Overtime – Episode #683: Peggy Noonan, Dan Jones, Max Brooks

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maul.

Okay, here we are in overtime. First, a Wall Street Journal poet supplies when he comes.
His new book is called A Certain Idea of America. Peggy Noonan is back with us.
And he's a fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the author of Devolution, Max Brooks. and the historian podcast

and author of Henry V,

The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest

Warrior King, Dan Jones.

Okay.

So.

Okay.

First question is for you, Peggy.

Is John Fetterman being disrespectful?

Oh, I read your piece on this, so I know the answer, but you can... Being disrespectful, John Fetterman, who never wears pants, when he wears shorts, even at the inauguration.
He showed up in the hoodie and the shorts. Right.
Should the Senate reinforce its dress code? Do you think that's something that's important? Look, I've slightly mixed feelings lately, because John Fetterman is a guy who's very independent. I love him.
And he says some really funny things that capture a moment. When he went down, after Trump was elected, Fetterman, a Democrat, Pennsylvania, was invited down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump.
None of the other Democrats were doing it. So Fetterman does it, and the press went into a tizzy, and somebody asked him, what are you going to say? What's going to happen? And Fetterman said, he's going to make me the Pope of Panama.
And it was so funny. It is.
And so unafraid. So that's the fabulous side of Fetterman.
Right. I believe that he's in a grown-up business, and he should be modeling for young men how we go forward in life.
He is. He's modeling shorts.
Yeah. But I do think on the floor of the Senate, the United States of America, he should be wearing a suit and a tie.
Okay. Dan, why did you write your book about Henry V? There are so many Henrys.
Can today's leaders learn anything from a 15th century monarch? Usually if people know any of the Henrys, it's Henry VIII, because he cut off so many heads, and they've made movies about him. But Henry V, review who that is for us.
Henry V, the great hero of Agincourt, went over and smashed the friends. Go deeper than that.
Have you got a guy called Shakespeare? Shakespeare? No, no, no, I know. Wrote a play about him.
The greatest of all the medieval kings of England came along at a point where the kingdom was at the nadir. It was in the pits.
You had one ruler who was vain, pompous, thin-skinned, paranoid, into the act of being a king, not really doing kingship. Thank God we got rid of that.
Then along comes a king who was once somewhere in the dim and distant past, a sort of competent politician, but is now ground down, decrepit by age, a technocrat really just struggling along towards the end. That doesn't really work either.
And then seemingly out out of nowhere, with the economy in the toilet, the after-effects of a pandemic, along comes a leader who manages to triangulate, takes the theatrical best of one and the dogged technocratic determination of the other, puts them together with a dose of charisma and a good deal of probity.

It sounds like Obama.

It's the dream.

It's the political dream that transcends the Middle Ages

when England's fighting France and battles no one's turned off.

How did we know he was really like that?

I mean, we're talking about the 15th century.

They could write English.

