Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Kimberly Hoang: Myth on Capitalism and Sex Industry #269

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

The web of capitalism operates everywhere, in every transaction, every policy, every "done deal" that never sees the light. In the midst of it all, we are slowly losing something far greater: the meaning of being human.Kimberly Kay Hoang, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, joins Endgame to uncover what has long remained hidden, from spiderweb capitalism to a sex industry far more complex than we assume, and to the question we rarely dare to ask plainly: what have we already sacrificed in the name of progress?#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #KimberlyHoang---------------Get your copy of Gita Wirjawan’s book, “What It Takes: Southeast Asia”, NOW:https://books.endgame.id/Also available on Amazon:https://sgpp.me/amazon/Leave your review here:www.goodreads.com/book/show/241922036-what-it-takes---------------Related Endgame episodes:     • How AI-Enabled Organized Crimes & Systemic...      • Jiang Xueqin: Our True Wealth Is Our Consc...      • Di Mana Titik Tengah Kekuasaan dan Kebebas...  

I don't think the revolution is going to come necessarily only from below. It's going to come from the battle between the millionaires and billionaires. The highly educated millionaires who don't want to live in this unequal world, who don't want to give their resources, their talents, further enrich the five tech titans in the U.S., right? I did 300 interviews and spent an extraordinary amount of time doing ethnography. But the longest interview was seven hours. It was 35,000 words in a transcript.

I couldn't get deep unless I went in and worked in these bars. I just realized, oh my gosh, this is the center of power. This is where business is being done. Factory work, domestic work, was far more exploitive than sex work. How do you tell a story about a system where everybody, wants to find a villain. Hi, friends. Today we're honored to be graced by Professor Kimberly Huang, who is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Kimberly, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You've gone around the world for so much and so long. You grew up in

Colorado. You came from a Vietnamese family. Tell us about your personal upbringing. It wasn't easy, but it really shaped into how you've become, which is very successful. Thank you. I'm the, yeah, I was born in Denver, Colorado. I was very fortunate that there was an old American woman who took my family in as refugees and taught my parents English and taught my mom how to be a mother. She was a young mother. And then I moved to California when I was five.

that my parents could start a business. They owned a laundromat in Colorado, and then they transitioned into owning a pool hall that catered primarily to Vietnamese immigrants, single men, and I grew up most of my, I would say, young childhood up to 18 in this billiard, in this pool hall. And much of that experience shaped a lot of my worldview. It made me think a lot about war, about migration, about, you know, trying to fit into American society, about subtle racism and, you know, how hard it was for immigrant communities at that time to get access to capital, to start a business, to keep a business afloat. And, you know, my own ignorance at the time, you know, looking down at many of the men who I learned a lot from and who humbled me in a lot of

ways. It's certainly not a traditional upbringing, I would say. I'm the oldest daughter of four siblings. And that also shaped a sense of responsibility that the oldest daughter has to be the role model for everybody else, has to chart out a pathway for them to follow. And I saw education. I will say this too. I grew up in a very patron. hierarchical household and in addition to that. And, you know, I think there was a lot of pressure to be good and to be a role model and to chart out a new pathway while at the same time learning how to advocate for your parents in their own ways, right, in a society that, where they experienced tremendous amount of racism. Yeah. Wow. Who would have been more

influential between your mom or dad? I think they were differently influential. You know, my mother was very, she's a very strong woman. She was a business woman at her poor. And she was a market woman. And I remember watching her in, you know, running the business and dealing with clients, dealing with mostly a male clientele knowing how, she had a kind of a soft power. She was gentle but firm, and people really came to fear and respect her. And I don't, but she wasn't, she wasn't masculine in her way. In fact, quite the opposite. And I, and I remember, you know, men in the billiard who felt sorry for my siblings and I for having to grow up in it. You know, they would, they drew portraits.

I mean, artists would draw portraits of my mom. My mom was also very beautiful. I was like this. She was, and she had this energy, a really good energy at the time about her. She always had good karma. Every time we drove somewhere, she would get the parking spot right at the front door, every time, without fail. And she attracted a certain kind of energy to her always.

Like she had an energy of abundance. and I don't really know where it came from given that when we the the life I grew up with grew up in compared to my siblings was one of scarcity and I would say poverty and somehow in some way she had this desire to open this business following one of her uncles and money kind of always followed her in a way I think I run a scarcity mindset compared to her because I saw the ups and downs of the business but somehow she always just had faith that it would flow. And I never got that from her. So part of why I went into academia was because I did not want to live with the instability of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur that comes with being an entrepreneur. I wanted medical benefits and a regular paycheck. Stability.

Stability. What about your dad? What role did he play onto your life journey? that's a complicated one. You know, my dad was a very complicated person. He was extremely patriarchal. He was hard on his kids, most hard on me, I would say. We had a very complicated relationship growing up.

And I think, you know, and I think when I look back and I think about what role he played, I will say this and I don't know if he would agree with it. but he taught me the power of quiet subversion. And what I mean by that is sort of the way that I've been successful in a lot of my life is to find ways of quiet subversion, right? To kind of like maneuver around patriarchy. And I think in some ways that has shaped so much of how I've operated. It's not loud.

I mean, one of the things he used to always say is it doesn't really matter what you do, because if you do something really well, you can be hiding on the highest mountain in the most remote place, and somebody will come find you and find a way to get to you. So, you know, I learned a lot from watching him, you know, experience very serious hardship. and try to raise a family in that. But I think, yeah, it's complicated. You know, I've always said to people that one of the key responsibilities of a teacher upon his or her student is to infuse imagination, ambition, and serendipity,

or smart serendipity, right? Who do you think would have played a bigger role in infusing some of those elements between your mom or dad? I will say this. I don't know that I think it was either of them. I think it was the grandmother who took my parents in. And this is what I mean. The grandmother who took my parents in

was this American woman in, like I would say, the quintessential military, like, household. Her husband was a GI. And he had passed away. And she, and this was not a diverse urban community in Colorado. And she just took it. She lived on this block where people in that neighborhood took in refugees. And she taught me what unconditional love may look like.

And what it means to open your house to people that look different from you, complete strangers, people that were called gooks back at the time, vilified, feet. you know, the way that America is experiencing immigrants from Central and South America today, Mexico today, and just opened her doors, you know. And when I think about that serendipity of unconditional love, it opened a world to me of what might be possible and how one could produce or grow from a place of love rather than from a place of chaos. And this is what I will say about, you know, my parents in some ways. They were young parents. And I grew up in a very chaotic household, you know, one where people were, you know, it's like you're struggling to, you know, my,

you know, my father started out working in a factory before realizing that factory work, mechanical work isn't going to make, isn't going to pay the bills and had to scrounge together capital to open this laundromat and then scrounge together capital to run the billiard. And it was probably of no fault of their own, but it also meant that the stress of the business was, you know, that chaos was brought home in some ways. My parents, neither of them were alcoholic, so it wasn't chaotic in that way. But I think it was chaotic in a way that many children experience in immigrant households. and there were moments of extreme volatility.

And I think what I really wanted was to find quiet in the chaos, to find pause in the chaos, to learn how to maneuver in it. And that has become my superpower. I think when I look back now, many years later, my superpower is going into places where everybody has left and shining a light on it or bringing light to it, finding light in darkness, finding light in places where people are afraid to go. Whether that was the household I grew up in, whether that was the billiard,

you know, many, there were gangsters, you know, coming in and out of that, whether that was the sex industry that I studied in Vietnam. I don't know that I knew it. Today I was at a summit called Sala, and there was a person there whose name I wish I knew because I can't attribute it, but he said, the two most important days of your life are the days that you were, that was the day that you were born and the day that you learned why you were born, what your purpose on earth was.

And I think this grandmother has instilled in me, even though I would say early childhood development, those like when your neurons, I'm the mother of a five-year-old now. And I think very deeply about how informative those early years are because there's neurons that are, you know, growing in your brain, right? And the thing that I think about is it took me nearly 40 years to figure out why I was born, why I was put on this earth.

And the answer to that is through the chaos that I grew up with, of no fault of their own, right? Because there was scarcity, there was racism, there was chaos. It's really about learning that you're not responsible for the things that happened to but you are responsible for recycling that, recycling darkness to light, moving energy, and understanding that there's power in that, right? Grit, resilience.

It allows you to see things differently that you wouldn't otherwise. And I think it took me 40 years to find that, but I found it. You know why you're born. But, you know, it kind of correlates with some of the stories I've heard about you about how you did your math homework with the help of some gang, some gangsters.

You found, how did you find peace in that? Did chaos actually condition you to find peace and stuff like that? And I guess the follow-up question would be, how would you teach people that grow up instability to cope with instability, right? That's a good question. So this is what I will say. When I was a teenager, I was, for lack of a better word, a little. You know, I was arrogant.

I was like American. I spoke perfect English. I thought all those guys were fobs. You know, I thought I was above them. I thought it was better than them. And I'd have to go in there. My mom got really sick when I was young. So I basically was running the business when I was a teenager.

And I couldn't, I couldn't. balance, leaving school, coming into the pool hall, running it on the weekends with doing well in school. In fact, I was a very poor high school student. And I remember really struggling with math and these guys that were fobs helped me with my math homework. And it was a really humbling experience. And also, because they were gangsters, I was at the same time afraid of them as a woman. And then they turned to be more like protectors, right? More like brothers, more like fathers. And I grew up with them.

And it was a very humbling experience because in the world that I was in high school, where I went to, where everybody was wanting to become upwardly mobile. And part of being upwardly mobile is rejecting assimilating and rejecting where you come from, I straddled these two worlds. and I think that that has shaped everything. It's just like, how do you look at people who you look down on with such dignity, with respect, with admiration, with empathy? And they humbled me.

