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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
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Ben Ansell
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Mike Pesca
Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. Hi, it's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. One from the vault and one from the week and early this week, Monday. I talked a lot about Donald, his mindset, what the decapitation strike on the Venezuelan regime means. And I do think that we have no plan. I don't think he ever thinks about second or third order effects. But I was trying to focus. That's what I like to do, by the way, in spiels, when there is a huge item in the news and there's many different slices you could take from it, I like to hone in on one that maybe has been underexplored. There's just a tendency I see you. You'll hear it in the spiel. Just because Donald Trump's a liar doesn't mean he's wrong. But I do have to say I think he's, if not wrong, I don't see how this plan really goes. Well, I think I have figured out, and I've talked about this in some of the other appearances I've done this week. I talked about it with Chris Soliza. That was a pretty good substack live that you could check out if you go to Mike pesca.substack.com. but I do think that he thinks that he'll be getting some oil while working with the corrupt dictators of Venezuela. Who Delsey Rodriguez, who was once the vice president. But I've articulated this in a few places. I don't see how Delsey Rodriguez, corrupt dictatorship who gives Donald Trump what he wants. I don't see how that possibly squares with I'm not even talking about anything abstract, but how that possibly squares with what will become the pressure to get a real democracy in Venezuela and not just from Donald Trump's perspectives where he doesn't have to follow international law, not just from the human rights community, not just from the specific person of Maria Karina Machado, but from the constituencies in America who clamored for this change, who support Marco Rubio, from Marco Rubio himself. Again, to go all the way back to the spiel I'm going to give you, it is true we often criticize Donald Trump as a liar. We let that stand in for everything else we need to know. We shouldn't do that with Venezuela. I've just been articulating why I have deep concerns about the Venezuela thing really turning out well for the United States in the medium term or longer. And then another aspect of the Venezuela decapitation, slash kidnapping slash detention is the whole fuck around and find out, which to me is just a swaggering way to say might makes right. And I did an interview a few months ago with an excellent British scholar, Ben Ansel, and we talked about fuck around and find out. He might say fuck about and find out. And we also talked about what he was writing about fuck around and don't find out to just have no consequences for wildly irresponsible speech. I don't know, maybe we're going to see a little fuck around and don't find out with the ice agents who shot to death Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. All right, best of the week. Best from the vault. Maybe not the best of America right now. Here we go. You know, when I'm seen about town wearing my camel hair double breasted overcoat and they have two, but mine's in the more camel brown caramel type color. I draw stairs. 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Sounds like a cliche about how Quint does it, but that really is how they do it. So you'd be a fool not to take advantage of the fact that middlemen are getting cut out left and right. If the middleman economy has to suffer, I mean, shouldn't you be the beneficiary? Plus, middlemen will be warmer. You got to see some of their Italian leather outerwear that the middlemen are wearing now. Refresh your winter wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in the cold land of Canada as well. That's qu I n c e dot com the gist free shipping and 365 day returns or quince.com/the gist. You know why we make New Year's resolutions? Well, it's because what we did in December kind of destroyed us. All those holiday parties and the skipped workouts and maybe some late nights decorating the tree. So, you know, you have to get a bit healthier. And maybe you're thinking things like gym or sleep. That's hard. 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But if you rent, that's not even an option for you. So this is really the best way to purify your water and by extension your body, if the house you live in is not your own. I use Cove Pure every day, many times a day, and it is quite delicious. I will attest to that co Pure makes it so easy to get pure water with the push of a button. So this year make a New Year's resolution that sticks. Improve your health with clean water. Right now you can get $200 off for a limited time if you use my link cove pure.com/the gist here comes the spelling portion of the show. C O V E p u r e.com/the gist to start this new year right. Every once in a while an article comes along that crystallizes a thought that you had been having. And then within that article there are crystallizations of sub thoughts. Such was the case of an article by Ben Ansel, who is a professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford Nuffield College. And the name of this article was an acronym. It was FAD fo. Now, have you heard of fafo? FAFO has gotten very, very popular as a descriptor of things in the universe. It means Fuck around and find out. So you see the wisdom of that. But Ben has put his finger on the fad foe phenomenon. Fuck around and don't find out, which is essentially what's going on around the world. Ben, welcome to the gist.
- [09:10]
Ben Ansell
Thank you for having me here, Mike. And I'm glad that we're allowed to use the F word out loud because I was wondering how we were going to make it through this conversation without.
- [09:20]
Mike Pesca
This is one of my theories that you had another substack posting go pretty viral. And it was, I don't know, viral, but it was mentioned in the Financial Times and the New York Times and that was a good post to Twilight of Populism. Maybe we'll touch upon it. In fact, the two posts are interrelated. But my theory is Twilight of Populism has the possibility of going popular, fuck around and 5 out find out has a bit of a limiter on it.
- [09:42]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, yeah. No, that's the sad truth. But I was hoping that, you know, I could come up with my own little acronym like that would be a big achievement for me as an academic, so.