Half. I mean, you cannot read Shakespeare without a guide.
Half the language has changed. Actually, Henry V himself wrote in English and in very plain English.
But Old English. That's not our...
No, no, really modern English. You could easily read...
So, Shakespeare's poetry, and that's 16th century. It's very mannered.
Henry V in the 15th century is very direct. So Shakespeare gives him this soliloquy before Agincourt.
What year is Chaucer? That's the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's late 14th century.
Okay, well that is absolutely not in English, even though it's in English. Because again, the fucking Germans.
The English are Germans. The English are German.
But one generation later, English has evolved. Really? One generation later? Oh, wow.
Shakespeare gives Henry this overblown poetic siloquies. The best account of what Henry V said before his most famous battle was not some sort of great florid poetry.
It was three words. Fellas, let's go.
He's simple, he's direct, he's imperative, he doesn't waste words, he does what he says he's going to do, he's not a dick about it, unless you're French. He's a big dick about it then.
So this is like the dream of leadership. He speaks the language of ordinary people.
He can mix as easily with aristocrats as he can with... Why is that a good thing? I mean, I know the history of what he was doing was...
I mean, this went on for a couple of centuries where England was owning half of France. This is what Joan of Arc...
People know Joan of Arc. This is what she was fighting against to kick the English out of France.
Right. Why is being an imperialist something that you admire so much? Well, it's not the imperialism I mind about it.
I mean, that's the historical context of the age. That's just the norms of the age.
If England's not conquering France, France is conquering England. That's just how it works at this time.
Well, Germans. Well, it was the Germans and then the Northmen.
The Normans were really a combination of the French and the Scandinavians. That's right, yeah.
Right, okay. All right, let's move on.
What do you think, Max, of Trump pardoning the founder of Silk Road, the dark web trading site which was dubbed the Amazon of drugs. Tell us what it is first.
Okay. I mean, this is part of a bigger picture, which is the rise of crypto, which is the ultimate dark money.
And the reason that crypto is now so popular is because we are now in a tech broocracy, right? This is where the super rich are going to run everything. You're right about this, too.
Silicon Valley, you don't trust them. No, I do not.
No, no, no. I mean, they're running everything, and they need a dark money way to pay for everything that nobody knows about, right? This is how geopolitics is going to be conducted, certainly while Trump is in office.
It's going to be conducted with Putin saying, well, listen, I will. Let's say if meme coin just happens to get a trillion dollars, maybe Ukraine will happen to disappear.
And that's what's going to happen. That's how these super rich are going to pay each other.
And we will never know. But this guy who was on Silk Road, the Amazon of drugs, it was not just crypto.
Oh, no. It was crypto being traded for anything, right? Crypto is the currency of evil.
Of criminals, yes. It is.
Crypto is the currency of evil. It's where you can deal in drugs, child pornography, terrorism, everything that's dark.
I mean, the reason we haven't had another 9-11 is because after 9-11, we followed the money. We saw how the terrorists were getting paid, where the bank accounts were, who was funneling money.
We know that also with Gaza. We know the money that came in for humanitarian aid to build Gaza after the Israelis left in 06 went into the coffers of the Hamas leadership, right? Once that goes into crypto, it's all going to go in the shadows.
I remember when they were not that long ago, they were afraid of cash. Because you can do things on the black market.
You know, cash. You know, who knows? That's for drugs and strip clubs and, you know, cash is a terrible cow.
It's all going to go away. No more barrels of cash, you know, being buried in the Colombian jungle.

You don't need it at all.

You don't need anything.

And it's going to go from the people, the outlaws, to world leadership now. That's how it's going to get done.
And your thing is with really the personalities of these Silicon Valley people, right? I think their essential nature and character is what worries me. essentially Silicon Valley people are people who 30, 35 years ago showed up, said we're inventing this fabulous new technology.
The whole world's going to be able to talk to each other, instant communication. Doctors in Africa will talk to doctors in New York and look at the X-ray together.
It was all idealistic and beautiful and let's talk.

But when you look at the record for the past 30 years, you see...

What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, oh my gosh.

You see a record of cynical self-dealing.

You see, you know, oh, the data comes into the office that children are becoming mentally ill, depression and anxiety on Instagram. And Instagram essentially says, what should we do about that if the problem is the algorithms? Well, I guess we'll make the algorithms even worse to get more of the kids involved.
So it's one thing to just insult people who started an industry that is a great industry, but it's another to know their mistakes, flaws, and characterological, I think, problems, and say they're in charge of AI now, and AI is the future and can eat the world, and those are the guys who have invented it, and it's the same cast of characters. They don't care.
I'm anxious about it, and I feel angry about it. They don't care where it's going.
And didn't this start in the 1980s? This is the Reagan revolution. This is the notion that the private sector should manage itself, right? That they're all good, decent people on Wall Street, and they'll do what's right for the country.
And in doing that, we handed the fire department over to the pyromaniacs. And look what's been happening.
Well, this is the wrong town. To make that analogy at this moment.
I don't know. I don't know how...
We didn't do great with the fire department here either. Well, no, but we do talk about privatization,

and we talk about what privatization does,

which it can be efficient,

but that's the point of the government.

Right.

The government is me, the citizen.

Of course.

The taxpayer.

I'm looking out for me,

so I'm there to regulate you before you hurt me.

Because the job of Wall Street,

the job of the private sector is to make money.

Good for them, but that's all their job is. Then the government, the people were supposed to come in and say, all right, now let's make sure that it's safe and it benefits all.
Yeah, that's how it should work. Who's not for that, all right? All right.
Thank you very much, everybody. I appreciate you coming.

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