I feel like you could go in two directions, and we've done episodes on both these scenarios. You could have one where people just become even more nihilistic and filled with ennui, so to speak. Or you could maybe have a sort of utopian world where AI is doing all the work for us, and we get freed up to pursue some of our cultural pursuits.
Yeah, actually, that was John Maynard Keynes, his vision of the future, that productivity would increase so much that we'd have, you know, we'd only have to work ten, twenty hours a week, and the rest we could pursue hobbies and so forth. I don't think that's going to make people happy in the end. I mean, the same problem with universal basic income. And the reason for this has to do with this concept of thumos. So megalothymia comes from the Greek word thumos, which is spiritedness or pride, that in addition to material needs, human beings want to be recognized for their basic human dignity. And, quite frankly, a lot of our dignity comes from the work we do. The fact that you are paid to do a job means that somebody in society thinks that what you do is valuable enough to give you, you know, money for it. And I think that that's why this vision of a society where everybody is just, you know, selling trinkets on Etsy, but not really, you know, doing the kind of work that we're used to doing, is not going to make people happy, because it doesn't give them a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, both of you and I did international relations at University College, as you would say, and at college at uni. And yeah, helped us a lot. It got us where we are here right now. Yeah. I think today's guest pretty much anyone who did any sort of political science or PR degree or maybe even, I don't know, some undergraduate syllabus or something like that with this author. This person was definitely on the syllabus in the early 2000s and probably still is, right?
Almost certainly still is. And I, you know, I did all the reading back when I was in college, you know, wasn't even though I was, I did get a degree in it technically, by the way, I don't know if I've ever said this. Technically in Texas, the degree was called government, which included poli sci and IR.
It's just sort of a little subtle. I had no choice. That's what it was called.
Insight into Joe's upcoming political ambitions.
That's right. But, you know, like a lot of the stuff, including the work of our guest today, I like went back and reread several years ago because I guess at the time, early 2000, it felt a lot like theory. And then suddenly, like over the last several years, it's like, oh, this is just, this might help explain the world or a thing is going on in the world that I need to revisit, and changes are afoot, etc. So revisited the work and so, even though it was a long time ago, feels fresh in my head.
Yeah, so I've already given it away. But today's guest is in fact Francis Fukuyama. He is a professor at Stanford, author of the new book In the Realm of the Last Man and author of famously, both an essay and a book called The End of History and The Last Man. And the last is really a key, which is really which is key. So a lot of people will think about the end of history as this idea that like, well, liberal democracy has won out and we're never going to have wars or conflicts or struggles ever again. And that wasn't quite the message. And we should talk about why it kind of, I don't know, got framed in that way. But I think this whole topic clearly is very relevant at the moment. We just had local elections in Germany over the weekend, and it's kind of a reminder that there is this lingering feeling or possibility that maybe people, maybe people don't actually like the liberal order, maybe they don't want it totally.
It certainly seems you could point to a lot of things. We don't need to go down the list, but various ideologies known as illiberalism of some form or another seemed to be on the march. And there's this sort of anxiety about why and whether the people who have spent a lot of time like upholding the various institutions that we associate with Western democracy or liberal democracy, entities like the EU or free trade agreements, the degree to which, you know, it feels like people, it feels like people are exhausted, like that. There is this effort to hold it up, but there is this sense of exhaustion, maybe resignation and so forth. The one other thing I'll say before we get into it, you know, like, I remember I mentioned this once or twice, but this is a thing that sticks out to me like in middle school or maybe my first year of high school learning about the Cold War. And it was taught in US history classes. And you know, we're talking like '93 here. Yeah. It might as well have been World War One. It was already taught as like ancient history or windows. And now look at 20, you know, from 20 to 26, I was like, oh, that was literally just the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. But already by that point, so many of these global questions were being taught as if they had finally been settled. Clearly, nothing is settled.
No, that was the total view in the early 2000, right? I was just sort of university. It was done. And yet here we are in 2026 and it seems things are very much not finished. So without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you so much for coming on. All thoughts long.
Thanks very much for having me.
So when you look at something like the German local election over the weekend, so the far right party Alternative for Deutschland, Alternative for Germany got a majority, do you. So how do you fit something like that in your framework? Is it. Well, this is a natural rejection of liberal democracy, of the sort that I write about in this book, In the Realm of the Last Man. Or is this just a sort of bump along the the evolution of liberal democracy?
