“… which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful, you know, we had a great time…. [What did Trump serve at dinner?] Oh, he said, he said what do you guys want to eat? And I, I just, I, for some reason I was just like, I, I, I, I know exactly what to say and I’m like, meat, I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. And, and by the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. [There were no sides?] There were no sides…. It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don’t think there was room on the table for sides. [Were there drinks or no alcohol?] There? It was a diet coke. He, he, he, he mainlines diet coke. And I was mainlining it right next to him.”
Said Marc Andreessen — with questions from Bari Weiss in brackets — in this “Honestly” podcast episode. This is a great podcast. (Andreessen, to quote Weiss, “got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser… He then co-founded Netscape… [and] now runs a venture capital firm… [that] invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft and Oculus to name just a few.”)
There’s a nice “lightning round” at the end of the podcast. After asking about the food Trump, the “incredible host,” served at Bedminster, Weiss asks: “Tomorrow you wake up and you’re the DNC chair, what’s the first thing you would do?”
I was especially interested in this because I was just listening to Jon Stewart talking to Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, a candidate for national chair, and he stressed building “an infrastructure” and “door-to-door organizing” (“We build neighborhood teams so neighbors are knocking on their neighbor’s door so that it’s someone that you actually know”). But Andreessen said, without pausing: “It has to be candidate recruitment. Like you, you gotta get to work in candidate recruitment.” Yeah, give us better people! I don’t need you knocking on my door.

And then Weiss asked him “What’s something you believe that most people disagree with?” He said:
Oh… that there is like tremendous reason for optimism. That like the, the, the America’s best days are ahead of it. That the world is going to get much better. That there are, that kids coming outta school now are much sharper and more capable than my generation. There is no reason that this can’t be a golden age.

Weiss asks “How will we know if America has won?” Andreessen says:

Oh, I mean, there will be economic indicators. There will be, you know, foreign competition indicators, you know, reduction of war, you know, economic growth will be two big ones. And then a lot of this is, I think, national spirit and psychology, animal spirits, enthusiasm, positivity, excitement.

Animal spirits! I had to look it up. There’s a Wikipedia article “Animal spirits,” and it turns out to be one of the most interesting Wikipedia articles I’ve ever stumbled across (and all because I thought it sounded quirky and woo-woo!):

Animal spirits is a term used by John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money to describe the instincts, proclivities and emotions that seemingly influence human behavior, which can be measured in terms of consumer confidence.

Here’s what Keynes wrote (I’ve added boldface):

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

And we’re given this, from a 2009 William Safire “On Language” column:

The phrase that Keynes made famous in economics has a long history. “Physitions teache that there ben thre kindes of spirites”, wrote Bartholomew Traheron in his 1543 translation of a text on surgery, “animal, vital, and natural. The animal spirite hath his seate in the brayne … called animal, bycause it is the first instrument of the soule, which the Latins call animam.” William Wood in 1719 was the first to apply it in economics: “The Increase of our Foreign Trade…whence has arisen all those Animal Spirits, those Springs of Riches which has enabled us to spend so many millions for the preservation of our Liberties.” Hear, hear. Novelists seized its upbeat sense with enthusiasm. Daniel Defoe, in “Robinson Crusoe”: “That the surprise may not drive the Animal Spirits from the Heart.” Jane Austen used it to mean “ebullience” in “Pride and Prejudice”: “She had high animal spirits.”…

So much meat. So much optimism. All those animal spirits.