End of History?
- [40:58]
Francis Fukuyama
I've never been to that store, but many people have sent me pictures of it. So, yes, I'm aware of that.
- [41:04]
Interviewer / Host
I mean, again, most people who write about international longitudinal, you know, geopolitics don't have that. So it's just, it's just funny to me. It's just interesting. Do you have out of your work a project or a book? I mean, out of the intellectual work that you feel did effectively reach people as, you know, a lot of writers feel like they're writing and it's not doing anything. I mentioned some of your influence already. Do you have one that's a favorite where you feel like you broke through?
- [41:33]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, you know, the book Trust that you referred to actually sold very well in very many countries, especially the ones that I labeled low trust countries, because no society believes that they have enough trust. And it was really fascinating to be invited to different places to talk about, you know, where trust comes from and how it can be enhanced. There's also a corporate angle to this because I do a certain amount of speaking to, you know, to business groups, and they also love the idea of trust. And I think that a lot of the successes in business actually depend on organizations understanding the importance of trust. So, for example, just in time manufacturing, you know, in Japan, this started at Toyota, where every worker has a cord, and if they pull the cord, they stop the entire production line in order to get at defects, underlying defects. And if you think about that, that's a system that completely relies on trust. If you don't trust your workers, they're going to be pulling the cord all the time just to screw the bosses. Right. And so it turns out in Silicon Valley, at least up until recently, it used to be a pretty high trust place. There were actually studies that showed that contracts written in Silicon Valley were thinner than those written in the east coast because you didn't have to protect yourself against, you know, so much misbehavior. Yeah, people could do things on handshakes, that sort of thing. So I think that it was very interesting to see this concept that for me started out as a very abstract one, actually play out in front of me. I mean, even things like domestic architecture, you know, in a low trust society, like many In Latin America or in China, if you're a rich person, you build your house all the way out to the street, street, and you have an interior courtyard, which is just for your family because you don't want to attract the tax collector or the envious neighbors. Whereas in a more high trust society, you build your McMansion, you know, in the middle of, you know, where everybody can see and admire you. And it really does have to do with, you know, whether people seeing a wealthy person feel more envy and hatred or whether they feel admiration and emulation. And these are little things, you know, that. That I think are quite interesting to observe, you know, as you travel around the world to different kinds of societies.
- [44:04]
Interviewer / Host
That is interesting. I know what you mean, because I've seen those comparisons. The final question is, for someone who wants to traffic in ideas at whatever level, do you have a view of whether your approach, which I think is fair to say was somewhat untraditional, was a better path for you? And I know you write about this in a forthcoming memoir, but basically, you didn't do the exact traditional Harvard path. You got that PhD, you got the credentials, but you spent years at Rand, as I mentioned, you went into government, you published books that were scholarly but had a following. Do you view that as a lane that is somehow better for people than going right into the muck of academia, or. It depends.
- [44:46]
Francis Fukuyama
You know, I usually advise students that are asking that kind of question not to take that path because it's a very tricky one and not everybody can actually write for these broader audiences in an accessible way. So, you know, it's one that I just stumbled on. I didn't really intend to do it, and I got very lucky. I mean, you just have to. You know, this is a trouble with a lot of conservatives. They think that everything is due to your individual effort. And they don't understand that luck plays a big role in how successful your life is. I had a number of very important mentors that other people didn't have access to. Alan Bloom, Samuel Huntington, Seymour Martin Lipset, you know, were very important in my life. And then I was lucky because I published the End of History. Right. You know, six months before the Berlin Wall fell.
- [45:41]
Interviewer / Host
Because you knew it was going to fall, clearly.
- [45:43]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, of course. Right. Yeah.
- [45:45]
Interviewer / Host
No, I.
- [45:46]
Francis Fukuyama
So, yeah, go ahead. No, so I just think that it's. Given how important just blind luck is, it's hard to advise young people to say, well, just, you know, let's hope you get lucky.
- [46:02]
Interviewer / Host
Right. It's not exactly advice, although it is good fortune to wish on everyone.
- [46:08]
MSNow Daily Newsletter Host
Mud, sand, snow, the track. Places where excuses don't work. Where capability is something you prove one race at a time. Off road racing, Formula One, different worlds that pose the same question. What are you made of? Every ground is our proving ground. Ready, Set.
- [46:35]
Francis Fukuyama
Forward.