Well, I don't think anybody knows which of those alternatives is the right one. I think that liberal democracy has had some pretty bad moments earlier in the 20th century. The 1930s was pretty bad, with communism and fascism both threatening it. The 1970s and the oil shocks also led to a lot of pessimism about the future of democracy. So it could be that we're going simply through a period like that. I think probably the discontent is a little bit more extreme this time. Freedom House says that the aggregate level of freedom in the world has declined now for the last 20 years, since about 2008 or so. And I think that one of the reasons for being more pessimistic is really what's happened in the United States, because for the entire post-World War Two period, the United States was the model of liberal democracy and spread. I mean, my Chinese students 20 years ago all said they wanted China to be like the United States. They don't say that anymore. And I think that the rise of a populist movement within the leading liberal democracy in the world is a big signal that something deeper is afoot, and that that discontent really reflects some underlying social changes.
I'm glad you brought up your student, because actually, that was sort of what I was going to ask first is having been a professor for several years, you know, setting aside international students or any students, you know, like I said, when I first learned that there was this thing called the Cold War, it's just like history. It was settled. It had come to an end, and I don't think we were taught in high school that history had come to an end. But we were taught that these big questions had kind of come to an end and kind of irrelevant, kind of like in the past. And I'm curious, have you seen, you know, the evolution of your students taking your courses, what you've observed about how they view that period of time, why they're interested in it, and if their interests have changed.
It's discouraging, getting older. You know, the Cold War is history. 9/11 is history. Yeah. Even the rise of Donald Trump now is history, had happened, you know, when I was seven years old. So things move. But I think that the most important phenomenon that I hadn't anticipated is the importance of generational change. For my generation, I think the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism was the big defining event. And that certainly what inspired, you know, me to write the End of History essay, the first one. But now we've come full circle where a lot of people that actually lived through or were in those countries now want to reverse that outcome, as in the Saxony-Anhalt election. And I think that it indicates that liberal democracy actually is something that is easily taken for granted. You know, you have a couple generations since the fall of the Berlin Wall that have grown up without any knowledge of what communism really was. And I think that one of the biggest things that makes people like liberal democracy is the opposite, is living under a dictatorship. If you live in a communist dictatorship, you know, I mean, the joy that Eastern Europeans felt when communism fell was really tangible because they didn't like, you know, being surveilled and imprisoned, you know, for speaking out. And nobody experiences that in Europe or the United States, or it's not experienced that, certainly for the last generation. And so it's very easy to assume that the good things about liberal democracy, the peace and the prosperity, are just naturally there, and we don't have to worry about them. And therefore, you can think about, you know, the EU as the biggest dictatorship in the world rather than a real dictatorship.
Can I just ask before we get into more current events, but the end of history? I touched on it in the intro, but a lot of people interpreted that to be quite literally the end of history. So liberal democracy won, globalization won, everyone was going to trade with each other and we weren't going to have any more wars or conflict and things like that. And I am certainly guilty in the past on this podcast of using end of history as a sort of byword for globalization. What do you attribute that misinterpretation to? Was it the zeitgeist of the end of the Cold War at the time you wrote the book in 1992? Was it people just were too lazy to read the last six chapters? What was going on?
Yeah, well, it's a little bit of all of those. The end of history was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel, who understood history with a capital H. The way we understand today is something like modernization or development. And so the idea is that human societies evolve over time. And they evolve in a progressive fashion. So the question was, you know, which direction were they evolving. And that's the end, its end in the sense of goal or termination point. So the question of the end of history was what kind of society emerges at the end of this long evolutionary process? Now, for about 150 years, the Marxists took Hegel's concept of history and said, the end of history is going to be communism. By the late 1980s, after Gorbachev and perestroika, it seemed to me that they were never going to make it. You know, that communism was really off the table. And therefore, if there was an end of history, it was a stage just before you got to communism, which was what the communists called bourgeois, you know, democracy and a market economy and capitalism. And so for me, that was the resting point that we seemed to be arriving at. What they didn't understand in the title, and I guess this is my fault for picking these words, but it was the end of history. And the last man, the philosopher Nietzsche was the one that talked about the last man because he hated the idea of there being an end of history, because for him, the victory of English liberalism would be a boring, flat world where nobody had aspirations. Everybody was fed, clothed, happy, but content. And that's happiness. Just like a cow, you know, grazing in the field. And he can seem pretty happy. Yeah, well, they are happy. But for Nietzsche, for a man is. Are you? Yeah. Human beings, you know, had a pride that shouldn't be satisfied just by, you know, peace and contentment. You should want something more. You should want to dominate and so forth. And I think that's the unhappiness that I was talking about back then in that part of the book. And I think that's what's driving a lot of the extremism in the world today.
