Progress Should Be Our Most Important Product

We are living through one of the most extraordinary periods of technological advancement in modern history. Artificial intelligence is reshaping knowledge work. Biotechnology is opening doors to better health and longevity once thought impossible. SpaceX has redefined spaceflight, and a new generation of innovators is tackling problems that seemed beyond our reach just a decade ago.

So why does the future feel so frightening?

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, economic policy expert and futurist James Pethokoukis argues that America may be suffering from something more profound than political polarization or economic anxiety. We may be losing confidence in progress itself. 

At the very moment when innovation is accelerating, we’ve become increasingly focused on risk, disruption, and everything that might go wrong. The result is a culture that too often celebrates caution over ambition, and manages scarcity rather than creating abundance.

Pethokoukis has spent years making the case that technological progress isn’t merely an economic advantage — it’s a moral one. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the country’s most thoughtful advocates for innovation-driven growth, he believes our greatest breakthroughs have always come from people willing to take extraordinary risks, challenge conventional wisdom, and imagine futures that initially seemed unrealistic.

Using the SpaceX IPO as a jumping-off point rather than the destination, this conversation explores much larger questions: 

Why have we become so uncomfortable with optimism? 

Why do founder-led companies inspire both admiration and suspicion? 

Why do remarkable technological achievements often provoke anxiety instead of excitement? 

And what happens to a society when fear of failure begins to outweigh the desire to build?

This is ultimately a conversation about whether America still believes in tomorrow — and whether progress itself remains our most important product.

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. For much of the past two decades, the dominant story about America has been one of decline. We worry that we can’t build infrastructure anymore, that our politics have become too polarized to tackle big challenges, that innovation has given way to apps, algorithms, and financial engineering. Even our confidence in the future has seemed to erode. And yet, beneath that narrative, something very different may be unfolding. Artificial intelligence is advancing at breakneck speed, new breakthroughs in biotechnology promise to reshape medicine, American manufacturing is showing signs of renewal, private companies are taking on challenges once reserved for governments, and SpaceX has transformed not only the economics of spaceflight, but our expectations of what ambitious engineering can accomplish. So which story is the real one? Are we living through an era of stagnation or the early stages of a new age of progress? And if remarkable things are happening, why do they so often generate as much anxiety and political division as excitement? Have we become uncomfortable with ambition itself, or have we simply forgotten how to recognize progress while we’re living through it? The recent SpaceX IPO provides a useful catalyst for asking those questions, not because the mechanics of the offering matter nearly as much as what the company represents. SpaceX has become a case study in American innovation. Founder-led entrepreneurship, public-private partnership, and the enduring ability to tackle problems once thought beyond our reach. 

Few people have thought more deeply about those larger questions than my guest, James Pethokoukis. Throughout his career, he has challenged the assumptions that decline is inevitable, arguing instead that economic growth, technological innovation, and human ingenuity remain the engines of prosperity and progress. At a time when so much of our public conversation is consumed by scarcity, conflict, and pessimism, he continues to make the case for abundance, optimism, and the belief that the future really can be better than the past. He is a renowned economic policy expert, and he shares his insights in his groundbreaking work, The Conservative Futurist. And he reminds us always that, like a shark, if we don’t keep moving forward, we die. It is my pleasure to welcome James Pethokoukis back to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. James, thanks so much for joining us.

James Pethokoukis: Jeff, thank you so much. And thank you for that generous, some would say overly generous, introduction, but I’m very grateful.

Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Thank you so much. When we look around today, there should be so much enthusiasm on a certain level, when we look at what’s happening with AI, things like SpaceX, the whole tech boom that’s going on, what’s happening in biotech. But instead of excitement and enthusiasm for all of that, what we hear is so much negativity about it and all the reasons that it’s problematic. Talk about that first.

James: Yeah. To me, I think you have identified a real anxiety that’s out there. I’m concerned about it because I worry that public anxiety will be responded to by government in a way that anxiety will slow down progress across a number of fields in a way — and obviously a lot of that is AI right now — that will slow that progress, that will delay progress. I think if there’s anything that we’ve shown that we’re able to do over the past half century is that we’re really good at slowing progress if we want to. Obviously, my favorite example is nuclear power, which we had a technology that worked, that we know how to build, but yet we really haven’t done much in the past half century. And had we, we wouldn’t be worrying about the lack of clean energy, we wouldn’t worry about climate change, we might not be worrying about these data centers because we’d have ample clean power to power them. So I do worry about public policy responding in a bad way to these anxieties, while also conceding these anxieties are real.

