Saagar is the co-host of the podcast and web series Breaking Points, which has over a million subscribers on Youtube. He was previously a White House correspondent for the Daily Caller.
On this episode of World of DaaS, Auren and Saagar discuss:
World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit worldofdaas.buzzsprout.com, and follow us @WorldOfDaaS.
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Saagar on X at @esaagar.
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
Saagar is the co-host of the podcast and web series Breaking Points, which has over a million subscribers on Youtube. He was previously a White House correspondent for the Daily Caller.
On this episode of World of DaaS, Auren and Saagar discuss:
World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit worldofdaas.buzzsprout.com, and follow us @WorldOfDaaS.
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Saagar on X at @esaagar.
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
Welcome to World of DaaS, a show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, CEO of Safegraph and GPFlex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts, visit safegraphcom. Slash podcasts podcasts. Saagar Enjeti is the co-host of the podcast and web series Breaking Points, which has over a million subscribers on YouTube. He was previously a White House correspondent on Daily Caller Saagar. Welcome to World of DaaS. Oh, thank you for having me Appreciate it, Really excited. I really want to start in. Just like media business models, what do you think of just the overall media business model today? What do you think of just the overall media?
Saagar Enjeti:business model today. Well, you and I are talking at a crazy time, because this is some of the biggest tech layoffs that I've ever sorry, biggest media layoffs that I've ever seen. We can talk about tech layoffs too, but that's a different story. Right now, we have basically every legacy media company on top of the digital darlings of the 2010s basically going up in flames. We've seen Vice I mean, that really was the poster child of the new era the go big, the sign, all the deals.
Saagar Enjeti:Unfortunately, I think, for a variety of ideological and business reasons, that it didn't end up working out for them. Buzzfeed, obviously basically going to zero in terms of their stock, firing the vast majority of their news team. Business Insider, really the only one that continues to kick and that's frankly, backstopped by a multi-billion dollar holding company. So the major lesson that I take away is that advertising first specifically web advertising based companies alone did not make it, and that was a huge bet of the 2010s. If we think about the legacy media companies that did last through, we have the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post Even the Washington Post, by the way, not doing so well, but a huge portion of the three of those legacy media businesses remains their direct subscription.
Saagar Enjeti:So I think that what people like me have been able to do quite successfully, as well as a lot of other people in the Substack realm quite successfully, as well as a lot of other people in the Substack realm, etc. Is they have been able to apply the same principle and create the same three-legged stool of revenue that the old companies did. The ones who didn't survive were the ones who, frankly, just had one leg. If you'll recall, back in the 2010s, people were going all in on Facebook traffic or many other things that could easily change, and they got decimated for it Bustle I can name a bunch of these off the top of my head and fundamentally it was just bad business. So they made some money in the interim, but they made long-term plans and I think it was actually a huge disgrace or disservice to a lot of their employees, because they didn't just do basic math about how CPMs can and often do change and didn't make prudent decisions in the interim.
Auren Hoffman:If you think of like ones that did do well, if you think of like Politico or Axios those guys did well, and then you see these other ones that you mentioned that didn't do well. Is it just like? I mean, obviously they both had good reporting, they both had. Is it just like one just had smarter business people? Or like what's the takeaway?
Saagar Enjeti:Here's what everybody forgets about Politico and Axios. Politico and Axios are event companies that also make money through news and that's what nobody really knows unless you really are in the nitty gritty here in Washington. So events is a huge driver there, massive driver. So next time you pay attention to Mike Allen's little Axios conference and it's sponsored by Bank of America now you understand how Axios makes money and how it got to a $500 million valuation.
Saagar Enjeti:Politico when it does Politico playbook, what does it say up there at the top? It says sponsored by Amazon, sponsored by Facebook. And the reason why is specifically not to get the clicks. It's because a very, very niche but high value newsletter audience tunes into that newsletter every single day. Got the Hill staffers and stuff Bingo, hill staffers, lobbyists it's the easiest way to get your eyeballs in front of your direct customer. It's kind of like if you live here in DC, when you get off at the Pentagon, there are all of these ads for defense companies and it sounds crazy but it's true. They literally buy ad space in the Metro stop when you get off at the Pentagon, which is kind of nuts. Same thing whenever you get off at the Capitol, you see all of this advertising for defense companies, for enterprise software, government application software. So I honestly count out Politico Axios and Punchbowl because in my opinion they're trade news, they're trade publications and that's a very, very different business model. I honestly put that to aside from like a national based news one.
Auren Hoffman:They're more like a B2B trade, exactly right, just like if you would have it on mortgage-backed securities or whatever and you're writing to bankers, okay, yes, yes, I have some friends that have their own let's say, sub-stack types of things podcasts. They have a lot of subscribers. One of the things that they complain about with the subscribers is that they tend to get more subscribers when they make their stories juicier, especially when they use a lot of red meat in their things, and when they make more nuanced stuff. Sometimes they lose subscribers. They certainly don't gain them, and so it starts to incent them to act in a way that they don't want to act, because they can literally see the dollars come in from that. How do you think about it?
Saagar Enjeti:Comes back to the three-legged stool, and it's exactly why you should never have just a single source of revenue. So my critique of a lot of people who go all in on Substack is that, as you just said, they're 100% reliant on their subscription business. Now, I'm not going to lie and say that I don't need my subscription business I definitely do. But I've also got a pretty thriving YouTube channel, as you mentioned, which is relatively independent of that. We do get some revenue off of that Not a lot, not enough to pay the bills, but some. And then we also get ads from our podcast, from CPMs that we're able to get there. So when you have any one three that is able to prop you up, if you take a temporary hit, as you said, in one area, so be it. That's what building a resilient business is like.
Saagar Enjeti:So I always advise people you need multiple streams of rev. You cannot just have a single source, because when you do, you are definitely victim to that mindset and to that incentive, and everything that I'm saying sounds obvious, but it's all in the execution. It's very hard to do. It's hard to get millions of people to watch something or to download something and to pay you for something and combine all three of those things. I mean, people who see me outwardly probably think of me as a news personality, but to be honest with you, I spent just as much time on my business as I do actually on the news, and that's another thing I always tell people is, hey, if you're going independent and you're a news person, you better know the basics of small business ownership, because it's not for everybody, it's not fun sometimes. Running a business is a pain in the ass very often.