Joe, the first ever essay I wrote when I was doing my international relations degree was we were allowed to choose our own topic, and I chose like a Nietzsche and an interpretation of international relations, which I thought at the time was just me being like an insufferable university student. But that. No, I'm sure you're right. You're right. I'm sure I was. But then I read End of History. I remember the Nietzsche reference, and I was like, maybe I'm onto something. Maybe, maybe you're onto something.
I have a question about this idea of like, okay, one interpretation of many of the political events that have transpired, I suppose, is that people got bored. Right. And so there's obviously more than the German election or is the election of Donald Trump. And there's Brexit and actually, like a million other things that we could cite. What about the possibility, like here's something like within what we call liberalism, we grew up with or learned to like celebrate differences among people and that this was important, and pluralism and difference and diversity and all these things that were like internalized as positive. But is there like what I sometimes wonder, is there like a contradiction in the sense like where we value pluralism and difference, but maybe some people really are different in the sense that like, no, like they really want, they really like want a different order or they really want to live in a distinct culture that maybe is like less oriented towards the market, etc. Really more energized by the idea of like cultural homogeneity or something like that. From the sort of liberal perspective, how do you think about like difference? Because things like migration, etc. seem to be one of the through lines for all of this sort of illiberal, the rise of illiberalism.
No, that's exactly right. I think right from the beginning of liberalism, one of the charges has been it weakens community, it weakens the sense of togetherness, you know, shared values and so forth. And that's deliberate. You know, liberalism got its start in the 17th century, after the European wars of religion, when Christians were killing each other over things like transubstantiation or childhood baptism, and the early liberals said, look, we actually need to accept the fact that we don't agree on the highest things. Let's just tolerate one another and live peacefully. And that's really the essence of liberalism, as you say, it accepts pluralism and difference. But I think that that's also what drives a lot of people crazy, is that you have to tolerate people you really disagree with. And you don't get this strong sense that everybody is marching in the same direction. And I think, you know, that's the origin of nationalism. That's the origin of religious politics. The trouble is that people forget that this sort of politics is what gets you into trouble. The 20th century was all about really strong national identities that wanted to assert themselves and dominate their neighbors. And you had two world wars as a result of it. Today, you see that in Vladimir Putin, right? That he's not content just to have a peaceful, prosperous Russia. He also has this idea that, you know, Russia is this great, you know, country that includes Ukraine and Belarus and all these other territories. And he is not happy unless he's dominating all of that. And that is not compatible with the liberalism that says, you know, you got to live and let live.
So setting aside multiculturalism for a second, which is a thorny problem for liberal democracies, I think you point to something in your book that, to me, is possibly an even thornier problem. It's this concept called megalothymia? Am I saying that right loosely? Megalothymia, right. Which is like the desire to be recognized as superior, right, in some ways. So people aren't just satisfied that they're all equal, they all have equal dignity, equal rights. People want to feel like they're special or superior in some way. And to me, Twitter, the fact that Twitter exists is like, yeah, totally. It off exactly where my mind went. Yeah. You know, you have people like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who still wants a platform to be heard and feel superior to others. When I went and reread The End of History several years ago, all I could think about is this explains why so many billionaires have all the power in the world, all the whatever in the world, what they really crave. Deep down at the base of that Maslow's pyramid is to be listened to and respected. And it drives them crazy that like they have everything, but they are still not as influential as like a typical, like, op-ed columnist. And I think this is the source of tremendous psychological angst, even for the most powerful people in the world. All right. Now imagine that on a society-wide scale, everyone wants to feel superior and recognized in some way. How are liberal democracies supposed to deal with that?
Well, so just as a footnote, I mentioned Donald Trump in the original history in the Last Man book. At that point, I said the great thing about having a capitalist democracy is that there's a way of bleeding off some of that desire to dominate and be great, because you can just get rich. And I gave Donald Trump as an example. Little did I know that just getting rich was not, it wasn't enough. You know, that he also wanted the political glory. So I don't think you can get away from megalothymia, this desire to be recognized as greater, because that's the source of any excellence. You know, if you want to be a great pianist or a great football forward or a great, you know, athlete or anything, you have to have this will to excel and to be better than other people. The trouble is that it oftentimes leads in bad directions where you simply want to be a tyrant. And I think you're right that, you know, if you're a billionaire, there's no material need that you have unsatisfied. What you don't have is the recognition of other people, of other billionaires. And I think that's really what's driving a lot of the competition. You know, in our economy, if it just stayed economic competition, that would be fine. But when it becomes politicized and turns into political ambition, I think that's where democracy gets in trouble. And I think that's really the challenge that we're facing. You're also correct that I think on a national level, people want this feeling of togetherness. They want a sense of national identity that is stronger than just tolerating everybody. And that is one of the reasons we still have, you know, conflicts in the world today.
