Modern Wisdom - Inside The Democratic Party Civil War - Ezra Klein - #1114

Starting point is 00:00:00 Ezra Klein, so hot right now. Oh, no. Did you ever expect to be referred to as an unlikely thirst trap? I did not. And I try to ignore that it's happening. It also is this funny quality, some of this coverage of how now, it's like I took off my glasses and grew a beard. And it's very she's all that. It's like, oh, like maybe he's, I always look the same to me.

Starting point is 00:00:25 Well, an unlikely thirst trap feels like the most backhanded insult. compliment. It's like a raw shock test for whether or not you feel good about yourself. I don't know what way that's... Is that supposed to be a nice thing? Unlikely thirst trap. I don't... When you are profiled,

Starting point is 00:00:42 it is not supposed to be a nice thing. Okay, so you'll take the unlikely thirst trap. I think that's also an important thing to know about just like the whole genre of profiling. It's never supposed to be a totally nice thing. Usually not supposed to be a totally mean thing. It's trying to create energy. That's interesting.

Starting point is 00:00:58 There was a rumor in that that that you, you'd had to adjust your lighting on your podcast set to make you look less attractive because it was distracting from the real substance of the... It is a not true rumor. Wow. And it's going to be an even weirder thing to discuss, like, here while you're sitting there, like three times is ripped in front of me as we talk about whether or not I'm hot. I know it's...

Starting point is 00:01:22 I thought that that was an interesting profile, but yeah, how do you feel about having a mini-celebrity moment like that? you try to focus on the work. And I mean that really seriously. I think that if you start to see yourself in the third person, it is very, very dangerous for doing good work. It's like the input of good work is independence of mind. And for me, particularly, it's a lot of time spent by myself,

Starting point is 00:01:49 reading books, thinking about things. Once the world's idea of you gets into your head, it is poison. And I think that's true, by the way, for, you know, people get profiled or have many, you know, moments. I think it's also just naturally true for everybody now who has social media profiles and has this kind of constant, like, front stage that they keep up. I always tell people who, like, come to me for advice in journalism or who are having some kind of pop in the press that you really have to be intentional.

Starting point is 00:02:22 You have to be intentional about maintaining as much of a backstage as you can. And when I see people who aren't having a pop, like destroying their backstage, I worry about them. The streamers worry me in an almost paternalistic way. I watch the amount of their lives they're putting online and they're putting in front of a camera. How little is left for them. And psychologically, I think it is going to do a lot of people, a lot of damage. Everyone feels uncomfortable watching that. You ever read Super Sad True Love Story by Goose Steingart?

Starting point is 00:02:53 No. It's amazing, amazing book. It is as prophetic a book on this moment. anybody has ever done. It was probably done 10, 20, 10, 15 years ago. And everything in it. It's like, it's all about a world of streamers and sort of America coming apart and people having everything around them like raided in public and everybody in it is looks maxing. There's a whole thing about how books smell bad. Like it's sort of like de class A to have physical books. So at least we haven't done that yet. But you can really have these moments right now where you realize

Starting point is 00:03:27 we have built the dystopia. We have done the thing the sci-fi writers warned us against doing, just in all directions, all at once. And it's just hope it turns out, well, this time. How do you think about protecting the backstage? I keep a lot of time quiet. I don't go to very much. Did you read a Lena Dunham's new book?

Starting point is 00:03:57 It's great, Famicic. And she talks a bunch about the way everything creates more of itself. Everything you do creates more of itself. And so if you get on different circuits, it just, it eats you. It eats the time. So for me, it's like the way I think about my work. Most weeks, I bring out three things.

Starting point is 00:04:15 I bring out two podcast episodes and one call. And the week is just very much organized around that. And I just more and more and more try to cut out, like, everything that is not directly feeding into one of those three pieces of work. or is not my children, my family, and deep friendships, or like personal care and time, right? And that's already a lot. Like, even as I say those five-ish things to you, I feel tired. Yeah. Yeah, and the fact that, I guess, one shortcut is to just make all of the other stuff part of the main thing to turn all of the private life into the public life.

Starting point is 00:04:58 I think Mary Harrington talks about a digital hijabre. that she wears where she covers up a lot of the parts of her that she doesn't want the world. Oh, that's a great... The world to see. A digital... That's a great coinage. She wears this thing. She told this story.

Starting point is 00:05:13 She finished her first marathon, a half marathon, something, some race. She's into running. And she took a selfie at the end because that's what you do, right? I'm proud of this thing. And she went to post it and she sort of saw this universe split, which was how much of this is for me and how much of this is for the internet. And yeah, I mean, it is very easy to be distracted from doing work. I'm curious how you handle this because you have a tougher job on this than I do.

Starting point is 00:05:40 So my work, I can define it much more tightly. You know, it's primarily about politics, current affairs, geopolitics. I bring in some things I care about like meditation and, but for the most part, it is not natural. I have to choose to let it colonize the things that are closer to my core. but yours, like the topics you touch on the show, they're very personal. So anything can become content for you. It's been a purposeful, I think I'm quite, by disposition, I'm quite a private person. Like my personal lives always remain very private.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And that's been something that a bunch of friends gave me advice on early on. And I'm really glad that I followed it. Once you open that door, I think it's very difficult to reverse it. People are interested in who you're dating now. and what does this mean? And who's he aligning himself with? As soon as you open that door, the snowball continues to roll. Mercifully for me, I think almost purposely trying to be as boring as possible with your

Starting point is 00:06:45 personal life is a great prophylactic. People just get very, very, they'll move on to what is more easily consumable. And for as long as destiny exists, I am not going to be top of the list. Like there was a period where destiny's private life was just made the most public thing over and over and over and over again. And Hassan will get in bother over and over and over and over again or Nick Fuentes will come through or Huberman will come through. You know, there's a lot of people that are like easier access than me who I think my biggest defense is purposefully making my private life very boring and not really talking about it all that much. And people just move on. And that for me is like, I'm completely fine by that as my strategy.

Starting point is 00:07:26 The other thing that I think is important is not exposing yourself to the algorithm is all that much. So I don't tweet. We've started putting clips up on Instagram. And even doing a little bit more of that, I feel the pull of it, the want of it. So I'm a big fan of all these mid-century media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and Walter Ong. And all of them basically, their main idea, is that every medium changes the user. So we think what we're doing when we, you know, turn on the television or turn on X or turn on Instagram or read a book for that matter is we are consuming content. We are choosing and we can make better or worse decisions, right?

Starting point is 00:08:08 We can read better worse people, watch better worse shows. And their whole view is no. It is always using and changing you. There's a great Marshall McLuhan quote where he says, I'll butcher it a little bit from memory, but he says, the content of a medium is the juicy steak thrown to distract the watchdog of the mind. And his point is that while you're sitting there getting mad at a tweet, what's actually happening is that your sense of how ideas should feel and look, how long they should be.

Starting point is 00:08:45 While you're sitting there looking at Instagram, your sense of what everything should look like, it's all changing. And as it changes, you change with it and you, and particularly with these algorithms that create, you know, constant rankings and other super sad true love story thing. It creates a constant feeling of, well, shouldn't I? Shouldn't I be competing here too? And what you can do and what I've seen a lot of people do is they get into local maximums, but long-term minimums or degradations where, you know, you know, you know, you. You're doing a lot to be as competitive on, say, Twitter or X as you can be, and you don't realize it in the long run, the trade you're making on that influence

Starting point is 00:09:32 is it the way you think is degrading. And so the long-term work is going to be worse. And in the long run, you know, it's hard to maintain a, it's hard to maintain a career where you have to be interesting over an extended period of time. And I think people who are trying to do that need to be very, very, very intentional. in the same way that like an athlete needs to be very intentional about, you know, avoiding injury and burnout. Getting two captured by one black hole being sucked into one particular medium. There's this great story.

Starting point is 00:10:03 I think it's Dostoevsky or Nietzsche, and the first part of their career, they were writing by hand. And the second part of their career, they started writing on typewriter. And explain the difference between the first and the second. They say the sentences got shorter and punchier, and their thoughts occurred in a different way. Their writing style changed because of the medium. And that's them just being facilitated by a new output medium, not even absorbing things in a different manner. So when you've got it going both ways, this bi-directional thing, I'm going to be influenced by what I see on this particular platform. Yeah, it's going to be deranging.

Starting point is 00:10:38 So one thing that I think about, and I've never quite been able to come up with a clean enough theory to start using it, but we can work it out here together. is I think we need a better politics of attention. And one of the ideas that influenced me, which came from an academic paper that I don't remember the authors to cite, but is to think about attention as a public good or a collective resource. And attention then is subject to tragedy of the commons problem. So a tragedy of the commons problem is when, you know, everybody has access to a grazing field.

Starting point is 00:11:10 And so it then becomes very quickly a problem where people will begin trying to graze as much of the field they can. And then everybody has to do more. And soon enough, you've exhausted this public good. And I think our attention is like that. And we only have so much of it. And we have it as a collective, not just individuals. And we are being like attention fracked.

Starting point is 00:11:30 And the more competition there is for our attention, the more aggressive everybody is about trying to get it. I don't know if you get on as many political emails and text message, you know, things as I do. Zero. God bless. Yeah. But they have gotten so loud.

Starting point is 00:11:44 They come with all these siren emojis now. It's always like, it's Chuck Schumer and Ezra, and I'm on my knees begging it, right? Everything is like the end of the world. Everything is an emergency. You know, a lot of these places are like, I always joke that X is like gain of function research for takes. It's just everybody competing to take like a normal take until you can turn it into something that has viral contagion. And then occasionally they do it too well and it escapes contagion and destroys their life. Like that's how X works.

Starting point is 00:12:15 And but collectively the effect is our collective attention is irritable, is short, it's changing. The people we want are changing. To again just stay on the mediums thing for a minute, there's a great, it's not a contrary. It's a Neil Postman argument that he makes in amusing ourselves to death, which is always one of my books I recommend to people. And he says that people often say to him that how can you say television? because this guy's writing, you know, around television is Drek. Like, look at Sesame Street. And he says, I don't worry about the Drek on television.

Starting point is 00:12:50 I worry about Sesame Street. Because what Sesame Street is doing is teaching kids that education should actually be entertainment. He said, the trash on television is no problem. Everybody knows it's trash. It's where you're subtly changing. Masquerading is something else. It's where you're changing your expectations for whatever thing else should be. So, I mean, right now we're moving into a period in politics where, I think, in order to be a successful politician,

Starting point is 00:13:11 you have to be attentionally capable. You have to be able to earn attention in a way you didn't have to before. Zoroamandani, Spencer Pratt, Graham Platner, Donald Trump, right? You can do it from different James Telerico. You can do it in better or worse ways. But what you can't be in a competitive race any longer

Starting point is 00:13:26 is a somewhat boring talker who's just really good at the government. Deliver on the policy. I understand the fundamental economics of this. I'm great with my constituents. You need more aura. How are things going for Kirstarmer? I mean, yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:41 a man that is the equivalent of a ham sandwich. Did you see this tweet? It's at the very bottom. Did you see that tweet earlier on today? The very, very bottom, it's hiding down there. I did, yes. I saw both of those. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:52 So I had to double check that at the Democrats is the Democrats official proper. Democratic National Committee. Correct. Yeah. And I'm like, is this a parody account? It's got to be. So the Democrats tweet, fired up ready to go.

Starting point is 00:14:08 It's time to take back Texas. Stephen Miller replies and says, the Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate. And at the Democrats reply, shut up, you ugly fuck. And that reached at least 50 million people. It's like 300,000 likes. I get it. The he did it first thing of pointing from one side to the other.

Starting point is 00:14:31 But maybe this is just my sort of British properness coming through. The thought that a, the honest. online representative account for one of the parties saying, shut up, you ugly fuck. Is that not absurd? Like, that feels kind of deranged to me. It is deranged. But this is a little bit what I mean about the whole medium, right? Because one thing that does, one thing in every movement like this does, and I take Donald Trump, honestly is a bit of a first mover here, is it is shifting people's sense of what political communication should sound like.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Agreed. So, I mean, that is the outcome, I would say, of a long process of learning that, you know, that, you know, that. If you tweet like a normal, sober, stolid, boring. Boring. Barack Obama is, I'm a big Barack Obama fan. That guy's Twitter account, not great. Not sexy enough.