Auren Hoffman:Breaking points now gets more viewers than most major TV network news and cable news. But I imagine your costs are like anywhere between 95 and 98% lower than those guys. Like probably 99%, yeah. Yeah, I mean maybe like what does it mean for the future of these TV news business model?
Saagar Enjeti:Unfortunately for them. I actually respect the original creators. That's what a lot of people don't understand. You know I hate cable news as it is currently, but when you start something, you should always go look at the prior generation and the real innovators. So before starting Breaking Points, I read every book I could get my hands on about Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and all of the fathers of the cable news business model.
Saagar Enjeti:And the single genius that they had was to exploit the analog cable system and subscriber-based fees. And what that meant is that at that time, in the late 80s and the early 90s, is that the cable companies themselves had effectively a monopolistic access to your living room, and so they would pay other channels to be a part of their bundle, because it was one of the reasons that you would pay the cable company. Well, to this day, the legacy cable fees are the only reason that any of these television companies are in business. So, for example, cnn last year they probably on an average primetime day I'm not kidding when I say it's probably get a third of the number of people that will watch Breaking Points, which is insane. It's insane, yeah, it's crazy, that's crazy, but but it doesn't matter, because they still made a billion in profit last year from the cable carriage fees. Their advertising business is nothing.
Auren Hoffman:That is unsustainable. At some point, I mean, I guess people have been predicting we'll go away for a lot longer than it has.
Saagar Enjeti:It's a seven year thing, oren, it's seven years. I mean, they've got years left on these deals. They're going to squeeze billions and billions and billions of dollars out of them in the interim. And listen, do I think they're going to last? No, not in the current form at all.
Auren Hoffman:I think they're all dinosaurs and I think that we not going to last. And you have this massive revenue stream coming in from the cable companies. Regardless, why not just start reducing your costs significantly? They're reducing their costs by like 10% 15%. They can reduce their costs by like 80% 90% and probably put up a product that's at least as good, maybe even better, than it is today.
Saagar Enjeti:You might be right, but I don't think they think that way. I mean, I think they have a religious and ideological devotion to their business in a certain sense and the whole like foreign bureau operation and everything is just very analog.
Auren Hoffman:Everything just costs a lot of money. It's one thing. They have the foreign bureau. It's like if you go to one of their studios, they have like a hundred people. Oh, it's like if you go to one of their studios they have like 100 people. Oh, it's crazy, I know. I know they have like four makeup people come and make you up and they bring you there with like a black car for some reason, Like I don't even know why you need a black car and they have like eight camera people and then they have like someone holding the cables for the camera people.
Auren Hoffman:I don't even know what all these people do there. I don't even know what all these people do there, like the foreign bureaus. I actually respect that you have a one camera person and one reporter and they're out there in the middle of the jungle Like I totally respect that, but the studio doesn't make any sense.
Saagar Enjeti:I totally agree, by the way. I mean, listen, I grew up in cable news. I came up, I did hundreds of cable news appearances before I started my business. I kind of studied it exactly as you said it. Exactly as you said, it's the most absurd system on the planet. All this makeup and all this other bullshit, frankly, which you just don't need. Because I got to build mine from the ground up, I know what it costs for cameras. It's not that much money, all right, like it's even the nicest camera in the world.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, no, I have the nicest cameras in the world. Maybe it costs like $200,000.
Saagar Enjeti:The nicest one right, there you go. Right, I have great cameras, I have a world-class studio, I've got great editors who all worked at the big networks and all of this. I've got a staff of 15, almost 20 people at some point who are working and touching my show. That said, it's still 99% costless than what they are. A lot of it is legacy for them. I mean, listen, I'll give CNN this one thing they hired this guy, mark Thompson, who ran the New York Times.
Saagar Enjeti:I respect him as a businessman because he turned around the New York Times. He turned it into a premier, world-class subscription that's lifestyle-based and not news-based, which is fundamentally correct. That's what you should do in the news business, at least in the newspaper business, if we look to history in terms of some of the original barons that were able to create great businesses that also supported the news. But we'll see what he does. I think he's in a pickle because right now, their latest strategy is to combine their news programming with HBO, max or Max or whatever it's called these days, which I think is just a massive mismatch. It's like that is just not what people are going to look and stream on their channels Huge misunderstanding.
Auren Hoffman:But the brand is amazing. Everyone in the world has heard of CNN. It's an incredible brand. There's so many opportunities, but they're tethered to this weird business model that is really hard to break.
Saagar Enjeti:I don't know what they're doing. The real people I know like I don't know what they're going to do are Fox, because at Fox, cnn's viewership is probably a decade younger than Fox, so CNN's people are like 65. People watching Fox are like 75.
Auren Hoffman:They're so old, but I don't know anyone who watches cable news, who's over I mean, except for maybe some people that work on the Hill that are under the age of like 60. I don't know who does that. Maybe in their hotel room they put it on, but it's like I mean, luckily, these people will hopefully live in their hundreds, so maybe they're still watching it when they're 120 and stuff.
Saagar Enjeti:Look, here's another thing. People ask why does cable news have such a major effect on our politics? And the sad answer is that the median voter in this country is a 55 year old white male, and that person is far more likely to watch cable news than they are to listen to a podcast or get news in any way that would be even remotely familiar to you or I or somebody a decade and a half younger than us, which is the really crazy part when you think about it that way.
Auren Hoffman:There's the cable news business model, but also just like the product seems terrible, yeah, it's bad. I mean people complain about social media being negative and polarizing and stuff like that, and then you literally go to like five minutes of cable news. You're like it's not interesting. First of all, they just keep repeating the same thing over and over. It's not smart. They just start screaming for some reason. It's not news, it's really entertainment. It's not even entertainment, it's like kind of like.
Saagar Enjeti:WWE. It's horrible, I mean, you know, and I really realized that I was a young guy and this is what I wanted to do. I was a nerd when I was growing up. I love politics, I always love politics All I ever wanted to do. I went to college here in Washington. This is literally what I wanted to do and you really think these people are playing at the top of the game.