I wasn't like that. And I think if I met some of those people now, they would say, yeah, you were horrible, you know. But I think we are all capable of evolving, of being reflective of looking back. Yeah, and what was your second question again? The follow-up would be how do you teach kids that grew up in stability to deal with instability? Yeah. Especially the Jan, the Jan Alpha, you know? Yeah.

I mean, honestly, I think about that with my own daughter now. My daughter has everything I never had. She goes to, you know, a very, an amazing, you know, school now. And she has everything. I mean, there's just, there isn't a single thing that she doesn't want. And the way that I think about it now is instead of thinking about you need to have scarcity and grit in order to have grit, right, or to overcome something, how do we think about what, what's possible when people can grow up from a place of abundance, from a place of support, from a place of love? How can they imagine? How can they create?

How can they build systems? And this is where I would say I was humbled in graduate school. Because when I entered a PhD program and I started a PhD program at Stanford University 20 years ago to this day. Which you bailed that off. Yes. You know, I entered a world of people who grew up with a lot of stability and a lot of resources, a lot of money. Parents who threw everything at them, tutoring, piano lessons, anything, my daughter now has all that, right? But the thing about that stability is there's a net to catch you if you fall and it's very hard to fall far.

Whereas when you're experiencing the kind of rapid upward mobility that I experience, there's always this feeling that, oh man, when you fall, it's going to hurt really bad. It's like when you climb up to the back of an elephant and you fall off that elephant, it's going to be hard. And so it's just rethinking about maybe it's thinking, you know, all of us are born and have a purpose. Like I said, you know, the day you're born, the what day you figure out we are born. And we are all, you know, I think of like there's some souls that come to earth that are meant to disrupt intergenerational patterns of trauma. And there's some souls that are meant to come here and rest. And that's my daughter. And those are the people that grow up with abundance.

But that doesn't mean that those souls that are. here to rest don't have a purpose. They do have a purpose. Their purpose is to support those who are coming here to do that hard work. One of my best friends in Chicago was raised with a tremendous amount of abundance. And, you know, her family's from Kazakhstan. She speaks Russian. I adore and admire her. Ten years ago, there's not a world in which I could imagine we would be friends. The woman has flown first class her entire life. You know, she, but you know what? She's taught me that she also operates with a particular kind of soft power.

She's intellectually curious. You can sit down and talk with her about anything. We had lunch the other day, and she was teaching me all about AI stuff that she's been digging into and robotics. And, you know, she's just insanely intelligent. And I think she is on earth to rest right now. But I think she's on earth to teach me that I could raise my daughter this way and my daughter can come out just fine. So I don't think it's either or.

I think it's both and, you know, and we have to just understand our purpose and understand the purpose of those around us. Just intuitively, as a sociologist, is it safe to assume that it's probably not a bad idea to manufacture scarcity as to educate our kids? to be able to not only manage, but harness abundance? I used to think that until maybe two years ago when I started meditating. I used to think that. And I used to think, oh, my gosh, all of my students, they're so privileged, they have no idea. And I was really hard on them. And I would say, you know, and actually I wrote an op-ed about graduate students who are so, have no Brit.

And, you know, they're going to enter an economy with no jobs. and I was really enough put my feet to the fire in that, right? Like people were really upset with me for writing and saying that. And it's not that that wasn't right. And I actually, it's sad that I was, right? Because there are fewer, you know, PhD students being admitted to programs. There are fewer academic jobs. I mean, it's tough.

But I think that the tougher thing is there are people who grow up with scarcity that don't even have the luxury to think about what their purpose is. But there are people that grow up with abundance who because they've grown up with abundance have such a hard time finding what their purposes. And so I think we have to come together as a society to think more deeply about what that is and how we could collaborate come across. You know, when I was a graduate student, there were these, I would call them like Silver Spoon Marxists, you know, these white boys who came from privilege, who were always out there protesting the university, protesting the institution. And at the time, I used to think, God, they're so privileged.

Like, I don't even have the luxury to stand out there in protest because I can't even, it's like, it's such a steep learning curve to just learn the basic theory, to learn statistics. You know, I mean, it was a really steep learning curve. And as I've matured now, I realize, actually, those people are really important. and the kind of organizing that they were doing and the kind of resistance movements that they were doing were really impactful and really and are so important today. And I'm really good friends with them now, you know.

But at the time, I didn't have the maturity to understand that we just all have a different purpose. And so those are people that grew up with an extraordinary amount of abundance. They could have sailed off into the sunset, right? But instead, what were they doing? They recognized that as sociologists, they recognize that there's certain kinds of substance. social problems. There's certain kinds of injustices in this world that even they don't want to

live with. And they start going out and doing things and powerful things, impactful things, right? And I think that's important. Yeah. The last bit on your personal upbringing, the pivot from communications to sociology and the pivot from Stanford to Berkeley. Just explain that. Yeah, so when I arrived at Stanford, and I know you're a big Stanford, you know, you bleed Stanford. Oh, no, no. I love California, so I'm agnostic. And my kids went to Berkeley.

My dad went to Berkeley. So it's just full of disclosure. Yeah. But Stanford has so much money. You know, the amount that they spend on flowers. manicuring the space, the palm trees, the, I remember walking around, there's a pride, there's a mall on campus with a Neiman Marcus and Tiffany's and a Louis Vuitton and, you know, in the classroom, everybody were, you know, at that time no one wore labels, but it was quiet,

quiet rich, right? You kind of learned the Brooks Brothers, you know, label, no label kind of thing. And I had a really hard time, you know, going. from a world of poverty, really, into a world of the 0.01%. Right? There's a horse state. People were bringing their horses to campus, right? And that really opened a world for me of like, I thought I knew what wealthy was and I had no idea. And the world has become even more unequal since then.

But it came, but here's the thing about Stanford. the people there were very nice to me. And they sufficiently professionalized me in a way that Berkeley didn't. At Stanford, everybody was about published, published, published. You know, David Greske, that was his thing. And he was a very nice person. And so was Michael Rosenfeld. I had great advisors.

There was, no one was mean to me. I just socially and culturally couldn't find a way to fit in. And so I ended up actually, ironically, at a mental health ward at Stanford. And I had a complete mental health breakdown. And I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I don't know if I've ever publicly told the story, but I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat.

There was this rat racing around in my brain for a long time. And I checked myself into Stanford's very luxurious mental health facility because I had insurance. And I remember being brought into this room. And there was like 14 doctors in white doctors. coats around a table. And they were, they said, we're just so confused. Do you mind if we have a conversation, we want to learn, you know, what happened? And I was just like, privilege. I don't know how to maneuver. I don't know how to deal with. I don't know wine. I don't know cheese. I don't, I get like, I was at this diversity dinner, ironically, and there were three forks and three knives,

and I have no idea that inside, outside, outside, inside. I was sitting next to a provost or vice provost of something and I was so afraid of accidentally drinking water from his cup because I wasn't sure which one was mine. And I just completely had a panic attack. And it didn't go away. It lasted for months. And then I remember somebody said, oh, and it was also a very quantitative department that was very American centric. So there wasn't anyone there that was doing qualitative research methods. And I was very interested in qualitative research methods. And part of the breakdown too was I was very interested in studying the sex industry in Vietnam, and a very well-intentioned professor said, you need to count condoms. And I was just like, that is completely beside the point.

And there was a woman by the name of Annette LaRoe, who is a sociologist who was at Casbus at the time. She's a professor at UPenn, but she was on a sabbatical at Casbis. And I went to meet her, and she said, I don't know how to tell you this, but I think you're in the wrong program. And I think you're not going to do well in this program. And actually Michael Rosenfeld, who was my mentor at the time, he actually got his PhD from the University of Chicago. He said the same thing to me. He said, I don't know how to tell you this, but I think you're in the wrong program. So that was now the second time I've heard this.

And they both encouraged me to apply to Berkeley. And I did. And Berkeley said, they called me an academic refugee because Berkeley said, we don't normally accept people who had already been admitted to top 10 PhD programs because we want to provide as many people with opportunities as we can. But you are really an intellectual refugee. You're not in the right program. You can't thrive there. And I remember after I got admitted, I went to, I took the train. It was like the three-hour train or something.

You know, I can't even remember the names of the train. But I walked out of the BART station. And there was a homeless guy. There was a dude playing the piano. It was just dirty. I mean, it was dirty. It's a great place. One of my favorites.

And I felt at home in that. But I gave up a lot of resources. You know, Stanford provided, for graduate students, for PhD students, they were fully funded. I went to Berkeley with far less funding. I was brought, I mean, I gave up everything. And it was a gamble. And but what I got there were more people who came from backgrounds like mine, more or less, just by virtue of the sheer numbers of people, numbers of students that they admitted.

and I found a way to make it work. It wasn't easy there either. But yeah. Well, you know, if it's any consolation, Berkeley has better culinary experience than Palo Alto. And they've got some of the great jazz bars. Yes, that's right. Yes, yes.

Now, I guess, well, I mean, if it's also any consolation, some of the great personalities that Stanford went to Berkeley. you know, for their PhDs. Okay, let's switch over to your first book. You know, dealing in desire. 2005, you went to Vietnam backpacking. You met with a stranger who inspired you about the narrative. Talk about that.

Yeah. So I was a feminist and I wanted to study women who were victims of sex trafficking, you know. and I really thought, again, there's something so wrong. I mean, I thought I was going to be this Western savior that's going to go and write about poor third world women who are victims of trafficking. And at that time, so many celebrities were pouring into the story of women from not just Vietnam, but Thailand, Indonesia, you know, that were trafficked and needed to be saved. And churches were pouring money, nonprofit organizations were pouring money into

this. And I went to Vietnam looking for victims of sex trafficking, and I found a lot of nonprofit organizations, but not a lot of women in those spaces. And the challenges, many of those nonprofit organizations were supporting women who were victims of domestic violence or women who were working as maids or in factories, but they couldn't get funding for that, right? But they could get a lot of funding for sex trafficking. So exposing the nonprofit who also couldn't find victims of sex trafficking felt very complicated. And I ended up in a house. I rented a room.