Starting point is 00:15:26 Not sexy enough. And so this is the way everything changes. Like, it actually, it changes the expectations. It changes the people and it changes what can succeed. And so, you know, sometimes maybe they, I mean, I guess you can ask the Democrats at the Democrats if they went too far or not. Maybe they, maybe to them it's a huge success. But this is what I mean when you have to think about these mediums, you have to think about the attention, you have to think about the norms, you have to think about the discourse as a kind of public good. What that is doing, like that right there is a tragedy of the comments problem. It's very hard for at the Democrats to be noticed. There's a huge cacophony of voices. The voices that get noticed are extreme. So here's a thing. You noticed them. We are here talking about at the Democrats rejoinder to Stephen Miller. I can't remember the last time that I talked about at the Democrats. So they probably just succeeded.

Starting point is 00:16:11 That's a W. But it's a tragedy of the commons. Like Stephen Miller, by the way, a deputy chief of staff to the president is tweeting about James Tolarico, whatever else you want to say about Tala Rico, an incredibly decent person, an incredibly decent man in politics who tries very hard to treat people on both sides with respect. Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, his reaction to Ken Paxton, by the way. It wasn't even like Tala RICO won the primary last night.

Starting point is 00:16:37 It was a couple nights ago. It was Paxton. was first transgender candidate. So again, I don't want to sit here and just like tut tut and chin stroke, but it is a degradation of the entire system. It sounds so uncool. I can even feel my own sort of cringometer of being out of touch occurring as we're talking about it. Like, what do you mean both within a couple of years of each other?

Starting point is 00:17:02 Are you really going to be the footy-duddies finger wagging at people, these kids on the internet having fun or whatever? I'm like, I don't know, man. It feels like extracting from a system that it shouldn't be. It feels like there's something that's going wrong with regards to that. I guess one of the biggest talking points that we've had over the last couple of years was around what happened in the 2024 election, especially independent media sort of being involved in that.

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Starting point is 00:18:20 Do you think if the left had had its own version of Joe Rogan that the last election would have really changed? The election was close enough in the battleground states. that I think you end up in a situation where you can change any variable and imagine moving, I don't remember the exact number, but something like you would have needed, I think, 150,000 votes to switch. I mean, those votes would have had to have been correctly, like, disfigured. But it was in, you know, just a handful states.

Starting point is 00:18:53 So maybe not just Joe Rogan, like, I always say that the way to think about this is not a liberal or illiberal Joe Rogan. It's candidates who are comfortable in the kinds of spaces that we mean, when we talk about Rogan. Like the point is not getting like one guy who is more on your side. The point is, you know, Harrison Walls having been everywhere and having been capable of talking more effectively a different kind of person.

Starting point is 00:19:17 But let me pull back on something you said a second ago. I've been thinking a lot about virtue and politics. And virtue, I was going to see it's not a word we use that much, but I actually think particularly like in your corners of the blogosphere, We were talking about blogs before he started of the RIPCosphere. RIP. It is something we talk about. And I was just doing a show that'll come out shortly about a bunch of the kind of more masculinist philosophies on the right, people like Bronze Age Pervert and Rog nationalist.

Starting point is 00:19:51 And one of the things I was thinking about is how much those visions of masculinity have a primitivism to them, right? it's this desire to rediscover a stereotypically testosterone-soaked, much more competitive, dominance-oriented, aggressive, right? There's a view that modern man has been warped into and constrained into this soft, cooperative, like against their own instincts. Okay. The thing that I was noticing how, when I actually read what these guys were writing, the thing that I was noticing was so absent was the idea of self-mobile.

Starting point is 00:20:29 mastery and self-discipline as a fundamental dimension, not just of manhood or masculinity, but just of humanity. In fact, a lot of these places seem to take self-discipline and self-mastery, with the exception maybe of like a homosocial weightlifting component as a negative, right? It was evidence of the way modernity had warped us into this attenuated shape that works for, you know, modern feminized liberal democracy, right? That's the argument. And so you see, I think this is particularly true on Trump, and you see it with Stephen Miller, this gleeful rejection of norms of behavior that once sort of reflected, I think, a kind of self-disciplined, right?

Starting point is 00:21:17 Politicians don't talk the way Donald Trump talks, right? They are disciplined. They know not to just unleash on the people they don't like in a way that is destructive, most of them. And it was this wiping away of that as a kind of show of that you would not be held back by the system as it existed. And so there's a message in what Miller is saying. And now you see the Democrats trying to ape it. But what I do think is going to create, I think what it's already creating is going to be a swing back to a desire to see political virtue, to see social virtue demonstrated in. in leaders. Everything creates its opposite in politics always. And so this sort of statesman-like,

Starting point is 00:22:01 a bit more decorum. Yeah, it'll have to be a version that works for today. It'll still need to be sexy. You've got to have a aura. You need to have a horror. You need to have a stormer. Correct. But the Tala Rico, I mean, the reason Tala Rico is dangerous to them, and I'm not saying he's going to win, Texas is a hard state for a Democrat to win in. But the reason Tala Rico popped in the first place, the reason he ended up on Joe Rogan in the first place is he is able to talk through a kind of progressive Christianity in a language of morality and virtue that people found And that you didn't really hear from Democrats anymore. And I think he was one of the first moments. And he's raised more, I think, than any Senate candidate in the country based on this. And I think he's one of the first moments where you really see where the pendulum is going to swing back to because I think people are looking around and they're seeing what it looks like when we unleash ourselves in a way that conforms to algorithmic media. And I'm not saying everybody dislikes it. Some people feel real excited by it. But I think most people dislike it. Even people I know who are Trump supporters. They don't like the way this all feels.

Starting point is 00:22:57 You like it in the way that you like having a McDonald's, that at the time it's kind of enticing, but afterward you feel a bit shitty. And if you have too many of them in a row, you actually start to reject the system a little bit. It's interesting as having this conversation with Arthur Brooks yesterday, and he was saying, the moment that you break any kind of addictive cycle,

Starting point is 00:23:15 the first thing that you have to do, at least following evidence for a broad range of aggregated addictions, is you have to get mad. You have to be angry at the thing. Like, I'm sick of being. at the mercy of this thing. I'm sick of being at the mercy of porn. I'm sick of being at the mercy of drugs. I'm sick of being at the mercy of alcohol. Sick of being at the mercy of scrolling on my phone. Getting mad is a really effective first step. And I wonder at what point. People just

Starting point is 00:23:38 get bored. Like, because this evolutionary arms race of like bullshittery that keeps on happening online. Now, if the Democrats tweet, shut up you ugly fuck again, it gets a tenth as much attention. So we've already seen it. Yeah. So unless you're going to continue to to play that game, okay, well, what's new? Well, what's new is the equivalent of a sundress and a cake, right? You know what I mean? Like, it's something that feels a little bit more kind of vestigial. I feel like there's been a move.

Starting point is 00:24:08 And again, you don't see that tweet set where we're using as our text here. A rich text, if spare. I already think there's a move towards something sunnier. I mean, if you had to use one word to describe the aesthetic of Mom Donnie, it's sunny. You can say a lot of other things about him, right? And people disagree with him. And, you know, everybody can have their organs about what he believes. You never saw that guy without a smile.

Starting point is 00:24:34 He didn't, I mean, if you ever just looked at the Mamdani smile, it's like Trump had this scowl. Even in his second presidential portrait, this is not me ragged on him. He has a portrait in which he's scowling. It's a very unusual portrait. It's just kind of like looking down. And Mamdani, the smile on Girodana had this great piece in his substack of ink. about like the red, Mom Dani smile as rhetoric. And Tala Rico, Mom Dani, you start to see something new working.

Starting point is 00:25:04 And of course, it will only work for so long and we'll see where it goes. And it's not the only thing working. But that Stephen Miller, the Democrats exchange, it sucks, right? Like who wants to feel that way? No one. And so that's a, it's a way in, not a way out. And I do think the winning move in politics in the next couple of years is going to be the way out, not the way in.

Starting point is 00:25:26 At best, it's a sort of gleeful dancing over somebody else. They've done in the same way as two bullies fighting against each other, kind of take a degree of satisfaction from having a pop. But it's not, yeah, it's not sunny. It's performing sunniness, right? I care less about what you think of me. Oh, no, actually, we care even less about what you think of us than you think that we do. Yeah, this arms race sucks.

Starting point is 00:25:51 I guess I'm kind of interested. Do you think that you are at the center of a Democrat civil war at the moment? At the center of a civil war? I don't know. Do you think I am? It seems that way on the internet. If you read the right pieces, there's certainly an orbiting. And I wonder whether it's because so few people are able to talk on many different sides.

Starting point is 00:26:14 That might be it. I think the Democratic Party is having a big debate over what it should be. And I think that the book that Derek Thompson and I released last year, Abundance, which it was one of these things, I mean, I've released a book before, things catch fire for their own reasons. And abundance became in a way that is a remarkable one of the texts that became the thing people used to have an argument they wanted to have, which was. which is not necessarily the argument we're actually having in the book, but Abundance sort of became at the center of this war between what I'd call the populace wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. And what was funny about that fight to me, so Abundance the book we did, was about the way

Starting point is 00:27:07 in which liberalism, Democrats of various stripes left to center, have made it very hard to build where they govern. And so in places it tend to be blue, like New York or California, it's been hard to build homes, hard to build clean energy. Texas where you live, they build just more homes and more clean energy than Blue States do. Not because they're necessarily more pro-affordable housing, and definitely not because they're more politically pro-clean energy or worried about climate change. They just have created a structure in which it is easier to build things. I've talked to climate tech entrepreneurs, not just doing sort of normal green energy, but doing things that are

Starting point is 00:27:42 much more on the cost, much bigger projects. And their politics are Californian. And they're just like, I can get things done in Texas and Arizona and I can't get the done here, right? And what was interesting about the fight that book kicked off then is a book was very much embraced by the people it was actually criticizing. So Gavin Newsom embraced that book, right? He talks all the time now about we need to be Democrats need to be a party of abundance. He uses another term that I have called the Liberals in the builds. And so did a lot of people from outside of the party. Obama's talked about the book, right? The part of the party that was actually in power that we were criticizing kind of grabbed onto it. And the part of the party that is insurgent sort of reacted against

Starting point is 00:28:23 that. It's like, well, abundance kind of became for them the face of like the Obamaism, you know, the sort of the party keeping power. And they want sort of a more populist party. Here's the thing. I just think most of this fight is fake because, you know, Zerun Mabdani, just as week released a big housing plan. And it's a housing plan. And it's a housing plan. and all about making it easier to build, and all about cutting through bureaucracy and red tape, and making it faster and cheaper. And in Los Angeles, Nithia Rahman, Democratic Socialists, running against Karen Bass, who's the Democratic mayor, is also running like taping things in, you know, overgrown fields that the L.A. city is, like, suing to stop from becoming affordable housing. You know, the New Democrats, the Congressional Caucus released a thing about how to build more clean energy and create clean energy abundance. So one of the hard things for me in, like, judging this debate is that there's an online discourse that because of the nature of online discourse becomes very, very factional and it becomes very angry.

Starting point is 00:29:25 And people who are, people sort of create a fight in it that they're used to. But to me, like the whole thing abundance is doing is cross-cutting divisions. It exists not just inside the Democratic Party, but also between Democrats and Republicans to sort of create new syntheses on things. And so I just don't see the fights that people are scoring on Twitter there as being even the fights and the difficulties that our ideas really face. Because in practice, it's much more about how hard these things are to get done. And I also think that there's like a whole technology side of abundance that has proven a much, much harder climb because of AI than it was when we were writing that book. So I'm always like happy to be a character in various people's discourse fights. But I tend to think that the particular one that has been, you know, present here has at this point been pretty belied by the reality of who is embracing these ideas.