Saagar Enjeti:And then you do a cable news segment and you have two and a half minutes and somebody is like, hey, we're going to do a panel on nationalism. You have three minutes. There are three other people who are here and I'm somebody who I've got a lot to say. Man, like we're going to talk about nationalism. We got to go back through some history and I want to lay it out for people. I've got respect for people at home. I believe that they have the time and they have the inclination and they want to listen if they will give them this chance.
Saagar Enjeti:But then you realize that your job is not to inform. Your job is to keep people hooked in between commercial breaks. And when you think about it that way as in, you're not the business. The business is the ads, the business is the carriage, the business is just keeping the television on, and so when you flip that around in your head, you start to feel part of a really gross system.
Saagar Enjeti:It's part of the reason I love doing what I do so much is I have an unlimited amount of time, a segment I just pick. Sometimes I'll go for two hours, sometimes I'll go for five minutes. It depends, and that's how it's supposed to be. I remember I used to have fights like this all the time back in the early days when I was starting out, especially in my old show Rising, because they were wedded to a time format. They're like it has to be eight minutes and I said why we're on the internet. Nobody gives a shit If it takes two hours. And the thing is they didn't get. I have watched YouTube videos that are like five and a half hours long on the Romanovs, and this is a 20-hour series, and on the Romanovs, and this is a 20-hour series. Okay, and I watched the whole thing. They exist, I know they exist.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, that's like this new world that we live in. People are different. They want to consume their information in different ways. You talked about rising your current thing with breaking points. You have this kind of like left-right co-host. You've got a co-host today with Crystal Ball and she's, I guess, more on the left than you are. Do you think that's a better way to deliver it, because at least you're kind of exposing your biases and you're kind of meeting together. How do you think people should be thinking about that? It's interesting.
Saagar Enjeti:I never cared that much about the dynamic. I just, frankly, respected Crystal and she respected me, so we had no beef or whatever. I never thought about it that much.
Saagar Enjeti:I have learned that this is an interesting, just like more of a meta point is. People will ask me like, why do you think people like the show? And it's interesting because you become more analytical, you do not see the things that people appreciate. And I have now learned, having spoken now to a lot of people in the wild and public or at events or whatever, that that is a very key point for them, because what they often would tell me is they knew previously when they were watching something that somebody had a bias but they weren't wearing it on their sleeve and that by wearing it on your sleeve it actually becomes more approachable and easier to contextualize points and not make you say, hey, why didn't they say X, y or Z, which is the counter opinion. And so when you combine the two as a conceit, I do think it's very powerful, which I had not realized when we started out. To be honest, I didn't realize how powerful that was.
Auren Hoffman:There are these things where you have left right, but it's like a debate and you're trying to score points on the other person. Like you guys are business partners and you're partners in building the show. You're not trying to like knock each other down. You're really trying to explain it from different points of view and you clearly have respect for each other. Obviously, you're in business. You're literally partners. You're in business together and so you have respect for one another as well. So it's not like the old crossfire type of thing.
Saagar Enjeti:That's right. Yeah, and that was the other thing. Both had a genuine disgust for that form of media, because that form of media teaches you nothing. Also, I think it really helps that in terms of the conceit, she's on the left, but, like here's the thing, she's from rural-ass Virginia, so like she, knows.
Saagar Enjeti:She knows a lot of people who are right wing and I'm the same way. I grew up in Texas. I know like actual, like straight up old school Bush evangelical Republicans I know a lot of the quote unquote new Republicans too, but I've lived in DC now for a long time Liberals I know you, I live amongst you, I understand you. If I hated you then what would I be doing here? You know like why do I live where I live? So you can't hate your neighbors at a certain point.
Saagar Enjeti:It's about recognizing the fundamental humanity, not just in each other, but when you extrapolate it out, and doing that especially in the Trump era. Again, I thought it was just common sense. I did not realize how powerful that was for a lot of people, because I think the vast majority of people live like this in their day-to-day lives. It's the media entertainment complex which failed them and made them believe that it's not possible in Washington or wherever right in politics in general, to hash things out the way that people in America have hashed things out for hundreds of years now. Nobody's agreed with each other and they live next to each other. They just talk. It's not a big deal.
Auren Hoffman:In some ways I would say you're. I don't know if you would agree, but there's the establishment. You guys are kind of more of the anti-establishment. Yes, that's fair. Yeah, Do you think there's a certain type of person who goes for the anti-establishment? How do you think it's like oh, I'm an establishment person, I'm going to go to the New York Times or watch CNN or whatever.
Saagar Enjeti:Again. I live here. How could I not understand the establishment? I know you, I've lived amongst you, I've eaten dinner at your houses.
Auren Hoffman:I know how you people think. I've been to those golf courses.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, I'm not mad at you, I just disagree with you. That is probably the most fundamental, palpable part of it is, if you're asking me really to give an unvarnished take, like I have a genuine disdain and distaste and, at often points, hatred of quote, unquote the establishment, and you can apply that in many different ways, and part of the big disagreement sometimes between Crystal and I is like who is the establishment? But we both do agree that we hate the establishment. What do we want the establishment to be? Do we want a new one? Do we want to go away forever? Those are all like really fun discussions, I think.
Saagar Enjeti:In terms of the appeal, though, one of the reasons that I am where I am today is I was at the nexus, like the pinnacle of establishment for my profession. I was a White House correspondent, and that's it. Like I made it, you know, at a young age too, and I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I'm more just. My life was set. I could have stayed in that lane for the rest of my life. I had a job offer to continue doing this. I could still be on cable doing the same shit, but, to be honest, I understood very quickly in the job I was playing within a bullshit system. Everyone in the White House room is just asking questions, not to inform the public or on the public interest, but to score ratings for their network or to have, like, an exchange with Sarah Sanders that will go viral, and I was like this is all performance art, this is all a game. But it's not a game because there are real people's lives who are affected by these decisions. I tried really hard to ask questions that I thought would stand the test of time and stand history.
