Embrace Your Inner Chaos Monkey

Show Notes

Dan opened this one by reading me a tweet from Nat Eliason — the Made You Think guy — declaring that the Fourth Turning is over. It started around 2008, ended with this election, and unlike past turnings it never came with a hot war, just a civil information war plus COVID. Now, in Nat's telling, it's time for reconstruction and a golden age. I wasn't ready to sign that lease. My read is we're still mid-cycle — the pandemic may well have been the ekpyrosis, that culminating crisis event the way World War II was for the last turning, but I don't think the burning-down has even really begun. Dan and I have circled this book — Neil Howe's, published back in 1997 — what feels like every fourth episode, and 27 years later we're still chewing on it, which says something.

What I kept noticing, though, was a shift in the people around me. Dan works with folks who lean hard one way or the other, and lately he's hearing more questions than statements — they say these tariffs will help us, but will they really? — where a year ago he'd have heard certainties. That brought us to the silent-Trump-voter thing, the dinner guest who agrees with you all night and then quietly votes the other way, which is part of why 2016 and this election both landed as shocks. People feel like things aren't working quite right everywhere, and a lot of them are, frankly, in the mood for some chaos.

The meatiest stretch was a piece Dan shared from Stephen Miran, a Treasury advisor from the back half of Trump's first term, on how you'd actually design a tariff regime that doesn't blow up the economy. My prior was simple: slap a flat 10% on everything and you get instant inflation. Miran's argument is more careful. He looked back at the roughly 18% net tariffs we put on China last time and found only about 4% came through as goods inflation — the rest got eaten by a currency revaluation, the dollar weakening against the renminbi to offset it. The deeper point is that the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency keeps it overstrong: when India and South Korea trade, they trade in dollars, foreigners buy dollars to do it, foreign money piles into US stocks, and that inflated dollar quietly subsidizes the flight of manufacturing offshore. So Miran's pitch is to phase tariffs in a point or two at a time, set them by your position with each partner, and use them as a geopolitical lever — IP compliance for a lower rate. I marked that paper up in red, blue, and yellow, and I came away genuinely interested, which surprised me.

From there we sprawled, the way we do. We poked at the idea of nuking a department like Education — which doesn't employ that many people but distributes enormous federal funds, so the real question is whether you end up putting a stranglehold on municipal governments and someone loses trash service in five years. And we landed on entitlements, because the Fourth Turning folks were confident we'd have to retool Social Security and Medicaid, and the CBO is right there flagging trouble in the 2030s if nothing changes. I floated an inverse Social Security: right now we take money from young people trying to buy a house and have kids and hand it to old people, some of whom are sitting on five million dollars. Means-test it. Nobody likes those words. Dan reminded me end-of-life care is brutally expensive and that money might be the only thing standing between someone and a half-million-dollar medical event — and that the inheritance arrives when the kids are 55, not at 35 when they actually need it. I told him about the house across the street from me in Houston, a mother and a teenage son with a literal hole in their roof, which is the thing that grounds me when I start theorizing.

We didn't solve any of it, and that was sort of the point. Dan brought up Factfulness — Hans Rosling's book, which I'd handed him — and its reminder that extreme poverty is at record lows and most of the world's kids are now vaccinated, that things genuinely keep getting better if you step back far enough to see the forest. Maybe the move isn't to jam a mixer into the bowl; maybe there's enough entropy on its own if we just let things happen. Then again, even in the best time in human history there'll always be a big enough group hollering grenades in the room, please — and Dan thinks we might be living exactly that moment. When he asked me, more ennui or joie de vivre these past two weeks, I had to go two-thirds toward joy, mostly because I drove the California coast and nearly teared up watching the sun come up over the ocean in Santa Barbara. Go get awed by the earth once in a while. The 1% that's loud isn't the whole picture.

I'm chaotic neutral right now, and weirdly at peace with it. It's one term, 1461 days, and then we all come back to the table and decide whether to keep going. So let's do it, I guess — let the pain be sharp and short, and see what's on the other side.

— Sean