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One of the most respected broadcasters on this side of the water recently ended a very uncharacteristic terade about the US president with the words sod off Trump.
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And I wouldn't have been the only listener to cheer, quite frankly.
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But now we are a month or so away from the American midterms.
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I think it's about time to get an insider's take on what's going on over there.
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And maybe a defense, who knows?
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My guest, because it falls entirely on your shoulders, Todd Buchholz.
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Welcome to Just Between Us, by the way.
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You're going to tell us just about everything we need to know about America, and indeed the world and the stage and everything else.
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But first of all, how are you?
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Well, it's a lovely morning in Southern California.
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I look out the window, I'm not seeing fires.
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I'm sitting in my chair.
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It's not vibrating from an earthquake.
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We're off to a good start.
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Jeremy, the uh the old comedian George Burns.
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Sunshine Boy.
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Sunshine Boys, yeah.
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He used to say when he was in his 90s and still performing, he would say, Well, I wake up in the morning and first thing I do is open up the newspaper to the obituary page.
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And if I don't see myself, I have breakfast.
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So, no fires, no earthquakes, no obituaries.
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Everything's good here.
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Now, listen, we need to talk.
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And first of all, I like to take a hop, a skip, and indeed sometimes to jump through my guests' background.
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So I've got a number of things written down on my screen in front of me.
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You were White House Director of Economic Policy under George W.
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Bush.
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You have headed a$15 billion hedge fund.
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Along the way, you've won Harvard's Economics Teaching Prize.
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You've written a whole lot of books, and dear listener, I have to say that behind Todd, in his study, I assume, is a display of books, all of which today's guest has written.
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And they range from ones that simply took my eye.
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Market Shock about economic and social upheaval, which happens, I think, to have been written before the crash.
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You have written and did very well with two books, New Ideas from Dead Economists, and New Ideas from Dead CEOs.
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You've written a novel.
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I haven't read it, I'd be honest with you, a crime thriller called The Castro Gene.
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And more recently, which I do want to talk about in a minute, you've written something called The Price of Prosperity, Why Rich Nations Fail and How to Renew Them.
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And when you're not making money for other people or writing books, you have invented a maths.
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Oh sorry.
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I'll use the American a math matrix, which, according to the blurb, makes numbers more intuitive to children.
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Not necessarily me.
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I tried to get my head around it.
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And I think maybe it was just too small on the screen.
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So it's an age problem rather than an intellect problem.
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Fascinatingly, you co-produce, you are one of the co-producers of the global hit musical Jersey Boys.
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And to bring us up to date this year with your daughter, you have put on stage a new musical for which you wrote the lyrics and the music and the book together, I understand.
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But feel free to take credit away from your daughter, called Glory Ride, which is all about a wartime Italian bicycle rider.
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We're gonna come back to that.
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I mean, I've just dramatically downplayed the musical, so I'll give you an opportunity to blow it back up again in a good way.
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So that's an incredible ride through your background, or rather a ride through your incredible background.
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And I know I've left a lot of things out, but can we come back to various things and start with what the hell's going on on your side of the water?
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Because as I say, we're having this conversation at the beginning of October, so before the midterms, but at the moment we are being told the polls are not looking at all good for Trump.
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And even, although this might be done to individual races rather than any wider trend, in places like Texas and Kansas, which have always been Republican.
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So tell us what's happening.
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Are the old Republicans, the so-called country club lot, are they all deserting him?
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Is it about Iran?
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Is it his authoritarian figure or the fact that it's a fruitcake?
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What's happening politically and why?
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There's a war in Iran.
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And petrol, gasoline, is expensive.
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And interest rates have crept higher.
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And people do not feel as if their standard of living has risen.
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And Trump is the president, so therefore he has to take a significant part of the blame.
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Now we could break apart each of those one by one.
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If there weren't a war in Iran, the price of energy would be quite cheap.
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It had fallen.
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Trump's policies of drill, drill, drill, whether you one opposes on environmental grounds or is in favor of it on economic grounds.
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It was pushing energy prices lower.
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And then we've gotten mired into a war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz.
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And that has made the cost of living more expensive.
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And the American people are not very forgiving about that sort of thing.
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At the same time, interest rates are higher, which makes it more expensive to buy a house.
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And this these two factors are the same all over the world.
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Interest rates are higher around the world, and energy prices are higher around the world.
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And so President Biden, in my book, had been a miserable president.
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He was hardly there.
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I mean, he was might as well have had Madame Tussaud's wax works do a Biden statue and put it in the Oval Office.
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But he's gone.
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So it's can't blame him anymore.
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So Donald Trump is bearing the brunt of this.
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How bad will the elections be?
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Well, the Republican majority is narrow to begin with.
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Republicans only have an advantage of basically three or four seats in both the Senate, our upper house, and the House of Representatives, our lower house.
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And in the House of Representatives, that's an advantage of three when you're talking about a total of 435 seats.
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So it was just a sliver of a majority that he had.
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And now it's most likely that he'd lose that.
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But that's not the same as a vote on whether Democrats should now take over the government.
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So if the American people had to vote now, as it would be more in a parliamentary regime, do you want the Tories or do you want labor?
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It's unclear to me that the American people would say, oh, we want labor back in, or in this case, we want the Democrats back in.
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Here it's a matter of we we want to punish or express our disappointment in certain parts of the economy.
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That also absolutely fascinates me.
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Because so much of the coverage over here is about Trump as an individual.
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It's about the executive orders.
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It's about renaming AI SI, it's about the triumphal arch or the West Wing or a number of things which we don't take as the truth or reality.
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We hear about economic policy, we hear about the cost at the pumps, but most of us on this side of the water, I suspect, spend more time worrying about his creeping authoritarianism than we do about the cost to the American cost of living.
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But Jeremy, I I would I would say that you can call it creeping authoritarianism, but the creeping won't go on for law because he is, as we call it, a lame duck.
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He can't run again.
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He's not going to be able to change the constitution to be president.
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He's about 80 years old.
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So he's going to be in the rearview mirror.
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In fact, as soon as the elections are over in the first week of November, Republicans will be airlifting themselves, hitchhiking, driving, hopping on trucks or rail cars to get to Iowa, the state of Iowa, which has the first caucus, the first sort of pseudo-election within the party to decide who's going to take Trump's place.
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So he is going to be fading.
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Now he doesn't want to fade, which is why he wants his name slapped across the Kennedy Center and every other mark that he can put up.
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But I think that what you are describing, the Trump personality expressing itself in ways that seem certainly unprecedented and in some cases outrageous.
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For the American people, that's more like reality TV entertainment.
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It's not actually what's driving their votes.
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And when the American people look at both parties, they see either party has a prescription to attend to go to an insane asylum.
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You can cite the various things Trump has done.
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Oh, Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, and so on and so forth.
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But then you go back to the Democratic Party, and this is a party where scientists, doctors, Supreme Court justices will testify before Congress and claim they don't know the difference between a man and a woman.
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Because they've been so co-opted by what is politically current that they take their logical brains and their knowledge and they put it in a lockbox somewhere because they don't want to offend.
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So there's craziness in both parties.
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Trump's craziness might be a little bit more entertaining, maybe a little bit more scary if you're concerned that he could stay in power.
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But I do not believe that's what the American people are voting on.
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They're voting with their pockets.
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You know, remember Ronald Reagan was obviously a controversial figure, but in 1984, when he ran for re-election, he was able to display advertisements with American flags being raised in parks around the country, and the slogan was it's morning in America.
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And he didn't mean morning with a U, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, but it was morning.
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It was break of day, it was a new day.
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Well, in the midst of a war and uh higher prices, it's hard for that kind of message to be said.
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So Republicans will be losing seats, most likely.
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That makes complete sense, but would make more sense if the war were outside of Donald Trump's control.
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That's one of the things that pushes it over the edge for me.
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Because it was his decision to go in in the way that he did, and indeed, as of now to stay in.
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But I am interested, as will lots of listeners be, once Trump has gone.
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The question is simple.
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What will be left of what we used to call the New World Order?
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Has it changed forever?
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I don't think it's changed forever.
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And of course, I think it depends who comes to power after Trump.
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You look at the Trump White House and the administration, and right now it would seem to be the two leading candidates are the vice president, J.D.
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Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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And I think those are very different characters, both having served in the Senate previously, Rubio for a much longer time.
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And Rubio, I believe, is an inter more of an internationalist, though he is someone who believes in what we call or what the world calls American exceptionalism.
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And why shouldn't he think America is exceptional?
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His family fled Cuba and came to the States, and then he became a congressman and then a senator and a secretary of state.
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There aren't too many countries in the world where that would have been possible.
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So he believes in that, but I don't see him on foreign policy in the same category as J.D.
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Vance, because it was J.D.
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Vance who sat Zelensky down on a sofa in the Oval Office and shouted him down.
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It was J.D.
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Vance who claimed he had a deal with the Iranians as if they could be trusted in these negotiations.
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And those who doubted him, he criticized.
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So I think if you have a J.D.
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Vance presidency, that does seem to be closer to a continuation of Trump.
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Marco Rubio, I think, would not necessarily be a continuation of Trump's policies.