Saagar Enjeti:I read a lot of history. You know. If people can't see, there's a lot of books behind me. I love biography and biographers like to go back and read transcripts of press briefings. I used to think that way and everybody else was just thinking in terms of how do I score points? But really how that connects back to and why I think the show hits in any respect is there are a lot of people out there who can see through the BS too and they were really hungry for something, for somebody quote unquote on the inside or people who are on the inside to tell them that the system is bullshit, because it is bullshit and everybody knows it. It's just that everybody makes too much money or their future incomes are all reliant on.
Saagar Enjeti:Let's all pretend the game isn't what it is. It's a game and I'm very lucky. My revenue doesn't rely on that. I don't care if I don't get invited to the Vanity Fair party. I literally don't care. You can invite me, sure, but for a lot of people that's it, man Like, if you're not there, it's a problem for you. If you're a lobbyist, you can't say that you've got access to your clients. If you're a reporter, then it's like hey, what are you doing? You haven't done your job, you're not around your sources. It's a self-reinforcing system. That's all around it. And I think at a certain point people know that people are very intuitive.
Auren Hoffman:They can really sense when somebody is lying to them or not telling them the Part of the permanent establishment is that, on the whole, at least if you take certain segments, let's say the foreign policy establishment, it seems like almost on every big thing, maybe on the middle and small things, but almost on every big thing. In the last 25 years the foreign policy establishment, by the way, are both parties, because they're kind of the same have been wrong about everything. I can't think of one big thing. There probably are. I mean, I shouldn't hold it against it, but I can't think of one big thing off the top of my head that they've been right about. And so it's like what's a bad track record of 25 years of being wrong about every single major thing?
Saagar Enjeti:You would think. You would think that is part of what, like I said, occasional hatred this is where it comes from is it has real impacts. I'm in politics for one reason Iraq war, iraq war changed everything for me. I was obsessed with the war. I hated the war. I was so against the war. I grew up in a town that's where George HW Bush's library is from total Bush country. People all around me were so pro-Bush and pro-war and whatever. The whole point is just. That's why I am where I am.
Saagar Enjeti:And I first came to DC and I'm walking around and I see guys like Paul Wolfowitz just strolling down the street on their way to coffee. And it's just like you, motherfucker. I'm like do you know what you're responsible for? Do you know what you did? There are people who are missing legs and who are missing sons and uncles because of you, because on September 12th 2001,. You said we should invade Iraq. Do you understand that? And you're just sitting pretty, walking around. Guys like that, I mean, for me I don't know man.
Saagar Enjeti:I believe in stakes, I believe in accountability for real. That used to actually really exist. But then you understand, the system is not capable of accountability because if it was who would run the system. They're all wrong, they've all been wrong and they look out for each other. They can pay each other off, even when they make these catastrophic decisions, and then they just pump out BS articles and use their network in order to make sure that nobody is able to be able to discuss the reasons that they're wrong.
Saagar Enjeti:That's why it takes a guy like Trump to just come in and look at Jeb Bush and say, no, your brother didn't keep us safe. That's one of the most powerful moments in modern American politics, whenever he challenged Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush on the Iraq war and he said what so many of us felt like you said. Or same on free trade. There's so many. We go down the list of all of these things where it's easy if it's a conceptual debate, but it's not. People are dead. Millions of people are dead over there. Tens of thousands are dead or maimed over here. It had an actual impact on a lot of people's lives Plus, the biggest beneficiary of it was Iran.
Auren Hoffman:Yes, right, and now they want to go to war with Iran. We'll do this to help Iran, Like in some ways so obvious and so crazy. It's like, oh, we're going to make Iran better.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, you start to just lose your mind. Now they want to bomb Iran. It never ends and they have an excuse for everything. The real thing is is that I have humility. I've gotten many things wrong.
Saagar Enjeti:The biggest mistake I made, as I said, I didn't think Russia would invade Ukraine. I took it on the chin for that one. I totally accept responsibility for that. It was a bias of my anti-establishment bias and it's definitely caused me to be more circumspect in my predictions.
Saagar Enjeti:But sometimes I'm getting kind of shit on by people who advocated for the war in Iraq and I'm like I'm not going to hear it from you, dude, if you advocated for the war and you never apologize.
Saagar Enjeti:You don't get to go after people whose default assumption is that the establishment and the intelligence community are lying to us about war because you created the conditions where the vast majority of people have a deep skepticism of their government specifically around these circumstances.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, I mean their failures are just so manifold and it's pathetic because I've read so many incredible books about guys like George Marshall and Dean Acheson and George Kennan and I mean the Dulles brothers to a certain extent every once in a while and whether you agree or disagree with them. These were really serious men. I think the benefit that they all had is they got to see the cost of idealism, of inaction and of not taking things seriously Just at a baseline level. They understood the stakes Because every single one of them lived through tumultuous times, through wars. They saw millions and millions of people die and every time they made a decision, they understood the impact that that decision would have both on the country, the responsibility that they had to our soldiers. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think that there's a person alive in government today, or very, very, very few at the top and highest echelons, who feel that same way, and I think that's really tragic. It's something I think about a lot.
Auren Hoffman:When I talk to people in the establishment many people even on this podcast from the foreign policy establishment and stuff like that many of them admit that they were wrong about stuff in there. Many of them even admit the establishment generally gets things wrong. Richard Haass, who is the president of Council of Foreign Relations he was on and he basically says like, yeah, we were mostly wrong on the big things. We've had other people on who said, yeah, I thought when, whatever this happened, I was wrong. They're willing to admit often that they're wrong or they're wrong about Iraq, so I don't feel like I'm blaming them there, but the track record's still bad. It's like if you're a bad investor and you keep making bad investments over and over and over again, it's great that you learn from them, but if you keep making bad and bad investments, you shouldn't get more money to invest from your LPs.
Saagar Enjeti:That is such an important point and that's where it's trite sometimes to say that government and all that should run like business. But you know what? The main thing I love about my business is Stakes, money, dollars and cents. If you have a good idea on how to create and gain more customers, you can field test it and you can have an impact the next day and you can learn from that. And when you have a bad idea, it costs you money.