Something I'm curious about when you think about the events of the last 40 years or 20 years, may be something that I'm very interested in. I'm curious whether you think about it much is the changing media environment. Oh, yeah. And the degree to which, say, you know, for better or worse, you have a few monopoly media outlets and that has this sort of effect of everyone having the same diet. And I'm curious, the role of digital media and social media and, you know, your active Instagram user in sort of regrouping people around, I guess maybe people will say like tribal lions, you know, and this, but the way technology changes how we interact and relate to each other, I think it's had a really profound effect.
One of the most dangerous for democracies is the fact that we no longer agree about simple empirical facts, because, you know, the old media really had certain journalistic standards. You couldn't just publish anything. Your editor would say, well, do you have a second source on that? And if you didn't, you know, it wouldn't get in the newspaper. Today, you know, we have the internet where anyone can say anything. And not only can they say anything, but that anything can be amplified. There's a, I think, very unhealthy dynamic in the online world where you get noticed if you're an internet influencer, you say something sensible, rational, reasonable, you know, people will listen to you, but they won't take bring back earnestness on the internet. It's so out of fashion. If you say something reasonable in earnest, it's like immediately consigned to the realms of internet. But there's an inevitable dynamic that happens where the moment you start saying something unreasonable, you know, you insult somebody or you say something that's just ridiculously untrue, it sets off, you know, a big uptick in your followers. And then you say, okay, we got to stop that by saying something even more extreme. And I think that that explains a lot of the extremism in our politics because people are living in an online world, and they also don't agree on basic facts.
Since we're on the topic of, I guess, new media and technology, can we talk a little bit about AI? Because I think even the last man, speaking of the last man, I knew there was an AI chapter in your new book, and I thought it was going to be more about, I guess, like the existential threat of AI and what it means for the whole bored last man concept. But you talk about it in a sort of state administrative capacity way. Why did you decide to take that line as opposed to, I don't know, arguing how AI would fit into the socio-political economy more broadly?
Well, no, I think that what I said was that the most dangerous aspect of AI is the is a gigantic AI. That is where human beings delegate to machines the power to make decisions. And I spend a lot of time thinking about human hierarchies, and I know that we often over-delegate authority in, you know, organizations and governments. But I think we're beginning to do that. I think this Hugging Face incident that OpenAI got into where they had developed an AI agent that broke out of its playpen and then started getting out into the internet and breaking into other computers. That's what agentic AI is all about. And that's what I think the whole loss of control fear is related to, is that you're going to create these agents that are powerful. And the thing about modern AI is that the people that create them don't really understand what's going on underneath the hood. You know, classic computer programming line by line. You know, it's very deterministic what the computer is going to do with these new AIs. They don't really understand why it's behaving the way it is. And if you then delegate authority to a machine where you don't really know why it's thinking what it's thinking, I think that's what leads you down the road to some real doomsday scenarios where, you know, they can kind of act as if they've got their own volition and really no human being's going to be able to control them.
You're a famous tinkerer, and you like building stuff, and you do woodworking, etc. Have you incorporated? Do you tinker with AI? Do you play around with it the way you play around with like making bookshelves or working on a car engine or something like that?
Well, ever since the early 90s, I built my own computers and I've written my own software and I use Claude Code a lot. It's just an amazing thing. I mean, I had written some fairly complicated programs, but I got stuck.
Rebuilding. Well, I mean, mostly it was. I maintain a few big databases on some servers that I keep at home, and I wanted to migrate it to a different system, and Claude Code just did it, you know, you don't. I mean, it helps to be a programmer because you can then correct things where it makes mistakes. But, yeah, basically it's just an amazing system.
There's a picture in the book of one of the tables that you made, and it looks really nice. It looks like a legitimate table when I. What is this is that you can really, you can really sit at it.
And so I, when I was in the State Department, the Secretary of State has a suite on the eighth floor. That's beautiful. It's furnished with these antique federal-style American classic furniture. And when I was delivering memos up there as a young official, I really admired that. And I wished I could have that in my own home. So basically, I taught myself how to build this kind of furniture.
I love that. I upholstered a chair recently for similar reasons, but I have yet to get to the actual woodworking. Oh, we can share woodworking and upholstery for the rest of it, do you think? Could you do a Chippendale chair?