Starting point is 00:30:27 Well, you're one of the few liberals that's sort of openly. critiquing liberal governance failures. Do you ever feel like you need to walk on eggshells a little because there is a degree of purity spiraling and othering on the left. The right seems to be prepared to welcome anybody with whatever history they've got with open arms? Well, unless you say, unless you say Joe Biden won the 2020 election and then Donald Trump will primary your like whole career into oblivion. That is kind of he who shall not be named for joining the right. That's the Voldemort of the right. That's correct. But I want to say something interesting about this, because this, I think, reflects a difference in the two parties right now.

Starting point is 00:31:05 What Donald Trump did very effectively is he collapsed purity on the Republican Party down to a single-dimensional point, which is loyalty to him. So he is willing to accept a tremendous amount of views so long as you are loyal to and say nice things about him personally. This is a single ordinating principle. Exactly. The left, which does not have a leader in that respect. A plurality of ways that you can get in trouble. Exactly. Whereas there's just a unity of ways that you can get in trouble on the right.

Starting point is 00:31:35 That's so interesting. Yeah. So the right has, it's a little bit of like the Fox and Head Talk thing. So the right has this one big thing you have to accept. This one, not just lie, right? The 2020 election stuff is a lie. But the problem they're about to have, the problem they're having right now is that what it means to be loyal to Trump is a more complicated thing than it was in the 2024 election.

Starting point is 00:31:58 because he's doing things, right, like the war in Iran. And so what it means to be loyal to him is not just you're pro-Trump, but you can believe whatever on vaccines, you can believe whatever on. Now you actually have to, as a member of the Republican Party, you know, sign on that you can't like break with him on the Epstein files, right? You know, like you see this happening. And so you've had like very maga people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey, you know, who 100% were on board with all kinds of election bullshit from Trump.

Starting point is 00:32:26 But they got pushed out over other things now because they weren't loyal. on the current policy. Single ordinating principle has fractured into... The Democratic Party, or maybe I'll call it like the broad left, it's not like it was four years ago, but what it has is an agenda

Starting point is 00:32:42 and a set of different factions have a platform and an orientation and a set of ideas you have to be loyalty, right? Do you believe in Medicare for all? Like, how do you feel about billionaires or how do you feel about wokeness if you're sort of more in the sense? They're trying to create a programmatic test.

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Starting point is 00:34:16 What if we step outside of the more political dimension of this, and we talk about the cultural left, the people that contribute to the discourse online? Because at least with that, people can be dissenting of Trump, but broadly still be seen as part of the right. I'm not convinced that the same level of, the same amount of ballast is in the system for people that are on the left. Now, maybe this is declining. I think that you're right. It was significantly more pure five or six years ago. But I'm just interested as somebody who seems to be departing, or at least criticizing, in a manner that I wouldn't have heard five years ago. whether that ever plays into the back of your mind.

Starting point is 00:34:59 I mean, I'm going to press post on this thing, but I know the subsequent nuclear fallout that's going to occur once I do. I like to think that I have tried to hold this approach to my politics and work for a long time. I mean, the thing that led to the moment I've had over the past couple of years was a sort of early and pretty aggressive argument

Starting point is 00:35:21 that Biden should step down. And that was not a popular thing that a Democratic Party when I made it, and it caused problems. So I have a view that, and by the way, abundance, which releases last year, I mean, the columns and essays that led to that started in 2021. So I was writing all this at a different time. I think you have to be self-critical as a party in politics, both for two reasons. One is you're probably making mistakes. And two is that if you believe in getting things done and you're failing, you have to try to figure out why, whether that getting done is winning elections or that getting done is

Starting point is 00:35:55 building homes or whatever it might be. I want to, but to take the broader thing you're saying, because I don't want to present that as too idiosyncratic, I think, one, this has all gotten easier, in part because I think like the weird moment in the platforms has fractured. So here's another theory I have. Whoever dominates Twitter pays for it three to four years later. And in 2020, Progressives dominated.

Starting point is 00:36:25 Twitter. And they convinced themselves of a lot of kind of wild ideas. And those ideas came and bit them in the ass in 2024. Okay. And Kamala Harris got like really hung out on different ads that got run against her with things she had said years before. Even right now, James Tala Rico, the attacks that Ken Paxton and Republicans are using against him have to do with things he said like three or four years ago, right? Like God is non-binary, that kind of thing. So the thing is then Elon Musk bought Twitter, made it X, sort of drove a lot of the left off of it, opened up the floodgates to the right on it. And now the right has ended up in a somewhat similar place where they have gotten, like, attached to Nick Fuentes and like the more conspiratorial incarnation of Tucker Carlson and the sort of like Twitter anon world. And people are talking themselves into much more wild and conspiratorial things.

Starting point is 00:37:25 And this is going to pert them, is my prediction, in two or three years when, like, the bill on all this comes due. Which is all to say that I think you cannot separate the dynamics we are talking about from algorithmic social media. I think that is fundamentally what is shaping these fast rise and fast falls in coalitional purity, in kind of extreme ideas taking hold. and in a sense where you get so consumed in talking to your own side that you lose a sense of where other people really are. And I mean, that's the most dangerous thing in all of us. It's not having some of these ideas. I mean, I agree, by the way, with many of the ideas people, like,

Starting point is 00:38:11 now to write as wokeness. The problem is when you don't realize you have not done the political work to make those ideas legible to others, or to sort of win enough support that you can push other ideas out of the marketplace. You stop, instead of doing politics, you're doing posting. And politics is a constant balancing of disagreement. Politics is an act of endless pluralism in a liberal democracy. And posting is not.

Starting point is 00:38:42 Posting is for your side and get in a lot of energy to hate on the other side. And posting tends to habituate people to a very, very, very, very bad. and very weak form of politics. So you're saying that people sort of believe their own hype for a while. That becomes its own kind of derangement. And then at some point in future... No, I'm saying that in the way we were talking about the algorithms earlier, people get into these one-up dynamics to sort of prove their purity.

Starting point is 00:39:13 So Mom Donnie, right, here in New York, when he ran for mayor, he just had to straight up disown a bunch of things he had said on Twitter a couple of years ago. right, like that the NYPD is anti-queer. And a lot of politicians on the left are just having to be in a, yeah, 2020 was a crazy time. You know, like I said some shit. And that came from being in a online milieu where people are getting pushed to, like, see and say stuff that was ever more out of the mainstream as a way of proving that they got it. You're optimizing for the platform. And your corner of it.

Starting point is 00:39:52 Correct. Yes, you're optimizing for this very specific echo chamber. You've got this arms race of attention. And also you're trying to do something which garners as much as many eyeballs as possible. Eventually somebody when that dust settles a little bit gets to look at it with a clearer set of eyes and go, what's this? What's this thing that you said not that long ago? And sometimes it appears in an ad. Or you're now running statewide in Texas or citywide in New York. And all of a sudden, it just, it wasn't for them. You were, you were saying something to the person you had seen two seconds ago on social media. And now it's being blasted out in an ad running all across El Paso. And it wasn't for the median voter. The internet. The internet is forever.

Starting point is 00:40:41 Do you, do you consider yourself, given this interesting position, and especially with, with the book, where it's put you in terms of criticizing liberal government? do you see yourself as further left or further right than previously, or are you just in exactly the same spot? I don't think my politics are that different. I mean, I see myself as a liberal. And I've been a liberal for a long time. And like the American tradition, it means different things in Europe and other places. And I have fairly recognizable liberal goals. I want universal health care. I want more like economic egalitarianism. I want people to have just the ability to, live a flourishing life. But in the way that I think it's traditionally been a big part of liberalism and think about Obama, for instance, I believe very strongly that the work of making a fractious, complex, multi-ethnic democracy function is honorable, important work. And that requires not just policies, but certain political virtues and approaches to politics. That

Starting point is 00:41:52 keep conflict from spinning out of being constructive and allow it to spin into spaces that are really destructive. If you were to design an incentive to do the opposite of that, it would be social media. Yes. And so I, yeah, I think I'm, in some ways, I'm probably further left than my temperament makes people think in terms of what I believe about things. but I also think that policy is not really the way people code other people's ideology. You know, what makes you more far left, right? Is it believing in the maximum level of universal health care you can get to? Or is it your view on climate change? Or is it review on what level of political compromise is okay?

Starting point is 00:42:43 A lot of the places where people get really angry at me is I am much more open to political compromise and I'm very open to Democrats running very different candidates in very different places, including candidates who are much more conservative than me because I believe disagreement is very real. And one mistake I think a lot of people make when looking at politics is they don't really credit how different people are from them. And so if you're in a political bubble in New York City or Austin or Los Angeles, what it takes for a Democrat like Joe Manchin to win statewide and West Virginia, I don't think it's conceivable to you. Like, you don't know anybody like, like, you don't know what it means to win working class voters in West Virginia. He does. He was like the Democratic MVP, right? I don't have Joe Manchin's politics. I find Joe Manchin incredibly irksome. And I also understand that his job is not my job. And so one of the things I'm,

Starting point is 00:43:40 one of the things I worry about because I worry about where this country's politics are going, And I am very deeply opposed to Donald Trump and MAGA and the way the politics their work is I think it's really important Democrats win Iowa. I think it's really important they are competitive in places like Nebraska, which they used to be. You know, in 2010, Democrats held, I believe, both seats in West Virginia, right, in the Senate. Like, that's unimaginable now. And so the question of what kind of big tent would allow that where you can have Azuron Mamdani here. but, you know, Rob Sand, who's this more moderate Democrat running statewide for governor in Iowa, who's great, he's running on getting rid of the two-party system, right? He's not running as a, like a Democrat to appeal to liberals in Brooklyn or leftist in Brooklyn, for that matter. He starts every town hall with he, he, like, has Republicans stood up. He says, I want everybody to clap for the Republicans in this room. The Democrats are to stand up. Everybody clap from the independence. And then he has him all do the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the Star Spangled Banner together. And is that my politics exactly?

Starting point is 00:44:46 Like, is that how I would run a rally? Probably not. Would I win statewide in Iowa? I sure look at it, man. But Rob Sand might win statewide in Iowa. And Rob Sand is a hero for that. And so you got to believe in things. But also, I do think the question, I mean, I think in the Trump era, I take more seriously than I used to, that building the stability of our politics was an incredible achievement.

Starting point is 00:45:17 And many countries don't have that. And in many countries, they had it and it was lost. And believing that in America, we cannot break this thing is a mistake. And if you do believe we can break this thing, then you actually have to think about what kinds of politics bring it back. And that's why I'm not excited, even if it works intentionally, about seeing a doom loop of vice and venality. Because even if you can win that way, you are breaking the thing by doing it. And so the question of how do you win virtuously is very important to me because I think, like, for all the other things I want to have, you actually need a working peaceful politics to get there. Who's your ideal Democratic Party candidate? For 2028? Yeah. They don't exist. I mean, I don't think there's a perfect Democrat for 2020.

Starting point is 00:46:11 And to the extent if there is, we don't know them yet because they've not been under those lights yet. I think I am a sort of unreconstructed admirer of Barack Obama. And if Obama were running today, he would have to run differently than he did then. More aura. He had a lot of aura then, man. Online aura. I think if you're running today, he'd have more online aura. That's the point, right?

Starting point is 00:46:34 You can't transpose who he is post-presidentially to now, right? He is a human institution. He's like a monument in some ways. So he's not going to be who he was, even when he was running in O.A. But I think he did something that's really hard to do, which is one, he contained many of the country's contradictions inside himself and was able to make people, even who disagreed with him quite deeply feel obscene. And he was able to combine two forms of moral imagination that I think are hard to combine, which is one was a sort of moral imagination of policy of things like universal health care, which he basically achieved, right? It's like a lot of people have failed on that before him. Could we make the other always?

Starting point is 00:47:17 But Obamacare is no small thing. And the second was a moral imagination on politics itself. In a country that had the kinds of racial divides and legacy we have and had in a country that in the Bush years felt very divided. He made people feel politics could be different. And the tragedy of Obamaism is that it got worse. that he was able actually to pass quite a lot of the policy he promised, but he was not able to make politics and this country's divisions feel better.