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Having said that, there's an asterisk.
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J.D.
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Vance doesn't have a long history, and he's been on different sides of the equation.
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Your listeners can Google within a moment and find various quotations where he not just criticizes Trump prior to his appointment as vice president or election as vice president, but indeed is lacerating of Trump.
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So JD Vance is unpredictable.
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Some people would say he's opportunistic, but I think the world would be comforted by a Marco Rubio presidency.
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Yeah.
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You mentioned in passing, you mentioned Cuba.
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Before he goes, is Trump gonna um take over Cuba?
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I was looking for a euphemism, but I couldn't find one.
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You know, the remarkable thing about Trump, and when I give speeches to business audiences, I say, here's what you need to know about Donald Trump's mind.
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He is the mind of my grandfather.
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My grandpa Sam was a developer, and he actually knew and was sort of a colleague and sometimes friend of Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father, because they both were building homes along the eastern seaboard between World War II and the 1970s.
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And one of the titles that the president of the United States has is commander in chief.
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I think we would be wise to think of him as developer-in-chief.
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What does it mean to be a developer-in-chief?
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A developer doesn't care so much about the old, the past.
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He wants new.
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He wants to build again and tear down and not shed a tear when he tears down.
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In fact, there was a 1980s story in the New York Times about Donald Trump.
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This was before he became famous, so his name was not in the headline.
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But when he built Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, he tore down the Bonwood Teller building, which was a department store.
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Well, at the top or on the facade of that building, were certain statues that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had wanted.
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But they were just torn down and pummeled into smithereens the way the rest of the building was, so there could be a new building.
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That tabula rasa, to use the Latin phrase, blank slate mentality, shows up in the Trump presidency.
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That's why, Jeremy, he can wake up in the morning and say, Gulf of Mexico, no, Gulf of America, Canada, 51st state, Greenland, 52nd state.
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Why not?
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So he has that freedom of thought.
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Some people might say no respect and a disdain for history.
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Yeah, and it's not a very conservative way to be.
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But it isn't, I guess, freeing.
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I guess, you know, I'd feel pretty free if I didn't feel I had to preserve anything in my life.
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But that's the Donald Trump mentality.
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And that's the best way to think of his daring.
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It's not simply he wants to do something daring like take over Cuba.
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It's that he doesn't care that Fidel Castro's regime had been there since 1959.
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That's such wonderful insight, Dodd.
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It really is.
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That's so clear.
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Just tell me quickly before we move on.
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Have you spent time with Trump?
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I have, but not intensely.
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And not, you know, I certainly do not consider myself an advisor.
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I've met him, I've been in rooms with him.
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I've spoken a little bit, but I don't want to give the impression that I've I've been whispering in his ear.
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In fact, at this moment, let me just correct one thing in your introduction.
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I was director of economic policy for the first Bush for George Herbert Walker Bush.
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Aha.
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Or W.
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Bush, I was an outside advisor, but not within the gates.
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Thank you.
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That makes a great deal of sense.
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When I was looking at that before, I was thinking of the dates.
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I Jeremy, you're supposed to follow that up by saying, but Todd you look too youthful to have been at the end.
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Okay, we'll do that again.
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We'll do that again.
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Oh, so you were director of economic policy for George H.
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Todd, I don't see that that's possible because you are too young looking for that to be true.
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Okay, we've done that now.
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We can move on.
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Now, this book of yours, we're getting on to talk about some economic stuff.
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I read and wrote down the blurb about your book, The Price of Prosperity.
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And I want to read it out very quickly because I think it's fascinating.
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Without common purpose and shared identity, nations can collapse.
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Reckless financial markets encourage gambling.
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A coddling culture removes the stigma of educational underachievement.
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Newcomers are watched with suspicion and contempt.
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That is an absolutely fascinating snapshot.
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You wrote that in the 2010s, I believe, although I think you've probably updated it since.
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But that background fascinates me because in some ways we can see the mirror image over here.
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You certainly can in London, which, as we all know, and you know London well, I guess, it's a global city, so it's not surprising that you'd see similar things if you look out of the window.
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What's your conclusion then?
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What is your what do you call it?
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Where rich nations fail and how to renew them.
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So where do we go from there to wherever we're going next?
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Because I think you'd agree that wherever it is, we ain't there yet.
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I think we've learned that nations are fragile things.
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Nations are fragile things.
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The US national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, ends with a question.
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Oh, say does that star-spangled banner still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
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There's a question mark.
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Because the writer Francis Scott Key penned that during the War of 1812, and there was bombing going on in Baltimore, and the nation had only been declared independent in 1776.
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So it hadn't been around very long.
00:20:09.119 --> 00:20:14.880
And at that point, there'd been various young nations that had been throttled in their youth.
00:20:14.960 --> 00:20:20.160
There was a Republic of Genoa and you know various others that just simply didn't make it.
00:20:20.319 --> 00:20:30.400
And you look at the history of regimes, countries, nations that had seemed strong and they didn't make it.
00:20:30.559 --> 00:20:35.759
My wife's grandmother passed away at a hundred and five and a half recently.
00:20:35.920 --> 00:20:39.039
Of course, when you get to 105, you count those halves, right?
00:20:39.279 --> 00:20:44.880
When she was born, there was a Habsburg Empire.
00:20:45.119 --> 00:20:47.519
There was an Ottoman Empire.
00:20:47.839 --> 00:20:54.720
And the Habsburg Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire controlled a half of Europe and it's gone.
00:20:54.960 --> 00:20:57.279
The Ottoman Empire, I've never met an Ottoman.
00:21:01.039 --> 00:21:02.240
I've never met an Ottoman.
00:21:02.400 --> 00:21:07.920
But the Ottoman Empire controlled all of the Middle East and parts of Africa, and they're gone.
00:21:08.240 --> 00:21:09.440
And why?
00:21:09.839 --> 00:21:20.960
Because they frayed, the stitching was ripped apart, there was not enough centrifugal force or commonality to keep things together.
00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:35.039
And when you look at modern economies, whether it's the UK or the US or France and Germany and others, and you see that in order to prosper, you have to engage in international trade, and that's a good thing.
00:21:35.359 --> 00:21:45.839
But if you don't have some kind of common principles, if you don't believe in a common history, then the country has no reason to stay together.
00:21:45.920 --> 00:21:48.720
And that's why those empires fell.
00:21:48.880 --> 00:21:49.920
And I worry about that.
00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:52.240
I worry deeply, especially in the UK.
00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:55.680
I've spent a lot of time in London and in the UK.
00:21:55.920 --> 00:22:03.519
And when we were rehearsing our musical Glory Ride, we were rehearsing a Bishopsgate, you know, near Liverpool Liverpool Station.
00:22:03.839 --> 00:22:08.240
And I remember when we had to get some scripts copied again.
00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:14.240
It must have been on a Sunday, or the conventional copy companies printers were not open.
00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:19.759
So I ended up basically jogging east of Liverpool Station.
00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.880
And the further I got east, the further I felt, oh, I was very east.
00:22:25.119 --> 00:22:30.240
I felt I was in Afghanistan, not in London.
00:22:30.480 --> 00:22:34.400
And I'm not saying that in a pejorative way.
00:22:34.559 --> 00:22:39.359
I'm just saying if you were to take a snapshot, you would not know you were in London.
00:22:39.519 --> 00:22:40.240
Is that a problem?
00:22:40.400 --> 00:22:41.920
It doesn't have to be a problem.
00:22:42.160 --> 00:23:06.559
If I speak to people in that neighborhood and they tell me they care about Gladstone, they know about Winston Churchill, they have some idea of the Second World War and the sacrifices that were made and the principles of the Magna Carta, and they want Britain to survive and prevail.
00:23:06.799 --> 00:23:09.759
Then I don't care if all the signs are in languages I can't read.
00:23:09.920 --> 00:23:15.440
Churchill said if the British Empire lasts for another thousand years, they will say this is our finest hour.
00:23:15.759 --> 00:23:27.519
You have to ask how many of residents in London or within the UK really care whether the empire lasts another thousand years.
00:23:27.680 --> 00:23:31.200
If we get the empire, whether the city or the country does.
00:23:31.680 --> 00:23:41.920
I think it's a fair question, but I also think that your observation is the geography is very interesting.
00:23:42.400 --> 00:23:58.880
Because what you're talking about is finding yourself in parts of the old East End around a place called Shoritch and that kind of area, just east of the city of London.
00:23:59.680 --> 00:24:26.079
And between 100 and 150 years ago, you would have made the same observation, except that rather than seeing people from Bangladesh and possibly Syria and a number of other countries, you'd have found a very large number of Jewish immigrants, including a number of my ancestors, and most of them, talking between themselves, would have spoken in Yiddish.
00:24:26.319 --> 00:24:36.880
It just so happens that that area has continued to be from the days of the Huguenots from France, so 100 years or more before then, my history isn't good.
00:24:37.119 --> 00:24:41.759
It's been a settling point for first-generation immigrants.
00:24:41.920 --> 00:24:45.440
And then when they make a bit of money, they go out east further into the coast.