Jeff: Are the anxieties real, or do they have other sources? Because the anxiety sometimes seems to be less about the technology, which a lot of people that are anxious don’t even know that much about, but they’re anxious because of the business model, or because people are making a lot of money, or various other aspects of it that have nothing to do with progress.

James: I always hesitate to tell people that whatever you’re feeling, it’s not real. So people, I think, are anxious, but what is the exact source of that anxiety, which I think is a good question. In economics, there’s something called revealed preference, which, you know, people will say one thing, but we should look at what people do. And people say they’re anxious about AI, but yet they’re going on ChatGPT and the other chatbots, and they’re asking questions. Sometimes they’re asking medical questions, they’re asking these technologies to help them write letters, or maybe they’re creating fun images, or they’re doing lots of stuff with this technology that they say they’re worried about. And many of the things they are worried about currently aren’t happening. There’s not job loss from AI, AI is not taking over our ICBM sites. So these are speculative worries that I think are fed — just to focus on AI for a second — they’re fed by 50 years of watching movies about how computers take over the world, and they ruin the world, and the robots kill everybody. So there’s a lot of that. It has not been helpful that I think a lot of AI CEOs have been really, I think, reckless in how they speak about the technology and the changes it will make. Saying that if you sit behind a computer screen, your job will be gone in 18 months, I think is an absurd notion, that I assume someone saying that has a reason for doing so and maybe they even believe it. But I think that is highly unlikely. Though I think people will take the head of an AI company seriously, or a top executive seriously, when they say that kind of thing. And I think people are just… We don’t mind change, but too much change can be really unsettling. And we’ve gone through a period for the last, you could say this century, there’s been a lot of disruptive change, whether it’s war, whether it’s pandemic, financial crisis. So we’ve had a lot of change — and it hasn’t been good change in many ways — in the 21st century. So maybe that’s just like a natural reaction to like, oh, here’s another big change coming down, and maybe we’ve been primed to fear it. But I’ll tell you, I’m as excited as I can be, not just about the potential of AI, but some of the other things that you mentioned. This is what I’ve been waiting for almost my entire life. Another period where it looks like we’re going to take a huge leap forward. And yes, there will be downsides, but I think the potential to solve a lot of problems across the board. I think it’s just a real strange time to be pessimistic.

Jeff: It’s interesting that you talk about the change that has happened. So much of it, as you detail, is not seen as good change. I wonder if you ask those people that have this anxiety about the change and see it as about what they would consider to be “good change” in their mind.

James: I think we have a period where we know what change that people like looks like. I think the 1990s, we saw a technology revolution. We saw — and at the start, it wasn’t necessarily obvious to everybody that it wouldn’t be disruptive in a bad way — but what happened was there was a period of anxiety back in the early to mid-’90s about the internet. And then it kind of went away, because what happened? Tons of jobs, wages rose fast, the stock market went up. Did inequality rise? Yes. But everybody was doing better, and it was not a huge concern. Even though there was a significant increase in income inequality, everybody seemed to be doing better. And I think if people feel that all this change is creating something tangibly better in their lives, and I think it will, and it’s not uncommon in the early days of a tech revolution for that not to be the case, but I feel confident that will eventually be the case. And again, talked a little bit about AI, I think that will be the case, I think that will be the case for artificial intelligence. And boy, I was just writing a piece and I was starting to just kind of write down good things that seem to be happening. I mean, there’s medical advances, you mentioned space exploration, which not only has great economic value, but is pretty darn inspirational. I mean, across the board, nuclear energy, and we’re creating newer, smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors and fusion reactors and huge advances in geothermal power. If you are willing to be open-minded and accept the possibility that change will overall make our lives better, there’s a ton, really a ton to hang your hat on right now.

Jeff: And yet oftentimes when you try and explain that to people that have this fear, that have this anxiety, and you remind them of that period in the ’90s or the internet, their answer to you, “Well, it produced social media and the iPhone, and it’s been terrible for society.” I mean, I hear that all the time.