- [09:51]
Mike Pesca
Exactly. So before. Well, look at the book on bullshit.
- [09:54]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, there we go.
- [09:56]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, that made. And it was this thick. So before we get to FAD foe, have you been seeing a rise in fafo? Is this a. I sometimes associate it with English football supporters, so maybe it came over to this side of the pond a little late. But has this been in your life for many, many years? Or is it a recent phenomenon that people are saying F around and find out, especially online?
- [10:20]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, that's a good point. So the FAFO thing that many of your listeners will remember is this. It's kind of a video of an economics professor drawing a line where on the X axis he has fucking around, on the Y axis he has finding out he just draws like a straight diagonal line between them. And so that's where it's got into kind of popular memes that people think about. But, yeah, I mean, it's quite British, isn't it? In style. Fuck around, Find out, mate.
- [10:48]
Mike Pesca
Well, except for one thing, I think. Except for the fact that the second half of it is find out. Yeah, I think the British would say fuck about.
- [10:56]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, yeah, No, I think. I think that's right. Jamie Vardy, the Leicester City footballer who's about to retire, who won them this crazy league victory, you know, one in a million chance in 2016, he was famous, that the saying, which is another version of this, which is chat shit, get banged, which is.
- [11:16]
Mike Pesca
There you go.
- [11:16]
Ben Ansell
Which is, you know, another kind of. So I think this kind of motif is quite popular in. In British English, and I think it.
- [11:24]
Mike Pesca
Shows that the world is getting a little less forgiving and there's a joy in people getting their. What is seen as their deserved comeuppance. And the fact that you can film this and put this on social media is probably accelerating this trend.
- [11:40]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, that's right. And if you think about all the other memes that people will be familiar with, right, we have the. The leopard eating people's faces party meme. The idea being that if you vote for this party and then the leopard eats your face, you should not have been surprised. Or we have the. The Tim Robinson in a hot dog suit. We're all looking for the guy who did this while his hot dog car has smashed into a building. Right. So I think that kind of really obvious outcome that we should have expected from doing something crazy, that meme, we're seeing it everywhere.
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Mike Pesca
Right, Right. What do you expect? It's a more violent or biblical version of what do you expect? And also the person saying it is taking some pleasure in it. And in American politics. Well, it's used across political lines. But how is it used in British politics?
- [12:31]
Ben Ansell
Mostly, Yeah, I think it's mostly been used in response to Brexit, because the Brexit vote had lots and lots of people sitting in ivory tower institutions, like me sitting here in my Oxford office saying, well, that might not work out so well. And then getting to spend the last nine years now of our lives saying, yep, told you so. Right. And that's been our own experience of, you know, when you have a really simple, binary, definable event where a bunch of people are saying, don't do this, and other people are being like, go on, do it. That's what's going to give you this whole FAFO logic.
- [13:10]
Mike Pesca
Yes. Okay. You've just lit in me realization that there is this phrase told you so doesn't feel great to say. And I bet that if we did an engram search of told you so, half the time, it would be as part of the phrase. I hate to say I told you so, but people love to say fuck around and find out that's what. Why it was invented.
- [13:33]
Ben Ansell
It sounds less supercilious and snobby. Right. I mean, everybody hates being told I told you so. And no one, you know, we understand that. We understand that no one's going to want us here. Hear us say it. So getting to say, oh, you fucked around and you found out, or you. You know, there's that. That other meme of. It was a Twitter meme of me. Me sewing. Oh, yeah. Fuck, yeah. Me reaping. Oh, my God, what the hell's happened? The same kind of, you know, we found a different way and a more comedic and maybe a more vicious way to basically resay told you so.
- [14:08]
Mike Pesca
Right. By the way, let's just go back. Give us a thumbnail. I know Brexit didn't deliver on the promises, but how much has it hurt the British and how much do the British. I'm not talking about the Nigel Farage backers, of which they're a legion.
- [14:23]
Ben Ansell
Yeah.
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Mike Pesca
How much did the British realize that they found out?
- [14:26]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. Look, Brexit hasn't been a total disaster by any stretch of the imagination. Right. We're still here. We're definitely not in the European Union anymore. Right. So also, if you just wanted to Brexit to leave the European Union, well, job done, that worked. But there were lots of promises that this would be good for the British economy, that we would become global Britain, that we would set out with our suitcase in hand getting deals around the world, and that our economy would grow. And that hasn't really happened. So Britain's last decade of economic growth, this is an amazing fact, is as bad as it has been since the Napoleonic Wars. So that's over 200 years ago. So that's quite poor. That's quite poor growth. And if you compare it to America, which.
- [15:08]
Mike Pesca
But then you got the Trafalgar spike, right?