At that time, I think it was $150 a month or something like that. I rented a room in this house with a guy who was from Australia, very nice, but essentially he had to live in sex worker. and I remember living on that street as a looking like I do with a white you know in a house with white men and people neighbors mistaking me as a sex worker as well which I don't I could see why right like you're an Asian woman Vietnamese woman living in a house with two white guys one of the woman is a is a sex worker and one night she took me to the bar she was working at and it completely shattered everything I thought.

But again, all my stereotypes. And I realized that she was not a victim of sex trafficking. She's a sex worker and there's this burgeoning sex industry with sex workers. And many of the women entered into the sex industry disrupting so many of my own stereotypes because factory work, domestic work, was far. more exploitive than sex work ironically. And at the time, that was very hard for me to wrap my head around and for nonprofit organizations to wrap their heads around.

I mean, it was just so counterintuitive and counter to a narrative that we understood. So I knew that in telling that story, I was going to come up against so much resistance from churches, from nonprofit organizations, from feminists that, you know, But the thing about me is that I really stick to the data. And I stick to what does the data tell us? And so I just kept returning. And, you know, that blew into a project about trying to understand hierarchies within the sex industry, trying to understand the relationship between men and women.

Because either, you know, the literature on the sex industry either focused on sex workers as victims or as men, the Johns, as criminal. criminals, right? And there were so many, so I was interested in this hierarchy, I was interested in studying, you know, low level to high end and the relationships between men and women. And that just blew everything up for me. I mean, everything I understood, right? Because suddenly all the stereotypes that I had, and I think this is the lens I have growing up the way that I did, which is that if you grow up so privileged, it's easy to walk into these spaces and find narratives that reaffirm your beliefs and play into tropes and stereotypes and write that story because the public is going to publish it and people are going to believe it, right?

I think it's much harder to find real data that tells a different story. And the data, so after 276 interviews with men and women across four sectors over five years, the story that I uncovered, which was very hard to tell, was a story of women who are very agentic. nobody was ever forced to have sex against their will. They were hustlers. I mean, the movie Hustlers came out in 2008, you know, about the 2008. I mean, they were hustlers in that, the truest sense of that, right?

They were shrewd business women. They were entrepreneurial. They did not see themselves as victims. They didn't want to be rescued. And the men, sadly, were getting duped left and right, you know, especially white men, right? So women would take these men on poverty tours of the people. the village. You know, some of them were well-meaning, well-intentioned. But built houses for these women, you know, built businesses for these women. And that was also not the, you know, the image of

the John that we think of as going to Thailand, as having these like Asian fantasies, desires, being violent, you know, that blew my mind. So the same way that I had to humble myself to the men in the billiard. I had to humble myself to the women and the men that I was meeting in this setting. And that was hard. The other thing I will say is in 2009 and 2010, I realized that I couldn't get deep

unless I went in and worked in these bars. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to study, you know, women that cater to Western backpackers, women that cater to Western businessmen, women that catered to overseas Vietnamese men. And I started in a bar that catered to overseas Vietnamese men, which, by the way, the owner used to play pool in my parents' pool hall. And he knew me as a kid, but I didn't know him.

He certainly knew my parents. He knew exactly. I mean, he could recount. And he asked me, what are you doing here? And I said, I've uncovered this, but I need a place to work. And I think he felt this uncle. like protective thing because he knew me from the and he knew my parents. So I worked in his bar that cater to overseas Vietnamese men. Ironically, the same kind of men in the parents billiard.

I mean, here's why you're born. You're like finding your purpose, right? There's all these synchronicities that the universe just puts in front of you, right? Like it just across worlds, right? Across oceans. And when I was in that bar, There was this local Vietnamese man. And so I never, I didn't get paid, but I also didn't act as if I was above the women working in the bar. I drank just as much as them. I served as them. I took all the crap that you get, you know, I wasn't a feminist in that space, right?

Like, and there was a local Vietnamese man who kept coming in and, you know, he's the gray slacks, sandals, the white shirt, you know, that type of guy. And he just kept coming in every single night. And he would say, why are you doing this? You were born in the U.S. You don't have to subject yourself to this dirty work, to this kind of dirty space. And I just kept saying, I want to understand. I think he was very suspicious until he saw it like two or three weeks in. He was just like, okay, she's not going anywhere.

And I would do all the dirty work that was involved in there. And he kept asking why. And I said, I just really want to understand, like really understand this. And then finally he said, what you're doing isn't safe because you're using American standards and you're telling everybody that you're, you know, a researcher and you're from the U.S. And, you know, and by the way, the American standards is that per IRB, you have to tell everyone that you're a researcher. So he said, I have a bar that's higher end that I think you will be better protected. And I kind of blew him off.

I was just like, everybody in Vietnam says they have a connection, that there's somebody, you know, that they, that they're, you know, I really did blow him off. But finally, I'd collected enough data in that bar that, and the owner of that bar said, I trust him, I think you should go. But he never said anything. He'd never, so I go to this other bar and it's all local Vietnamese men with Asian businessmen who are frequenting the bar. They're not overseas Vietnamese.

They're not Western. and it was much higher end. Only bottles in that bar were blue label bottles. Johnny Walker blue label. Bottle after bottle after buddy. These men were spending money like whales and drinking like whales, you know, and they were older. And I just realized, oh, my gosh, this is the center of power.

And none of the women in here know who these men are. And that's on purpose. but I slowly started to put two and two together and realize this is the lever. And I realized that this is where business is being done. And in a country where you don't have faith in states or institutions or rule of law, what drives business, relationships, trust, mistrust, Jeffrey Epstein-style relationships of mutual hostage, dirt on each other, right? And then I realized, oh my gosh, the white men are blocked out of all these deals, big deals, real estate deals, energy deals, you know, oil.

I mean, just teleco deal. I mean, lots of deal. Banking, finance, I mean, heavily, you know, state markets that are heavily regulated by the state. And that blew me into a story of Asian ascendancy and Western decline. And if this was 2010, and at that time, nobody believed me when I wrote the four words, Asian ascendancy and Western decline. And certainly nobody was going to believe that I could tell an economic story from inside of hostess bars, right? From inside the sex industry. And it took me four years to get those four words published.

It kept getting rejected from peer review journal after peer review because Western arrogance, Western men who can controlled the academy, even women who controlled the academy, our publishing outlets just couldn't get over, were beside themselves. And when I would give talks in the U.S., the amount, the way in which I triggered white men in particular, I mean, we're like living in it now, but back then, it was just resistance, resistance, resistance. And, but nonetheless, the data spoke for itself. It's just like, well, this is the data that I found. This is what I came with. And I realize it as the messenger telling the story. My subjectivity brings out all of that in them. And sometimes I think if somebody like, you know, one of my colleagues at Booth were to tell the same story, maybe they would,

they would be, they, people would believe them, you know. But in the end, it was a story that I told and it finally found ways and found outlets. And then guess what? As the world continued to evolve, it was just more and more and more affirming, right? Like from 2010 until now, Oh, my gosh, Asian ascendancy is common knowledge, right? And I think that's partly, you know, to the man who helped me get access to that space, the thing I think I did right by him with was that I told a story that was really hard to tell that nobody would believe. And I think the part of the reason why I got access to do research for my second book in Vietnam,

even though the first book is banned, and I think the second one is too, was because I told a story that was honest and nuanced and carefully researched. And I allowed to, I allowed, I wrote it in a way that one didn't insult the intelligence of the reader. Two did not play into tropes or stereotypes about Vietnam. Sex workers, Vietnam being highly corrupt, many things, the tropes that one could imagine. But the other was because I could write about people in multidimensional ways. and I could see them in multi-dimensional ways. And I think part of growing up with the chaos that I did

is that I had to learn how to read people. I had to learn how to read a route. I had to learn how to anticipate needs. I had to learn patriotic. I mean, I grew up in a patriarchal household, so I learned that was easy for me, right? And that taught me, that opened up this whole world of this new story. And it wasn't easy to tell, but I did.

And, you know, you can look at this as a success story now, but there were many barriers along the way. Do you have the conviction that you're going to be able to further mainstream your argument? I think so. I mean, you know, it's interesting you ask that question because when I was coming up in graduate school, people told me that if you study Vietnam, that if you study a narrow industry like the sex industry, you're going to get pigeonholed as an area studies person. is a feminist person, you know, no one's interested in gender, sociology of gender or sexuality. And I remember saying to myself at the time that I want to mainstream Vietnam, Southeast Asia. I want to put Southeast Asia on the map in my own way, right? And there was a strong Southeast Asian crew of scholars from Cornell and at Berkeley, Peter Zinemann was an incredible mentor. And, you know, Peter Zineman and I got along really well, in part because he always just gave me feedback and helped me grow intellectually.

But my goal was to say, how do I do that? And, you know, when I was trying to get Dealing and Desire Published, the sociology editor actually handed me off to read Malcolm, who was the editor for Asia, the Asia series at University of Kempel. California Press. And I just thought, well, you know, it's my first book. It's not going to be mainstream sociology. You know, like, at least it's going to get published. And after it got published, I don't know. And I believe in divine or devention.