Starting point is 00:47:47 In fact, they felt worse. And the thing that I think no one has an answer to is how to resuscitate that side of his moral imagination in a way that does not feel naive or hopeless or cliche. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength App is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life,

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Starting point is 00:48:42 about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's rpsstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. Yeah, it's an interesting one to look to what happens in 2028. You know, it was so fascinating to me, the UK and starting to come online with realizing just how, how tumultuous America was politically, and then observing that unfold, and then starting to be a part of the conversation, I guess, because I started Modern Wisdom in 2018, and then to roll it forward and to think about what happens

Starting point is 00:49:28 in just two years time, just two years from now, kind of blows my mind. And I don't know, I don't know what people are looking for on either side in 2028 anymore. Do you follow, I don't know how deep yarn politics, I know we've had Bernie and people like that on the show. Do you look at the Democrats? Do you think that one? No. No. But I also don't look at the conservatives and think that one either. I mean, my basic read of the field for what it's worth right now is that the ones doing the most interesting things are Gavin Newsom or AOC, are Buttigieg. And then the big dark horse, I think that people should not underestimate right now is John Asif, who is the senator from Georgia. It was in a re-election this year.

Starting point is 00:50:15 But when I look at the Democrats, those are the four who I think have figured out attention in this era. And one of my views on politics is that attention is its own competency now. And that if you are not capable of earning it and wielding it and using it and breaking through on it yourself, then you actually cannot compete. at the highest levels. Certainly not right now with the way the ecosystem sits at the moment. And I don't think it'll be different in 2020. You're going to play the ball where it lies. And there's also something about one of the great, I think, character mistakes of the Democrats. And center left parties actually, I think you see this with Kier-Starmor in a bunch of places is people who are too formed by institutions, they're afraid. And one way I often put this is I think right now one of the problems in American politics is, is Republicans are underformed by institutions and Democrats are overformed by them. So Republicans sort of in the Trump era, they're too contemptuous of institutions,

Starting point is 00:51:24 too contemptuous of institutional authority, too contemptuous of the norms of institutions and how you act inside a company, just rip it all up, doge it, chain-saw, it's all bullshit anyway, and that's wrong. The problem for the Democrats can be that there can become a party of Tracy Flex, and they are so framed and molded

Starting point is 00:51:44 by like from birth having competed their way, you know, through every school, you know, through every competition, through every company through their politics in a party that is much more pro institutions now and the Republicans are. And people who come through institutions like that, they often reflect those institutions. They begin to talk like them. You can hear the institution when they open their mouth. Kirstremer speaks like he is the, government, right? Like, you feel, like, he's like got, like, he feels like a bureaucracy. Correct. And I'm not even saying that as a negative on him at another time that might have been more, you know, a doable thing. But I don't think that works in this media environment at all.

Starting point is 00:52:34 Like, you have to feel honest, authentic. You have to like, like a real person, like an actual human. People can, people can sense that before they can sense anything else about you. And so when I see some of the Democrats who are running, but they still talk like someone who is optimized. And to be fair to them, this used to be a thing you optimized for and it worked to win over like local editorial boards at small town newspapers. They were optimized to be somebody that the editors of newspapers thought seemed like a competent, decent person. And it might be, and it is, I think, a shame that that has become some kind of a liability. that you need to have some edge of wildness to you. But it is what is.

Starting point is 00:53:21 A new skill set as you rise up through the ranks. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. There's kind of a common thread here, which is that you almost get locked into a mode of thinking from a particular domain that you're in, whether it be a platform, from a particular niche that you're in,

Starting point is 00:53:37 geographically, culturally, from a particular time that you were in, in your career and what was useful then, and the inability to be prepared to update that, and also the potential hypocrisy of having updated that, that creates its own challenge too. So you're sort of fighting against it. I guess when we're talking about a more like active left,

Starting point is 00:53:57 like a building left, right? The word deregulation gets used by Elon Musk, and it also gets used by you. It does. And you clearly don't mean the same thing, but the same word doing two jobs is a problem in politics, right? It sort of lets one team's project ride the slipstream of the other, and you end up in this sort of semantic game back and forth.

Starting point is 00:54:20 How do you tell the difference between your kind of deregulation and Elon's in a simple way that you can explain around the dinner table? They have different goals. I mean, what is deregulation? You are removing rules. What is regulation? You're adding rules. Is adding rules or removing rules good or bad?

Starting point is 00:54:41 Well, how the fuck would you answer that question? Depends on the rule is. Depends on the rule. And so, look, I consider Musk to be a tragedy. This is a guy who is clearly a genius, who is the most capable industrialist of our time, who built those industries on public-private partnerships. Tesla is built on government subsidies, on government tax credits. There is no electric vehicle market in this country without the huge amount of money we,

Starting point is 00:55:21 and California, by the way, in particular, pumped into making that market real. Tesla would have gone under without an Obama-era loan guarantee. SpaceX is NASA contracts. And Musk at some point, and I mean, you can basically like chart when it happened because he was sort of a Democrat in semi-good standing. He was like pro-Obama, right? He radicalizes. He's online way too much. He gets Twitter brained.

Starting point is 00:55:47 Twitter has been bad for no one, the way it has been specifically bad for the way that guy thinks. And his information environment is so deeply toxic. And there's a world where he joined the Trump administration and tried to increase state capacity. And yes, that might mean chainsawing through some of what the government did. But with the goal of making it possible

Starting point is 00:56:12 to do more in space, with the goal of making it possible to do more effective research into battery technology. And instead, he cuts completely indiscriminately. I have friends who got layoff notices that the email read, dear, first name, last name,

Starting point is 00:56:37 you have been terminated for cause. Which cause? Who was that email to? So, like, Musk's project, deregulation is a traditional Republican thing. He didn't make it up. But the point is that right now, the government often imposes too many rules on itself.

Starting point is 00:56:58 And that makes it hard for it to do things. So if you look at the Mamdani housing plan that came out this week, block by block is what it's called, what he is doing in that plan overall is he is, he is removing rules, he is deregulating what is required when New York puts in money to build affordable housing. That in order to build affordable housing in most jurisdictions, certainly blue ones in this country, because you are using public money, it triggers a bunch of government rules and make it much more expensive because a lot of interests have come up and, you know, won their way into the fight.

Starting point is 00:57:34 And so they've been able to, you know, force higher. building standards and higher wage standards and higher environmental standards. And all these things might be good on their own. They really might be. But what you've done is make it twice as expensive or three times as expensive or four times as expensive to build affordable housing is to build market rate housing. And so the taxpayer is getting a shitty deal. And you're not building enough affordable housing.

Starting point is 00:57:58 There was a story in Washington, D.C. a couple years ago about how they had ended up building affordable housing units. They were costing $1.2 million per unit. these are affordable housing units with, again, like public and non-profit dollars. There was one particular build where I'm worried I'll get the numbers wrong from memory, but I think it was something like the same developer built affordable and market rate next to each other. And the affordable cost something like $800,000 per unit. And the market rate was like $400,000.

Starting point is 00:58:27 And like, you just can't achieve the goal is affordable housing. And so what I care about, the point of abundance, the first sentence of it, basically, of the book is what do we need more of and how do we get it? And so the thing that separates different people in this debate, for me, the abundance debate, the debate about plenitude is first you have to decide, what do you want more of? I want a lot more green energy. Donald Trump does not. So the fact that he is deregulating what it means to build like coal or oil in this country is not a big abundance win because he's trying to achieve something that I don't support. He's actually made it harder to build wind and solar.

Starting point is 00:59:11 So you can regulate government to make it harder for government to act. You can deregulate it. You can use rules well and poorly. And when you get your politics wrapped up on the axle of having emotional reaction to the means, to the tools you're using, then you got a problem. The idea that deregulation is owned by the right, or for that matter, that regulation is owned by the left, it's not true, but it's a way of shutting off your thought. The right regulates things all the time. The left deregulates things. Like, it's just a stupid. Yeah, no, I agree.

Starting point is 00:59:46 Stupid way of thinking. This proposal for abundance is a lot about rolling back red tape, but I know a lot of people are concerned about what that means for unchecked power of potential AI overlords. And if you've got a very small number of people who are controlling a massive amount of influence and a massive amount of the economy, how does the rolling back of red tape help with that solution? So two things. So what I want to say, abundance is not about rolling back red tape.

Starting point is 01:00:17 There are places like building housing in dense blue cities where you probably do need to roll back what people call red tape. But that is useful where that is the problem. On AI, I believe we need a lot more AI regulation. This is why I don't buy the sort of deregulation, pro-regulation like dichotomy. There are places. I want to regulate more places I want to regulate less. I think the abundance question on AI is different. I have a lot of concern about the power concentrating on A. And I've covered these guys forever. I've had Demis and Sam Altman and Dario all on my show, right? Like I've been in this since GPT2, I guess. And you do not want power concentrating with them. And at one point, and some of them will still say that they don't want power concentrating with them, although in practice they don't always act like that now.

Starting point is 01:01:06 Yeah. Sam Altman, I think, in Open AI, seemed to be more pro-regulation a couple years ago than in practice, like, the Greg Brockman, its president, has helped fund this super PAC that is dumping money against candidates who want to regulate AI. And so it's like, on the one hand, they'll come to a hearing and say, we want to be regulated. Then somebody will run for office saying, we should do some light regulation. It's like, not you. Not by you. Not by you. We don't. So you have like real money in politics problems. And I, by the way, just as a broad thing, this is not something we wrote about in abundance, but like I just believe in much, much, much stronger money and politics regulations. You should amend the U.S. Constitution to say money is not speech. Money should not be as protected speech when spent on politics and make it possible to regulate it. There's an effort to do that through state house is happening right now. But I think the abundance question on AI is at two levels. One is we think of AI models, right?

Starting point is 01:02:05 People argue about are they using Gemini or Chatchip-D or Claude? But AI is, you know, Jensen Wong of Nvidia always makes this point. It's like a five-layer cake. And there's an energy level, there's a chips level, there's all this infrastructure you actually need. If we want the U.S. to be, continue to be kind of AI competitive, even AI dominant, you're going to need to get that infrastructure right. And in order to then not make that an energetic disaster, you're going to need to use the data center buildout

Starting point is 01:02:36 to create a modern grid and create much more of electric state, not a petro state, right? Like, there's like a whole set of questions that are raised by the physical AI buildup. But then the second thing I'm actually writing about this right now is we are having so many conversations about what we don't want from AI. What do we want from it? What is the public agenda?

Starting point is 01:02:56 for AI? What does the public, what are the public goods? Because they're not just going to come on their own. Right now, if you talk to any corporation that is really tooling itself for AI, they are spending huge amounts of money on compute, just buying enough tokens. But they are often restructuring themselves as an organization in order to become legible and make their problems legible to the systems. So for AI to be able to solve a problem for you, you need a couple of things. One is there needs to be money behind the problem because if you need a lot of compute to do it, it is costly even now. The second thing is the problem needs to be legible to the system. So what I mean by that, for instance, is Alpha Fold, which I think is the most impressive

Starting point is 01:03:42 thing AI has done yet, which is the protein folding, is solving the protein folding problem. The reason it was possible to do that was there was a thing called the protein database, which had been, it was arguably the cleanest scientific database in existence, certainly one of them, where people had been keeping really high-quality data on every single protein that we had mapped its structure. And that meant there was one place where the data was structured in a way. We could set the machine learning loose on it, and it could learn the data, begin to predict based on the data, and then also begin to create synthetic versions of that data to extend its predictions and then be able to test them backwards and so on and so forth.

Starting point is 01:04:20 there are a lot of problems that might have that shape, but you will have to create the data that the machine learning can work on for them. And in government, that's often not done. So here's a very simple use case I keep talking to people about. There's no reason that the IRS can't have, I mean, build it on Claude, build it on chat chadpD, build your own. They could have an LLM that does your tax.

Starting point is 01:04:50 is with you. The IRS knows how much money you make, so they have ground truth there. They know the tax code. They write it a lot of the time, or at least certainly help in the regulatory system to define it. There's no reason most people have to pay an accountant. More broadly, you could have an AI that act as a concierge to anything the government might be able to do for you because it knows you, it knows your situation, and it knows what the government is capable of doing. It's very, very hard to navigate the government right now. But you have to make the underlying data and system legible so that I can learn what it needs to learn. Drug discovery, energy, there's a lot of questions like this where, for instance, on drug discovery, I don't know how good AIs will be on drug discovery. I have talked to

Starting point is 01:05:38 different people who disagree on it. But if you look at what AIs are good at, like, did you follow the solving of this Erdos theorem? Yes. Yes, I did. Okay, so I talked to some mathematicians about this. My dad's actually a mathematician. I haven't talked to him about it yet. I should. But this particular theorem, what it was able to do was sort of two things. What it was able to do was come, it knew kind of everything about mathematics.