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Ben Ansell
Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, this was. This was the Era of the Luddites, the guys who used to bash machines up to get rid of them. So that was how good things were at that time compared to the U.S. right. And I know lots of people in the U.S. have not enjoyed the economy since COVID Right. That's why Joe Biden lost the election. But you. Almost every measure, the British economy has lagged it pretty badly over that.
- [15:32]
Mike Pesca
Well, the U.S. economy has been really great compared to almost every other. You can't take, you know, Ethiopia, which has amazing growth because the starting place of almost nothing but the US economy has been excellent compared to the eu. All the countries in the eu, basically. Do they realize that in the other OECD countries?
- [15:50]
Ben Ansell
I think they do. I mean, I think this is where you get lots of kind of Europe explaining from. I mean, I'm, I'm an Anglo American, right. So I'll just flip whichever side works for me here. But there is this kind of European line that, oh well, we don't really want tumble dryers anyway. And you know, who, who wants ice makers or air conditioners? So there's a lot of kind of, you know, sour grapes, I guess, response. I think there's also a view though.
- [16:16]
Mike Pesca
And warm beer. Sour grapes and warm beer.
- [16:18]
Ben Ansell
Yeah.
- [16:18]
Mike Pesca
There's your next.
- [16:18]
Ben Ansell
Exactly.
- [16:19]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [16:20]
Ben Ansell
There is a concern though that, you know, Europeans, you know, maybe rightfully look at some of the problems with America. They look at higher crime, they certainly look at higher homicide rates, they, you know, look at higher inequality, they look at the health care system, they say, yeah, I don't really want that. And so that's how they would think of the trade off.
- [16:38]
Mike Pesca
That's true. But I monitor a lot of British media and there is not a stereotype. It is true that there's a lot of violent crime in the US but the Brits are obsessed with knife crime and I sometimes laugh. Although it's tragic that it's a 80 to 1 ratio of knifings to homicide. In fact, probably more like how many, how many people are knifed to death each year in the uk.
- [16:59]
Ben Ansell
I mean, the UK homicide rate is in the hundreds, so it's not very high. Yeah, if I remember right, United states, you know, 20,000. Yeah, I used to live in Minneapolis and the homicide rate in Minneapolis and homicide rate in London are very similar. Right. And obviously London is a much, much larger city to give you a sense.
- [17:13]
Mike Pesca
It was huge spike in Minneapolis in.
- [17:15]
Ben Ansell
The last few years, by the way.
- [17:17]
Mike Pesca
So. So we've done some chronicling of the fuck around and find out the appeal of it, what it's used for. It's all true, it's all fascinating, it's all useful as a phrase, fun to say, an improvement on previous phrases. But what about what you put your finger on the fuck around and don't find out phenomenon? Describe that.
- [17:36]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. So here's the thing about FAFO is it's great and it's fun to say, but actually doesn't happen very often because most of the time people make decisions that seem pretty radical and then nothing really happens. And in a way, that's what happened in 2016 when America voted for Donald Trump. Because there was the Spiegel in Germany had Trump decapitating the Statue of Liberty. There were some pretty extreme examples of what people thought was going to happen. They thought there'd be World War Three, that it would kill the economy. That's not what happened in the period 2016 to 2020. We can argue back and forth about some of the worst stuff that happened in the first Trump administration at the border and so on, but there wasn't a global war, Economy didn't collapse, and people had voted in this guy who really did promise to tear up the whole system. So why didn't America find out? Well, maybe it was the genius of Donald Trump, or maybe it was the genius of the guys who were constraining Donald Trump, keeping him from doing the more wild things he'd thought of doing and keeping on side the parts of Trumpism that were going to work better. Tax cuts or slightly more aggressive foreign policy.
- [18:47]
Mike Pesca
Right. So very irresponsible. People can then fuck around and know that or have a strong inclination that they won't pay the consequences of their fucking around. And we see it in policies which are really just fucking around with what's working. But consequences aren't really visited upon people.
- [19:07]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. And that's why, you know, the tariffs. Liberation Day has been so interesting, because the tariffs have happened or are happening. There are boats in the Pacific from China right now, and when those boats arrive, the tariffs are going to go up. Right. So we are like right on the cusp between fad, FO and FAFO right now. Because as those things arrive, people are going to be like, oh, yes, we did vote for the tariffs. We kind of think didn't think they'd happen. Right. Think about Wall Street's reaction to Trump when he came in with the initial tariffs on Colombia. Trump got mad about Colombia not accepting a flight of deportees. And so then there were 20% tariffs, but then they went away overnight and the same for Canada and Mexico. And so people thought, yeah, it's fuck around but don't find out because Trump says he'll do tariffs. But look, it's all negotiating and really at the end of the day it won't happen. And then Liberation Day happened. And some of this has been forestalled, right, with the 90 day delay, but other bits like the Chinese tariffs, those are totally happening. And so we're in a really interesting moment right now.