00:24:45.920 --> 00:24:56.319
By the way, listener, if you haven't already, I commend to you the Just Between Us episode with my own aunt, who is also 105 and a half.
00:24:56.480 --> 00:24:59.279
In fact, coming up to 106, I think, in November.
00:24:59.599 --> 00:25:01.759
Well, I'm glad you interviewed her before me.
00:25:01.839 --> 00:25:03.680
You really have to prioritize these.
00:25:04.160 --> 00:25:05.440
Well, I think that's true.
00:25:05.599 --> 00:25:06.799
I wouldn't argue with that.
00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:19.359
And she talked about how at home everyone around her was talking in Yiddish, but she didn't want to and ran away from Hebrew lessons and blah, blah, blah.
00:25:19.519 --> 00:25:22.559
Which is maybe more of a comment on my aunt than anything else.
00:25:22.720 --> 00:25:23.440
I appreciate that.
00:25:23.599 --> 00:25:25.039
So let's move on to another.
00:25:25.279 --> 00:25:30.880
A coddling culture removes the stigma of educational underachievement.
00:25:31.279 --> 00:25:38.799
We had in this country, the same in the UK, this self-esteem movement for a generation.
00:25:39.759 --> 00:25:44.559
So uh there was a survey done in the uh Washington, D.C.
00:25:44.720 --> 00:25:48.799
school district, and then tests done, objective tests.
00:25:49.200 --> 00:25:51.279
And the students in the Washington, D.C.
00:25:51.519 --> 00:25:57.359
school district graded themselves as very strong in maths.
00:25:58.559 --> 00:26:01.039
But it turned out they were terrible.
00:26:01.359 --> 00:26:17.119
They thought they were great, but they were awful because the teacher spent more time boosting them up, giving them trophies for being so strong that they actually didn't spend much time learning how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
00:26:17.440 --> 00:26:30.640
And actually, there was a story just a week or two ago about a woman who writes for the New York Times who wrote a controversial essay that became a movement called the 1619 Project.
00:26:30.880 --> 00:26:34.079
And the point is, she happened to be an African-American.
00:26:34.240 --> 00:26:35.759
She placed her daughter.
00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:39.920
The woman could get her daughter into almost any school she wanted.
00:26:40.160 --> 00:26:46.000
She placed her in a low-performing school, largely African-American population.
00:26:46.160 --> 00:26:50.799
Well, the daughter is now 16 years old and is outraged at her mother.
00:26:51.119 --> 00:26:58.640
And it turns out that this daughter was told that she was very strong in maths.
00:26:58.880 --> 00:27:06.319
And she's now discovered as she's applying university or contemplating university that she is terribly ill-prepared.
00:27:06.559 --> 00:27:11.279
And so that's why, you know, I you had cited the word coddled.
00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:18.559
It doesn't do much good for someone's self-esteem to tell them something that they eventually will discover.
00:27:18.720 --> 00:27:26.720
The best way to get esteem is to do something worthy of esteem and earn it.
00:27:26.960 --> 00:27:32.000
There was an actor and producer who was the producing partner of Orson Wells.
00:27:32.160 --> 00:27:34.160
His name was John Houseman.
00:27:34.400 --> 00:27:38.559
And John Houseman had a kind of pseudo-British accent.
00:27:38.799 --> 00:27:40.079
I think he was born in Romania.
00:27:40.240 --> 00:27:41.440
I think he lived anyway.
00:27:41.519 --> 00:27:44.799
He may have affected a British accent, but it was very persuasive to Americans.
00:27:44.960 --> 00:27:53.839
And he starred in a movie called The Paper Chase, and it was a television series about an authoritarian professor at Harvard Law School.
00:27:54.079 --> 00:28:00.480
And this same actor, John Houseman, was contracted by a financial firm, a brokerage house, called E.F.
00:28:00.640 --> 00:28:01.119
Hutton.
00:28:01.440 --> 00:28:09.599
And the ad campaign was him in his very stentorian tone saying, We make money the old-fashioned way.
00:28:09.920 --> 00:28:11.279
We earn it.
00:28:11.599 --> 00:28:13.599
Well, there is something to that.
00:28:13.680 --> 00:28:28.079
You know, it was kind of haughty and a little obnoxious at the time, but it doesn't do children any good to tell them they're good at something, and then for them to discover with broken hearts that in fact they may have wasted a lot of time pretending.
00:28:28.400 --> 00:28:31.759
I think you and I agree so much on this that we ought to move on.
00:28:31.920 --> 00:28:32.880
Let's talk briefly.
00:28:32.960 --> 00:28:34.160
I know time's sticking away.
00:28:34.400 --> 00:28:44.319
And I know, because a birdie told me that you have a meeting coming up with Stallone's management, which obviously I want to ask you to spill the beans on.
00:28:44.400 --> 00:28:49.839
But before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about the markets and investment and that side of things.
00:28:50.160 --> 00:28:57.119
Because in Price of Prosperity, you also criticize reckless financial markets.
00:28:57.440 --> 00:29:01.680
And I am not in the least bit informed about this.
00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:08.240
But it seems to be that there is this great AI-related boom going on.
00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:17.440
And it seems to be that not all these companies are going to be able to deliver on what they claim to be their promise.
00:29:17.759 --> 00:29:22.480
That it seems to me that the bubble is going to burst at some point.
00:29:22.799 --> 00:29:30.400
True, likely, or not at all likely, it's going to carry on from strength to strength for these reasons.
00:29:30.880 --> 00:29:35.759
Yes, well, sure, it'll carry on strength to strength till it destroys the entire world.
00:29:35.920 --> 00:29:38.799
And it looks like the end of some Bruce Willis movie or something.
00:29:38.960 --> 00:29:41.279
I actually don't think that we're facing the end of the world.
00:29:41.440 --> 00:29:48.400
I think the best analogy is to the beginning of the automobile industry in the early 20th century.
00:29:49.279 --> 00:30:06.799
There were literally thousands of automobile makers, thousands of them around the world, throughout Europe, but through the United States alone, and thousands of auto companies in the early days making cars, not just little bits, not just, oh, the thousands that made ashtrays and brake pads.
00:30:06.880 --> 00:30:09.519
No, there are thousands that made full cars.
00:30:09.839 --> 00:30:13.279
But only three survived.
00:30:13.359 --> 00:30:18.240
That is, for many decades, we talked about the big three: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler.
00:30:18.559 --> 00:30:20.880
Did that mean the auto industry didn't survive?
00:30:21.039 --> 00:30:26.400
No, the auto industry thrived and became pretty much the biggest industry in the country.
00:30:26.559 --> 00:30:28.960
But thousands and thousands went bankrupt.
00:30:29.119 --> 00:30:33.440
So we look at artificial intelligence and data centers and so on.
00:30:33.599 --> 00:30:39.599
And I think the industry itself and the promise of the industry is enormous.
00:30:39.920 --> 00:30:43.920
But can we figure out in advance who the survivors are?
00:30:44.160 --> 00:30:48.079
I think that's a pretty difficult thing from an investment point of view.
00:30:48.319 --> 00:30:57.839
Having said that, there are certain companies at any particular time that look nearly untouchable and in almost monopoly positions.
00:30:58.079 --> 00:31:04.240
And you look at NVIDIA today, does lead the world in chip intelligence.
00:31:04.480 --> 00:31:07.440
And no one else seems particularly close.
00:31:07.599 --> 00:31:08.799
Will they have that forever?
00:31:09.039 --> 00:31:10.720
Well, I doubt forever.
00:31:10.960 --> 00:31:19.599
There was a time when we all walked around in the 80s with Sony Walkman, and Sony had all the portable audio products.
00:31:19.839 --> 00:31:22.000
And we thought, well, they're the best.
00:31:22.160 --> 00:31:24.240
And then Apple came out with the iPod.
00:31:24.319 --> 00:31:30.319
And I don't, you know, really haven't heard of Sony since, except for flat screen TVs and a few other products.
00:31:30.640 --> 00:31:40.400
So at any snapshot in time, we'll point out certain companies that seem as if maybe they will be eternal.
00:31:40.640 --> 00:31:47.119
But markets are ferocious in finding weaknesses and exploiting them.
00:31:47.279 --> 00:31:56.400
So, bottom line, Jeremy, I think AI is truly a big deal and will continue to be a big deal from an investment point of view.
00:31:56.640 --> 00:32:08.960
I would advise investors who want to be part of that to invest in a broad way and not think they can figure out which specific company is going to be the big winner in the next five to ten years.
00:32:09.279 --> 00:32:14.000
If you had a spare billion, that might not be a hypothetical question for all I know.
00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:17.359
So with your spare billion, where would you put it right now?
00:32:17.680 --> 00:32:20.720
Well, if I had a spare billion, I might buy a baseball.
00:32:21.039 --> 00:32:24.319
No, that you can't even buy, you can't buy a sports club anymore, can you?
00:32:24.559 --> 00:32:26.960
So look, I would take the advice I'm giving.
00:32:27.200 --> 00:32:35.839
I do think that over time, and I'll speak for the U.S., because I have less confidence in the equity markets abroad.
00:32:36.079 --> 00:32:37.039
I think the U.S.