Saagar Enjeti:It's not just about you. It's about the fact that one of your employees is redoing their kid's bedroom or some shit and you're paying for that man and that's on you and you better not fuck that up. And there's something very important about that that I think that every business operator has had to learn, both at a micro and a macro scale, which a lot of these people are insulated from for their entire careers, like you said. Okay, it's great, richard Haas, that you admitted that, but I still see you in the page of the Washington Post and you haven't changed your tune that much or on MSNBC. I love Richard.
Auren Hoffman:He's a friend. I actually do think he's a really great guy who's very, very thoughtful about things and he hasn't been in the game for a long time and I think he was very helpful when he was in government. He's done a lot of good in the world. Guys like him. Yeah, Everyone's different so you can't stereotype everybody there. But just in general, like the quote unquote establishment has a bad investment record. If you gave them money and they were running a mutual fund, they would be down like 90 to 95% right now. This wouldn't look good right.
Saagar Enjeti:Exactly right, totally agree.
Auren Hoffman:You're a huge fan of US history. What historical era do you think most is analogous to where we are today.
Saagar Enjeti:Probably the Gilded Age in the late 1890s, and what I mean by that is that that was called the Age of Acrimony. There's actually a book called the Age of Acrimony. People should go and read it.
Saagar Enjeti:A very important political lesson I learned from the Age of Acrimony is that throughout the Reconstruction period and post-Reconstruction leading towards the Gilded Age, we had some of the highest levels of voter participation ever, and the lesson on that is that negativity drives votes much more than positivity. As in when you hate somebody let's say you're the Jim Crow white South and you want these Yankees out you will drag your ass across broken glass to vote and vice versa, to keep Reconstruction. That's a powerful lesson. 2020 had some of the highest voter participation in modern memory and it was a very, very acrimonious election. I think that the age of acrimony is very deeply analogous on a lot of levels. If you look at the 1890s not even just the trite economic comparison about disparity we had incredibly high levels of foreign born population, probably very analogous to where we are right now. We had some crazy if you think our immigration debates are crazier now there was a whole party called the Know Nothings that was entirely dedicated to being anti, not just anti-immigration, like anti-Irish and all this other Catholic.
Auren Hoffman:We had the gold versus silver debate.
Saagar Enjeti:Right, we had gold and silver. I mean, these were titanic debates and that's why even gold and silver is a good point. We're living in the age of crypto. We're asking about fundamental questions about the monetary policy, about the Fed, for this year is actually political at a very interesting level. For almost a decade, we didn't really think about the Fed I don't think a lot of people even really did for during zero interest rates. Now it's like soft landing, hard landing. Oh my God, this impacts my business. How can I buy a house? These are all things that are an age of uncertainty, of acrimony. So 1870s to 90s really fits to me.
Auren Hoffman:Another example might even be. Obviously, the 1890s was the only time in US history where you had a president who then lost, who then came back later and ran again. And then actually and won for president right. So we have so many parallels to that.
Saagar Enjeti:I could probably make a case for the early. It really depends on the foreign policy situation, because if you're saying 1890s, then the Great War is like 30 years away. The other case would be the 1910s, late 1900s, which had some of the same politics but we had more of the progressive era with Theodore Roosevelt on that, and that's your answer. If you believe that a major global war is on the horizon in the next decade and I go back and forth on that all the time A lot of it really comes down to China, taiwan, russia, ukraine. I have no idea, obviously, what's going to happen there. If nothing does pop off, then my answer is 1890s. If something does pop off, then my answer is like late 1900s and we're living in the Edwardian age, right before the Great War.
Auren Hoffman:Obviously, throughout history there have been some great US presidents. Is it still possible to have a great US president today?
Saagar Enjeti:I think so, because a lot of the great presidents were. What made a great president and this really gets back to that idea is outside of Washington, because he set the template was let's think about the weak, ineffective, awful presidents of the people who preceded Lincoln. What made Lincoln great? Lincoln rose to the occasion where the presidency was weak, where the party system itself was fundamentally incongruous with the divisive issue at the time, which was slavery. He forced a consensus to the Republican Party and then prosecuted the Civil War in a masterful way that eventually got to the most maximalist position for Republicans, while keeping and forging a political consensus that lasts until this day. In other words, he took kind of like a rotten system and, both through the craziness of events and his own wisdom, forged a new idea of the American identity and of the American presidency. Wisdom forged a new idea of the American identity and of the American presidency. That's the exact same thing for FDR.
Saagar Enjeti:Fdr basically was a king, and I mean I don't say that necessarily in a bad way, but he was a king in this country. He was, and there's a lot of power in that. Before that there were no kings. He was the first one in American history and he looked at the chaos of Hoover and of the Great Depression and of Congress and how powerful they were. And he looked at the chaos of Hoover and of the Great Depression and of Congress and how powerful they were and he intuited his connection to the people. He decided to become a Napoleon III almost dictator and just say screw you to the Congress. And he tried all sorts of interesting things and the people loved him for it and they reelected him four times. They reelected him whenever he was so sick that he was drooling out of his mouth and lived only 83 days after his inauguration, which is nuts. We were basically living under a quasi-military dictatorship for the last six months of his life. But that's how much people trusted him. That's how much people loved him. So when I think about those two examples, lbj falls into this category and so does TR is both forged, new consensus, new identities of American executiveship, ideas, relationships with Congress, as opposed to resigning themselves to the status quo or being unable to resolve or to move past the status quo.
Saagar Enjeti:Kennedy is a good example of somebody who it's funny people don't really talk honestly about Kennedy and I like JFK for a number of reasons A very interesting media figure and brilliant in his own right. I think he was the right man for the right time. That said, he was terrible at getting legislation passed. He was terrible at anything really beyond giving a speech. People in Congress hated him. It was reverting back to the pre-FDR consensus. If he hadn't died, almost all the legislation that happened in the late 1960s and early 1960s never would have happened, because LBJ was the only person who could really do it. That's kind of an interesting point too, where you can be a genuinely innovative and new figure, but to be able to forge something new, it's a very difficult skill set. That's what being a great political master is all about, and there's very few of them because it's tough to do.