- [20:08]
Mike Pesca
Well, there is a parallel, as you know, to British politics. Liz Truss comes in, she has an economic policy of massive tax cuts that are unfunded, which have more salience in a place that doesn't make the world's reserve currency. And she anymore. Yeah, exactly. Sorry about the pound. So there was a mini version of tariffs with Liz Truss. Now is the fact that she fucked around and found out and the tariffs were a fuck around and find out, not a not a don't find out, is it that on things that are purely economic, in which this is what I've surmised, when there is a market every day that tracks incremental changes up and down, the finding out aspect is immediate, it's well chronicled, it's unavoidable. So in other aspects of life, the changes, the changes wrought, that which is reaped and sowed can be a little opaque, but not with the markets. Do you think that's going on?
- [21:09]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, that's absolutely right. The way to think about the US bond market is it is the only political actor in the entire world that has consistently batted at 1.0. Right. It is undefeated. It never loses out. And you know, you try and push against the market. You remember back with the 2008 financial crisis when it was still, it was the tail days of Bush and it was Hank Paulson, but it was before the presidential election. They went to do a bailout bill. It didn't satisfy the markets. Markets collapsed. Next day they had to go back and do another bailout bill. Like the markets can compel, they compelled in the UK and in a way, the US can still fuck around a little bit more because as you say, the dollar is the global reserve currency, so the interest rates aren't going to spike quite as dramatically. But with Liz Truss. Yeah, you know, that's why the lettuce was such appealing metaphor, because people knew the moment you do this and the markets react, your, you know, your shelf life is that of a thin green.
- [22:10]
Mike Pesca
Salad with little nutritional value. Is one of the reason that, one of the reasons that politicians will Always fuck around and then rely on the fact that they don't, that they won't find out. Can the media or our human inclination towards catastrophizing be somewhat blamed? And the people who propose these big radical swings of policies understand this more than, I don't know, the regular person just trying to sort through the information of the world.
- [22:45]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, when Donald Trump used his, his interesting neologism, Panican, remember he had this like complained about the Panicans, where the hell he got that from? But you know, he actually, he put his nail on something there, which is that there is a tendency for lots of people to panic with new political news. There was a lot of panic, for example, after Brexit. Ultimately, Brexit slowed the UK rate of growth by like, you know, half a percent a year for a few years. Like we are poorer than we otherwise would have been, but being 3% poorer is sort of noticeable at the margin. So I think a lot of the time you can do something pretty dramatic that changes the incentives dramatically for a lot of market actors. But as long as markets can adjust, then we're okay. I mean, you know, there are many, you think about, you know, Fukushima, the Japanese nuclear reactor blew up and now we're at a point where people are rebuilding there again. Right. So really terrible things can happen and humanity is pretty good at adjusting. The, the danger is that that I think makes politicians think, well, you know, what's the real risk? Because there will be an adjustment, we can adjust, people will figure things out. And all the people who are freaking out at the start are just freaking out. And I think there is some truth to that.
- [24:01]
Mike Pesca
Mm. Successful societies build guardrails, build, build systems so that when there is a failure, it's not a catastrophic failure. And that's to their credit. But cynical actors, or I guess you could say people who understand these systems can exploit that, can exploit that rhetorically and can exploit that political and can exploit that to propose solutions that aren't solutions but won't have the find out aspect of it.
- [24:32]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, that's right. Lots of institutions we have have this fatal kind of Greek tragic flaw that they operate, they prevent bad things from happening and barely anybody knows. Right. So one of the examples I talk about in the FADFO pieces is the millennium bug. You know, as a, as a Gen Xer, this is familiar to me, but I'm beginning to worry that other people don't know what it is.
- [24:56]
Mike Pesca
But in the year 2000, it's not even generational Right. It's familial with you?
- [25:00]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, indeed. Right. Because my father, a boomer, he was, he was working for hsbc, the bank. He was one of those kind of logistics troubleshooters. So he had to spend the millennium in an office trying to make sure that the bank's entire computer systems didn't blow up. Because the computer systems had never been programmed to recognize two zeros as the year. Now, you know, that was true for lots and lots of people in IT and logistics and ops management, and they worked on it really hard for half a year. And the millennium happened and almost no computer systems went down. So everybody was like, well, what was the problem? Well, of course you don't see the problem because everybody sorted it out ahead of time. So you can see this with a lot of public health issues where people with vaccinations, right, we're seeing that with measles right now, that you can push the lines a bit and the public health system responds. Presumably, though is some kind of threshold. I mean, you must be able to overload these systems if you don't do anything at all or if you push the institutions too hard, too far. And that's when politically you get democratic backsliding. Economically, you become Argentina and everything just falls apart. And in wealthy OECD countries like the US and the UK and France and Switzerland and so on, you don't usually reach that point. And so then people think, well, maybe that point doesn't exist, but it must, right? I mean, there has to be some limit point where you fuck around too much and the system can't handle it.
- [26:28]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back in a minute with more of Ben Ansell.