00:32:37.200 --> 00:32:40.960
equity market in the long run will continue to be strong.
00:32:41.039 --> 00:32:46.240
So a broad base of stocks is where a majority should go.
00:32:46.319 --> 00:32:54.319
And then obviously you need some, or if you had a million dollars, a billion dollars, you probably don't really have to have security.
00:32:54.559 --> 00:33:11.440
But I think the same advice I'd give a billionaire, I would give to somebody who has a couple fewer zeros than that, which is 60 or 70 percent of your funds should be placing a bet on innovation continuing.
00:33:11.680 --> 00:33:13.920
And keep an eye on the political process.
00:33:14.079 --> 00:33:22.400
If the US turns into some sort of authoritarian regime, and if tariffs go on forever, then I would shave back that ratio.
00:33:22.720 --> 00:33:23.039
Okay.
00:33:23.359 --> 00:33:24.079
Thank you very much.
00:33:24.240 --> 00:33:28.160
Sorry to be so cheeky as to ask for that advice for nothing.
00:33:28.400 --> 00:33:44.319
Now, I want to go to the most important subject, which is this musical that you have written with your daughter, because you gave it a run in London and in the US as well, but that ain't going to be the last of it.
00:33:44.480 --> 00:33:49.519
My assumption is that you want to see it propping up the West End.
00:33:49.599 --> 00:33:53.920
You want to see it in lights on the West End and on Broadway.
00:33:54.160 --> 00:33:55.440
So, how's it going?
00:33:55.599 --> 00:33:56.799
What stage are you at now?
00:33:57.119 --> 00:33:57.759
Thank you, Jeremy.
00:33:58.079 --> 00:33:58.960
It's going very well.
00:33:59.119 --> 00:34:04.799
We did a an early developmental production at the Charing Cross Theater a few years ago.
00:34:05.039 --> 00:34:06.880
And we were very proud of that production.
00:34:07.119 --> 00:34:18.719
And we decided after that we needed to make the show really cool so that young people and old people would be screaming and crying and laughing.
00:34:18.960 --> 00:34:20.320
And so we worked very hard.
00:34:20.400 --> 00:34:23.280
And I should I should summarize for your listeners what it's about.
00:34:23.440 --> 00:34:24.719
So it's called Glory Ride.
00:34:24.800 --> 00:34:28.719
It's based on a true, amazing story from the Second World War.
00:34:28.960 --> 00:34:34.800
Basically, the film was the most famous athlete in Italy, and that's where it takes place in Florence, Italy.
00:34:34.880 --> 00:34:37.360
And who doesn't want to go to Tuscany for a couple hours?
00:34:37.679 --> 00:34:41.199
The most famous athlete in Italy was a cyclist named Gino Bartoli.
00:34:41.360 --> 00:34:43.360
He won the Tour de France in 1938.
00:34:43.519 --> 00:34:50.880
So then the war comes, and the Cardinal of Florence comes to him, and he's sitting out the war because Mussolini idolizes him.
00:34:50.960 --> 00:34:52.000
He doesn't have to fight.
00:34:52.239 --> 00:34:55.199
The Cardinal of Florence comes to him and says, Gino, you have to help us.
00:34:55.280 --> 00:34:57.199
And Gino says, Well, what are you talking about?
00:34:57.360 --> 00:35:02.719
And the cardinal explains, look, the Nazis are now on the other side of the river in Florence.
00:35:02.880 --> 00:35:08.960
The black shirts are rounding up gypsies, Jews, Slavs, Greeks, and sending them to the camps in Germany.
00:35:09.039 --> 00:35:09.519
You have to help.
00:35:09.679 --> 00:35:12.239
And the cyclist is, What do you want from me?
00:35:12.400 --> 00:35:13.199
I have a bicycle.
00:35:13.360 --> 00:35:14.400
I have a yellow shirt.
00:35:14.559 --> 00:35:15.840
Find somebody with tanks.
00:35:16.079 --> 00:35:17.119
I can't help you.
00:35:17.280 --> 00:35:20.000
And the cardinal says, wait, don't you understand?
00:35:20.320 --> 00:35:27.440
Because of your fame and because of your bicycle, you are the only guy who can get past the fascist checkpoints.
00:35:27.599 --> 00:35:30.000
We've been hiding children all over Tuscany.
00:35:30.159 --> 00:35:35.280
We need you to send those passports and visas so these kids can get out.
00:35:35.440 --> 00:35:36.880
So he embarks on this mission.
00:35:36.960 --> 00:35:43.039
It's kind of a, we've turned it into a heist, an accountant, a cardinal of the Catholic Church, and a cyclist.
00:35:43.199 --> 00:35:48.800
Fool the fascists and get hundreds out of fascist Italy before they're going to be murdered.
00:35:49.039 --> 00:35:49.760
True story.
00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:53.519
Then the same cyclist in 1948 wins the Tour de France again.
00:35:53.679 --> 00:35:58.480
10 years after his first victory, oldest guy ever to win, he doesn't tell anybody what he did during the war.
00:35:58.639 --> 00:36:00.159
Then he dies in 2000.
00:36:00.400 --> 00:36:04.159
And some old people say, oh, you know, he saved my life, and no one believes them.
00:36:04.320 --> 00:36:09.599
And then it's only been the last 10 or 15 years it's been divulged, the story we tell in Glory Ride.
00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:14.639
So we took what we did in London a few years ago and we reimagined it.
00:36:14.800 --> 00:36:21.119
And now it's kind of a modern, energetic, more Hamilton-ish telling of the story.
00:36:21.199 --> 00:36:24.559
And we broke the box office records at the Delaware Theater Company.
00:36:24.639 --> 00:36:25.280
And now you're right.
00:36:25.360 --> 00:36:29.360
We are looking for a West End theater and looking to bring it to New York as well.
00:36:29.599 --> 00:36:36.639
So if Andrew Lloyd Weber, if Nika Burns, or if the folks who run ATG are listening, we are ready.
00:36:36.960 --> 00:36:43.679
Well, I used to know Nika very well, but um I have no idea whether she's listening or not, but I'm sure she knows.
00:36:43.840 --> 00:36:47.840
I did a TV pilot with Nika once, which I'll tell you about off-air.
00:36:48.239 --> 00:36:51.920
Not because I'm being secretive, but because it's not that interesting a story.
00:36:52.159 --> 00:36:54.800
Would you and your daughter do a musical about Trump?
00:36:56.880 --> 00:36:59.039
Oh, here's how we're gonna answer that.
00:36:59.280 --> 00:37:03.199
In Glory Ride, it takes place during World War II, as I said.
00:37:03.599 --> 00:37:11.760
When we wrote the first script and did the first kind of rehearsal, we actually had Mussolini as a character.
00:37:12.079 --> 00:37:18.000
And then we decided that it brings too much expectation.
00:37:18.079 --> 00:37:19.840
Oh, does it look like Mussolini?
00:37:19.920 --> 00:37:20.960
How bald is he?
00:37:21.039 --> 00:37:24.960
How does it and it dominates the storytelling itself?
00:37:25.280 --> 00:37:28.960
So Trump, maybe 20 years from now, it could be different.
00:37:29.199 --> 00:37:39.360
But at this point, the question of Trump and mimicry and and so on would be so dominating that I don't think you could get a story that would touch people.
00:37:39.440 --> 00:37:43.039
And that's what you want in a novel, in a musical, in a drama.
00:37:43.199 --> 00:37:47.440
You want people's feelings to be tapped into, and not simply feelings of rage.
00:37:47.599 --> 00:37:49.840
Oh, I hate him, he's such a so-and-so.
00:37:50.239 --> 00:37:51.760
So the answer would be no.
00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:56.480
Better to do a story about someone who is a little bit further into the past.
00:37:56.880 --> 00:37:58.000
I get it completely.
00:37:58.159 --> 00:38:01.360
So, okay, one very last question.
00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:08.239
What I'm not a journalist, but I share the love of scoops.
00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:13.519
What's your next, apart from Glory Ride, what's your next big thing?
00:38:13.920 --> 00:38:19.280
Yeah, look, I'm working on another economics book, but that's in early stages.
00:38:19.599 --> 00:38:25.119
I've also finished a draft of a novel that I'm working on that also takes place during the Second World War.
00:38:25.199 --> 00:38:30.880
So we'll see whether that sees the light of day or just as something on the laptop for years to come.
00:38:31.440 --> 00:38:33.920
Todd, thanks for your time this morning.
00:38:34.239 --> 00:38:36.960
I knew it was gonna be educational.
00:38:37.360 --> 00:38:40.079
It's actually been better than that.
00:38:40.639 --> 00:38:56.159
Because I now feel as though I, and hopefully my listeners have a much, much better steer on what's going on in the States, but also how that relates to the American psyche.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:38:57.920
Todd, thank you very much.
00:38:58.000 --> 00:39:00.320
I hope it's not too long before I see you again.
00:39:00.480 --> 00:39:01.360
Thank you so much.
00:39:01.679 --> 00:39:03.119
Good to be with you, Jeremy.
00:39:03.280 --> 00:39:04.079
Thank you.