Auren Hoffman:There's something about the time too. You have to be the right person at the right time.
Saagar Enjeti:Right yeah, the time is key.
Auren Hoffman:What is something that maybe most people don't understand about our political system? The time is key. What?
Saagar Enjeti:is something that maybe most people don't understand about our political system. That's a good question. I think they don't understand how mundane it all is and that is also a tough lesson. Being a congressman is not cool the job actually sucks and that's what people don't really get.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, the job sucks. You don't really do anything. Congress, these days, even if you're a committee chair, who cares? Legislation doesn't get voted out of committee. You don't mark up, you don't do regular appropriations. Leadership tells you when your ass is supposed to show up to vote and that's it. The rest of the time, you spend your ass dialing for dollars and a lot of these guys-.
Auren Hoffman:Or you're meeting with constituents that are just complaining about stuff.
Saagar Enjeti:Oh my God, they're like my company in New York is subject to an aluminum tariff and you need to do something about that. It's like ma'am, I'm a member of Congress, what the fuck am I supposed to do about this? I can try. Or they're like my son, jimmy didn't get his VA check in the mail and it's like well, did he create an online membership? And they're like no. And it's like well, and you have to get on the phone and like walk this lady. It's like tech support like.
Auren Hoffman:Congress. Yeah, literally yeah.
Saagar Enjeti:That's a huge portion of. Oh, and getting boomers their social security checks that's another big part. But that's kind of my point is that being a congressman is a deeply mundane job. You spend a lot of time on a plane and it's not fun because it's government travel. There's a lot of rules and other things. Don't get me wrong. I mean, they have a lot of power and a lot of them are such egomaniacs they're willing to put up with this just because they love being famous or being on television. But it's not a cool job and I think that's something that people don't really understand is that the imperial parts of Washington maybe 20 people get to participate in that and, just like in every other imperial system, there are a lot of court hangers and mundane things that are all happening around the imperial city.
Auren Hoffman:It's kind of like being in the military. There's fighting that happens in a war but most of it's just sitting around waiting. Absolutely 98%.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, it's just like, hopefully you're with some good people where it's fun and you get to joke around with them and stuff.
Auren Hoffman:It's just sitting around waiting Absolutely 98%, yeah. Yeah. It's just like hopefully you're with some good people where it's fun and you get to joke around with them and stuff.
Saagar Enjeti:It's not exciting, exactly, it's not exciting and I think people have watched too much TV too much House of Cards. Listen, I cover the White House day in and day out for years. Most of the time, shit is boring man. The president is speaking at the National Boat Builders Association and you're just sitting there and you want to kill yourself because it's like boat building is a critical part of American history. You're just like, oh my God, and that's most of it, Totally.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your take on what's going on in American colleges right now?
Saagar Enjeti:Ooh, that's an interesting one. I'm very worried about higher education. I'm deeply worried about the decline of the meritocracy. I was very heartened to see, for example, yale University bringing back the SATs. I believe Dartmouth did as well. I saw some other. Yeah, dartmouth brought it back. Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti:The sad part, though, is I just read a stat Some 84% of higher education institutions are not requiring SATs as of this year, and that's just catastrophic. I think that's deeply unfair, obviously for a lot of the Asians, for which the policy is intended to discriminate against so that you can effectively legalize affirmative action without being able to prove it. But I guess what I worry more than anything about that is not even the decline of the meritocracy, but it's a lot of it is the debt and the system. The entire idea that you have all of this government-backed debt for fundamentally which is a bad proposition and then you have a government policy which forgives the debt on the back end but doesn't fix the system of those who are going into debt is so insane. I mean, during the student debt cancellation debate, I tweeted out a chart that went very viral. It takes a matter of five years with the debt cancellation scheme for the amount of student debt in the system to revert back to the mean. That's insane, but that's just because it's a self-perpetuating wheel. We have to dramatically change the way that people culturally and financially think about one of the most major and important decisions of their lives.
Saagar Enjeti:And I've been accused of being classist for saying this, but I really don't believe it is, because if you go back to the 1940s, only 2% of the population went to college. Nobody went to college. It was really only in the post-GI period that college became normalized, and I think it should be. I think it should be accessible to everyone, but we're at almost like a 40% to 50% rate of people who are trying to attain a bachelor's degree. I honestly think that's way too high and I think the market speaks to that.
Saagar Enjeti:Is that the truth is is that it's not being rewarded. The premium is being erased. The real premium is only concentrated in a few majors and other places and we need to make it very culturally acceptable for, let's say, a good chunk of the people who are going to college. You don't need to go, you should go, and there are a lot of different avenues for education, for self-improvement, attaining skills and other things. Where it's not necessary, nor should it be. That's both a cultural question, but it's a big policy question. So I'm deeply worried about it.
Auren Hoffman:Two weird things are happening. One is obviously like the number of people going to college has skyrocketed over the last 50 years, but also the average price of a college, both tuition and the board has skyrocketed. So that has gone up three times at least the rate of inflation every year for the last 50 years. It's outrageous, and you would think it'd be the opposite, right, If you have this scarce good, this Louis Vuitton bag it's a scarce good. It makes sense that the price would go up. If you started giving Louis Vuitton bags to everybody, you would think the price would come down, just like the average TV set. The price has come down dramatically over the last 50 years in inflation-adjusted dollars. But it's like the opposite. It's like oh, we have this good that everyone can get. Now Price is still going to go up dramatically, which makes no sense to me.
Saagar Enjeti:It's a criminal cartel in a lot of ways. I mean they're using tax advantage status to turn themselves into hedge funds with more wealth than small African nations and also increasing room and board costs to like $85,000 a year. How do you get away with this? Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great post about Princeton and the self-perpetuating machine how they could afford to send every single one of their students for free and they would still be able to have a good return on their endowment fund. And obviously they don't do it, because it's about printing cash and the government. Part of that is that we're backstopping, guaranteeing and encouraging that with no stakes. I mean we don't even let banks get away with the shit that these colleges do.