Starting point is 01:06:03 It was able to combine approaches from fields that were not primarily thought to be useful in this particular theorem. But there was one mathematician was like, oh, I thought about doing this, but it was super labor intensive. So I just didn't bother. So it also was able to be tireless in doing that. It did not do, I think, what you would call truly new groundbreaking mathematics. It didn't invent a whole new field here. It did something very clever and very labor intensive. And that is how a lot of advances happen.

Starting point is 01:06:32 Synthesis plus hard work. So think about what's called orphan diseases. These are diseases. My wife actually has one of them that are quite rare. So there isn't a huge amount of money in solving them. And that means, unlike, say something like diabetes, where there is just a functionally endless number of drug researchers working on diabetes drugs and a huge amount of money behind it and like the best people in the

Starting point is 01:06:56 field. On these things, you don't have that. So that's a great place where being able to have a lot of compute and then the federal government saying, if you invent this thing, this is basically what we do with Operation Warp Speed, right? We said, if you invent this thing, we will buy it. And then we will hand it out at low cost, right? That's how we made the COVID vaccines. You could do that across a huge number of diseases and say, if you're able to solve any of these, here's what we will give you. Like, it is worth it to us, the public, to have cures here, and we'll make those cures cheap.

Starting point is 01:07:32 And we'll put work into making the regulatory system amenable to this. They also did that in warp speed. We'll put in work to trying to, like, create better databases. Like, we'll clean things up for you. But we will create a prize system, an advanced market commitment system. What do we want AI to solve? Because right now the private market is putting a lot of money into that question. But the public sector is only thinking about what it wants to prevent AI from doing, which is important.

Starting point is 01:07:56 I'm a big believer in AI harms. I've been talking about existential risk for years. But you also need a theory of AI goods. And right now we don't have one. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangy nectar, and I really tell the

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Starting point is 01:08:52 Are heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash bottom wisdom. It's interesting. I had Nick Boss from on the show and super intelligence more, more than 10 years ago now, 2014, 15, something like that when that came out, was kind of my introduction to, holy shit, Like there are a lot of ways that this could go very, very wrong, the X risk of X risks. And then his new book was basically, okay, what happens if this goes right?

Starting point is 01:09:20 And even on the path to it going right, there were tons of different ways that it could go wrong. It is kind of mind-blowing to me that there is any time being spent on anything that isn't AI safety at the moment. You know, I'm aware, climate change, something that we need to keep an eye on. It's not going to happen within the next decade. birth rate decline, something that I've talked a lot about on the show too. I think, you know, that's going to happen more quickly than climate changes, but still not on the timelines that we're talking about here. I'm like, do you see Tristan Harris's new thing, the AI doc? I haven't seen the dock, but I know Tristan. Ah, dude, it's really, really, really good. It's really, really interesting. I have come, as a person who is in that world for a long time, I have come to a probably slightly different view on the right way to approach AIS. You're going to give me a white pill? I really need one. What would a white pill be? I never know the pill. anymore. There are too many of them. Hope. Feel better. Hope. No, look, I, you, the, you cannot solve a problem whose shape you do not know. You can't. So it's very, it's good to talk about AI safety. We should be pumping money into say mechanistic interpretability. We have made big strides on interpretability. Shout out to Chris Ola at Anthropic, who's been a hero in this and is now hanging out with the Pope, I guess. So apparently, you know, good thing to see. Good things happen to good people. We should be trying to understand these systems.

Starting point is 01:10:43 But so much of the AI conversation, the mind is attracted to these speculative scenarios, mass automation where there are no more jobs, recursive superintelligence, self-improving superintelligence that slips out of our control like overnight. Here's a deal. If we create recursive superintelligence that slips out of our control overnight, which is sort of how like the AI-2027 scenario works, we better just hope for the best because I think we are kind of fucked in that scenario. I don't think it will happen like that or that quickly. I agree. But we want as good interpretability as we can possibly have.

Starting point is 01:11:21 But the other thing we want is to be in constant work on regulating the existing nature of these systems and at their frontier and testing the systems and working on them constantly. Because in the same way that the AI companies, the ones who are founded on the theory, of safety like Open AI, which, eh, and anthropic, we're like, well, we can't make it safe unless we build it. You cannot figure out how to regulate it unless you regulate it, both for good and for bad. And so my view is that the political system needs to get in the game on the system that exists right now and not endlessly debate a speculative scenario that it is not going to be able to respond to until you're there.

Starting point is 01:12:04 That is not how politics works. It's not how, like, anything we do works. So, yes, like, that does. imply a certain amount of pessimism if we end up in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario. I don't think we're in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario. And just by the way, I have always thought and have always had this argument by effective altruous friends. And actually Dorcasch Patel, who's like a great AI podcaster, just sent out a like a little substack making the same point. The capability to wield power is more than intelligence, a lot more.

Starting point is 01:12:38 And so the world is full of friction. And the super-intelligence. And the super-intelligence. and scenario has always had this dynamic where it isn't just like the thing becomes recursive approving and super powerful and super powerful. But it also never makes a mistake on its way to taking over a world that doesn't understand. And have you ever dealt with smart people? Like, is Donald Trump the smartest person in the world? No, he's got a like incredible animalistic instinct for power and other people's weakness. And he's made a ton of mistakes. And, you know, Dorcas and his piece was like, maybe Stalin is, person we're talking about here, but Stalin also is not like the world's greatest genius. I think

Starting point is 01:13:17 there's like a real mistake being made on how easy it is to translate intelligence and information into power. Yeah. And I am just skeptical. Like, again, we can all come up with a sci-fi scenario, but I can't forever argue against the absolute worst thought experiment. Like, like, then we're just in a world. Like, yeah, if all we're dealing with here is an endless effort for you to, you to, you to, like, you can't to come up with thought experiments that the regulators can't match, you will outmatch the regulators very quickly. Correct. Which is why the regulators should be increasing their competency by actually dealing with

Starting point is 01:13:51 AI in the present moment. You get better things by doing them. So you're saying that the most dangerous AI isn't the smartest one, it's the canniest one? I think that's true. But I'm saying that the AI safety debate has been caught in thinking about the future for too long and now we're in the present. And so the thing to do is to figure out how to take some of these fears, which I take as serious.

Starting point is 01:14:11 I do not. I am not somebody who's dismissive of them. I have a P. Doom sitting in the back of my head. But you have to take them and do something in the now because now we're at the point where AI is here. For a long time, there was nothing really to do because AI was speculative, right? You could try to be running your experiments in these labs, but that's all you can do. Now the thing is here. We actually have quite powerful AIs are getting more powerful all the time. Like Congress, like, we need to probably build more capable institutions that actually like have expertise on regulating it and are able to like high. are some of the best people because the market for AI researchers is more expensive than the current civil service rules we have for hiring really make possible to compete in. And you have to like be getting your hands dirty and trying to like make what we have work well and also be like trying to create the goods that can give it a direction that is safer. Well, think about who was involved in the conversation from 2015 to 2020-ish philosophers. A lot of philosophers. And if you watch the new AI doc, it's maths grad, computer science, programmer, futurist, technologist. It's moving more, but you're saying this goes even beyond that to people who are policy makers. Like, we need to

Starting point is 01:15:23 bring those sorts of people in to actually get involved in this too. So yeah, it's gone from being as hypothetical and theoretical as possible to now something where the rubber's really met the I am like, my view on this is not that I am dismissive of the possibility of future I had a sub out of our control. Or frankly, even, although I am more skeptical of this, the possibility of mass automation. What I am saying is it it is long past time to start working on the systems that we have now as regulators and stop debating a hypothetical. You do not have a way to stop the hypothetical. Like, have you read Eliasurikowski's book? Yes.

Starting point is 01:16:06 I had him on the show. The argument, as did I. The argument is shut it all down. That's where it goes. And for better, and maybe for much worse, maybe he's right. I mean, his view is 98% if we create superintelligence, we're fucked. But we're not going to shut it all down. And so the question is, given what we have and where we are, like, start actually bringing the system and the system's under Democratic control.

Starting point is 01:16:34 What would you do? Let's say that you had God's eye coordination power. I would have like probably three or four buckets. So one, I would put a lot more money into evaluation than we're currently putting in publicly. Actually, Trump and Musk gutted a bunch of that. But I would make our public evaluation capabilities incredibly strong. So that's one thing. They were trying to do that sort of in Biden.

Starting point is 01:16:55 I would start doing a lot of regulating AI run kids because I think there's actually a fair amount of consensus on that. And so you could move on that. I think we should be quite careful about running this experiment on children. I think that the idea of kids growing up with a bunch of AI bunch of, and lovers, I don't think we know how it will warp people's sense of how relationships should work when they have those before they have real relationships. I've heard you say that the kind of childhood that you had could have fallen prey to this kind of...

Starting point is 01:17:25 Yes, I was a very lonely kid. I was bullied a lot. Like, I, if they're, and I was also a smart, nerdy kid. And so what would it have meant if instead of having to sort of fight through that and find my, you know, best friends and figure it out as I did, like work. with the friction the world gave me, which made me who I am, I could have disappeared into frictionless digital relationships, friends, tutors, lovers. I think that's actually quite scary. I was the same except for being a lot less smart and nerdy.

Starting point is 01:17:56 I don't know. I think you're probably underwriting yourself. But so I would do a lot on kids. I would do a lot on actual goods, as I was just saying. I really want to see a public goods agenda for AI. And I think there are harms we can begin looking at now in the way AI is used in what it is given autonomy and power over on when human beings you need to be in the loop. I think that there's a pretty good thinking on safety. You know, something that isn't in the AI 2027 thing that I think is smart is AI should always have to keep a legible chain of reasoning notepad in English that the moment we start letting them come up with our own languages and we really have no capacity to see how they're reasoning?

Starting point is 01:18:40 The black box has a black box. I don't want to make the black box too black boxy. Yep. And so you want to start working with what you have now. And, you know, I'm not saying I have like all the ideas in my head, but there's enough on the table that I think we could begin. And I also, by the way, I thought whether you want Anthropic doing it is like we can argue, I think having a fair number of restrictions on how AI can be used for surveillance for

Starting point is 01:19:06 kill chain questions is wise. And I particularly worry about surveillance. I am both in a kind of macro way against using AI to create the Panopticon, but in a micro way, a lot of the machine learning tools being used to make the lives of workers measured and miserable right now are in a chemical. You read a lot about this on, you know, with Amazon and delivery drivers, I've read things about like eye tracking software. there's all kinds of software being used in different places. I don't want to do it by memory because there's minutes as I looked at the report, but to just track how productive workers are. It's like having somebody always watching you to make sure you're never slacking off. And what I would say is that turning, using machines to turn people into machines is inimical to human flourishing. And I do think we need to think harder in politics. And AI is going to push this on what actually human flourishing means. What does it mean to be a human being in the age of AI? What does it mean to be a human being in the age of AI? What do you think? Does it mean to learn like a human being? What is human dignity? The Pope is right about that.