00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:29.679
One of the most respected broadcasters on this side of the water recently ended a very uncharacteristic terade about the US president with the words sod off Trump.
00:00:30.320 --> 00:00:35.039
And I wouldn't have been the only listener to cheer, quite frankly.
00:00:35.359 --> 00:00:40.159
But now we are a month or so away from the American midterms.
00:00:40.719 --> 00:00:46.399
I think it's about time to get an insider's take on what's going on over there.
00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:49.119
And maybe a defense, who knows?
00:00:49.439 --> 00:00:55.679
My guest, because it falls entirely on your shoulders, Todd Buchholz.
00:00:56.159 --> 00:00:58.640
Welcome to Just Between Us, by the way.
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You're going to tell us just about everything we need to know about America, and indeed the world and the stage and everything else.
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But first of all, how are you?
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Well, it's a lovely morning in Southern California.
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I look out the window, I'm not seeing fires.
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I'm sitting in my chair.
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It's not vibrating from an earthquake.
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We're off to a good start.
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Jeremy, the uh the old comedian George Burns.
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Sunshine Boy.
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Sunshine Boys, yeah.
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He used to say when he was in his 90s and still performing, he would say, Well, I wake up in the morning and first thing I do is open up the newspaper to the obituary page.
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And if I don't see myself, I have breakfast.
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So, no fires, no earthquakes, no obituaries.
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Everything's good here.
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Now, listen, we need to talk.
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And first of all, I like to take a hop, a skip, and indeed sometimes to jump through my guests' background.
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So I've got a number of things written down on my screen in front of me.
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You were White House Director of Economic Policy under George W.
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Bush.
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You have headed a$15 billion hedge fund.
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Along the way, you've won Harvard's Economics Teaching Prize.
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You've written a whole lot of books, and dear listener, I have to say that behind Todd, in his study, I assume, is a display of books, all of which today's guest has written.
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And they range from ones that simply took my eye.
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Market Shock about economic and social upheaval, which happens, I think, to have been written before the crash.
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You have written and did very well with two books, New Ideas from Dead Economists, and New Ideas from Dead CEOs.
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You've written a novel.
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I haven't read it, I'd be honest with you, a crime thriller called The Castro Gene.
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And more recently, which I do want to talk about in a minute, you've written something called The Price of Prosperity, Why Rich Nations Fail and How to Renew Them.
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And when you're not making money for other people or writing books, you have invented a maths.
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Oh sorry.
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I'll use the American a math matrix, which, according to the blurb, makes numbers more intuitive to children.
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Not necessarily me.
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I tried to get my head around it.
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And I think maybe it was just too small on the screen.
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So it's an age problem rather than an intellect problem.
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Fascinatingly, you co-produce, you are one of the co-producers of the global hit musical Jersey Boys.
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And to bring us up to date this year with your daughter, you have put on stage a new musical for which you wrote the lyrics and the music and the book together, I understand.
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But feel free to take credit away from your daughter, called Glory Ride, which is all about a wartime Italian bicycle rider.
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We're gonna come back to that.
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I mean, I've just dramatically downplayed the musical, so I'll give you an opportunity to blow it back up again in a good way.
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So that's an incredible ride through your background, or rather a ride through your incredible background.
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And I know I've left a lot of things out, but can we come back to various things and start with what the hell's going on on your side of the water?
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Because as I say, we're having this conversation at the beginning of October, so before the midterms, but at the moment we are being told the polls are not looking at all good for Trump.
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And even, although this might be done to individual races rather than any wider trend, in places like Texas and Kansas, which have always been Republican.
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So tell us what's happening.
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Are the old Republicans, the so-called country club lot, are they all deserting him?
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Is it about Iran?
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Is it his authoritarian figure or the fact that it's a fruitcake?
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What's happening politically and why?
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There's a war in Iran.
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And petrol, gasoline, is expensive.
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And interest rates have crept higher.
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And people do not feel as if their standard of living has risen.
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And Trump is the president, so therefore he has to take a significant part of the blame.
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Now we could break apart each of those one by one.
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If there weren't a war in Iran, the price of energy would be quite cheap.
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It had fallen.
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Trump's policies of drill, drill, drill, whether you one opposes on environmental grounds or is in favor of it on economic grounds.
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It was pushing energy prices lower.
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And then we've gotten mired into a war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz.
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And that has made the cost of living more expensive.
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And the American people are not very forgiving about that sort of thing.
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At the same time, interest rates are higher, which makes it more expensive to buy a house.
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And this these two factors are the same all over the world.
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Interest rates are higher around the world, and energy prices are higher around the world.
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And so President Biden, in my book, had been a miserable president.
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He was hardly there.
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I mean, he was might as well have had Madame Tussaud's wax works do a Biden statue and put it in the Oval Office.
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But he's gone.
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So it's can't blame him anymore.
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So Donald Trump is bearing the brunt of this.
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How bad will the elections be?
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Well, the Republican majority is narrow to begin with.
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Republicans only have an advantage of basically three or four seats in both the Senate, our upper house, and the House of Representatives, our lower house.
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And in the House of Representatives, that's an advantage of three when you're talking about a total of 435 seats.
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So it was just a sliver of a majority that he had.
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And now it's most likely that he'd lose that.
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But that's not the same as a vote on whether Democrats should now take over the government.
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So if the American people had to vote now, as it would be more in a parliamentary regime, do you want the Tories or do you want labor?
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It's unclear to me that the American people would say, oh, we want labor back in, or in this case, we want the Democrats back in.
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Here it's a matter of we we want to punish or express our disappointment in certain parts of the economy.
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That also absolutely fascinates me.
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Because so much of the coverage over here is about Trump as an individual.
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It's about the executive orders.
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It's about renaming AI SI, it's about the triumphal arch or the West Wing or a number of things which we don't take as the truth or reality.
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We hear about economic policy, we hear about the cost at the pumps, but most of us on this side of the water, I suspect, spend more time worrying about his creeping authoritarianism than we do about the cost to the American cost of living.
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But Jeremy, I I would I would say that you can call it creeping authoritarianism, but the creeping won't go on for law because he is, as we call it, a lame duck.
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He can't run again.
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He's not going to be able to change the constitution to be president.
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He's about 80 years old.
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So he's going to be in the rearview mirror.
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In fact, as soon as the elections are over in the first week of November, Republicans will be airlifting themselves, hitchhiking, driving, hopping on trucks or rail cars to get to Iowa, the state of Iowa, which has the first caucus, the first sort of pseudo-election within the party to decide who's going to take Trump's place.
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So he is going to be fading.
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Now he doesn't want to fade, which is why he wants his name slapped across the Kennedy Center and every other mark that he can put up.
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But I think that what you are describing, the Trump personality expressing itself in ways that seem certainly unprecedented and in some cases outrageous.
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For the American people, that's more like reality TV entertainment.
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It's not actually what's driving their votes.
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And when the American people look at both parties, they see either party has a prescription to attend to go to an insane asylum.
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You can cite the various things Trump has done.
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Oh, Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, and so on and so forth.
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But then you go back to the Democratic Party, and this is a party where scientists, doctors, Supreme Court justices will testify before Congress and claim they don't know the difference between a man and a woman.
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Because they've been so co-opted by what is politically current that they take their logical brains and their knowledge and they put it in a lockbox somewhere because they don't want to offend.
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So there's craziness in both parties.
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Trump's craziness might be a little bit more entertaining, maybe a little bit more scary if you're concerned that he could stay in power.
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But I do not believe that's what the American people are voting on.
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They're voting with their pockets.
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You know, remember Ronald Reagan was obviously a controversial figure, but in 1984, when he ran for re-election, he was able to display advertisements with American flags being raised in parks around the country, and the slogan was it's morning in America.
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And he didn't mean morning with a U, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, but it was morning.
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It was break of day, it was a new day.
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Well, in the midst of a war and uh higher prices, it's hard for that kind of message to be said.
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So Republicans will be losing seats, most likely.
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That makes complete sense, but would make more sense if the war were outside of Donald Trump's control.
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That's one of the things that pushes it over the edge for me.
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Because it was his decision to go in in the way that he did, and indeed, as of now to stay in.
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But I am interested, as will lots of listeners be, once Trump has gone.
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The question is simple.
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What will be left of what we used to call the New World Order?
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Has it changed forever?
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I don't think it's changed forever.
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And of course, I think it depends who comes to power after Trump.
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You look at the Trump White House and the administration, and right now it would seem to be the two leading candidates are the vice president, J.D.
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Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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And I think those are very different characters, both having served in the Senate previously, Rubio for a much longer time.
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And Rubio, I believe, is an inter more of an internationalist, though he is someone who believes in what we call or what the world calls American exceptionalism.
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And why shouldn't he think America is exceptional?
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His family fled Cuba and came to the States, and then he became a congressman and then a senator and a secretary of state.
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There aren't too many countries in the world where that would have been possible.
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So he believes in that, but I don't see him on foreign policy in the same category as J.D.
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Vance, because it was J.D.
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Vance who sat Zelensky down on a sofa in the Oval Office and shouted him down.
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It was J.D.