James: I certainly understand that argument. And I think with every technology there’s trade-offs. I don’t see people abandoning their iPhones. When they ask people if we could, if we are willing to pay you to get rid of this app or that app. They say, “Oh, I won’t do it for almost any amount.” Or they say, “You’d have to pay me $500 every month to get rid of Instagram.” So I mean, how people act is that they find real value in their phones. And again, we’re speaking from a rich country perspective. In a lot of countries that aren’t quite so rich, iPhones provide amazing abilities to communicate, to start businesses that wouldn’t have otherwise been available because they don’t have a particularly built-out communications grid. And if you are optimistic about AI, then you have to ultimately love the internet because the AI was trained on the internet and has gone a long way to enabling the emergence of this technology. Yes. Am I thrilled with every impact? No, but we shouldn’t mistake the existence of trade-offs and downsides as an argument to eliminate whatever that change happens to be, because we don’t live in a fantasy, cotton-candy world where only good things happen, where even a change that is positive will have no downside impacts. That’s not history. But you know what? We take the good, and then we figure out how to fix the bad, and we move forward.

Jeff: So much of it is how this is covered, how it’s looked at. I mean, an example, particularly here in the Bay Area, is that the Waymos that fill the streets and that are great fun to be in — these self-driving cars providing all this transportation — they’re much safer than human drivers, and that’s been proven over and over again. And yet one Waymo has a fender bender with a curb or a car or something, and that becomes a national story.

James: And it’s an impossible, obviously, it’s an impossible standard to hold any technology to. And so then, I just wondered about those kinds of people, like, is it really a problem with this technology? Is it a fact that they have a problem with tech billionaires, or billionaires, and therefore everything that comes as a result of their efforts, they don’t like? Maybe some of these people are taxi drivers, or maybe they’re now Uber drivers and they worry about their jobs. That’s a different story, right? That I understand. That is a different story. And I think that’s sort of looking at everything through a certain kind of political lens, really. One, I think it’s just a bad way to live, because you’re sort of not going to… Listen, I’m a center-right person, and I have watched movies for decades by actors who I bet, if we sat down and talked politics, we wouldn’t agree a whole lot. But you know what? I still like those movies, and I’m not going to stop watching. And to live in that kind of ultra-politicized life where I’m going to reject this technology that will save 50,000 lives a year because I think this billionaire whose company is doing this should pay a higher capital gains tax rate — I mean, it’s a way of living. I think it’s not a very satisfying one.

Jeff: And it stands in the way of progress. I mean, that’s the other part of it. Because it has political consequences, it has policy consequences at some point, and it stands in the way of so much that could still happen.

James: This is not the best the world can be. We can be — and again, oftentimes the default position is to think about this for someone who lives in the United States or Europe. A lot of countries, people are a lot poorer and would really like a lot more progress, a lot more growth. But even for someone who lives here, there are more opportunities. There can be not just people at the top, but everybody’s income and opportunities can be higher. There can be better medicines there. However you want to look at it, this is not the best possible world. 

And for another thing I was doing, I was reading some experts from 1976 who have been interviewed by various magazines — and it was kind of a natural thing to do is interview experts — and, what do you think the future holds? And so many of these experts back then, who I think had really drunk deeply from the idea that we are running out of oil and running out of this resource, and there are too many people. They had the idea that this was it. We had enough. Life was good enough and we shouldn’t push for any more. There should be no more economic growth. We should live in what they call a steady-state society. And I don’t know about you, as nostalgic as some of us might be for life in the ’90s or ’80s or ’70s, I don’t think we would actually want to live in that decade and give up everything we’ve gained since then, whether it’s the size of our homes, whether it’s just our everyday living standards, whether it’s the medicines. So there’s a lot of economic nostalgia that I think, again, would not stand up to people actually having to embrace that economic nostalgia and live how they did decades ago. And I think that we will have the same attitude 50 years from now, that we will look back at 2026 and say, you know what? Life was, it wasn’t, we didn’t live in a horror story or anything — life was good — but I would still rather live in 2076 than 2026.

Jeff: There’s also this comfort somehow. And we see it over and over again, particularly in the political arena, with preferring to manage scarcity rather than focusing on creating more abundance.