I believe that we're brought here on Earth for a reason. The universe, the way the universe was is that this book sold more books than books on China and books on mainstream sociology topics. It was like the number two highest grossing books. at the press within sociology, right, beating out other sociology titles. And so in that way, and I am now a professor at the University of Chicago, one of the oldest, I think, the first sociology department in the United States, right? And the fact that I exist at a place like the University of Chicago, the fact that the book did that well, to me is a sign that I did mainstream

it. And that was the goal all along, right? I think scholars who studied Indonesia did a great job of mainstreaming Indonesia. Although I will say one of my students to say, they mainstream the ideas, but not the place. And I think that's a problem looking in hindsight, looking back, right? They made sense of theory, but the theory was, it was, we somehow lost the sense of place that those theories came out of research in Indonesia. Yeah. And what, I think I just was lucky that when I arrived on Earth, I was part of a different generation of people coming after that that I could put Vietnam on the map, right? Like a country that everybody thought was like war-torn, you know, including my own husband

who's Mexican-American. And, you know, he thought it was like rice thatchuts. And, you know, and I was just like, you're so racist. I'm going to show you Vietnamese excellence. I'm going to show you how wealthy Vietnam is, you know. understanding that there's extreme inequality there too, right? But that there's a first world that exists there. And I think people in the world needed to know and see that.

You know, your fan base, Vietnam's fan base is growing quite exponentially at the rate that Vietnam has been taken lunch from, you know, a lot of countries around the world, many of which are in Southeast Asia, unfortunately or fortunately. How do you think you can, well, let's be a bit more positive and constructive here. How do you think Vietnam can help in getting some of its positive attributes to rub off in a good way for its neighbors? You know, I mean, you know, just take a look at the PISA score for the 15-year-olds. Vietnam now is already number two after Singapore.

Only two countries out of 11 countries are about the global average. And Vietnam is just killing it in terms of capital allocation from all across the world. And they're building manufacturing capabilities and all that. I'm not saying Vietnam is perfect, but I think there's some good attributes that I think the other, not 10, but nine countries could learn from. I think that the Vietnamese soul and at the heart of its sort of soul, and this is just my interpretation, I really want to defer to local Vietnamese folks who we know were born and raised there. But the way that I see it is that this is a small country that beat the United States. of America in a war in a guerrilla warfare style. And that guerrilla warfare style doesn't ever leave the hearts and souls of the people.

And it is that, like I think it's a country also that has always had to play the United States and China off of each other, times Russia. It's a country that, you know, it's a guerrilla. It's insurgent. It's a phoenix. It's a lotus. It's a rising dragon. It's all of those things.

That is in the heart and the soul of the place. And here's the thing about the heart and soul of that kind of place. It had to navigate and maneuver all of these complex relationships. And I think that in the same way that China is the, you know, it's a developing economy that's the largest trading partner for development. economies around the world. I think Vietnam has the potential to be that in the region. And I don't know if the state leaders at this point have aspirations for this, but they certainly are capable of it. And I think that the same kind of growth, I think there's a kind of communal

orientation to that growth, despite the wide inequality of, you know, we are all small countries in this region. And we are all in. on the same position, geopolitically, you know, geographically. And, you know, there is a certain sentiment of kind of we're in this together. Because if we lose, so do you all. You know, it's kind of like the way that Malaysia and Singapore have that. And I think increasingly you can see that, those Southeast Asian inter-Asia connections. And I do think that for Vietnam in particular, the growth is one of yes and, right?

Like spread the wealth, develop those other neighbors. It's going to benefit us too, right? Bring them to the table. The time of guerrilla tactics, I think they know what it's appropriate and when there's time to bring others, right? To bring others along. And I think it's there. I think it's in, I think it's what, what attracts people to come and what attracts investors. It is a beautiful, beautiful country. We were just talking earlier about Indonesia and you were saying, I need to go visit all of these places of Indonesia. And I always say to people the same about Vietnam.

There's so many places to see beyond the cities, beyond the beaches, right? Yeah. And the last thing I'll say is this. When I started, my research in Vietnam in 2005. I remember visiting Thailand. I remember visiting Bangkok and that same year visiting Jakarta. And I remember feeling a deep sense of sadness. Because when I was in Jakarta and when I was in Bangkok, I thought, man, if Vietnam hadn't gone through this war, Ho Chiman City, Hanoi would look like Jakarta would look like Bangkok, right? Better. Right? Even better, I think. Yeah. It was like once called the sort of like Pearl of the Orient. And, but it didn't look like that. So I think it's important for people, for countries like

Indonesia and Thailand to remember that Vietnam was so far behind. I mean, 20 years behind where Bangkok was 20 years behind where Jakarta is, right? So if they can develop as rapidly as they have in this amount of time, and this is going back to the abundance, right? Like in Jakarta and Bangkok, you already have the baseline. Imagine it goes back to what I was alluding to, right? You got to fabricate or manufacture some degree of scarcity

to, you know, I was in Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh to give a lecture just a couple of months ago and it's just amazing the drive. You talked about grit, but you know, I think that culture of hard

work. You know, my neighbor works nine hours a day, I'm going to work 14 hours a day. If he or she works 14 hours a day, I'm going to work 16 hours a day. That drive, that gorilla mentality. And I met up with some people who told me stories about, you know, a lot of people have known about how people were hiding in the tunnels, right? But apparently during the war, people were hiding on a mangrove forest for years. And, you know, with the wave, you know, fluctuations and all that, they've got to learn how to breathe. You know, it's just, you know, If that rubs off a little bit on each one of the other 10 or nine countries, and I'm excluding Singapore here, because, you know, they're at the top.

But as we're dealing with an exponential evolution of things as they relate to geopolitics, technology, and climate, the more cohesive we have to be as a region, right? And I think structurally it balls down to the educational attainment divergence. Yes. Right? Amongst all 11 countries. Singapore is way at the top. Vietnam is just skyrocketing to the top. The others need to pick up their slack on this education.

And once we can converge a little bit more on educational attainment and infuse a bit of that guerrilla mentality, I think game on, you know? Yeah. You know, the other thing I will say is there are some amazing, talented Vietnamese folks from Vietnam who many of actually who went to Stanford during my time, who came straight from Vietnam. Maybe they went to boarding school, some that were more privileged, but not all.

And you know what? They actually went back to Vietnam. Oh, I'll tell you this story. When I gave that lecture, I'm not going to say the university's name, but I was invited to a lunch with the chancellor, and he invited a teacher who was teaching at a local high school.

That guy went to Caltech. The Vietnamese who graduated from Caltech decided to go back to Vietnam and teach at a high school. I mean, wow, it's visionary. Yeah. You know? Yeah, many of them. I mean, some of the people that inspire me the most

are people that are younger than me by 10 years even who went back. They built, I mean, education learning platforms. They built systems to help, younger folks get into college. They built English language programs. I mean, Obama was, they had met Obama. And let me tell you this.

At the, as a, you know, at the University of Chicago, I have this like close proximity to Obama, but never have been able to shake that man's hand. You know, and there are the people that are younger than me doing those kinds of things. And it's just so utterly inspiring, right? Like they could have stayed. They could have been comfortable, but they all chose to go back.

And, you know, I have to say that they're winning. They made the right decision. You know, they saw a frontier rising and they rode that wave. And those of us that, you know, came back to the U.S. and built this life here, I think we all have a little bit of fomo for what they, you know, for the wave that they've written. But to their credit, they were the ones that went back and built those systems. and I find them incredibly inspiring, right? And they've now been there for at this point, you know, 15, 20 plus either. They're in it.

Wow. This isn't a temporary thing. So I think a big part of it is how do countries attract talent to return? And that would be the case for Indonesia, for Thailand. You know, what is it that will attract highly educated talent to return? People are coming, going back to China. Some of it is a push-pull factor with like, you know, the state of things in the U.S. right now and the anti-immigrant sentiment and the anti-Asian sentiment that came up during COVID. But people were going back well before then, opening businesses.

There was a woman who I love and admire so much. She opened a small clothing shop called Parenthood and Co. And it's linen. And she like sources linen. And actually she started with this company called Cooper and Coe that did men's tailored suits. And, you know, just it, what they do is they showcase the potential for Vietnamese excellence in Vietnam. Not Vietnamese excellence in the United States where they're all the resources, right? And there's something that's very moving about that.

There's something that's really inspiring about that. And I think everyone there is rooting for them. And there's a certain kind of pride. Wow. Let's talk about your other book, Spider-Web Capitalism. What inspired you to write it? It's a great book, by the other one, too. So I've been meditating for the past two or three years,

and I said to you, I only learned about my purpose maybe two years ago when I started meditating. And I think my purpose is to find ways to speak truth to power. And I think that actually started when I was very young, right? It was like standing up to my dad, who was a patriarch, right, as the oldest daughter, and how scary that was and how hard that was, how, you know, he could be unpredictably and volatile at times and being quietly subversive by finding a way out, getting a PhD when it wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't supported to get that in my family from my extended. I have nine Catholic priests in my family. I mean, men dominate. everything. The priests understood what I was doing. But as a woman, to be highly educated, I was

made fun of often. People said, like, I wasn't in an, I didn't grow up in an environment that supported this, right? It was counterculture to what I grew up in. Then I go do dealing in desire, right? And I get closer to the bone of, you know, higher level business elites and exposing their business dealings, you know, hustler style. It's like not no. I mean, now they all want to be protagonist of the book, right? And they all want to say that they were characters in it because it gives them, it gives them like street cred, right? But at the time, none of them wanted to be named or known.