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Vance who claimed he had a deal with the Iranians as if they could be trusted in these negotiations.
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And those who doubted him, he criticized.
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So I think if you have a J.D.
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Vance presidency, that does seem to be closer to a continuation of Trump.
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Marco Rubio, I think, would not necessarily be a continuation of Trump's policies.
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Having said that, there's an asterisk.
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J.D.
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Vance doesn't have a long history, and he's been on different sides of the equation.
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Your listeners can Google within a moment and find various quotations where he not just criticizes Trump prior to his appointment as vice president or election as vice president, but indeed is lacerating of Trump.
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So JD Vance is unpredictable.
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Some people would say he's opportunistic, but I think the world would be comforted by a Marco Rubio presidency.
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Yeah.
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You mentioned in passing, you mentioned Cuba.
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Before he goes, is Trump gonna um take over Cuba?
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I was looking for a euphemism, but I couldn't find one.
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You know, the remarkable thing about Trump, and when I give speeches to business audiences, I say, here's what you need to know about Donald Trump's mind.
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He is the mind of my grandfather.
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My grandpa Sam was a developer, and he actually knew and was sort of a colleague and sometimes friend of Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father, because they both were building homes along the eastern seaboard between World War II and the 1970s.
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And one of the titles that the president of the United States has is commander in chief.
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I think we would be wise to think of him as developer-in-chief.
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What does it mean to be a developer-in-chief?
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A developer doesn't care so much about the old, the past.
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He wants new.
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He wants to build again and tear down and not shed a tear when he tears down.
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In fact, there was a 1980s story in the New York Times about Donald Trump.
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This was before he became famous, so his name was not in the headline.
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But when he built Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, he tore down the Bonwood Teller building, which was a department store.
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Well, at the top or on the facade of that building, were certain statues that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had wanted.
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But they were just torn down and pummeled into smithereens the way the rest of the building was, so there could be a new building.
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That tabula rasa, to use the Latin phrase, blank slate mentality, shows up in the Trump presidency.
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That's why, Jeremy, he can wake up in the morning and say, Gulf of Mexico, no, Gulf of America, Canada, 51st state, Greenland, 52nd state.
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Why not?
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So he has that freedom of thought.
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Some people might say no respect and a disdain for history.
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Yeah, and it's not a very conservative way to be.
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But it isn't, I guess, freeing.
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I guess, you know, I'd feel pretty free if I didn't feel I had to preserve anything in my life.
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But that's the Donald Trump mentality.
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And that's the best way to think of his daring.
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It's not simply he wants to do something daring like take over Cuba.
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It's that he doesn't care that Fidel Castro's regime had been there since 1959.
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That's such wonderful insight, Dodd.
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It really is.
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That's so clear.
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Just tell me quickly before we move on.
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Have you spent time with Trump?
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I have, but not intensely.
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And not, you know, I certainly do not consider myself an advisor.
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I've met him, I've been in rooms with him.
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I've spoken a little bit, but I don't want to give the impression that I've I've been whispering in his ear.
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In fact, at this moment, let me just correct one thing in your introduction.
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I was director of economic policy for the first Bush for George Herbert Walker Bush.
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Aha.
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Or W.
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Bush, I was an outside advisor, but not within the gates.
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Thank you.
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That makes a great deal of sense.
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When I was looking at that before, I was thinking of the dates.
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I Jeremy, you're supposed to follow that up by saying, but Todd you look too youthful to have been at the end.
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Okay, we'll do that again.
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We'll do that again.
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Oh, so you were director of economic policy for George H.
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Todd, I don't see that that's possible because you are too young looking for that to be true.
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Okay, we've done that now.
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We can move on.
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Now, this book of yours, we're getting on to talk about some economic stuff.
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I read and wrote down the blurb about your book, The Price of Prosperity.
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And I want to read it out very quickly because I think it's fascinating.
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Without common purpose and shared identity, nations can collapse.
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Reckless financial markets encourage gambling.
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A coddling culture removes the stigma of educational underachievement.
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Newcomers are watched with suspicion and contempt.
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That is an absolutely fascinating snapshot.
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You wrote that in the 2010s, I believe, although I think you've probably updated it since.
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But that background fascinates me because in some ways we can see the mirror image over here.
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You certainly can in London, which, as we all know, and you know London well, I guess, it's a global city, so it's not surprising that you'd see similar things if you look out of the window.
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What's your conclusion then?
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What is your what do you call it?
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Where rich nations fail and how to renew them.
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So where do we go from there to wherever we're going next?
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Because I think you'd agree that wherever it is, we ain't there yet.
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I think we've learned that nations are fragile things.
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Nations are fragile things.
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The US national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, ends with a question.
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Oh, say does that star-spangled banner still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
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There's a question mark.
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Because the writer Francis Scott Key penned that during the War of 1812, and there was bombing going on in Baltimore, and the nation had only been declared independent in 1776.
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So it hadn't been around very long.
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And at that point, there'd been various young nations that had been throttled in their youth.
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There was a Republic of Genoa and you know various others that just simply didn't make it.
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And you look at the history of regimes, countries, nations that had seemed strong and they didn't make it.
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My wife's grandmother passed away at a hundred and five and a half recently.
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Of course, when you get to 105, you count those halves, right?
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When she was born, there was a Habsburg Empire.
00:20:45.119 --> 00:20:47.519
There was an Ottoman Empire.
00:20:47.839 --> 00:20:54.720
And the Habsburg Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire controlled a half of Europe and it's gone.
00:20:54.960 --> 00:20:57.279
The Ottoman Empire, I've never met an Ottoman.
00:21:01.039 --> 00:21:02.240
I've never met an Ottoman.
00:21:02.400 --> 00:21:07.920
But the Ottoman Empire controlled all of the Middle East and parts of Africa, and they're gone.
00:21:08.240 --> 00:21:09.440
And why?
00:21:09.839 --> 00:21:20.960
Because they frayed, the stitching was ripped apart, there was not enough centrifugal force or commonality to keep things together.
00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:35.039
And when you look at modern economies, whether it's the UK or the US or France and Germany and others, and you see that in order to prosper, you have to engage in international trade, and that's a good thing.
00:21:35.359 --> 00:21:45.839
But if you don't have some kind of common principles, if you don't believe in a common history, then the country has no reason to stay together.
00:21:45.920 --> 00:21:48.720
And that's why those empires fell.
00:21:48.880 --> 00:21:49.920
And I worry about that.
00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:52.240
I worry deeply, especially in the UK.
00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:55.680
I've spent a lot of time in London and in the UK.
00:21:55.920 --> 00:22:03.519
And when we were rehearsing our musical Glory Ride, we were rehearsing a Bishopsgate, you know, near Liverpool Liverpool Station.
00:22:03.839 --> 00:22:08.240
And I remember when we had to get some scripts copied again.
00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:14.240
It must have been on a Sunday, or the conventional copy companies printers were not open.
00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:19.759
So I ended up basically jogging east of Liverpool Station.
00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.880
And the further I got east, the further I felt, oh, I was very east.
00:22:25.119 --> 00:22:30.240
I felt I was in Afghanistan, not in London.
00:22:30.480 --> 00:22:34.400
And I'm not saying that in a pejorative way.
00:22:34.559 --> 00:22:39.359
I'm just saying if you were to take a snapshot, you would not know you were in London.
00:22:39.519 --> 00:22:40.240
Is that a problem?
00:22:40.400 --> 00:22:41.920
It doesn't have to be a problem.
00:22:42.160 --> 00:23:06.559
If I speak to people in that neighborhood and they tell me they care about Gladstone, they know about Winston Churchill, they have some idea of the Second World War and the sacrifices that were made and the principles of the Magna Carta, and they want Britain to survive and prevail.
00:23:06.799 --> 00:23:09.759
Then I don't care if all the signs are in languages I can't read.
00:23:09.920 --> 00:23:15.440
Churchill said if the British Empire lasts for another thousand years, they will say this is our finest hour.
00:23:15.759 --> 00:23:27.519
You have to ask how many of residents in London or within the UK really care whether the empire lasts another thousand years.
00:23:27.680 --> 00:23:31.200
If we get the empire, whether the city or the country does.
00:23:31.680 --> 00:23:41.920
I think it's a fair question, but I also think that your observation is the geography is very interesting.
00:23:42.400 --> 00:23:58.880
Because what you're talking about is finding yourself in parts of the old East End around a place called Shoritch and that kind of area, just east of the city of London.
00:23:59.680 --> 00:24:26.079
And between 100 and 150 years ago, you would have made the same observation, except that rather than seeing people from Bangladesh and possibly Syria and a number of other countries, you'd have found a very large number of Jewish immigrants, including a number of my ancestors, and most of them, talking between themselves, would have spoken in Yiddish.
00:24:26.319 --> 00:24:36.880
It just so happens that that area has continued to be from the days of the Huguenots from France, so 100 years or more before then, my history isn't good.
00:24:37.119 --> 00:24:41.759
It's been a settling point for first-generation immigrants.
00:24:41.920 --> 00:24:45.440
And then when they make a bit of money, they go out east further into the coast.