James: I think about that a lot. And I think to me, it’s also kind of akin to the idea of, all right, I can see how a piece of technology would automate this part of a job, or an entire job, and I can see how the job loss would happen. But it’s much harder to see what will replace that job because that job has not been invented yet. The government will put out reports about what will be the hot jobs over the next five years, 10 years, 20 years. They have a tendency to be really wrong because it is akin to predicting the future. I get asked all the time what will be the hot job in the age of AI? I mean, I can come up with an answer, and it might even be a plausible or reasonable answer, but I would not be surprised if I would get that completely wrong. And I often give people that caveat, because if I knew what those jobs were, I would also know what those businesses were, and I would be taking a cash advance on my credit cards and starting up a company to build those companies to create those jobs. We have an economic system in this country, which is based on people taking a risk and creating something new — tough to predict, but that’s how we got here, and I would assume that will continue to be the case in the future. But it’s just hard to imagine. There is a cognitive bias called anchoring, in which we anchor ourselves to what we have right now, and what we don’t have because we can’t imagine it, and maybe it turns out bad — I already know what I have today, I know what can go wrong — and it makes us super anxious. So I think that plays a role. But we didn’t get here, we didn’t move from being 3 million people huddling on the Atlantic coast of North America by fearing the future, by worrying solely about downsides, without taking risks. We got here by taking a risk. We got to where we are in 2026 by taking a risk. And I think we can get to a future over the next five decades at the tricentennial — that may seem science fictional to us and pretty good — by continuing to take risks and not letting an obsession with what can go wrong, and the bad trade-offs, paralyze us.

Jeff: It also creates, or it should create a greater appreciation for founders, for founder-led companies.

James: I also get this a lot, where people will say, I don’t understand how that person, sure, he started a company, but like, how hard can it really be? I mean, why should Elon Musk be worth that much? Okay, he started a company, but on a fundamental basis, they don’t know what that process is like. They don’t understand what it means to start a company, to build a company, to take risks. You see it, probably, almost collapse 20 times, which is the case with SpaceX, and to make decisions about changing directions, or not hiring these people, or giving up that product line, all those decisions, all those decisions are what it takes to create a big, successful company. And if you happen to be the person who started that company, you will benefit from it. But I get this all the time, especially among people in Washington who are policy people who are very eager to regulate or break companies up. And I feel as if a lot of them are lawyers — and nothing against lawyers — but a lot of these people are lawyers, and I feel like they, on a fundamental level, don’t understand how business works, why companies succeed and some fail. Like they’ve never read a biography of a business person, or they’ve never read a book about how a company started from nothing and became a big, important company. That’s our basic knowledge. If they had, it would create a lot of humility on their part about saying, oh, this CEO doesn’t deserve this money or this company needs to be broke up. I think it’s just a real lack of knowledge of how the world works. And obviously among some people, is there a level of jealousy there? Well, I would guess so.

Jeff: Is it also a fear of ambition, that people are afraid of people that are so ambitious that they can create those companies?

James: Most of us aren’t, though, aren’t those people. That’s fine, everybody does not have to be a sort of go-for-broke, work seven days a week entrepreneur. We need enough of those people. And in many ways, those people, I mean, they are different. And it can be almost scary in their obsession to making that company work, because some of us may have a little bit of it — most of us don’t have as much of it. And it is a very alien way to live. Most people, we like going to our jobs and we’re willing to work overtime sometimes, but we don’t want to work seven days a week. Maybe there’s other things of interest in our lives as well, like our family and friends and baseball, and we don’t utterly devote ourselves. Well, these folks do, and I think a lot of people just find it sort of weird. And from that weirdness, they assume, well, they’re not just weird — they sort of must be bad. That’s not how I would live my life, I wouldn’t work seven days a week and live on the factory floor, as Elon Musk did with Tesla, or sleep in my office. There’s something just wrong with those people; that’s not a way to live your life. But because those people choose to live their lives like that — and there’s an especially high number of those kinds of people who live in the United States — that’s a reason we are the technological leader of the world, the most economically powerful and militarily powerful and technologically advanced country in the world. That is the result of those people. And you don’t have to want to live your life like that, but we should be grateful that some people have chosen to live their lives like that.

Jeff: Grateful and appreciative. I mean, years ago, I guess this was back in the mid-’90s, Jeffrey Katzenberg, when he was running Disney, basically said, “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother to show up on Sunday.”