Starting point is 01:20:11 People are already feeling this, like, thought entropy thing kicking in. There's, like, lifting with an exoskeleton suit on that my capacity to actually be able to think properly is being degraded. And I know Pemit Chudran, one of your favorite writers, talks about sitting with uncertainty instead of running from it. AI is, like, in a sense, the most powerful uncertainty killer ever built. You have instant answers straight away. You never need to wonder again. Even, you know, I think about the before times of internet use. There was friction even in your search, right, to go on to Google, to look for a thing,

Starting point is 01:20:51 to go, is that, how reliable is that particular forum? How reliable is this particular poster? Have they got an agenda on the, oh, it's not got a security certificate on this particular website? Or I'm going to have to scroll for a little while to find the specific type. of answers I'm looking for and then I'm going to have to scan the document as opposed to having the equivalent of sort of refined NASA ready to eat dehydrated, reconstituted food that you can just squeeze from a toothpaste tube into your mouth. My like, the simplest thing I tell, I sometimes do culture speaking, I'll get asked by kids,

Starting point is 01:21:26 you know, what should I do, you know, AI? My answer is always read books and paper. You should have a practice of cultivating the form of attention, the form of sustained attention, without reaching to resolve every question that occurs in your mind that books create. People think of books, I think, as a technology of information, that you download information from a book into your head. But they're a technology of thinking. They are a scaffold for thinking. And what is happening when you read a book in paper and are not distracting yourself every two seconds is connections are being made,

Starting point is 01:22:06 in your mind. Like the value of a book is not just the information on it. It is what happens in your mind when you read it. And one of the things I feel very strongly about with my kids, one of the things that I worry about with integrating AI into schools is, you know, we talked about attention at the beginning here. We need as human beings to cultivate healthy forms of attention. And AI, one of its seductions, even for smart, agentic, as we now call them people, is the constant feeling and simulacra of productivity it gives you. So you're reading something and you go and you look it up and you're, and it all feels very productive.

Starting point is 01:22:49 Because you are, there's constant information, those back and forth. And I do. I use AI for research. I learn things from it. I'm not, I mean, I think you can hear in this conversation. I'm not like a pure hater. But if you are not spending time thinking and reading away from screens, just you are allowing something to atrophy that you will not get back.

Starting point is 01:23:10 And what I worry about with a lot of smart people I know is that AI makes you feel superhuman and it's making you less than human. And I've watched a lot of people who seem to use AI a lot more and their work is not getting better. It's getting worse. I hear about people of all these agents running on their behalf now. And they come in in the morning and it's prepared this huge summary of everything. And it's like, what about reading a physical newspaper? instead of now absorbing tons of book reports from your AIs, right?

Starting point is 01:23:38 Like, where is your space? Where is your mind? The ghost of productivity, the illusion of productivity is something that you have to fight so hard, I think, in this era. Because, I mean, even prior to AI, it sure feels like you're doing something productive to sit there on your laptop, on your iPad. And even when your brain has stopped really working, you're flicking back and forth to the news, to your email, you're seeing things on social media that sort of poses information. But it's all distraction wearing productivity's clothing. Yes. And you have to be really vigilant against it.

Starting point is 01:24:18 Because deeper productivity often doesn't look or even feel like productivity. It's taking a walk and having an idea. It's like the second hour reading an actually pleasurable good book in a coffee shop. Right. Like, these things are deeply human experiences that the reason books worked and the reason we festoon rooms in them when we want the rooms to look smart, which is what we're doing in here. There's a reason we associate them with intelligence because they're not about what's in the book. They're about the way that people who read books are trained to think and attend. And, like, that will ultimately make you much better at using AI.

Starting point is 01:24:55 Desperately compensating with all the books behind. No, I notice with myself, one of the best questions that I asked myself on an annual review a couple of years ago was, what do I think is productive that isn't? And what do I not think is productive but is? And going for a walk without AirPods in. What did you come up with on your second list there? I want to hear it. Driving without consuming anything. So no music, no podcasts, no nothing else.

Starting point is 01:25:24 The same with going for a walk. at dinner with friends, massively productive, hugely productive, come home and I've got five new ideas or I feel a little bit more peaceful or I've just got to listen to someone else entertain me or got new perspective on something or I've not thought about my shit. Even simply the space that you create, the void that you create between thinking about your shit and thinking about your shit by hearing somebody else extemporaneously think about their shit to you. You're like, oh, brilliant. I thought about someone else's shit for a bit. That stuff that isn't productive, but I thought was sitting in my desk when I'm not working.

Starting point is 01:26:01 I've just got the laptop open. I'm like, oh, maybe I'll pick up some productivity pennies here. Slack, almost ever. Being on calls when I don't need to. Like just checking in calls. They have all of the trappings of something that looks like progress and productivity. But when you think about what's actually happened at the end of it, it's almost never anything productive. lying in a hammock

Starting point is 01:26:27 lying in a hammock unusually productive so what comes to my view? A bunch of those I'd agree with. Travel. Huge. And I was like want to be careful

Starting point is 01:26:41 about the language of productivity here because the point is not to like do it in service. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The, for me, the absolute best thing I can do for my productivity is go to a coffee shop or some beautiful space.

Starting point is 01:26:55 the aesthetic richness of the space is meaningful for me and read paper books for a long enough time to get into a state where my mind has settled on that being what it's doing. So that's very, very, very, like that is, I think, the most important thing I do for my work. Walking, I don't listen to or read things for the most part on the subway anymore. I just sit there. Like a psychopath. Like a psychopath.

Starting point is 01:27:23 It is amazing how much is like sitting there staring forward. You feel weird now on the subway. Do you know the Rory Sutherland line about this to do with smoking? He says, sometimes you just want to stand in the corner of a room and stare out of the window. The problem is, if you do this without a cigarette, you look like a friendless idiot. But if you do it with a cigarette, you look like a fucking philosopher. Yeah, yeah. Aesthetics count for a lot.

Starting point is 01:27:51 Yeah, they do. So really just taking breaks in general. I mean, I think actually the thing, if you want to just boil down a lot of what we just said, aside from the reading, it's that just staring at a screen endlessly is bad for you. It's good for you when you're doing it intentionally and for long enough. But, I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I have solved a problem on a column that I had been banging away at the keyboard on for hours or days. by just leaving. You can't white-knuckle creativity. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:26 You don't get to white-knuckle it. And so there's a lot of that. I mean, the gym is obvious. You know, you get a lot of ideas. There are showers. I mean, this shit is all there. But I think to draw it out of the creativity space that or the productivity space, the thing that is being said here is, you need to make space for yourself to be a human being things. And AI is going to be better at being a machine than we're going to be at being machines.

Starting point is 01:28:51 And so trying to make yourself into a better machine. Like, everybody thinks you're using the AI as a prosthetic. But again, the lesson of McLuhan and Postman and others is eventually the AI is going to be using you as a prosthetic. Or certainly, to make maybe be more specific, the organization that pays for both you and the AI is going to be making you a prosthetic of the AI in the same way that Amazon has made people into prosthetics of the boxes they pick up and the delivery van they drive. And it, trying to be as little like a machine as possible, or at least create big spaces where you're not acting as a machine is, I think it'd be really important. If I had to make a bet on how I would educate my kids, and you told me you can put them into school that is going to be at the cutting edge of using AI. Like a health of school or whatever. Or you can put them in a school that is like St. John's University or something.

Starting point is 01:29:48 And it's like going to be all paper and pens. I would go that one. Because there will be AI. It will be out there. What I need to develop in them is the ability to be a human being. And one of the dangers whenever we get really excited to be a new technology is we overadopt it in a thoughtless way. And then the technology colonizes our minds. And then we can't realize how much we have lost attentionally in terms of our own independence, in terms of our own depth. So just like all the things we're talking about, Take breaks, take a walk. It is so basic. It's the sort of shit that your mom would happily give you an answer for. Yeah. And she's happily got the answer for it.

Starting point is 01:30:34 What's that line? Is it, I think it might be a Nietzsche one where it's like, I beg you, my friend, sleep well and go for more walks. It's just always a solution. Oh my God, really advice Nietzsche should have taken. Yes, agreed. You mentioned earlier on about this challenge, this positioning that we've got at the moment around encouraging people, both sides encouraging people to better themselves, perhaps a little bit of an version of this self-determination, personal development, at least traditionally coming from the left,

Starting point is 01:31:06 but maybe also coming from the right now. I think the left talks a lot about structural barriers for women. Do you think it's got an equally serious account of what's going wrong for men at the moment? I don't. I think it knows it doesn't, and it's beginning to try to think about what to do about that. People like Gavin Newsom are taking that a lot more seriously. I want to get at the thing you said underneath that because I think it's important, though. I think a very damaging thing that happened on the left, I'll call it liberalism to be more of my own stream here, is that it began to see individualistic explanations as excuses for structural dysfunction. And so it became hostile to any politics or moral structure that was also about self-improvement.

Starting point is 01:31:52 And one, that's a betrayal of the long history of liberalism, which has always been about self-cultivation, like go read your Kant or your John Mills. But, or for that matter, your, you know, great liberal politicians like Frederick Douglass or MLK or FDR, Lincoln. But when you give up on that, you're giving up on one of the fundamental drives. So you want a society that is taking seriously all the ways and with structures, oppressed, and coerce and impede people's flourishing. And also what you're trying to create space for is for them to use their agency and their energy and their will to flourish.

Starting point is 01:32:37 And so you need both sides of that. You need the vision of the just society and you need the vision of the flourishing, self-cultivating person. And I do think the left became hostile to this and particularly became hostile to it when it was male-coded. So when it was coded in the way that self-help is for women, right, more therapeutically, more relationally, it was, you know, much easier. Esther Perel, Brené Brown, other people like that, who have more of a vision in that, that went down easily. But in the male space where it's a little more testosteroney, when it got associated with the Joe Rogans and modern wisdoms and I shouldn't say that, but the Jordan Peterson's made the better way to put it, I think there was like,

Starting point is 01:33:23 a pushback because also some of those people did have very aggressive right-wing politics. And so these things got like linked together in their minds. And instead of saying, okay, how can we take the impulse in here that is clearly making Jordan Peterson into some kind of international phenom and also try to answer it and has something constructive to say about it, it was sort of a rejection of it. Discard it entirely because it's rejecting the structural inequalities that people are facing by saying that there are things that you can do and to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What is surprising to me, and I'd be very curious for what you think happened here, because you know this were a lot better than I do, not the right politically, but somewhere this went, is I don't

Starting point is 01:34:07 really, the way that Peterson and maybe Doug Murray and people like that, it seemed to, like, what came after that was Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes and people who have, I think, no real concept of virtue. Right? I got my disagreements with Jordan Peterson on lots of things, but that guy thought a lot about virtue, thought about myth, thought about, you know. Overthought about it. Overthought about it. Somehow the right, like Bronze Age Pervert, it pushed towards vice. So the left gave up on virtue and the right rejected it. Now, I shouldn't say the left and the right because lots of people in both, just like normal-ass people. Right.

Starting point is 01:34:50 raising kids and loving their partners and doing their job and volunteering in their community and going to church. But maybe it's like an algorithmic dimension of things. The quiet middle three quintiles. Yes. But at like the apex of the attention economy, like I do feel I watch this happen. Like you're not going to convince me it didn't. Like the left became quite hostile to sort of ideas of individual cultivation. Like, oh, that's just like you using your privilege.

Starting point is 01:35:16 And the right became the right moved in a way where it became. like vice-maxing to use the term that Darrowmson uses. Kind of caricatured it to a degree that the most extreme version of this. I mean, certainly, I think if Jordan hadn't had his time away, if he hadn't done the God pivot in the same way, if he'd continue to do the clean your room, get your bootstraps and pick yourself up by them, I do think that that would have probably curtailed a lot of the vacuum that other voices. got sucked into. Now, who knows how that would have actually played out, but I definitely get the

Starting point is 01:35:55 sense that, wow, there is this big cohort of largely men, largely young men, who have increasingly grown up in fatherless homes, which is a problem that the left should be very concerned about, right? They're looking for a patriarch figure. They're looking for someone to tell them, like, how do I become a, it's the equivalent of, dad, how do I shave? Or I fancy this girl in school. How do I talk to her? It's the equivalent for that, but life-wide. And if you open up that market, but then remove yourself from it, it's just going to suck in. Anybody that can service it, but perhaps not quite at the level that that first mover had been able to do. And I think that that was definitely a big part of it.

Starting point is 01:36:39 It's been kind of fascinating to see this conversation unfold because everybody is talking out of both sides of their mouth, which, for instance, one of the big criticisms that I can certainly have of, most of the pro-male advocates and most of the people that are on the right are men's mental health isn't taken seriously until it affects women or other people. Lips service is paid to that, but no one really cares and there aren't very many therapeutic models that sort of speak to men in the way that they want to be spoken to with regards to understanding their desire for progress and conquer and mastery and also providing them with solutions that they can move forward on, as opposed to just, hey, come in here, talk about your feelings, your issue is that you're a defective woman as opposed to a man who needs assistance, moving forward, linearly.