00:24:45.920 --> 00:24:56.319
By the way, listener, if you haven't already, I commend to you the Just Between Us episode with my own aunt, who is also 105 and a half.
00:24:56.480 --> 00:24:59.279
In fact, coming up to 106, I think, in November.
00:24:59.599 --> 00:25:01.759
Well, I'm glad you interviewed her before me.
00:25:01.839 --> 00:25:03.680
You really have to prioritize these.
00:25:04.160 --> 00:25:05.440
Well, I think that's true.
00:25:05.599 --> 00:25:06.799
I wouldn't argue with that.
00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:19.359
And she talked about how at home everyone around her was talking in Yiddish, but she didn't want to and ran away from Hebrew lessons and blah, blah, blah.
00:25:19.519 --> 00:25:22.559
Which is maybe more of a comment on my aunt than anything else.
00:25:22.720 --> 00:25:23.440
I appreciate that.
00:25:23.599 --> 00:25:25.039
So let's move on to another.
00:25:25.279 --> 00:25:30.880
A coddling culture removes the stigma of educational underachievement.
00:25:31.279 --> 00:25:38.799
We had in this country, the same in the UK, this self-esteem movement for a generation.
00:25:39.759 --> 00:25:44.559
So uh there was a survey done in the uh Washington, D.C.
00:25:44.720 --> 00:25:48.799
school district, and then tests done, objective tests.
00:25:49.200 --> 00:25:51.279
And the students in the Washington, D.C.
00:25:51.519 --> 00:25:57.359
school district graded themselves as very strong in maths.
00:25:58.559 --> 00:26:01.039
But it turned out they were terrible.
00:26:01.359 --> 00:26:17.119
They thought they were great, but they were awful because the teacher spent more time boosting them up, giving them trophies for being so strong that they actually didn't spend much time learning how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
00:26:17.440 --> 00:26:30.640
And actually, there was a story just a week or two ago about a woman who writes for the New York Times who wrote a controversial essay that became a movement called the 1619 Project.
00:26:30.880 --> 00:26:34.079
And the point is, she happened to be an African-American.
00:26:34.240 --> 00:26:35.759
She placed her daughter.
00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:39.920
The woman could get her daughter into almost any school she wanted.
00:26:40.160 --> 00:26:46.000
She placed her in a low-performing school, largely African-American population.
00:26:46.160 --> 00:26:50.799
Well, the daughter is now 16 years old and is outraged at her mother.
00:26:51.119 --> 00:26:58.640
And it turns out that this daughter was told that she was very strong in maths.
00:26:58.880 --> 00:27:06.319
And she's now discovered as she's applying university or contemplating university that she is terribly ill-prepared.
00:27:06.559 --> 00:27:11.279
And so that's why, you know, I you had cited the word coddled.
00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:18.559
It doesn't do much good for someone's self-esteem to tell them something that they eventually will discover.
00:27:18.720 --> 00:27:26.720
The best way to get esteem is to do something worthy of esteem and earn it.
00:27:26.960 --> 00:27:32.000
There was an actor and producer who was the producing partner of Orson Wells.
00:27:32.160 --> 00:27:34.160
His name was John Houseman.
00:27:34.400 --> 00:27:38.559
And John Houseman had a kind of pseudo-British accent.
00:27:38.799 --> 00:27:40.079
I think he was born in Romania.
00:27:40.240 --> 00:27:41.440
I think he lived anyway.
00:27:41.519 --> 00:27:44.799
He may have affected a British accent, but it was very persuasive to Americans.
00:27:44.960 --> 00:27:53.839
And he starred in a movie called The Paper Chase, and it was a television series about an authoritarian professor at Harvard Law School.
00:27:54.079 --> 00:28:00.480
And this same actor, John Houseman, was contracted by a financial firm, a brokerage house, called E.F.
00:28:00.640 --> 00:28:01.119
Hutton.
00:28:01.440 --> 00:28:09.599
And the ad campaign was him in his very stentorian tone saying, We make money the old-fashioned way.
00:28:09.920 --> 00:28:11.279
We earn it.
00:28:11.599 --> 00:28:13.599
Well, there is something to that.
00:28:13.680 --> 00:28:28.079
You know, it was kind of haughty and a little obnoxious at the time, but it doesn't do children any good to tell them they're good at something, and then for them to discover with broken hearts that in fact they may have wasted a lot of time pretending.
00:28:28.400 --> 00:28:31.759
I think you and I agree so much on this that we ought to move on.
00:28:31.920 --> 00:28:32.880
Let's talk briefly.
00:28:32.960 --> 00:28:34.160
I know time's sticking away.
00:28:34.400 --> 00:28:44.319
And I know, because a birdie told me that you have a meeting coming up with Stallone's management, which obviously I want to ask you to spill the beans on.
00:28:44.400 --> 00:28:49.839
But before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about the markets and investment and that side of things.
00:28:50.160 --> 00:28:57.119
Because in Price of Prosperity, you also criticize reckless financial markets.
00:28:57.440 --> 00:29:01.680
And I am not in the least bit informed about this.
00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:08.240
But it seems to be that there is this great AI-related boom going on.
00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:17.440
And it seems to be that not all these companies are going to be able to deliver on what they claim to be their promise.
00:29:17.759 --> 00:29:22.480
That it seems to me that the bubble is going to burst at some point.
00:29:22.799 --> 00:29:30.400
True, likely, or not at all likely, it's going to carry on from strength to strength for these reasons.
00:29:30.880 --> 00:29:35.759
Yes, well, sure, it'll carry on strength to strength till it destroys the entire world.
00:29:35.920 --> 00:29:38.799
And it looks like the end of some Bruce Willis movie or something.
00:29:38.960 --> 00:29:41.279
I actually don't think that we're facing the end of the world.
00:29:41.440 --> 00:29:48.400
I think the best analogy is to the beginning of the automobile industry in the early 20th century.
00:29:49.279 --> 00:30:06.799
There were literally thousands of automobile makers, thousands of them around the world, throughout Europe, but through the United States alone, and thousands of auto companies in the early days making cars, not just little bits, not just, oh, the thousands that made ashtrays and brake pads.
00:30:06.880 --> 00:30:09.519
No, there are thousands that made full cars.
00:30:09.839 --> 00:30:13.279
But only three survived.
00:30:13.359 --> 00:30:18.240
That is, for many decades, we talked about the big three: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler.
00:30:18.559 --> 00:30:20.880
Did that mean the auto industry didn't survive?
00:30:21.039 --> 00:30:26.400
No, the auto industry thrived and became pretty much the biggest industry in the country.
00:30:26.559 --> 00:30:28.960
But thousands and thousands went bankrupt.
00:30:29.119 --> 00:30:33.440
So we look at artificial intelligence and data centers and so on.
00:30:33.599 --> 00:30:39.599
And I think the industry itself and the promise of the industry is enormous.
00:30:39.920 --> 00:30:43.920
But can we figure out in advance who the survivors are?
00:30:44.160 --> 00:30:48.079
I think that's a pretty difficult thing from an investment point of view.
00:30:48.319 --> 00:30:57.839
Having said that, there are certain companies at any particular time that look nearly untouchable and in almost monopoly positions.
00:30:58.079 --> 00:31:04.240
And you look at NVIDIA today, does lead the world in chip intelligence.
00:31:04.480 --> 00:31:07.440
And no one else seems particularly close.
00:31:07.599 --> 00:31:08.799
Will they have that forever?
00:31:09.039 --> 00:31:10.720
Well, I doubt forever.
00:31:10.960 --> 00:31:19.599
There was a time when we all walked around in the 80s with Sony Walkman, and Sony had all the portable audio products.
00:31:19.839 --> 00:31:22.000
And we thought, well, they're the best.
00:31:22.160 --> 00:31:24.240
And then Apple came out with the iPod.
00:31:24.319 --> 00:31:30.319
And I don't, you know, really haven't heard of Sony since, except for flat screen TVs and a few other products.
00:31:30.640 --> 00:31:40.400
So at any snapshot in time, we'll point out certain companies that seem as if maybe they will be eternal.
00:31:40.640 --> 00:31:47.119
But markets are ferocious in finding weaknesses and exploiting them.
00:31:47.279 --> 00:31:56.400
So, bottom line, Jeremy, I think AI is truly a big deal and will continue to be a big deal from an investment point of view.
00:31:56.640 --> 00:32:08.960
I would advise investors who want to be part of that to invest in a broad way and not think they can figure out which specific company is going to be the big winner in the next five to ten years.
00:32:09.279 --> 00:32:14.000
If you had a spare billion, that might not be a hypothetical question for all I know.
00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:17.359
So with your spare billion, where would you put it right now?
00:32:17.680 --> 00:32:20.720
Well, if I had a spare billion, I might buy a baseball.
00:32:21.039 --> 00:32:24.319
No, that you can't even buy, you can't buy a sports club anymore, can you?
00:32:24.559 --> 00:32:26.960
So look, I would take the advice I'm giving.
00:32:27.200 --> 00:32:35.839
I do think that over time, and I'll speak for the U.S., because I have less confidence in the equity markets abroad.
00:32:36.079 --> 00:32:37.039
I think the U.S.