James: Right? Tough bosses, there’s a lot of tough bosses. And if you read an impartial bio of, whether it’s Steve Jobs of Apple or Jensen Huang of Nvidia, tough people, a lot of screamers, they want you to be as devoted as they are. And you might, if you just visited those companies and caught these guys on a bad day, you’d think like, oh, what a monster. But you know what? They’ve built something amazing. And the people are incredibly loyal because at some point, the people who decide to go to those places and stay there, they share in that drive and vision of wanting to build. And guess what? It’s a great advantage. There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t come from places where that kind of energy is rewarded, and they’re like, okay, I’ll come to America. That energy is rewarded. And I’ll go, I’ll build that company here. If you look at the most valuable companies in the world, of the top 10, five are American companies. And four of those companies are built by immigrants: thankfully, hard-working, highly driven people. You may not want those people to be your spouse necessarily, but thank goodness they exist and they come here. And I think America is a great place to create, to make their vision come true.

Jeff: Why is it, in your view, that those people have gotten such a bad rap in the public consciousness now? I mean, if we go back historically, there were times where people that built companies, people that ran companies, people that built railroads, were looked on in a more positive way than people that lead progress today.

James: I don’t know, I think there’s always been kind of a mixed attitude, starting with the era of the so-called robber barons. And now the robber barons, the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Mellons, they tend to be looked on better because they built libraries and people say, well, the modern CEOs, they don’t have as much charitable giving, even though a lot of them do have foundations. I do think that there is that tension. And do I think that CEOs have always… Today’s super rich — and, again, the way you generally become super rich in this country is by building a company. So you haven’t inherited it, you’ve created it. And that means you’ve created something of value that people around you value. So that’s a good thing. And I think a lot of them… I think Jeff Bezos said as much in a recent interview that like, that’s his charity, like creating things that people find valuable and doing that and spending his time doing that is by far the most valuable thing he could do. And that may sit wrong with most people. I think it’s correct that most of the value you create from building a company doesn’t go to the founder, it goes to everybody else who uses those products or takes advantage of those services, and that just may seem a little ethereal to most people. But since we started talking about SpaceX, Elon Musk to me doesn’t live a publicly extraordinarily luxurious lifestyle. He doesn’t look like he dresses particularly well. He spends a lot of time living in a very small house near Starbase in Texas. I’m not sure what else you want out of the guy. You may not like his politics. And maybe there’s a greater willingness of some CEOs to be involved in politics, so then it becomes that kind of thing. But it is, to me, it is strange, but I remember there was a quote by a historian talking about the United States and how there are certainly places around the world where we’re not very popular, and he said, “It is impossible for someone who is strong and successful and wealthy to be loved by someone who is none of those things.” So I think there is a little bit of that — for some people — that there is a little bit of jealousy and it’s politics. And I think it’s just not an appreciation of how you get rich in this country — it’s not because the parents cut you a check.

Jeff: Talk about optimism, because it does seem oftentimes that pessimism has become the default operating system of this country from time to time.

James: As I’ve said, with change — and the consulting word for that is disruption — that’s real. Companies rise, companies fall, they move — not necessarily even overseas, but they’ll move around this country. So that churn, wherever, people every month lose their jobs and they gain new jobs, and new startups will come on the scene and some of those startups won’t pan out, and so they’ll close their doors. All that churn. Listen, when I was a kid, there was a recession in the early ’80s. My mother lost her job. That was really devastating for us. That’s real things that happen and nobody likes it. So in order to accept that at a societal level, you have to think it is worth it. You have to be able, I think, not only do a proper reading of history, but imagine how the churn and the dynamism and the sacrifice is worth it, if not even necessarily for yourself, it’ll be worth it for your children. And if we cannot imagine a better future resulting from what’s going on now, then maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe we should not let companies fire people, and we should not… If a company looks like it’s going to go out of business, maybe government should come in and it should buy that company. It’s a very different way of looking at the world. Of course, you’re not going to like those businessmen because their companies, even the most successful companies, sometimes they lay off people. Or look at Meta/Facebook, which spent a ton of money on this virtual reality idea, kind of hasn’t panned out. So if you’re working for the virtual reality unit of Meta/Facebook, your job probably is pretty shaky if you still have one. Then they shift now into AI, so they make mistakes and things don’t work out. You have to be willing to accept that level of failure and to accept it. You have to think, well, it’ll be worth it, it’s been worth it in the United States for 250 years, and I think it’ll be worth it in the future. But we have to be able to imagine how that pans out. I think politicians play a role in that. I think the CEOs play a role in that. I think our culture plays a role in that. And I think we have a responsibility to at least stay open-minded and curious that tomorrow will be better than today, and that’s a good baseline opinion. The good baseline opinion is that your children will be way better off than you are, and their grandchildren and on and on. Like that should be your baseline assumption, not that the best days are behind us.