Saagar Enjeti:I hate the banks, everybody hates the banks, but Chase is more of a responsible purveyor as an institution than higher education. It's the most. And, by the way, my parents work in higher education. They work as professors at Texas A&M University, which I'm much more in favor of. That type of system too, just because state-based input from the state government. It's much more egalitarian for access to the college. Something I love about the Texas system that I'm going to just speak to is they allow like the top 10% of every high school gets automatic admission to every college in the state. I think it's just fantastic. It gives you egalitarian and total representation. It's meritocratic, but it's more important, it's egalitarian. It gives people from every walks of life the ability to attend this world-class institution, and they don't charge you a lot of money for it.
Auren Hoffman:Some of these colleges are becoming more resorts. They have Lazy Rivers.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, that's famous. That's the famous one.
Auren Hoffman:Lazy Rivers has gone up. It was zero when I went to college. Now it's like 300, 500 of them have Lazy rivers. It's like what do you need a lazy river for college? They've got all this bells and whistles, stuff. They've got beautiful facilities that people don't even use. Yeah, they're living like kings the rooms that you live in and the dorms and it's not like you get a better education today per se. You're paying all this money to get pampered. It's like, yeah, you get to live in the four seasons, which is nice.
Saagar Enjeti:And you get a declining wage premium. I can't walk away from that. You're getting a declining wage premium and that's just fundamentally not worth it. So most people who reach out to me unless your parents are genuinely wealthy, I think you should go to a state college. I think the norm is that we could almost always get out of a state college what you need In some very rare instances. Again, if the money genuinely is a drop in the bucket for you and, of course, you have the meritocratic ability to get into an Ivy League or a private institution, then you should consider it, and it is still worth it for a lot of people out there. Don't get me wrong. That said, you should put some thought into it, and not enough people put thought into it. That's my critique.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, to me it's interesting. You have a super premium, super well-branded school and then you have the number 500 school and they're the same price. Don't go there.
Saagar Enjeti:It makes no sense to me.
Auren Hoffman:The number 500 school has a 98% acceptance rate. Yeah, you can go to Four Seasons. You can go to the Best Western. Sometimes you might wanna pay more to go to Four Seasons and pay whatever two grand a night at there. Sometimes you might wanna go to the Best Western and pay 100 bucks a night or 50 bucks a night, whatever it is, and you should be able to make that choice and decide what is the value for you.
Saagar Enjeti:And you should think about it exactly in that way, because you're talking about value. Yeah, you're right. Sometimes, when you're on your honeymoon, it makes a lot of sense. Or sometimes, if you're really rich, four seasons doesn't mean anything to you. Cool, I'm happy for you. That's not the case, though, for a lot of the people who are staying in the equivalent of four seasons in college, and I mean, let's be honest, they'd be better off. They spent a week at the four. That on a credit card is compared to the amount of debt that some of these people at least. Technically, you can go bankrupt if you aren't able to pay your four seasons bill. That's not even the case if you're able to discharge student loan debt.
Saagar Enjeti:Like I said, you wouldn't even let the banks get away with some of the things. We treat credit card companies. We put more regulation on them than we do higher ed. It's nuts. It's just the most nuts system in the world.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, tuition, you actually have a lot of breaks. So a lot of these schools, like Tulane, it's very rare for people to pay full price. Tulane's a very good school but mostly if you get in they're going to give you a deal. They're going to say you pay half off tuition or something like that, but room and board you still have to pay, and room and board is like crazy expensive. It's so much it's so much.
Saagar Enjeti:Like I said, please, I am begging you. My parents teach at A&M. It's a great school. If any of these state universities who are out there, please, please, consider it. Do not take a premium unless you have the financial means or you have a real plan. Man Like you're going to Harvard and biotech and you're going to go out and if you're taking out 100% debt, you're going to work your ass off while you're in college. You'll be doing these internships. You're going to go get a biotech job straight out of college. You need to make $250,000 a year immediately and you start paying the shit off, because I have too many friends who are just in mountains and mountains of debt who, to be honest, they made a bad financial choice period and it's killing you. I'm 31 years old. You can't buy a house because you're paying a thousand bucks a month or whatever on your debt for 20 something years. It'll eat your income.
Auren Hoffman:There's 50 year olds who still have student debt.
Saagar Enjeti:I know that gives me a headache. I mean, it's just one of those where oh, what a terrible thing.
Auren Hoffman:You've been in DC for most of your adult life. How would you describe DC? What do you like about it?
Saagar Enjeti:I don't love DC. I think if I could live anywhere, I'm not sure I would live here. That said, there are a lot of cool things about it. It's a very intellectual city. Most people here are very highly educated. That can be bad. Very often it can also be good, so there are a lot of benefits to that. There's something intoxicating, if you like it, about living in the Imperial City. It's fun. I've been to some cool events at the White House. I've gotten to do some very unique and interesting things and I've met a lot of people from all over the world. I met my fiance here. We both work in politics. We have very similar interests.
Saagar Enjeti:So if you're interested in that type of thing, or if you like history, or you want to work in policy or many other interesting folks, this is a great place if you want to work and you want to live here. But there's a lot of downsides. It's a surprisingly livable place too. Here's the thing. Compare it to New York. I think it's way more livable. We have suburbs, we have the ability to commute, we have an okay enough metro system.
Saagar Enjeti:Even if you live in the city, you can find a relatively affordable place to live. So if you live in the city, you can find a relatively affordable place to live. So if you are interested in anything government related, political related, I think you should live here. I think it's a good place, especially if you're young. I highly encourage you. It's a great place to be. I've lived here since I was 18 years old and that time period in particular from when I had graduated and from when I was like 27, was a really amazing time and I met so many people just in and around and doing my job Now.
Auren Hoffman:You and I are, I think, both interested in conspiracy theories. I find them super fascinating. I love to learn about them and I've heard you say recently you've never believed more in aliens than you do right now, like how have you thought about that crazy conspiracy theory and stuff?
Saagar Enjeti:It's funny you call that crazy conspiracy theory.
Auren Hoffman:No, I love crazy conspiracy theories.