- [26:35]
Ben Ansell
Foreign.
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Mike Pesca
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- [29:34]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. So look, most people are not me or you, and they don't spend all day like reading the news and caring about policy. And I'm employed to do this stuff. That's great. They pay me to know. But most people, for understandable reasons, do not spend all their time thinking about how well a policy is going. So ultimately what they see is they see how well their job is going, what the price of things in the store and how people in their neighborhood are feeling. And so you can get through quite a lot of fucking around until all of those things turn south. You know, poor old Joe Biden had to deal with the fact that prices going up is a pretty obvious problem, right? Everybody sees it. And you could come up with all kinds of complicated reasons about why the policies that he had in the Inflation Reduction act and the CHIPS act would make America richer. But people don't see that. They see the price of eggs. And that's why we talk about, that's why we talk so much about egg prices. I think basically publics, Democratic publics, you know, we think of them in political science as pretty thermostatic. So they, when the temperature gets too hot, they want to cool down and when the temperature gets too cold, they want to heat it up. And that's true for this.
- [30:40]
Mike Pesca
While the out party almost always wins midterms.
- [30:43]
Ben Ansell
Exactly. And so I suspect that a lot of that will happen and publics are pretty good at responding. I do think it's the case that in polarized media environments it becomes easier to disguise how badly things are going from some of your own partisan audience. But I think swing voters aren't spending a lot of time on polarized media either. It may be that right now the people who watch Fox News aren't seeing the stock market ticker when it goes down and are seeing it when it goes up, but those people are going to vote for Trump anyway. So maybe that doesn't matter.
- [31:17]
Mike Pesca
I think, I think fad foe is characterized or the people who benefit from it are, tend to be the more radical actors in our, on the political spectrum, maybe populists. Then again, I'll just say maybe this is reflecting my own kind of moderate centrist worldview. But I'm thinking of the left and not communism, but just the pretty far left in the US have they can to this point still propose solutions that I guess they don't get implemented. So therefore they don't find out. I'm thinking of two things. The calls to, you know, actually literally defund the police. There were a couple of instances where not necessarily defunding as, as a policy going in, but this was the consequence of a lot of police officers quitting in cities like Minneapolis. And then crime went up a lot. But I'm also thinking of modern monetary theory and the idea that essentially simplifying it, we could print more money. And because us, the reserve currency, inflation won't be a problem. Or another way to put it is if inflation is a problem, we'll always be able to deal with it. Let's just spend more on things. Seems to me that they fucked around and found out. But I don't know that they found out. I don't see many signs that the left has thought. Sorry, I don't see many signs that the left has concluded that they found out A, do you and B, why not?
- [32:44]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. So I think what's great about FADFO is it's an equal opportunity critique. Right. So, and I'm, you know, you could even apply it to kind of centrists in this, kind of waving away people's, you know, legitimate concerns, left behind areas, all that. That hasn't worked out that well for, for the centrists either. Right. So we've, we've probably all been guilty of this, but on the left. Yeah, I mean.
- [33:06]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. So you're saying the kind of person who said, oh, trade will be great and don't worry, we won't create hollowed out towns where there was once industry.
- [33:14]
Ben Ansell
Exactly. Ye, it's positive sum in the aggregate. So who cares about who the losers are? Well, the losers, it turns out so many of us are guilty of this. And so the version of the hot dog meme or the leopards meme used to attack populists. But on the right, Rob Henderson had his line about now I've forgotten the name of this. What was Rob's line? Luxury. Luxury beliefs. Thank you. Okay, so yeah, the idea of luxury beliefs that basically, if you have some people on, on the right wokeness, was a set of luxury beliefs that people on the left had that they didn't actually really want fully imposed, but they felt had consumption value to believe and maybe made you look, you know, gave you high status among a group. So yeah, you know, I think that all of these things are different ways of looking at fadfo. I think on the left, you know, if we move the kind of debate about wokeness aside, defund the police, you know, was, was a very memorable slogan. And then if you asked a lot of defund the police people, they would say, well actually what we really mean is in Europe they spend less money on the police because they have a good welfare state. I'm like, well why did, why is your slogan not expand the welfare state? But you know, you can, you can see why. And it turns out that the thing about the police is that they are political actors as well. So if you defund them, they can do things like not show up, they can slow walk everything. And you know, as you said, that is what happened in Minneapolis with mmt. That was a crew of heterodox economists who absolutely thought that you should basically be targeting printing more money and assuming that that would become more raw output and you shouldn't worry about inflation. Well, I think what we've relearned, which we'd forgotten, maybe for 40 years is that people really hate inflation and that's why it was part of the misery index in the 70s. So the big question, though, Mike, is do any of the people advocating these ideas, are they the ones who found out or is it just everybody else finding out? Like, do they admit it? And I don't know. Right. Because if you've put a lot of effort into believing this idea and promulgating it, you're probably not going to be the first person who's like, yeah, you're right, we shouldn't have defunded the police.