Starting point is 01:37:29 But also, that same group of people that say that that's a big deal and claim to be advocates for men will happily mock a guy who opens up about his emotions on the internet. If you see a video of a guy who's crying or is really struggling or is down on his luck, there is not this sort of camaraderie that you're claiming that is supposed to be. be there. That's like, there's just a huge hypocrisy. This is, uh, men are good. Tom Golden's got a substack and, uh, he identifies this. It's like, guys won't help other guys that are struggling emotionally in that sort of a way, whilst saying that men's mental health needs to be taken more seriously.

Starting point is 01:38:04 It's like, it's the equivalent of not putting your money where your mouth is with regards to this. But on the left, the kind of complete denial of self-agency, of sovereignty, of modern men being made to pay for the sins that their grandfather's benefited from, a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of, as Christine Embersays. And you go, okay, well, on both of those sides, it doesn't feel like much progress is being, at least much productive progress is being made. And then if you do begin to try and have this conversation, I'm aware, like, looking the way that I do, maybe it's the British accent, maybe it's the whatever,

Starting point is 01:38:43 Like as soon as you start talking about the problems of men and boys, unless you have this painful throat clearing land acknowledgement before you fucking do it, every single time, the same boring accusations get thrown at you. You don't care about women, that this is misogyny rebranded, that this is the thin end of the wedge, that it's a gateway drug to something that's much more pernicious down the line, that talking about birth rates or coupling or you're trying to pull women out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen. And it's boring and fatiguing

Starting point is 01:39:17 when you're trying to make genuine progress. And you say, okay, well, at what point can we have this conversation without having to prostrate ourselves for all of these issues that have come before? Let me ask you something, though. Because I think you're right about the world of a couple of years ago.

Starting point is 01:39:32 But I go on podcasts like this one. Sometimes I was just some with Dax and armchair expert and have done others. Do you ever, who are you shat? Who are we shadow boxing with here? Because is this still true? I actually do think there was a period where you would get a lot of, I mean, a lot, maybe is even a strong word. But in both directions, there was like pretty toxic and weird social media dynamics.

Starting point is 01:40:03 It got very, very gendered. And we're very adeptitarian. And now I think there's a lot of hangover. of that. But it, and I'm not saying you can't find it somewhere on the internet. You can find anything somewhere on the internet. But is it really still there in that way? Like I see, for instance, Gavin Newsom on the left is trying to engage his conversation,

Starting point is 01:40:28 you know, fairly successfully, I think. And in who he's having on his podcast, which has been, I think, a very interesting project. And, you know, I see Ryan Holiday, right, who I know has been on the show. Obama, Obama made a pivot long ago. I mean, his post, I mean, Obama, we have. always you. This is a thing, right? This was a very, this thing we're talking about was a very punctuated moment because Obama had a very aggressive politics of self-cultivation, right? A very big, there's a society and there's the individual and you have to act in a certain way. You have to

Starting point is 01:40:58 be a certain thing for your family. And his post presidential project was about young men, right? That was like a big thing he did. And it's like there was this period online where things got really fractious between the genders and other things. And I think everybody is having some trouble knowing if they can declare it over. Yeah, I understand what you mean. So do you still experience it is, I guess, the question I was going to ask you. Absolutely. From where?

Starting point is 01:41:27 Like who? If I was to put out any kind of a real online that talks about sex differences, still, the blank slatism will come in. There was one that came out yesterday. There was one that came out yesterday that said the, differential in terms of housework around the house between men and women. A really interesting study. If you look at the number, the amount of housework time that is spent by single men and single women living on their own, women do 200% the amount of housework. Their standards for a home

Starting point is 01:41:55 tend to be more clean than men's do. And I mean, this has been shown up in the Simpsons and family guy and, you know, all of the kind of cliches for a long time. But a ton of the comments are to do with, well, the only reason for that is because women are socialized into thinking that they have to have high levels of presentability and that it's a judgmental and social conditioning that's caused this thing to happen. I don't think that that's the case.

Starting point is 01:42:18 I think that you can make a pretty easy evolutionary psychology explanation to understand why that would not be the case. If you'd talk ever about anything that's to do with male self-improvement and the challenges that they're facing with regards to that.

Starting point is 01:42:35 A good example of this was there was a study that said men need two guys nights out per week in order to maintain optimal mental health. It's a pretty big study. It was pretty well researched. Every single comment was boo-hoo, poor patriarchy, tell me that you're a man-child without telling me that you're a man-child. I think when you see what Sabrina Carpenter at the moment, the lyrics, the broad culture that's happening is not unifying. And it's not unifying from both sides. I would agree. It's not unifying. But I think this is the thing I'm trying to get out here a little bit. Because I'm not disagreeing that

Starting point is 01:43:16 either these comments are real or some of these dynamics are real. I think one of the things that is we have to get over in the culture is, one, expecting anything to be unifying. But treating the comment section like the actual reaction. What would be a more real reaction? I think the other people in the conversation, I mean, because my perception of this, right, which I track more what the people in politics are saying and what the other journalists are saying, is that this conversation about men doing poorly is everywhere. I mean, Richard Reeves' book was a big deal. And it's completely at the set, like the Democratic Party, like it had this, like sort of ridiculous thing who was going to spend tens of millions of dollars on its, like, problems on men. But the idea that you can just say, like, toxic masculinity be done with it, I'm not saying you won't find that in a common section.

Starting point is 01:44:15 I'm just saying that it actually doesn't feel to me, like, where the zeitgeist is. But I think there's a lot of shadowboxing with it. So, I mean, I, again, like, I'm a well-known liberal commentator out here talking about how much we need liberal politics of virtue. And broadly getting a good reaction to that, not never getting shit for it. But I don't know. I don't expect to never get shit. It's interesting. I wonder whether the accelerator was pressed and we're still sort of coasting close to maximum speed, but it's not actually being increased. That might be a way to look at it. At least in my perspective, you're right that talking about the problems of men and boys, talking about the problems of men and boys, is not seen with the same dismissiveness that it would have been two years ago. Talking about the solutions for the problems of men and boys, which is really what matters. Like identifying the problem is only interesting or useful insofar as it. it allows you to find a solution, that to me still gets the hackles up of a lot of people

Starting point is 01:45:12 on the internet. And whether comments are tastemakers, how top down versus bottom up is this? Like, it's kind of hard. What are you aggregating it from? That's what I mean that I think is very hard. I think we have very distorted views of the public. And this has been one of the ways we've been deranged by algorithmic media. And I think a couple of years back, people reflected that. at. They thought it was real. And so the tastemakers and the elites began to sort of like fall in line to it a little bit. And I think that has stopped to a large degree. And I think people have sort of reasserted independence from it. But obviously, like the buzz is still there. But not mistaking the buzz is like the thing. So like, look, I don't know what the solutions are that you're describing. I'm sure there are like some I might agree with some I might not. I don't feel. I will say that even compared to what I thought was true a couple years ago, I don't feel this particular conversation to be electric fenced. Right?

Starting point is 01:46:16 Like, I believe there are differences between men and women. Like, something I've said on different shows is that one reason I think that some of the vision of masculinity I'm seeing, like, the, you know, take the shackles off of men, right? Seems wrong to me is that you have to, I think, start any vision of masculinity with the reality that men are stronger and through testosterone more aggressive. And so self-mastery has always been an important part of visions of masculinity. Like self-mastery and the constructive channeling of those impulses is foundational to any healthy masculinity. And mostly I think people understand what I'm talking about when I say that. I have boys, I think about this a lot. The capacity for restraint is increasingly important.

Starting point is 01:47:00 Yeah, you're not going to convince me that I don't have to channel their aggressive impulses in healthy ways. And I just think in politics I mean, you know, again, I think Newsom is interesting because he's somebody who, and you should have him on the show, it would be a very interesting conversation. But he's somebody who I think is a very sensitive touch for the politics of a moment. And, I mean, you look at his book,

Starting point is 01:47:23 like Young Man in a Hurry, the one he just released, which is unusually interesting for a politician's book, which is not a high bar, obviously. They should put that on the front cover. But it is very much about this question of, like, I mean, you could really understand that book as a confrontation with a certain kind of malness. And he's very explicit about that in a way I find interesting. So to me, my sense is like the water has changed here. I will say, I think the other thing, though, is that I have often thought, like, the division of the problems into male problems and problems and female problems.

Starting point is 01:47:54 I agree that there are different questions for men and women. I also think that there's a broader set of questions that are part of the AI thing and are a little bit more unifying about we actually need to find ways for human beings just like continue to be human beings and become more so. Like I, this is one of my obsessions and it's not to change the subject. We can keep talking about men. But I think there are more things that everybody is going to need and ways in which we have turned modernity as a try to keep people useful in the ways the economy needed them to be useful. They're going to need to be rethought in more fundamental fashions, starting with education. And that actually has some specific male questions around that.

Starting point is 01:48:38 I think Richard Reeves is right when he says that modern education is not well built for boys. But in a funny way, like the competition, like we've been so used to framing this as a competition between men and women, that the possibility of framing at least some things correctly is competition between humans and machines. Open up some avenues and pathways, I think, to talk about things that are more innate to humans of both. sexes and also separately innate in both sexes that maybe would have been harder to do five years ago. It's certainly going to be easier to unify if you have a common enemy because that happened previously. It was just between each other as opposed to together against something else. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:17 Yeah. Look, it's interesting. It definitely feels to me like I hope that it's not just lip service that's being paid to something because evidently in 2024, that was a blank space that because left untouched resulted in a lot of people going to the other side, right, from the left, like that young men really, really seemed to depart from, they didn't feel like they were a part of the damage. What was that line? There was a group for underprivileged or underserved communities, and there was 13 of them, and the only one that was missing was men.

Starting point is 01:49:52 That there was every different version of this is Richard Reeves' big post about this. In 2020, before, that wasn't true. There was a men for Harris thing that, like, there's a whole. The white guys for Harris movement? I think that, right? Yeah. I have mixed feelings. I'm sure. But you live by the affinity group. You die by the affinity group. That's true. That is.

Starting point is 01:50:11 It can't be like there's no affinity groups for me and then they do one. Well, it's interesting. On the, what are the groups that are falling behind? That was the issue that Richard took with it. I don't know what he thought about the white guys for Harris group. There was definitely some sort of prostrating of the self there that felt a little strange. I'm interested, as you sort of think about being somebody who has public opinions, who is putting these sorts of things out on the internet, having the changing landscape and having this sort of very long career of saying things that might have felt true at the time but can be pointed to in future.

Starting point is 01:50:48 How do you avoid being too deranged by the criticisms? By the criticisms? Yeah. That's not where I thought you were going to go with that. I don't know. I think it's the same thing we were talking about earlier. You have a backstage. I have people whose reactions to things are bellwether for me. And if there's a huge amount of critique of me at a certain moment and that happens every so often, I try to take it seriously and think about it. Doesn't mean I always change my opinion on it. But I think you need your own internal compass. Again, I will say I have pretty aggressive algorithmic media hygiene. And so I'm not out there looking for reaction. The reason I ask is, you know, we're talking about a need for a degree of resilience. A degree of resilience in terms of individual agency, now up against what's going to be happening with AI,

Starting point is 01:51:41 already up against what's been happening with social media and screens and distraction. And there's a great article by Ethan Strauss, which is called Criticism Capture is More Warping than Audience Capture. Oh, yeah. I've not read that article, but I think there's something really too. It's one of the most canonical things that I've read for the modern age. It's so good. And it basically says that people begin to change their positions more to either in advance defend against or as a reaction to the existing or potential criticisms that their work is going to receive. I think that it is a very tricky thing.

Starting point is 01:52:22 I will say this for me. It is a very tricky thing to know the day. difference between absorbing critique and synthesizing good points from it and absorbing critique and not wanting to touch the

Starting point is 01:52:39 stove. And because they could kind of feel the same inside. And there's not like one way to do it. But I do think it is important. I try to think about this a lot that critique is often a form of in-group disciplining.