They could have never predicted, you know, what happened, you know. Then I get to Spider-Web capitalism and I got closer to the bone. And what I mean by that is that my husband used to have this saying, when you go at the king, you best not miss. And the stakes were a lot higher because you're telling a story of how people navigate widespread corruption, which inherently implicates not just the economic elites, but the political elites. And in fact, I knew that I got so close to the bone that I was afraid to talk about it or do interviews like this. You know, the book came out in 2022. I started the research in 2026. It's been, it's taken me 10 years of sitting with the data. And I, and I will say this about my book. There are many books on the financial sector, on finance, financial industry. They did like 50 interviews, 100 interviews. I did 300 interviews and spent an extraordinary amount of time doing ethnography. I gave up 18 months of my life for both of these books, like each time for both.

of these books, right? And really deeply embedded and really tried to learn. And the story of offshoring came on accident because initially I was really interested in this question of like, how do people navigate foreign investment in a context of widespread corruption? And we know now that that's mainstream because the Geomelan case is just like the Vietnamese government made that mainstream with the burning furnace. But you have to remember that this was a time of doing the research when that way of doing business was mainstream and nobody talked about it and the stakes were incredibly high. And so I felt like I had to do it in a way that was careful, you know, and in a way that told the

nuance. So I said, you know, this isn't a story just about Vietnamese corruption. It's a story about how that is entangled in a web. And that web is connected to the most developed financial economies around the world. which is getting closer to the bone, right? Which is making an argument that people from highly democratic societies are engaged in this great activity abroad, but they're interconnected with one another. And doing that kind of work is very risky, right?

Like doing that kind of work, one, you want to make, there's no room to get it wrong. you know, and I think that that's just so important. And I think telling a story of, you know, first of all, like, there's a technical story of, you know, how do we think of the difference between different varieties of corruption? Everything from like two people paying, having two books for the taxes, okay, fine, we can accept that. Paying small petty things to get the bureaucrats to do what they want to do, fine. Nominee structures, you know, kickbacks in the, order of, you know, five to 30 percent in an offshore structure, outright theft and fraud,

those stories are much harder to tell. And at the same time, it's a system story. And so part of what took me so long with this book was, how do you tell a story about a system where everybody wants to find a villain? And the problem is, is, you know, these people are smart, they're highly educated. They're like even the locals, right? They're guerrilla tactic. They are super reflective about how to make sense of something that may be legal, but is morally reprehensible, right?

But even like hits a nerve somewhere in their gut. And it's a calculation, a risk calculation that they're making. And that's sort of, you know, it made me think a lot about the people move money. It's people behind markets. And what is tied up with people that I think economists miss a big part of the story. Their emotions, their relationships,

the risks that they take, the ways that they have to reflect back on it. And so part of what Spider-Web capitalism is doing is just trying to put those pieces of the puzzle together. That maze was really puzzled. as part of a pun. But it was, and part of the reason why I did 300 interviews was because there were a number of people who use experimental methods who do offshoring.

And what they found, and they're mostly from the UK, was like when, you know, companies incorporate offshore, it's a similar, it's the same structure, it's the same exact structure. And with qualitative work, what you do is you try to find patterns. So if until you find, you do all these interviews until you can find consistent patterns, At that point, you reach what we call saturation. And you're telling a system story, a process story, a pattern story. What was crazy is after 300 interviews, there were no pattern. And finally I gave up and I said, I think the story from the qualitative data that I have

is that it's purposely obscure. And every structure is different. You know, companies set up incorporate in the British Virgin Islands and they're a subsidiary in Hong Kong and Singapore and they're onshore operations in Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, right? Every time, every deal, every, you know, project has a different structure. And that's on purpose to obscure the web, right? I call it a spider web because I like metaphors, but this is, this is a financial web. And what do we, how do we make sense of the fact that no two webs were ever constructed the same way? The lawyers can't make sense of it. The accountants purposely,

you know, there's a legal firewall at each layer that obfrews. escapes the relationship and connection to other parts of the web. And it told that story, right? But it went up against common knowledge at that time of how offshore structures are structured. The 300 or more than 300 people you interviewed, how much time did you spend with each one of them on average? I don't know. I mean, I spent a lot of time building trust first. At the time, I remember, I felt like I was wasting a lot of time.

have dinners with them, drink with them. You know, it's funny you say, Vietnam was this culture of like everyone's working eight, 12-hour days, but they also work hard, they play hard. You know, everyone's out. Happy hour, dinner, you know, drinks, another drinks, round of drinks, and then get back to work at 8 a.m. I don't know how people did it, to be honest. And I was grateful that I could just sleep during the day while they were all at work. And then I could get back into my work was at night getting that data. But I think I spent a lot of time with people building trust. I think I had a lot of cred from the book, my first book, where people did the due diligence

on me and they read parts of the book in the news or in, you know, the introduction at least. And so some people had empathy for what I'd done for that book and would say, oh, we know you know how this works. Let me just tell you all the stuff. So I would say if in some instances the interview was one hour and 30 minutes of that is like their PR version and I could squeeze out some real story of 30 minutes, you know. But the longest interview was seven hours. It was 35,000 words in a transcript. And that's smashed onto two pages in chapter seven of my book. And that interview was like months of relationship building,

of trust building of, you know, and even then a lot of times when you do an interview with somebody, your mind wanders and you're they wander and you want to get pieces of the puzzle right so you have to go back and ask and do follow-up conversations follow-up interviews verify go check back right and so it's really hard to quantify the amount of time i also did interviews on long airplane rides i did interviews in airport lounges um you know at two o'clock in the morning if we were delayed somewhere I mean, delays were great for research because we're stuck there, lounge at the airport together,

having more drinks and more drinks. I mean, I never was so happy to be delayed in my life during that time. Hey, I want to ask you about the difference between complying to the letter versus complying to the spirit. And it just strikes me. in a weird way that people are so focused on making sure that they comply to the letter.

And they've beautifully structured. All these structures in many places around the world where they can just hoist a flag of good governance because they comply to the letter. But many of us know that it's not really in compliance to the spirit. How do we address that or how do we remedy that? I mean, I think the United States of America is at a inflection point of crisis on this very question. And what's really interesting is we used to think that this is a crisis. It was this crisis of a law versus a spirit in frontier economies, in the emerging markets,

and countries with widespread corruption. And it turns out that this is the crux of the problem in democracy, like one of the most advanced democracies in the world right now today. And I was at a summit today that earlier this morning that was incredibly inspiring and somebody said, we speak with each other more through law and lawfare and the letter of the law, and we've forgotten to see the humanity in each other. We've forgotten to, we don't know how to communicate with each other outside of the threat of a lawsuit or the fear of a lawsuit coming on.

And we have lost a moral compass. And I think that there are so many contexts and situations where this is the case, right? And kind of like an unraveling that we're living in right now, that I'm living in in the United States. And what's really interesting is I remember, you know, back to our, this kind of circles back to about mainstreaming Vietnam. It used to be the case that if you did research on a country like Vietnam, you would look to the West to chart Vietnam's path to development, right? How does a country emerge and the path is something like, oh, America used to have the robber barons who was highly corrupt,

and then guess what, they regulated, and then they have clear rule of law, and clear rule of law means transparency, and what that means is democracy, and what that means is economic growth, right? Typical economic story. Then you had Vietnam and China rising in authoritarian context. Nobody could explain how or why or what, you know. And what I think is so fascinating is the question about the law versus the spirit is one where we actually have to look at Vietnam, the Philippines, maybe Indonesia.

I don't know enough enough about Indonesia to say, but definitely Vietnam, the Philippines, to chart our trajectory for the kind of democratic reordering that is happening in the United States right now. And that's super fascinating because if these studies of these countries were mainstreamed, we would have answer. Like, nobody would be surprised by how everything is unraveling right now. I don't think anybody, I mean, you're sitting in Indonesia right now. I'm sitting in Chicago. Nobody in Indonesia, nobody in Vietnam is surprised by any of this. I think they're more surprised by the fact that Americans are so shocked, right?

And so it's really interesting how when you can move between countries and spaces across continents, how your register shifts and how you look at the same thing. So as one example, you know, when the first time that Trump came up and had all the tech bros at the dinner table, everyone in the U.S. was just shocked by that, just beside themselves. Couldn't believe it. The overt kind of like deal brokering. I was just like, this is the same playbook that they were using in Vietnam. I mean, the same playbook that they were using in other parts of Asia.

If you had this lens, you wouldn't be surprised by any of this right now. Not that that makes it right or moral or that we have to, we're having a crisis of, you know, the spirit. And it's interesting because part of where I take your point about the spirit, and I think this goes back to spirituality, whatever you believe, part of why I leaned into meditation and why I leaned into thinking about the spirit beyond the law. Because you come up in an American education system, everything is about rationality. What's rational? And I would be like, well, what's rational in this market is not rational in this market? And you can put together really beautiful models to predict behavior and outcome. But if you're biased with those models to begin with, the model is messed up.

I mean, you just can't predict the messiness of human behavior and culture and history. And, you know, there's so much laid into that that we now know. But part of it is with meditation, you have to believe in something bigger than yourself, right? You have to get quiet in the chaos. and part of the chaos that we're thinking, I think there's a, we're like, there's tectonic plates that are moving. Like the ground is shifting below us.

And you have to get really, really kind of still to make sense of it. You think that's enough to entail a truly meaningful inflection for humanity? Yes, I think so. I think there's an energy shift. This is the eastern part of it. coming out. I think there's an energy shift.

I think there's a spiritual shift. I think that, you know, with the rise of AI, with the fear of AI taking over, we're getting back to what makes us uniquely human. I mean, the University of Chicago just launched

a major campaign around the minds, right? Like our minds, our powerful minds, right? And that, I think it's not just, our minds. I think it's our soul. I think it's our spirit. I think it's our purpose, our sense of connection to one another. That is so important. You know, there's about $140 trillion worth

of liquidity circling around the globe. A good chunk of that is hiding in a spider web, right, in beautiful structures. That just seems like a lot of vested interest in status quo, right? What conviction do you have that that's going to change for the better on the back of this tectonic shifts that you're witnessing or that you're pontificating? So because I'm a sociologist, I want to bring a little bit of sociology to the podcast today. One of my favorite sociologists is Carl Polani. And Carl Polani has this idea that this theory, this argument, that throughout human history, economic activities have always been embedded within social, cultural, political institutions.

meaning you can't extract the market from social, you know, society, from our society. And unregulated markets threaten to destroy human society. So what happens is societies naturally push back. And I think what is happening now is that people are beginning to see why it's so important to prioritize social relationships, reciprocity, redistribution. I mean, much of this, rather than acting as like in a purely profit-driven, sort of like rational, self-interested individuals, because we're seeing the harms of that, the consequences of that.

