Maxwell Meyer (X, Newsletter) is the founder and editor of Arena Magazine, an "American Propaganda" print and digital publication focused on technology, capitalism, and civilizational progress. Max also works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and is the proprietor of his Iowan farm, Henry Hills. He was previously the editor of the Stanford Review.
Our conversation is about ideas Max is most interested in across storytelling and media, American values, technology and progress, capitalism, writing and craft, and deep love for his country.
We start with critique, the media's tendency toward cliché, and defending the new while building trust with readers. Then we talk about American ideology: its radical founding myth, collective enterprise, and a nation of movers. Max makes a case that national character ought to be lived and formed bottom-up, and repeatedly argues that cultural pendulum swings are as old as time and we need not overreact to the swings of the day. He describes tech's brief abandonment of the rest of America and talks through how we might export Silicon Valley's outcome-oriented culture to government and other industries. Max argues that the foundation of capitalism is simple: "you can't kill your counterparty." We of course discuss Arena, magazines, writing, editing, and his ambitions there too.
Above all else, Max makes the case for America, big and small: the beautiful, always-changing, rarely-agreeing, perpetually striving amalgamation of souls that stretch from sea to shining sea.
You can subscribe to Arena here: https://arenamag.com/subscribe
Full transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/maxwell-meyer
Timestamps:
- 00:00: Intro
- 01:14: Elon, The Media, Cliché, American Collectivism, and Cultural Pendulum Swings
- 09:07: Media, Criticism, and Defending the New
- 17:49: American Ideology: The Declaration, Communal Enterprise, Americans as Movers
- 28:20: Patriotism
- 33:36: Learning from the Rest of the World
- 40:27: A Case for Progress
- 49:38: Tech's Separation from American Culture in the 2010s
- 58:44: Tech Accountability and Engaging Normal People on their Premises
- 1:15:23: Silicon Valley's Tiny Nations and Alex Karp's "The Technological Republic"
- 1:21:19: The Frontier and the Core: Exporting SV Engineering Culture to Government
- 1:28:46: Principled and Unpredictable Thinkers
- 1:34:06: The Case for Capitalism
- 1:43:07: Defending Critiques of Capitalism and Concerns of Concentration of Power
- 1:49:37: Arena, Good Writing and Editing, Magazines as a Medium, Durability, Influences
- 2:02:19: Big and Small America
- 2:06:16: Joe Lonsdale
- 2:06:50: Upholding Abundance
- 2:11:39: Cooking and Bringing People Together
- 2:12:38: The Back Half of the Brain
- 2:14:02: The Places Between Places
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