- [35:29]
Mike Pesca
I guess when your belief is not a luxury belief, but a niche belief, there's not the mechanism by which there's this huge backlash and everyone finds out. I guess the MMT people can kind of gather among themselves and tell themselves reasons why they didn't get a rebuke of their overall philosophy.
- [35:46]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. Because the whole country really happened. Right. Like that'll be the argument. This is the. The no true Scotsman argument. Right. Well, that wasn't proper mmt. And we had this, by the way, so much true communism's never true communism tried. So true Brexit has never been tried. Is the call of Nigel Farage when he's criticized, well, look, this didn't have all the. All the effects that you claimed it would he say, yeah, but I didn't implement it and they didn't do it properly.
- [36:09]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. I know. That's what they're going to say about Doge. Absolutely, yes. The inevitable. Oh, so fascinating. Wait. Oh, yeah, there's one more thing I want to get to, but we wouldn't want, at the same time, we wouldn't want to be so allergic of the possibility of running into a FAFO or a fad fox that we don't try some amount of fucking around. Right. My fuck my fucking around could be your hope and change or your radical solutions that are brought up by terrible situations. So you don't want to be too constrained in your. Your capacity to, quote, unquote, fuck around.
- [36:49]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely right. Right. I've written other substacks about disruption, whether disruption's a good thing or not. And I'm a bit torn because you could argue that a lot of the problems that America and European countries got into the 1970s is that they did have a pretty. Pretty stagnant and stagflatory environment where nothing really changed, where the same interest groups and business lobbyists and parties made the same policies year after year. And that's why the economies Kind of got stuck. And so there were lots of people arguing in the 70s that actually that system needed to be disrupted. And the disruption which we saw, you know, in the US under Volcker, Paul Volcker at the head of the Fed and Reagan, and certainly in the UK under Thatcher, that disruption was really disruptive. But it's not clear to me that it wasn't to some degree necessary. Right. So I think there's always a balance between getting stuck in at this very stagnant system where we have too much stability, and then just abandoning stability entirely. Right. Like everything in moderation, including moderation.
- [37:59]
Mike Pesca
So measles, tariffs, tariffs. We talked about Nigel Farage's Reform Party, I don't know, Romanian right wing elections. What do you, as a political calculator, see as the next likely fad foe culprit?
- [38:13]
Ben Ansell
Yeah, that's a good question. Right. Because we're seeing, you know, as you mentioned, my kind of twilight of the populist piece earlier, we're also seeing this backlash with people like Mark Carney and now in Australia, Anthony Albanese kind of push back. So I think we're pivoting back and forth at the moment. It's hard to know exactly which way we're going to go on that. I mean, in the uk it would be something like Nigel Farage's reform. Yeah. Actually becoming the official opposition. So they, we had our local elections. They won a lot of councils. They never run a council before that. You know, council normally has 100 to 100,000 to a million people in it. They're going to have to provide bus services and parks and libraries. That is pretty thankless. Right.
- [39:00]
Mike Pesca
The analogy I think of is the Taliban.
- [39:02]
Ben Ansell
Yeah.
- [39:03]
Mike Pesca
Right. When it's, when, when it's broad and sweeping and ideological, it sounds great, but when it comes to actually running a water filtration plant or buses, it's a little harder.
- [39:12]
Ben Ansell
Yeah. And that's, you know, that's. That's not what a lot of people who get into more populist radical politics really want to spend their time doing. They don't want to be fixing church roofs. This is not their bag. I think Musk found this a bit with Doge, which is that he was absolutely certain there would be lots of easy wins. And it became clear that actually if you tried to slice the big stuff like Social Security, the immune system of America would just react and scream you down. And so then you're spending your time, like cutting back the National Institute for Health and all the cancer care money. And I'm not totally sure, that's why Musk got into this. But he went to where the easy cuts were in the end because it proved more complicated and more boring than he thought it would be.
- [39:57]
Mike Pesca
Ben Ansell is the author on substack of Political Calculus and he also teaches at Oxford. He's the author of why Politics Fails. And I have to say the US Edition is also called why Politics Fails, Not Fail, which is I guess a deb. And also I listened to him on a podcast called Rethinking, which I have to go to the BBC app. It's not available here. It's a huge pain in the ass to get to, but a worth it podcast. Ben, great talking to you, Mike.
- [40:25]
Ben Ansell
Thank you so much for having me.