I think part of my thing of speaking truth to power is that it's scary to write about the 0.1%, the 1%, because they're powerful people who can go after you, right? They have a bottomless bank account to destroy your life, make your life so miserable, so challenging. But I think that we've reached such an inflection point that Polani's idea of the double movement, we're witnessing this in real time, which is that unregulated markets. And unregulated markets are markets that hide in the spider web, right? because they have subvert sovereign laws, they subvert tax laws across multiple countries. They actually threatened to destroy human society. And what Polani argues is that societies always push back.

And this is what he calls a double movement. And it's this push towards a free, unregulated market is always met by a counter movement. He uses this rubber band analogy, right? It will pull out and the rubber band will kind of contract back. And what is it that contracts back? It's society demanding social protections. So in history, that was in the form of labor unions, environmental laws, welfare programs, child labor laws, right? What those are is protections.

It's like society protecting itself from the ravages of the market. And so I think we're, again, with these tectonic shifts, we're at this. new inflection point where inequality has gotten so wide that even the top end of the, you know, the bottom end of the 1%, or even the top 10% feel economically precarious. And this actually goes back to Spider-Web capitalism because I had a really hard time finding the soul in that book. And part of where I found the soul is I realize that very wealthy individuals don't see themselves as wealthy vis-a-vis the 01%. They see themselves as economically precarious. Sure,

they're educated professionals. Sure, they're making $500 to a million, $500,000 to a million a year. In after-tax dollars, they feel like the stretch of the cost of child care, the cost of groceries, inflation, cost of housing. I mean, everything has gone up. So the dollars aren't worth as much. And that's not just in the United States. That's around the world, right? And so, What happens when even that group starts to feel precarious, it pushes back, right? I mean, we're seeing social movements against AI with, you know, people not wanting to have data centers in their neighborhoods and their backyards because it destroys the water that they have, you know, that one, it takes all of all this water, but two, the water gets very dirty that comes through their pipes. And so we're seeing this kind of push, this pushback. And I think that, you know, there's more calls and demands for oversight for, you know, I don't like to use the word regulation because it has, you know, there's like this sort of like the tensions between communism and democracy or socialism and democracy there.

But what we're seeing is kind of societies demanding more oversight, right? And I think that, yeah. I want to drill a little bit on how these people have been able to thrive and are likely to continue thriving on a back of basically the instability, right? It's because of the instability, not despite instability, which is a very subtle differentiation. and it's defining for this people, right? They've been able to get away with it because of the instability, not despite the instability. And it's just created this massive chasm

between the top 0.1% and not just the bottom 99%, but the bottom 1%. I think there are a couple of things. So they have created such complex structures that the average person has a hard time wrapping their. I mean, forget the average person. I've had lawyers, you know, retired lawyers from PWC, look at some of the charts that I, some of the flow charts that I've put together, you know, putting back to, looking at corporate registries and trying to remap out the structures, they can't get it.

looking at contracts, they don't understand it. What's the difference between A shares and B shares? Why does somebody have point half of one share, but voting power, but no money? Right. Like there's, it's so complicated, purposefully complicated. And 08 taught us this, right? Because economists also say, oh, it's so complicated. Only we understand this. Nobody else can understand it. Part of what I was trying to do with Spider-Web capitalism was to take a really complex story and to tell it to the average, smart individual and not insult their intelligence by dumbing it down so much that you lose the complexity.

And that's really hard to do. How do you write a book that's mainstream that tries to cater to a mainstream audience that is telling a really complex system story? I'm not sure that I successfully did it. I think some of the reviews of my book say it's still too theory-heavy or too concept-heavy. But I think the general public

generally gets the story of offshoring from that book. So part of it is it's complicated, right? The webs are so complicated. But I also think as a sociologist, I think we shouldn't insult the intelligence of the general, even the uneducated public. Right. Because once they can understand the complexity of the puzzle,

they can begin to think about how to, again, in a Polani way, to pull back, right? To put in, to argue for regulations, to put in for protections, to, you know, use their talents, to make the world that they live in better, the world that their kids are going to inherit better. You know, there's a, there's a moral.

The summit that I was at today, too, there were so many, you know, like people in the private sector. And I was just so surprised by how much they're fixated on the widening inequality, where before it was just be this thing you don't talk about, you don't touch, you don't, you don't go at the king. And now it's out in the open. We're talking about it. That didn't happen five years, five years ago on the heels of the book coming out.

And that was part of what made the book coming out nervous. The other things that I think that contribute to this is the chaos that people are living in right now. So every day you wake up and there's a new news thing. I mean, some days I just think, oh my gosh, that felt like news that happened four months ago was like it happened four years ago. You know, oh, that's that's an old news cycle story. And that has the way to do with like social media, the way that news is available at our fingertips. There's just like information clouding out our brain. It's noise.

It's a lot of noise. Then in addition to that, there's precariousness. Even among working professionals, doctors, lawyers, I call it. Yeah, I mean, working class folks definitely feel this. But increasingly, lawyers are talking about themselves as wage laborers. I mean, today lawyers that we're talking about themselves as hourly wage laborers, right? I mean, that language is now, you know, part of their language. I don't think they've talked about themselves that way five years ago, right?

Partners in a law firm saying the way they climbed up was just billable hours down to the quarter of the hour, you know, in a kind of Marxist way of thinking about your time and selling your time, right? And then the last thing is because there's so much chaos and so much precarity, I don't think people have the time or a luxury of time to sit down and think through the complexity of these puzzles. I guess the last thing I will say is that while Vietnam has an increased educated population, and I think that's more so the case in math, engineering, you know, back-end stuff, less so in sort of like the social science and humanities, although I could be wrong. and I think if someone calls me out, I will see to that.

You know, critical thinking faculties and whatnot. But in the U.S. where I'm at now, the cost of education has become so expensive, even in public institutions. It's unreal. It's unreal. You know, I, as a mother and as an educator, I put in the other day how much, what's the projected cost of college when my daughter goes if I want to send her to a private liberal arts school? Do you know what? It spit back out to me at the Charles Schwab and Vanguard, $750,000.

Do you know how much you have to save today to get that? You know, it's like all of the calculations projections are at least $1,500 a month, if not more, right? Who has that? Who can who, I mean, two working professionals, that would be a stretch, right? We're talking about child care and then putting away, you know, into a 529. that means that people are spread thin, that they're giving more of their hours away so that they don't have time in order to pay for all these things, right? So they don't have the time to sit with the complexity of the mess that we're in.

And this is why I think people who come from a place of abundance, who come from wealth, I always say to my students, and this is me being at an elite ivory tower now. I've been cursed since I left Stanford. The only jobs I've gotten are elite private universities. But part of the thing of knowing your purpose, which is speaking truth to power, is this. I don't think the revolution is going to come necessarily only from below or from the bottom. I think the revolution is going to come from the battle between the millionaires and billionaires.

The highly educated millionaires who don't live in this unequal world, who don't want to give their resources, their talents to enrich further enrich. the five tech titans in the U.S., right? I think we're starting to see in a Polani kind of way this pullback. And that is where I think I'm optimistic that change is going to come from. And part of why I think I say existence is a form of resistance. And my inhabiting a place like the University of Chicago is that, yeah, free market. I mean, it's all over the news right now, right? economics is a dominant major. They're growing. The econ major is growing. You can read all that.

But it's a pullback to remind us why the social sciences and humanities are so important, ever more important now than ever. And if we don't continue to grow these spaces, we won't be ready to, we won't have it in our, in our, in our, in our, in our, in our, armory to deploy when it's most crucial, most needed. Right. And so yeah, I think, think that those are the factors that contribute to the continuing widening inequality. You know, in a future where the cost of education is going to be $750,000 in a present where the student loan balances in the trillions of dollars, it's just not sustainable. I can see a future, if not remedied, I can see a future where Americans are going to opt out.

And they would want to go to schools in China, Vietnam, and India, where things are just going to be disproportionately cheaper and they're going to get just as good if not better education, right? And it's, you know, going back to the inequalities, you know, putting that in the context of how the West has bragged about about, you know, democratizing itself and democratizing the rest of the world. You know, I've always been in a camp where democracy shouldn't just been defined as the manifestation or distribution of power, but also public goods. And public goods have not been well distributed in many democracies around the world. Mine included. India included, the U.S. included. These are the three largest democracies around the world where I've not witnessed

great distribution of public goods. Call it intellect, education, healthcare, welfare, social value, moral value. I guess my question is, with your latest book, the Spital Web Capitalism, when you wrote it, what do you think would define success? This new altered reality where you're going to see better distribution of public goods, some sort of constitutional reawakening people will wake up from the bottom, from the middle, from the top so that there is a reset. Is that how you define success?

I think that's a really hard question to answer. I think I would define success that the general public feels like they're more aware, more informed about what the system is and how they're prey in the web. And that it's kind of time to wake up. And I think that, you know, what we're in right now is what I would call a propaganda war. Because socialism, as an example, back to the Cold War, right, it is very basic principles is about social welfare systems. And I think we as a whole world need to have a deeper reflection on what are basic human rights, the right to life, the right to health care, the right to live. Like, you know, education, you know, we should have a thriving, we should want a thriving, educated population.