00:32:37.200 --> 00:32:40.960
equity market in the long run will continue to be strong.
00:32:41.039 --> 00:32:46.240
So a broad base of stocks is where a majority should go.
00:32:46.319 --> 00:32:54.319
And then obviously you need some, or if you had a million dollars, a billion dollars, you probably don't really have to have security.
00:32:54.559 --> 00:33:11.440
But I think the same advice I'd give a billionaire, I would give to somebody who has a couple fewer zeros than that, which is 60 or 70 percent of your funds should be placing a bet on innovation continuing.
00:33:11.680 --> 00:33:13.920
And keep an eye on the political process.
00:33:14.079 --> 00:33:22.400
If the US turns into some sort of authoritarian regime, and if tariffs go on forever, then I would shave back that ratio.
00:33:22.720 --> 00:33:23.039
Okay.
00:33:23.359 --> 00:33:24.079
Thank you very much.
00:33:24.240 --> 00:33:28.160
Sorry to be so cheeky as to ask for that advice for nothing.
00:33:28.400 --> 00:33:44.319
Now, I want to go to the most important subject, which is this musical that you have written with your daughter, because you gave it a run in London and in the US as well, but that ain't going to be the last of it.
00:33:44.480 --> 00:33:49.519
My assumption is that you want to see it propping up the West End.
00:33:49.599 --> 00:33:53.920
You want to see it in lights on the West End and on Broadway.
00:33:54.160 --> 00:33:55.440
So, how's it going?
00:33:55.599 --> 00:33:56.799
What stage are you at now?
00:33:57.119 --> 00:33:57.759
Thank you, Jeremy.
00:33:58.079 --> 00:33:58.960
It's going very well.
00:33:59.119 --> 00:34:04.799
We did a an early developmental production at the Charing Cross Theater a few years ago.
00:34:05.039 --> 00:34:06.880
And we were very proud of that production.
00:34:07.119 --> 00:34:18.719
And we decided after that we needed to make the show really cool so that young people and old people would be screaming and crying and laughing.
00:34:18.960 --> 00:34:20.320
And so we worked very hard.
00:34:20.400 --> 00:34:23.280
And I should I should summarize for your listeners what it's about.
00:34:23.440 --> 00:34:24.719
So it's called Glory Ride.
00:34:24.800 --> 00:34:28.719
It's based on a true, amazing story from the Second World War.
00:34:28.960 --> 00:34:34.800
Basically, the film was the most famous athlete in Italy, and that's where it takes place in Florence, Italy.
00:34:34.880 --> 00:34:37.360
And who doesn't want to go to Tuscany for a couple hours?
00:34:37.679 --> 00:34:41.199
The most famous athlete in Italy was a cyclist named Gino Bartoli.
00:34:41.360 --> 00:34:43.360
He won the Tour de France in 1938.
00:34:43.519 --> 00:34:50.880
So then the war comes, and the Cardinal of Florence comes to him, and he's sitting out the war because Mussolini idolizes him.
00:34:50.960 --> 00:34:52.000
He doesn't have to fight.
00:34:52.239 --> 00:34:55.199
The Cardinal of Florence comes to him and says, Gino, you have to help us.
00:34:55.280 --> 00:34:57.199
And Gino says, Well, what are you talking about?
00:34:57.360 --> 00:35:02.719
And the cardinal explains, look, the Nazis are now on the other side of the river in Florence.
00:35:02.880 --> 00:35:08.960
The black shirts are rounding up gypsies, Jews, Slavs, Greeks, and sending them to the camps in Germany.
00:35:09.039 --> 00:35:09.519
You have to help.
00:35:09.679 --> 00:35:12.239
And the cyclist is, What do you want from me?
00:35:12.400 --> 00:35:13.199
I have a bicycle.
00:35:13.360 --> 00:35:14.400
I have a yellow shirt.
00:35:14.559 --> 00:35:15.840
Find somebody with tanks.
00:35:16.079 --> 00:35:17.119
I can't help you.
00:35:17.280 --> 00:35:20.000
And the cardinal says, wait, don't you understand?
00:35:20.320 --> 00:35:27.440
Because of your fame and because of your bicycle, you are the only guy who can get past the fascist checkpoints.
00:35:27.599 --> 00:35:30.000
We've been hiding children all over Tuscany.
00:35:30.159 --> 00:35:35.280
We need you to send those passports and visas so these kids can get out.
00:35:35.440 --> 00:35:36.880
So he embarks on this mission.
00:35:36.960 --> 00:35:43.039
It's kind of a, we've turned it into a heist, an accountant, a cardinal of the Catholic Church, and a cyclist.
00:35:43.199 --> 00:35:48.800
Fool the fascists and get hundreds out of fascist Italy before they're going to be murdered.
00:35:49.039 --> 00:35:49.760
True story.
00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:53.519
Then the same cyclist in 1948 wins the Tour de France again.
00:35:53.679 --> 00:35:58.480
10 years after his first victory, oldest guy ever to win, he doesn't tell anybody what he did during the war.
00:35:58.639 --> 00:36:00.159
Then he dies in 2000.
00:36:00.400 --> 00:36:04.159
And some old people say, oh, you know, he saved my life, and no one believes them.
00:36:04.320 --> 00:36:09.599
And then it's only been the last 10 or 15 years it's been divulged, the story we tell in Glory Ride.
00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:14.639
So we took what we did in London a few years ago and we reimagined it.
00:36:14.800 --> 00:36:21.119
And now it's kind of a modern, energetic, more Hamilton-ish telling of the story.
00:36:21.199 --> 00:36:24.559
And we broke the box office records at the Delaware Theater Company.
00:36:24.639 --> 00:36:25.280
And now you're right.
00:36:25.360 --> 00:36:29.360
We are looking for a West End theater and looking to bring it to New York as well.
00:36:29.599 --> 00:36:36.639
So if Andrew Lloyd Weber, if Nika Burns, or if the folks who run ATG are listening, we are ready.
00:36:36.960 --> 00:36:43.679
Well, I used to know Nika very well, but um I have no idea whether she's listening or not, but I'm sure she knows.
00:36:43.840 --> 00:36:47.840
I did a TV pilot with Nika once, which I'll tell you about off-air.
00:36:48.239 --> 00:36:51.920
Not because I'm being secretive, but because it's not that interesting a story.
00:36:52.159 --> 00:36:54.800
Would you and your daughter do a musical about Trump?
00:36:56.880 --> 00:36:59.039
Oh, here's how we're gonna answer that.
00:36:59.280 --> 00:37:03.199
In Glory Ride, it takes place during World War II, as I said.
00:37:03.599 --> 00:37:11.760
When we wrote the first script and did the first kind of rehearsal, we actually had Mussolini as a character.
00:37:12.079 --> 00:37:18.000
And then we decided that it brings too much expectation.
00:37:18.079 --> 00:37:19.840
Oh, does it look like Mussolini?
00:37:19.920 --> 00:37:20.960
How bald is he?
00:37:21.039 --> 00:37:24.960
How does it and it dominates the storytelling itself?
00:37:25.280 --> 00:37:28.960
So Trump, maybe 20 years from now, it could be different.
00:37:29.199 --> 00:37:39.360
But at this point, the question of Trump and mimicry and and so on would be so dominating that I don't think you could get a story that would touch people.
00:37:39.440 --> 00:37:43.039
And that's what you want in a novel, in a musical, in a drama.
00:37:43.199 --> 00:37:47.440
You want people's feelings to be tapped into, and not simply feelings of rage.
00:37:47.599 --> 00:37:49.840
Oh, I hate him, he's such a so-and-so.
00:37:50.239 --> 00:37:51.760
So the answer would be no.
00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:56.480
Better to do a story about someone who is a little bit further into the past.
00:37:56.880 --> 00:37:58.000
I get it completely.
00:37:58.159 --> 00:38:01.360
So, okay, one very last question.
00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:08.239
What I'm not a journalist, but I share the love of scoops.
00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:13.519
What's your next, apart from Glory Ride, what's your next big thing?
00:38:13.920 --> 00:38:19.280
Yeah, look, I'm working on another economics book, but that's in early stages.
00:38:19.599 --> 00:38:25.119
I've also finished a draft of a novel that I'm working on that also takes place during the Second World War.
00:38:25.199 --> 00:38:30.880
So we'll see whether that sees the light of day or just as something on the laptop for years to come.
00:38:31.440 --> 00:38:33.920
Todd, thanks for your time this morning.
00:38:34.239 --> 00:38:36.960
I knew it was gonna be educational.
00:38:37.360 --> 00:38:40.079
It's actually been better than that.
00:38:40.639 --> 00:38:56.159
Because I now feel as though I, and hopefully my listeners have a much, much better steer on what's going on in the States, but also how that relates to the American psyche.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:38:57.920
Todd, thank you very much.
00:38:58.000 --> 00:39:00.320
I hope it's not too long before I see you again.
00:39:00.480 --> 00:39:01.360
Thank you so much.
00:39:01.679 --> 00:39:03.119
Good to be with you, Jeremy.
00:39:03.280 --> 00:39:04.079
Thank you.