Starting point is 01:53:04 One thing I've found over the years is that nobody is hated like an apostate. So the right, you know, to start there, and I know this from my friends there, it's like, if you are on the right and you turn anti-Trump, the hell you get is nothing like what I get as a, like, forever anti-Trump. anti-Trump. Nobody cares. In fact, I have perfectly good relations with people I have to report on for the Trump administration because they don't, they never saw me on their side. It's like it's a stable relationship in a way. Similarly, on, you know, the left, like nobody's hated like an apostate. The small differences make the most. Yeah, but also, it's a possibly effective action. Get in line. Yeah, get in line. And maybe you will. And so you have to be very. careful about that inside yourself. On the one hand, you want to be able to hear critique, and on the other hand, you don't want to be scared of it. One of my practices is when there's a lot of critique of me, I will often invite one of the critics on the show and just kind of talk it out

Starting point is 01:54:13 and see where I agree and disagree. And if I can sort of pull it into the spaces where I can deliberate about it, but if all I'm doing is exposing myself to the roar, of anger at a moment what is getting algorithmically boosted. I don't, that's not constructive. I will say the other thing that I'll sometimes do is I find it's quite important for me in terms of how thoughtfully I can integrate feedback when and in what context I absorb it. So being at dinner and getting pinged on my phone where somebody sends me a mean article about me, sometimes friends are like, did you see these terrible things people are writing

Starting point is 01:54:55 about you and it's like thank you. They didn't have my personal, you know, way to reach me, but you do. And now you brought it to my attention. Yeah. At dinner. Yeah, you're a conduit. Yeah, I didn't need you do a conduit. I know people are mad at me. I'm aware. Yeah. But the thing that I'll now do is if there's stuff collecting, I will like put it together and I will go print it all out or if it's videos, you know, watch a video. You create a portfolio of criticism. 30 a.m. when I'm resourced and have energy. Resilience is highest. And can think about it during the day as opposed to at the end of the day when I'm like trying to transition between the subway and my kids or, you know, dinner and bed, whatever it might be. So it's like everything else, right? You need a certain, if you're getting a lot of it, I think you need a certain level of discipline and you need to walk this balancing line between not getting overwhelmed and not shutting out. And I'm not saying I always do it well. You, like, I'm not, it's not a thing I would say I've mastered.

Starting point is 01:55:57 Yeah, you've, it's fascinating for me to see somebody who, I'm just, however cantankerous and controversial and inflammatory, some of the topics that I talk about are or have been, none of them ever come close to politics. Politics is always going to be ground zero for this, right? It's always going to be ground zero. And just the, uh, the preparedness to step into that over and over again for me. is pretty fascinating. I think in the past I've heard you describe journalism as organized curiosity. Given how the last few years have gone, I remember as well you talking about Vox on the idea that better information leads to better politics. Do you still believe that? You still believe that now? I'd probably alter it a little bit to say that it's not just the information, it's the information environment because it's hard to say did we get better or worse information. What we got was more information. And then the way the information was sorted, algorithmically, and other things,

Starting point is 01:57:09 you can have better information than any time in history and worse. And we did. And so the way I would say it is I do think better and worse information environments, attention environments, I really do take that layer as we've been talking about pretty seriously. But is it a direct thing? I don't know. I will say one of the things that has weirdly made me very hopeful about how politics still can work is the experience I've had on abundance. And the point is not that just like me and Derek did this. Abundance is synthesizing things like the YIMBY movement, the Yes in My Backyard Housing Movement.

Starting point is 01:57:45 It's synthesizing where I think some of the smartest green groups went on decarbonization and recognizing we need to do that by accelerating green technology and then figuring out how to deploy it at scale. there were a lot of people and ideas and so forth that we were kind of putting into that. And I have watched, I have watched in a matter of a couple of years, ideas that were quite marginal. I mean, the first piece on this I did before we called it abundance, I called it supply side progressivism. Then I got to a liberalism. Way less sexy. Yeah, right. Then liberalism that builds, which is pretty good. And then Derek got abundance. But the point was that the left didn't talk about supply. We only talked about demand. We talked about how to redistribute. We talked about how to distribute. We talked about how to subsidize, which are important things, but we didn't talk about how to create more of the goods we needed. Now we do all the time. So, like, there was a big intellectual argument, again, not just mine, and it worked. And now everybody from Newsom to Morahili to Westmore to Mamdani to everybody, right? Like, I just did a California governor's forum where the top five Democrats in the governance race did a housing forum with me. And they were all just talking about how to make it easier to build and how to cut construction costs. So, like, I have watched.

Starting point is 01:58:55 good information, good argumentation. There's a RAND study about how much it costs to construct per square foot in California, Texas, Colorado. They were all familiar with it. This one study had been incredibly influential on all of us. So it can happen. What are you paying the most attention to over the next couple of years? I mean, AI. I'm trying to help create a better liberalism more capable of competing with illiberalism.

Starting point is 01:59:19 I'm trying to create a better liberalism more capable of competing with illiberalism. I obviously pay a lot of tension politics. I cover Israel-Palestine a lot, which is just a tough-ass issue. There's a bit of a mix of I'm paying attention to everything you would think I'm trying to pay attention to, and also the constant curves in the road, right? Did I expect us to be spending the year talking about war in Iran? I didn't really. But now we are, and that's part of what I'm paying attention to. And so more things will happen that I'm not expecting and seeing.

Starting point is 01:59:57 My work is a mix of being connected to the news, connected to longer range intellectual efforts in politics, and then connected to shows that are more about the point of all this, which is a more like beautiful and humane world with novelists and meditators and people like that. And so it's all, like for me, it's this constant, calibrating of am I too far in this direction, too much news, not enough ideas,

Starting point is 02:00:26 too many ideas, not enough news, too much of politics, not enough humanism, and there's no way to do it but by feel and by attending to the moment. It sounds terrifyingly human. It does, it does. It sounds like, it sounds unusually in touch,

Starting point is 02:00:44 I think, with what people's experiences of life are, and certainly being on the outside and watching sort of what goes on with politics, so much of it seems to be this very sterile detachment from what people's normal day-to-day lives are like. The reporting on it, too, also doesn't take that. As if people wake up on a morning and all that they're doing is mainlining politics and political governance into their veins. You really don't want to let the algorithms replace your intuition. What I mean? That I think a lot of people, because he give their attention over to the algorithms,

Starting point is 02:01:15 and then the algorithms decide what they want to see, that that process I just talked about, where you're constantly calibrating and recalibrating and really trying to think about what am I attending to? Well, if you, if the way you get information is you open up X in the morning or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, the algorithms have decided what you're attending to. There's much more room for intuition when you're reading a print newspaper. You looked around and looked at what you were interested in

Starting point is 02:01:39 and turned the page and maybe saw something you didn't think you were interested in, but you were. And you were saying it sounds very human. It's all human in a way. We're all humans doing it, though, you know, I think different spaces make us feel less that way. But I try to create a lot of space for my own judgment to exist and to like feel what different things feel like. One thing that I have, one way I believe my own mind works differently than I did 10 years ago,

Starting point is 02:02:10 is I am much more in touch with how embodied it is and the signals come from the body, not just the mind. including in a, I don't know how much you feel this way, but I was thinking about this in podcasts. I have a questions document. I don't follow it. How do I know where I'm going? It's like my skin prickles. What the fuck is that?

Starting point is 02:02:33 And yet, what makes me a good podcaster is not the questions document. It's the skin prickling. Correct. And trying to become more and more and more in touch with that over time. Again, these are the kinds of things that I wish school would do more of.

Starting point is 02:02:48 It's like, I want to teach my sons how to listen to their bodies. It's very difficult to teach instinct, to teach taste. It's not scalable. It's going to be different and idiosyncratic for every person. And yet is one of the most, if not the single, most important thing that you can continue to develop. But I think you can teach, and I think you can help people cultivate the connection, those things you need to come through. Even just explaining the primacy of it, like this is something that's important that you, you should pay attention to.

Starting point is 02:03:17 Yeah. Do not outsource your taste to the AI. Yeah, but you have to feel, right? This is one of the worries I have about a lot of things is they disembodied us. Correct. And I never know less about my body than when I'm really strolling. Do you ever do that where you like move from a paper book to your phone, which I will sometimes have both out? And you can really feel the difference, like how much I'm in touch with the body on the physical, like, print, slow versus here.

Starting point is 02:03:46 you really do become a brain and a bat. And I'm not saying it's all bad. I don't want to be overly a ludite here. I have a phone. I have a computer. I work on the internet. But I do think, yet developing intuition,

Starting point is 02:03:59 developing taste, that's a very personal, very mysterious thing. But developing the ability to listen to what's happening inside of yourself, that through meditation and movement practice

Starting point is 02:04:12 and other things, it's like, I just like to give people kids. a lot more meta-training in their attention and mind. And, you know, I think we do, we are over-torked on information and need to push, particularly in this era harder, or I would like to see us push harder on, I don't even know what to call it, like the art of thinking, the art of feeling just as much. I always think that going back to some of the trends in podcasting a few years back,

Starting point is 02:04:46 when I guess there's Ben Shapiro's line, you know, facts don't care about your feelings. I always thought it was a big, I was really disagreed with that line. Because not that facts care about your feelings, facts don't care about anything. They're fact. But you should care about your feelings. Feelings are very intelligent. And the dismissal of them is, which is not obviously just a Ben thing, it's a mistake. You want to be in touch with the way things feel.

Starting point is 02:05:12 There's a lot of intelligence in that. And again, the AI can't feel the way things feel, but you can. And so that's a capacity to cultivate. It's fascinating. I had a conversation with Alex O'Connor, and he was explaining how the sort of modern world of rationalism, focus on science, trying to optimize your thinking tools and the dismissal of religion,

Starting point is 02:05:39 story, mythology, narrative, narrative arc, personification, was getting people to reject that that felt most real to them in place of something that you told them was more real, but felt as fake as it could be. Like if you see facts and figures, they're not as compelling as a story of a person that this affected, and you can just continue to scale that all the way up to, well, you can try and reverse engineer virtue from first principles,

Starting point is 02:06:05 but it's like actually a really hard, It's a very difficult and clunky thing to do as opposed to, you know, when I did, you know, when I behaved in that way, I didn't feel good. I didn't feel good when I said when I lied to that person, as opposed to having to be able to show me your proof of why lying is wrong on this whiteboard. It's way harder. And, yeah, I'm completely on board. I think the demand is going to be for people to feel more.

Starting point is 02:06:35 Although I would take this in both directions, actually. We mentioned Pema Chodran, who's a Buddhist teacher that was recently on my show, and I'm a very big fan of a lot of her work. And her work is very much about tolerating the feelings we don't want to tolerate. And one of the reasons I think it's very important to be in touch with what you're feeling is not always because you should listen to it. Sometimes, actually, I think so much of life is driven by these little embodied contractions. we barely even notice, but because we don't even notice that they're happening, we follow them

Starting point is 02:07:09 unthinkingly. And so it's such a weird balance. On the one hand, I completely agree with, you said it was Alex O'Connor, what he was saying. On the other hand, of course, there are many, many, many times when the way the world works violates what feels true to us. And so having the information is there so you can make good judgments about it. But if you don't know that that information is happening in you, you're actually going to be much easier, much more easily moved by it than if you do. I have become one thing that I'm proud of myself because it has been very hard work for me, like genuinely hard work for me, particularly in personal relationships. I have become better at knowing that I am uncomfortable. And so I don't run away from it. But when I didn't know it,

Starting point is 02:07:59 I was much more let around by it because I just knew I didn't want to be there. But I didn't take time to sit in the space because I wasn't fully feeling it. You're just reacting to it. I was just reacting to it. So that to me is like some of the genius of getting better at listening to your own body.

Starting point is 02:08:16 You actually know if something's happening that you're going to need to sit through rather than react to. Heck yeah. Asra Klein, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, man. That was a pleasure. Coming up next.

Starting point is 02:08:27 Who did I just tape with? Just tape with Ian Bremmer. had a great conversation about the crazed state of the world. That could be a title for pretty much everything that you're doing at the moment. I appreciate you, man. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. See you next time, everyone.

Modern Wisdom - Inside The Democratic Party Civil War - Ezra Klein - #1114

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