We should want diversity. I mean, that's all, you know, we're all losing that out now, too, right? and there's been this kind of crisis and this rollback. And part of it is that the logics of capitalism have just taken over every aspect of our lives. If you think very carefully about it, every aspect of our lives is highly financialized, including our household, our private households, right? I mean, the fact that a 529 exists to pay for child, to pay for college later, that is like financializing parenthood, you know,

Nina Bandel wrote this book, The Overinvested Parent, and that's not just about finance. It's like the financialization of childhoods is the story, right? The most sacred parts of our lives are financialized, our health. I mean, I was at the event I was at today, everyone was like, oh, we need to really buy long-term health insurance,

long-term care health insurance. At 40, start thinking about that now. Healthcare, education, you know, like everything, that that financialized logic has seaped into every aspect of our lives, and it's really hard to separate them. And so we've lost what it means to be human. And I often think about this, too, right? You know, people who come from families, and they think about this in terms of like succession

planning, right? Like families that have lots of money that they're thinking about how to preserve it across generations and pass it down, you know, generational skip trusts in the United States where they're not just thinking about their children, but their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is it that people do when they have money and they don't actually have to pay work to live? They want to be creative. They want to be artists. They want to create, right?

And innovation comes from creation. But if we're so busy being cogged in the system, there's no room anymore for creativity, for art. You know, my husband painted this piece behind me. He's an artist. He likes to paint leisurely. And, you know, there's some resentment sometimes with me. I'm just like, we need to pay for child care. Like, that's, you know, and yet even I know, like, even I know that he needs to have the creative outlet.

He needs to paint. He needs to do creative work. And you know what's really interesting? His artwork has actually given him, his has given him. has given him the creative juices to do the intellectual work he does even better. And, you know, I'm over here, like, being that wife-mother being just like, you know, you need to, you need to, like, do other productive things, right? That's just how much it's taken over.

And actually, you could see this in the Silicon Valley. You mean, you spend a lot of time in California, in San Francisco. Do you remember when San Francisco reminded you of Hong Kong where there was, like, the rich textures of social life. You could have high, low in San Francisco. You could have a poleta, you know, in the Mission District and tacos at two in the morning. And then you can go to some other neighborhood. And then tech took over.

And it just became more and more and more homogenous. And why aren't we asking what we're losing, what we've lost? And this is something, too, like the creativity, art, music. You know, my daughter really loves the piano. those are not things that cost us. So why are we so obsessed with more and more and more and more? Because we're afraid that there's no net to catch us if we fall as inequality gets wider and wider.

We're afraid of getting left behind, right? That is interesting. Do you teach that notion to your students as a professor? Well, I guess the other way to question is, would you focus on creating scarcity or idea creation or purpose creation for your students? I think my students think probably that this is what I say to my students. Like parenting, no student ever has the same professor because who I was as a professor 10 years ago is not who I am as a professor today. 10 years ago, 11 years ago when I started my career,

I taught from a scarcity mindset. I taught from a, the world is hard out there. The world is terrible. The world is racist. The world is sexist. You're going to be a victim of all these things. And you need to be exceptional to succeed. I don't think I went as far as like being a tiger mom or that kind of with my students.

But I was, you know, when when I meet people, graduate students or students and they say, oh, I met you and I want to crawl under a table because I'm like, what phase of life was I in back then? Was I a total B? You know, I mean, was I that person that just like is like subjecting this intergenerational trauma. And this is a, I wrote an op-ed in 2020 around COVID, that effectively said, it's a luxury to be a graduate student, do your job. And oh my gosh, It was just like the horrible backlash. I mean, death threats, people, grown men saying they want to punch me in the face. But the thing, and I get it because as an ivory tower, tenured professor, who am I to say that?

But what was erased was my entire working class background, my entire refugee background. I mean, all of that was erased. That gets erased. You lose nuance. You know, now I'm in what I call my woo-woo phase. And I guess the woo-hoo phase is that what I do in my classroom is I have all of my students meditate and some of them really hate me for this. I mean, they cannot stand me. Like this like, you know, this privileged-ass professor making me meditate and she thinks that's going to solve all the world problems.

Like, you know, just like, I mean, that's, it's not crunchy, Berkeley, granola. It's a different version, some other version. But the reason why I do that is that I think it's so. important for students to learn how to regulate their nervous system so that they can find the creative juices to find creative solutions to these really complex problems. And in my woo-woo phase, I no longer have this sort of like scarcity way of thinking, I think, how can we create abundance for all? I mean, and then Jeff Bezos the other day was saying we need to have a basic, you know, living wage or something. I can't remember exactly what it was, right? But I do think

And the cynic in me is like, yeah, I mean, he's saying that because basically 50% of the population is not going to have jobs. So what does that even mean? Like he's banking on that, right? Like a universal whatever. Basic income. Basic income. I kind of like universal basic equity. I like that too.

Because basic income assumes that people are working and what happens? And at the same time we're talking about building all these robots, well, 50% of the people aren't working, 50% of people aren't going to have an income. So what does it matter if the other? 50 have a universal basic income. Everything else is going to be run by robots. Right. Yeah. And so I think this woo-woo phase that I'm in right now is not just about getting centered,

becoming clear, knowing, it's about finding your purpose. What I want my students to uncover in their 20s is what took me 40 years to uncover. The two most important days of your life, the day you were born and the day you were, you find what you were meant to do on this earth that's beyond you that's bigger than you and it's going to be messy and it's going to be complicated and don't there are days where I've wandered the forest figuring trying to your years I've wandered the forest without a sense of purpose not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing why I'm here you know and that changes it evolves over time we evolve that that's the phase I'm in right now I want students to be able to find what what is it

about them and the other thing is in the time of AI what makes them you must human. What makes us uniquely human? How do we connect with each other? How do we thrive? How can we move in diverse spaces, right? You know, spaces that are really, really left, spaces that are really, really right. And one of the things that I love about being at the University of Chicago, despite all of its problems, is that it can bring really different people to the table to debate. Not always on fair grounds, to be clear, but ideas level the playing field. And I think that there's something really, really important and powerful about people coming together, people pushing back, people thinking, what is it that makes human emotion, our brains, our sense of self, our sense of a connection

to the universe, our, if you believe in God, right? Like, I don't think that, and how can we not be, how can we let go of a noise in order to notice the synchronicities in our lives? So, you know, how is it that I was in this random bar in Ho Chi Minh City and this guy was one of the guys I was condescending to as a thob now protecting me in this space? What, how do you make sense of that? How do you make- Serendipity? Right.

People are brought into your life at a certain moment and a certain time to teach you certain lesson. What season of life are you in right now? Who are those people that are who you're encountering and what can you learn from them? This thing about us all being on our phones, we don't talk to the person next to us on an airplane. A couple weeks ago, I sat on an airplane next to this gentleman. He was very nice. He helped him with my luggage. Turns out he is a, he does all the B-roll for the NBA. He takes all the, and he's an Emmy Award winning videographer. I know nothing about basketball, NBA. I'm not an NBA person. But you know what was crazy is I asked. So I turned to him and I'm like, oh, I don't care about, you know, the fact that you

hobnob with Kobe and Shaq and all that. But I turned him and I asked, was it true that Kobe had a ritual of meditation? Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. That's real. Oh, yeah. I know that. Yeah. He pulls out this picture of Kobe, Shaq, you know, Yao Ming, all together. And I just couldn't, I mean, that was the basis of our conversation. This man and I have nothing in common. And then it turns out that he really wants to visit Vietnam. He's been thinking about visiting Vietnam. And I said, oh, my gosh, I have all this.

I have a guy. He can help build an itinerary. And, you know, yeah, it's very chaotic when you go there. But I can make it easy. And it's beautiful. and let me build out a whole itinerary for you. In the time that we're all on our phones, right? And we're just like in our faces in here.

We lose that sense of human connection. That's what makes us human. That's what makes us. We have a purpose in this world. I think this woo-woo phase of mine came from having a daughter. Because I just think, this is what, you know, I had a very, very rough childhood, and I didn't get into that because I don't know that this was the place.

But in the time of my meditation, I think our souls choose the families that we're born into. And some of those, and I had this dream one time that I could see souls lining up to choose their families. And I believe that about my daughter because my daughter was born, she's a golden rat. She was born in the year of the rest. She's a golden rat. And this kid, by the skin of her teeth, I mean, entered the world COVID-2020, born on November, her, you know, on election day, I mean, and everything, the theme of her life is by the skin of her teeth.

Like, just every, you know, every time I think she's not going to make a milestone, suddenly we're like getting, you know, she's promoted in her swim class or something like that. Every time we're trying to ride a bike and then by the skin of her teeth, she learns, you know, think, that's just like the theme of her life. And I remember thinking, I was brought to this earth to break patterns of intergenerational trauma to speak truth to power. that's my superpower. If I go into places, everybody has left. I run a program in Hong Kong where the only American university left in Hong Kong and I remember seeing at an airport

and this guy said to me, he's an older man who's maybe in his 80s from Charlotte, North Carolina. He was an engineer that built Disneyland Hong Kong years, years ago, does a lot of work in China. He said to me, the airport lounge, what are you doing here? And I said, have this knack of going into places

where everybody has left. I that's my superpower it just came out of me it just like what I said and I and I think that the other is I bring light to darkness to heavy darkness whether that's in my personal life whether that's like you know the grit of surviving horrific things to career things there's how do I exist in a place that's like how do I exist in a department with the oldest white men I mean this just divine intervention right I mean I And here's the thing I think about divine intervention. Because I've done work that's so risky and gets closer and closer to the bone, I often think that part of why I ended up here is because, well, if something happened to me, if I disappear, somebody's going to notice and somebody's going to do something. I just believe, I believe in divine intervention. And so there is this purpose.