Jeff: Does it trouble you that we see young people expressing so much of the pessimism? I mean, you heard the stories. We all read the stories about the various commencement speakers that brought up AI in their commencement addresses and got booed by students, by graduates.

James: Yeah, I was in college — sometimes you get caught up in the moment and you’re booing them. It’s kind of fun to boo people sometimes. I would just hope that when they are done with that commencement address and they’re done with their time at college, that they take a deep breath and like, here’s a new technology. How can I use this technology to make myself a better job candidate, a better worker? What can I do to move forward? Having that kind of pessimism — and again, I don’t know how deeply it runs and may run a bit deeper than I would hope because I think, unfortunately, we’ve been primed to think about technology, particularly computers, as job takers, brilliant machines taking our jobs in a way like your dumb PC can’t. I think we’ve been primed to think like that. But my gosh, 21, 22, all the opportunity in the world, all the opportunity to make mistakes and then change course and try something new… To go into that life, and maybe that’s the dad in me talking, to go into that life negative — no matter what some CEO says, no matter what video you see on TikTok, you have to find it within yourself to ignore that and just keep moving forward. The universe rewards action, so keep moving forward.

Jeff: It was encouraging, on the other hand, to see how many retail investors, people not caught up in any of this, were interested in participating in the SpaceX IPO because they just saw it as a positive thing about the future.

James: Yeah, I was having a conversation about this the other day. And I think most financial advisors would say, stay away from IPOs. They get this big pop on day one and then they go down, and they tend to be a terrible investment. It’s a well-known phenomenon in the investment world that for a retail investor, steer clear of those IPOs at first. But I think with SpaceX, I don’t think people are necessarily treating it as a company that is going to do well over the next six months to 18 months. To some level, they are buying in, they’re buying into the capabilities of the CEO and to that vision that this is not just a hot company, hot private company that went public, but this could be one of the most important, if not the most important company that has ever existed. A company that will create a brand-new market off planet for people to live and work, and also guarantee the continued existence of our species. So I think that is what a lot of people — and there’s some bright day traders out there, I’m not saying there aren’t — but that is what I think people were investing in: a positive long-term vision, not just of this company, not just of America even, but of humanity. I hope no one put every dime of their retirement savings into that IPO, but I think being able to pull up your 401(k), your account and seeing a share of SpaceX, I think that’s an interesting vote, a vote of confidence in our future.

Jeff: And finally, talk a little bit about the role of leaders in government, not of government per se, but of leaders in participating in this and shaping the kind of optimism that can drive the country forward and so many doing the reverse.

James: I mean, policy matters. I work at my full-time job at a think tank. So I have to believe that what we do through government has an impact — good, hopefully mostly good, but sometimes bad — on society. Our leaders are in charge of that policy. But the other role, the role of speaking to our anxieties and our hopes, is a tremendously powerful one. And I think many of the leaders who we remember fondly, even if we didn’t vote for them, or maybe they were the leaders when we were kids and or maybe our parents didn’t vote for them, but we tend to still look back and think like, all right, they were good for America. They seem to be very American. And by that I mean, whether it’s a president or a senator, someone who is very American has a certain optimism that tomorrow can be better, and we have it within our power to make tomorrow better. And I cannot imagine being a governor or a president or any sort of public position, and not with great frequency referring to that kind of message and vision when speaking to my constituents or our voters everywhere. It’s the most American thing an American leader can do. And it’s not propaganda and it’s not feel-good; it reflects how we got here, it reflects how we’ll get to where we want to go. And I think it’s a pretty important role — and again, to not do it, I think you’re really missing the point of the job.

Jeff: James Pethokoukis, thank you so very much for spending time with us.

James: Yeah, I loved it. Please invite me back sometime. Just really enjoy doing it.

Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.