- [40:27]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. The United States, in a raid both tactically brilliant and politically questionable, has abducted Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. The Trump administration will not say abducted. Instead they will say detained or arrested. What they did, specifically what he, Donald Trump did say, was to bring outlaw dictator Nicolas Maduro to justice. Trump also did say that the US Will be running Venezuela now and articulated this is his plan going forward. We're in the oil business. We're going to sell it to him. We're not going to say we're not going to go. In other words, we'll be selling oil probably in much larger doses because they couldn't produce very much because their infrastructure was so bad. So we'll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries, many of whom are using it now, but I would say many more will come. So he is saying that this is regime change for justice, but also more tangibly, oil. But you know, Trump says a lot of things, which is the point of this spiel. When evaluating the Trump presidency, commentators, including careful ones, do what they can do. The only thing they can do, they can go by what the man says and what he says is not the truth. It is true that Trump just isn't. He lies constantly, he exaggerates, he misstates, he performs analysis without a crystal ball, but with his own inaccurate words point out to the public that he is spouting nonsense. And good. It's good to point that out. The lies are correctly identified, they're catalog their fact check. But you know what happens. The exposure of falsehoods becomes something like a proxy for evaluating the entire operation. Was it smart? Didn't work well. Trump lied about it. Must not have gone so well that he could have told the truth. But this is important to remember. He can't tell the truth if Trump says Something inaccurate or absurd. The inference that follows is that the thing itself must be unserious, failed or illusory. It feels like an intuitive conclusion to draw. Problem is, it's frequently mistaken. As hard as it is to acknowledge, Donald Trump's relationship to the truth is a poor indication of how outcomes are actually produced. His rhetoric is so unreliable. But rhetoric is not the mechanism through which military campaigns or intelligence operations or bureaucratic programs are executed. These unfold through institutions, institutions with people much more proficient than Trump. And even though he has done a purge of many of the institutions, there are enough staffs there and planners and career officers and logistics experts to produce excellent results that Trump narrates badly. This doesn't mean that events obediently mirror the bad narration. And I'll also acknowledge that this term, specifically one key military planner, so long as I'm holding the military up as an example of competence. During the Trump administration, one key military figure is Pete Hegseth, who offers no better relationship to accuracy, which is essentially why he was tapped to lead the department. In fact, the department, which should be called the Department of Defense, he calls the Department of War. Hmm. Think about this. Right now, after the Maduro raid is being sold as a defense of Americans from drugs or a defense of the democratic ideals of the Venezuelan people, sort of a humanitarian intervention. Wouldn't a message other than this is war go down a bit more easily? President Trump is deadly serious about stopping the flow of gangs and violence to our country, deadly serious about stopping the flow of drugs and poison to our people, deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us, and deadly serious about re establishing American deterrence and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. This is about the safety, security, freedom and prosperity of the American people. This is America first. This is peace through strength, and the United States War Department is proud to help deliver it. Trump's statements and Hegseth's bluster heard there are weak evidence about the facts on the ground. They tell us little about damage assessments or strategic effects or execution. US Operations are designed and carried out, as I said, by professionals with redundancy and delegation and buffers that limit how much presidential confusion and distortion can actually have an effect on the real world. Once you recognize this, you might begin to think differently about the most common form of analysis. In the immediate wake after a military operation, Trump said X that is a lie. Therefore, the operation success buttress by the lie can't be credited. Sometimes that's the right way to look at it. I mean, domestically, we'll take domestic situation. He has said great things that are totally inaccurate about health care or doge or tariffs. They were all going to be so great and also going so well, and none of that was true. Also internationally is spoken that way about solving the war between Russia and Ukraine. He has lied and been stymied. But internationally, and especially militarily, there are plenty of examples. Examples of a lie queuing analysis that the operation was flawed or failed, or a disaster or a time bomb, when in fact a fair analysis would indicate the operation seems more or less successful. Take the bombing of the Fordeau facility in Iran. Trump said tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Obliterated means something. It has a definition in the dictionary, and that definition does not apply to what happened to Iran's facilities at Fordeau and the other nuclear enrichment sites. However, now that we have the benefit of some analysis and some distance and some deep breathing, the important thing doesn't go become if the word obliterated was right, the important thing becomes, well, what happened in Fordeau? And it turns out that despite Trump's words, despite the contradictory assessment by one of the intelligence agencies issued with low confidence in the days immediately after, it seems that Fordeau went pretty well from an American perspective and certainly not from an Iranian1. On November 21, the Institute for Science and International Security, which is very respected, wrote, the main nuclear sites at Fordo, Netanzen, Esfahan were largely destroyed and have seen little significant activity since the war. The extent of damage to the tunnel portion of Esfahan remains unknown, but could be severe. The activities at Fordow, to the extent visible, appear to have been mainly related to damage assessments and minimal cleanup at Natanz. Activities also point toward protecting the site's remaining utilities against future attacks. Overall, satellite imagery suggests that Iran's uranium enrichment program remains significantly set back. At present, Iran does not appear able to enrich uranium in any significant manner or make gas centrifuges in significant numbers. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities, its facility to produce uranium, and its centrifuge manufacturing and research and development facilities remains severely damaged or destroyed. Now, in the moments afterwards, obliterated was the word to seize upon and rebut. And that's what many in the media and the Democratic Party did. Here was Simone Sanders talking to Senator Chris Van Hollen about the leakers of that initial skeptical assessment. The truth, and so just the importance.