At my daughter, I think she came to Earth to rest. I think she's on earth to that. The paradox of plenty. I have a couple of follow-up questions on AI since you brought it up. I guess the first one is, you know, it's all about hallucination, right? That's influenced by hypnosis. From a sociological standpoint, how do we make sure that the hypnosis is net positive as opposed to net negative.

And the second follow-up question would be, sociologically, how do we deal with displacements? Jobs are being taken over by AI, disproportionately faster than ever. How do you help prepare societies in dealing with these two phenomenal, Elements. You know, as a professor, this is the thing that I lose sleepover at night.

Because my job as a professor is to train students to enter the labor market. Whether that are bachelor students getting jobs, whether that's PhD students going into the academy, whether that's master students. and I have an incredibly a talented undergraduate student who built a large language model for me over the last three years. I mean, the guy has written like hundreds of, you know, thousands of pages, lines of code to do this. He built this modular pipeline. It was very humbling. I sat in a digital humanities class next to him. And I'm honest, I cheated the entire time.

I would write code. It would fail. I would feed it to Claude, chat GPT, try to figure out why my code is generating errors. He used his human mind mostly and with the help of Cloud too to write much of this code. He couldn't find a job this year. Oh my gosh. This is the University of Chicago student who won a student Marshall Award, who is running Serp. He's more talented than I am technically in terms of methods.

And I lose sleep overnight. at night and he said it's been very, very stressful. There's no jobs. I was at a summit today. There was a partner at a law firm who said, who mentioned that, you know, the summer interns from law is like, they're down to six per office now because AI can do a lot. And I really lose sleep about the dispossession. The other thing I will say is this. So much investment into AI has gone to building AI has gone into like the break, go fast and break model. And very few are investing in AI auditing, AI regulation, AI, you know, AI hallucinates, AI is biased. We know these things. There's research that shows these things. And to the extent that the data exists, it only

exists for for-profit purposes. So we now also live in a world. of proprietary data that you can monetize, right? Like, because our lives are so financialized, and the financialized logic, you know, feeds into everything. I probably shouldn't say this on a public podcast, but I'm going to say it. You know, I had access to this large database

to mostly fact-check some of the findings of my new research. And it was a corporate registry database, and the subscription to it was quite expensive for one year. subscription is going to end in a month. I got an email saying they are no longer renewing my subscription. And I wrote back and said, you know, is there any option? Is it because of the payment?

Did something go wrong? Nope. We are no longer. You know, there was no reason. And I went and looked on their website. And by the, I can't name them because part of the data agreement was I wouldn't name the source. But I went and looked on the website and I said, it's so interesting because large

companies, corporations, are using this database to do due diligence, to carry out due diligence on their trading partners, to look at shipping logistics. But you, and like, they want to know if they're working with a corrupt, you know, partner. They have access to that information for profit purposes. To use that same data to regulate, to expose, to fact check even in my case, I don't even know that I was looking at to expose. We don't have access to it. that's scary. And this is the last thing I will say. It is extraordinarily hard to find money or resources within universities to fund regulatory, like to study for the study of power. So to give you an example, I am working with a team. At this point, I've had 20 different undergraduate students working for me,

getting paid nothing. I mean, like $5,000. for a year. It's like, you know, two quarters worth of work, you know, it's just like truly it's exploitive at this point. But they, because they have this moral compass, for my research, I have not been able to secure any external funding

to study power. And this is about like, how do we, because this is about democracy. This is questions about democracy. And, you know, my colleagues in computer, science, they are essentially, you know, they have a bottomless bank account to do research on building these AI systems, right? Like using them, understanding them, but I don't have any resources to do that for accountability purposes. There's no AI auditing. There's no accountability.

There's no, and we know that it hallucinates. We can't even forget the AI, forget like the use of AI versus a regulating AI. The data is proprietary. Data regulating governments, exposing corruption. It's all been privatized. And data is the commodity now. It's only used for profit purposes. So when you think about like, what is the role, I think universities are at a crisis, not just because of, well, you know, the cost of education as we talked about and students potentially going to other countries for lower cost education, better treatment, et cetera, I mean, I think AI, I mean, I think the education is becoming democratized with platforms like school, you know, Instagram, the public education, reels of people distilling knowledge. But I think the other piece of it is within universities, some people have access to proprietary data and some don't.

And the ones that are asking the more critical questions have a really hard time. To study power, right now with the federal, with, you know, no NSF funding, we rely on philanthropy, philanthropic donors to give to universities. Philanthropic donors don't want professors studying the very system that enrich them. I mean, it's just logical, right? So it's incredibly hard to do this work. And I will say scary and lonely, too, on top of the scarcity of resources. And so that part of it, I think, is a part of the crisis within the modern university, right?

It used to be, I mean, tech companies call themselves universities, campuses. That proprietary data exists on those campuses, right? So what, and so what is the solution for universities to perform proprietary, to do proprietary data agreements? But that means when, if philanthropy is making donations to universities to universities, universities, that means they're dictating the very questions you can ask in the first place. Where does innovation come from? How do we learn? How do we ask different questions? It kind of goes back to my earlier question about the vested interest of these people that are managing hundreds of trillions or tens of trillions. They've got so much power and the rate

that everything is so financialized, that's leverage for them. Kimberly, we're almost two hours from the beginning. Oh, my gosh. I got lots more questions, but let me just ask you one or two more questions, if I may. You know, you've spent more than 40 years of your life. Is there anything that you would have done differently? I think that I wish that I wasn't so reactive. I don't know.

I didn't, I, that I, maybe this is just part of, your calling and I'm not, and I haven't been able to reconcile this part. But everything, like the energy that I took up until very recently was all about fighting and digging down systems, exposing systems, you know, patriarchy, you know, capitalism, all of that. And I think there's a time, maybe there's a season and a time and a place for that and that is like when you do that, You do that when you're younger. But sometimes I wish that I could do that without such a fight. And part of the reason why I'm saying this is as a sociologist, it's very easy to slip into a victim mindset.

Like you're a victim of racism, sexism. Those things are definitely true. But they, it's like the book, the body keeps score. They wear on you and cortisol shoots all over your body. And it shuts down your whole system. It shuts down your ability to think creatively. It shuts down your ability to ask different questions, to do new things. And part of what I wish my students will have is to learn that lesson in their 20s

so that they can spend their young years fighting differently. And not in a way that is just wrecks havoc on your – whole entire nervous system, body or, you know, your health. And I think that I wish that I had, I mean, I think my students now, they're much more mature than I was when I was at that age. They're much more self-assured. They have tools. They have language. I think it's also bifurcated, you know, the layer of inequality. But I wish I, I wish I had exposure to that. And, you know, I see it with my daughter when I, when I put my daughter to bed, if she has a hard time falling asleep, I'll say,

okay, close your eyes and imagine all the bad energy moving out of your body. And what's your color today? And she would say like rainbow or pink or purple. And imagine this like big bubble forming around you. And it's just filling you with positive energy. And this kid, man, she's a super manifester. She wants something and just appears somehow. You know, and somehow along the line, I lost that.

I lost that magic. I lost it. I had a sense of purpose, but I wish I could have purpose with magic, serendipity, openness. I think there were so many opportunities that were right in front of me that I couldn't even see. I missed it because I, because again, like the Silver Spoon Marxist, I had issue. I like wanted to fight them. The, you know, everything was just like, everyone was my antagonist. And I wish that I had the foresight to think about how to build community.

And I think that would have made me a better teacher years ago Instead of like, oh my gosh, the world is so hard And let me tell you about all these things It was almost like, let me tell you about all the minds That you're going to encounter That are just going to erupt in any moment. And what I didn't realize when I was doing that Was I was transmitting trauma

And I wish I could do that differently. Wow. Okay, one final question. I'll take us to the two-hour limit. You know, as a student of meditation, one believes in the impermanence of things, right? Within your conviction, what would it take for the industrialization of bad stuff to be impermanent? Was so taken by Artemis II. And the reason being was that during a time of so much chaos, there was so much hope.

And the view of the earth from Artemis II was unbelievably gorgeous. We are one people. We are part of this gorgeous earth. And there's this void in space. There's nothing in space. And I feel so deeply moved. And I believe that the universe made that happen at this very time to remind us of our shared humanity to maybe inspire us to stop fighting wars, stop wars. Because all we have is each other.

I mean, we are more similar than we are different. And I think Artemis 2, that entire mission and the views of Earth from space and the views of the stars and the craters and the moon, that to me is a reminder of impermanence. It's a reminder of, I mean, I guess I, yeah, I think that's a reminder. That's the most, that's the closest we're going to get in our time of a material reminder of how to connect to that. And so, yes, and you know what's so interesting about Artemis too? There's certainly the astronomy, the science, the engineering, the hard math, you know, the rational part of it. But all of them had a spiritual connection to being there. a spiritual message to share

a way of being so moved by what they were witnessing in real time and we got to go on that journey and we got to see and witness alongside and that was so powerful and that gives me so much hope in this moment and in this time right?

Like none of them want to stay out there. None of them, I mean, we're talking about colonizing Mars right, colonizing, you know, just like outer space, colonizing, you know, who wants to be out there? And do you know why? Because people connect us. We are a part of a community. We are a part of people. And we have to remember. So if that's the, if we think about impermanence in that way, then truly, what is our purpose on this earth? Yeah. If not to make the lives of the people around us better. How did we lose?

sight of that. How did we lose that? How can we come back to that? And I think one of the greatest joys about being a professor, and I've had my peaks in valleys, and I've had years where I probably was a horrible professor. And, you know, when I meet people and I, you know, and I wonder what season of life did I meet them at? In this moment right now, the thing I love about being a professor is the dynamism of the students, the energy, the things I learn. And perhaps, to be a quiet reminder of this very impermanence. Wow. That's a great ending to this podcast.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, thank you. Friends, that was Professor Kimberly Hong from the University of Chicago. Thank you.