Saagar Enjeti:I know it sounds crazy and I understand that, and I think extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. I've never had more of a belief in aliens than I have today and it's because of my exposure to the system. And I just know too many people who are highly credible, who have had access to special compartmentalized information or who have had brushes up against that within the military and the Pentagon or the intelligence community, who have provided very interesting, very intriguing, sworn testimony before congress. And I've looked dave grush, for example, the ufo whistleblower. I looked him in the eyes. I don't think he's crazy. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I am being deceived.
Saagar Enjeti:I've met a lot of bullshitters. The one thing nobody tells you about is that when you're a prominent person who talks about the news, schizophrenics contact me all the time. I've heard from you have no idea the amount of mail I've gotten from schizophrenics over the years. I know crazy people when I see it. I've met them all over the country. Hey, you really got to talk about this. You're like, oh God, but I've met too many of these folks.
Saagar Enjeti:I believe it's real, I believe that they are telling the truth. I even said if the guy's lying, I want him to be prosecuted. End of story. I do. I believe in stakes and all of that, but I think, based on the testimony of the pilots of the military, of a longstanding multi-decade program acknowledged to have existed throughout the last 80 years, I don't know how you could not see the evidence. There's just been too much cover up of something that is going on out there. It could be something. I mean, it could be another country, which is very, very possible. I don't believe that. I just don't, because of the way that I know that research, development and science, the advancement in science, works. That's the only real explanation that makes any sense to me. But I don't know.
Auren Hoffman:What's a good example of a former conspiracy theory? Let's say something that was people thought was a quote unquote conspiracy theory that later was accepted to be true.
Saagar Enjeti:Gulf of Tonkin, uss Maine. Yeah, gulf of Tonkin, uss Maine. Those are two good ones. What else? Covid stuff? Covid is all. Yeah, that one, we're still living, I think. The JFK one, I mean, I think if you believe that Oswald acted alone, you're honestly an idiot and that's just one of those where Really Okay You're Absolutely yeah.
Saagar Enjeti:Again, it's a highly rational thing. It sounds like a conspiracy. It's not. What makes more sense? That Oswald acted alone, or and this is the problem people take it way too far and and the CIA personally wanted JFK killed, or the mob or whatever. What makes more sense?
Saagar Enjeti:That Oswald acted alone, this guy who was not a crack shot and had no ability to pull this off and, by all accounts, was a total fuck up or the fact that he was tied to a bunch of hard right anti-communists who were super pissed off that JFK fucked them over on the Bay of Pigs and wanted to get back at him and rationally, correctly thought that LBJ would do a better job. And then the reason that there was a cover-up was that, even though they weren't directly working for the CIA, it would be embarrassing, as it would be today, let's say, if a former FBI employee went out and shot the president the FBI, it would be a bad look's say if a former FBI employee went out and shot the president the FBI. It would be a bad look for them If they were people who are well-trusted. It's all a highly rational takeaway as to why all of that happened.
Auren Hoffman:And then the Jack Ruby thing it's also. It's just like yeah, come on, like what? Yeah, who's this guy, this Jack Ruby guy? He's just a hero.
Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, and then Jack Ruby was totally rational about why he killed Oswald. And look, I know this sounds crazy, but this is all verified and it's all true. Jack Ruby had one meeting with a guy named Jolly West who was a psychiatrist and he totally lost his mind. And Jolly West, who was the psychiatrist who evaluated him, he was rational, jack Ruby, when he went into prison. He had the meeting with Jolly West very soon after he gets arrested for shooting Oswald and then he's totally crazy for the rest of his life and eventually dies of cancer. Well, we know now through the Freedom of Information Act, through the church committee, that Jolly West was a psychiatrist who was working for the CIA MKUltra program. This is a verifiable fact, that this was a person who was working on mind control experiments with Charlie Manson for the CIA. Don't ask me, ask Senator Frank Church. It happened, he was fine and then he was crazy. Am I a conspiracy theorist or something? Again, everyone laughs and thinks it's funny. This is all true.
Auren Hoffman:It's one of those where I'm like you're the crazy one if you think that this sounds nice, right, some of these things like there's this conspiracy, but then, because things are unexplained, then people can take it to the 10th level down, as you mentioned, like the Dulles brothers were the ones who pulled all the strings. No, I don't believe that, you know, or whatever it might be. Or Castro somehow pulled it off, or Khrushchev had sleeper agents, whatever it might be. All right, this has been awesome, all right. Last question we ask all of our guests what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
Saagar Enjeti:That's the Peter Thiel question, right? I don't know At this point. I spend so much time in unconventional circles I feel like even saying something that's quote unquote. Unconventional is itself conventional, so that's part of the problem. Yeah, I mean, I would go back to what I said about college. I think that way too many people go to college, but I don't even know if that's necessarily an unconventional thing Now, at this point, it is controversial 10 years ago that might have been extremely unconventional, whereas probably the mood has shifted on that.
Saagar Enjeti:The mood, I think, has shifted on that. I would say for a lot of people the vast majority of people who attend a higher education institution, it's probably not worth it for you when you should do something else and you would be better off either taking a gap year or thinking about business. That's another one where that's probably conventional too.
Auren Hoffman:Let's say we take it all the way down to high school. You don't learn that much in school. No, be kind of unfair for parents if you're not babysitting and stuff.
Saagar Enjeti:Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. You're like wait, so high school is really about just childcare. Again, you need to do a flip of like why institutions exist.
Auren Hoffman:You have to allow the parents to go to work and without worrying about somebody, like doing keg stands in your house or something when you're gone.
Saagar Enjeti:So that's what really this is all about. Again, I don't know if there's anything necessarily unconventional enough about this. Yeah, I think that's where I'm at All right?
Auren Hoffman:Well, that's great. This has been amazing. Well, thank you, sagar and Jetty, for joining us on World of DAS. I follow you at eSagar on Twitter. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun, good.
Saagar Enjeti:Thank you for having me.
Auren Hoffman:If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdascom that's D-A-A-S. Worldofdascom and sign up for our weekly data as a service roundup newsletter. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of Das and Das is D-A-A-S, you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts, and also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at at Oren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Oren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by Safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraphcom. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of Das. Check it out at flexcapitalcom.