- [48:46]
Ben Ansell
If you will, of the government, if.
- [48:48]
Mike Pesca
You will, of I say all that to say, though, in all of those instances, the people coming forward came forward.
- [48:57]
Ben Ansell
That is the information elites, whatever you.
- [48:59]
Mike Pesca
Want to call it, because the government.
- [49:00]
Ben Ansell
Was not telling the truth. And so just the importance, if you will, of the when the government is not telling the truth, when the government.
- [49:07]
Mike Pesca
Is lying, when the government is fudging.
- [49:10]
Ben Ansell
The facts, the importance of these people.
- [49:11]
Mike Pesca
Who are willing to come forward and.
- [49:13]
Ben Ansell
Give the information out, I think is.
- [49:15]
Mike Pesca
Critical, particularly in this climate where misinformation.
- [49:18]
Ben Ansell
And disinformation will get literally around the world twice before the truth ever shows up.
- [49:22]
Mike Pesca
Van Hollen went on to say that the administration was sending the message, if you tell the truth, we will punish you. But the truth was not on his side. In that case, the truth didn't come out of Trump's mouth with the word obliterated. But the overall truth was mission successful and certainly no wider war sucking in the United States and costing millions of lives. Here are some more examples. In the first term, Trump killed Qasem Soleimani. His public understanding of what went on appears shallow. His messaging was chaotic. It was of course, self centered, yet the targeting was accurate, the execution was precise, and it really affected things to the benefit of American foreign policy. So you don't have to credit Trump's often inaccurate boasting, but you do have to evaluate what happened independent of the boasting. Here's another good example, the defeat of the Islamic State, which more or less happened. Oh, Trump said it happened before it happened, and he claimed instant and total victory, and that was false. But during his term, ISIS lost significant territorial control, governing capacity, revenue streams, conventional military strength. They're basically, they're almost nothing now. They're not a major fearful player in the region. So he did lie about how quickly that came about and how completely that came about and how it was only because of him. But you can't take the lies as evidence that the program didn't work. And of course, the things he gets wrong do lodge in your brain because it's wrong and shocking that a president lies like that. And so you pay attention. And of course, of course we shouldn't excuse dishonesty. Rhetoric shapes trust, legitimacy and long term cohesion. Leadership quality matters, but it does mean that holding a president to account for speech is not the same thing as holding power to account for outcomes. So what I generally do is I don't disregard Trump's lies. I track them down. But I discount his narration as an evaluation tool. I come back to what really happened after. Better conclusions can be drawn we should all do this, but we don't. Was the last time you read or heard about that assessment of Fordeau that I shared? Responsible media, even the ones who received the leaks at the time, if you recall all said things about now this is preliminary now we have to wait a long time for the better information to come out. Here was Kendall Indian on msnbc. These have been completely and totally obliterated. But three people familiar with the matter are telling NBC News there's a new intelligence assessment out today that paints a much different picture. This initial battle damage assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that this American bombing attack may have only set back Iran's nuclear program by as little as as three to six months. It says that that underground facility at Fordo that was hit by those massive bunker busting American bombs was not fully destroyed. And it estimates that a lot of the nuclear fuel, the enriched uranium that Iran would need to construct nuclear weapons is unaccounted for and may have been moved around the country. Democrats who have seen this assessment are saying that this attack was not nearly as successful as Donald Trump is portraying it as now. The defense secretary and the White House spokeswoman are pushing back on this reporting and saying that it's wrong and that in fact these bombs did significant damage. No one's disputing that these bombs destroyed key Iran nuclear facilities. The question is how long will it take the Iranians, if it's their intention, to rebuild their nuclear program? That debate will continue. But of course, when the better information did come out, it wasn't as much as a story as it was in the immediate days after, when the strike was on everyone's mind, but so was contradicting the lies of Donald Trump. Just as Trump says whatever pops into his head, he has really bad impulse control. The media doesn't always exhibit the best habits of careful considered communication. They don't lie exactly like Trump, but they're less than honest. I want to be fair. They're less than clear in a slightly different way. They don't lead you towards the truth as maybe some different habits which take longer would accomplish. They allow disqualification over Trump's pronouncements to do too much work to cement in the public's mind an assessment of Trump's policies. Otherwise critique becomes satisfying but shallow, accurate about the words in a way that Donald Trump isn't, but inaccurate and inattentive to the effects. And that's it for Today's show for 2026. Corey Wara is the producer. Jeff Craig runs our socials we have a pretty great new website with a lot of features that Astrid Green contributed greatly to Catherine Sykes. She's still doing the just list which, you know, it's no longer discounted. We told you all about it. But please go and check that out@mike pesca.substack.com and still running it all even in this late year. Michelle Pesca, CEO of Peach Fish Productions and thanks for listening.
- [54:52]
Ben Ansell
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Mike Pesca
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