The Ricochet Podcast - Advice to Grads?

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

This week, we wanted to do a show aimed at graduating students — which is why we booked The WSJ’s Andy Kessler to discuss his column Advice to New Grads: Scale or Bail and Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua (yes, her new book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations isn’t strictly for grads, but hey, she’s the TIGER MOM). But one of our podcasters decided to hijack that theme and take us on his... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Why is it that it is the common impression that poorly adjusted people tend in greater numbers to the world of LSD than normally adjusted people. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks.

Today we talk to the Wall Street Journal's Andy Kessler with some advice for grads. And Amy Chua, Tiger Mom, talking about tribes. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 402. We're brought to you by the fine people at, well, for example, HelloFresh. You know them. They're the meal kit delivery service that shops and plans and delivers your favorite step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can just cook, eat, and enjoy. For $30 off your first week of HelloFresh, visit HelloFresh.com and enter the promo code RICOSHAY30. And we're brought to you by Harry's. Harry's is the razor company that delivers a close, comfortable shave at a fair price. Get a $13 value trial set that comes with everything you need for a close, comfortable shave.

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If you're listening to this podcast and you are not a member, I realize that you have reasons, but I'm not going to talk to the people who decided not to become members. I don't know how to convince you to support something you're enjoying if you don't support it you don't support it but there's a whole lot of people who keep meaning to join who intend to join and then it just slips their mind i totally get it you when you're listening to this you're driving whatever you're doing i get it please this weekend today join join at the podcast listener level. It's about $2.50 a month. It's nothing, but it means the world to us. It helps us keep our doors open. It helps us plan for more events like our members event in D.C., and we're going to do another one in Northern California soon.

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We will appreciate it, and we will thank you, and we will be pleased to greet you as fellow members at the next meetup. That was it. I'm done. Thank you. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Careful of the expletives. This is gold otherwise. Yeah, so now who's going? Yeah.

Did we lose James? Is he on Slack? He's not even on Slack. Can you hear me now? Yes. Oh, there you are. Hi, James. That was bizarre.

All right, take it. I just heard it. I will pick it up. Three, two, one. So do it today, and you will have our eternal thanks on this Memorial Day. And that is my pitch. James, what do you think? There's a lot of people who say, you know what?

I'll join and give you money when I see a big Democratic Hillary donor marched out in front of everybody with handcuffs. Well, it happened today with Harvey. So now we're holding you to your promise. Yeah, do sign up because you get all kinds of great stuff, like Peter Robinson telling us about his LSD trip. Peter, we sign up because you get all kinds of great stuff like Peter Robinson telling us about his LSD trip. Peter, we were chatting about this beforehand. I was only listening just a little bit, but I picked some of it up.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. That's not a sweater tied around my neck. Those are snakes. Rob was arguing while we were monkeying around with your technical difficulties, James. Rob was arguing, and I'm just going to put this to you and see what Rob and you do with it, that Timothy Leary did to LSD what Joe McCarthy did to anti-communism. Over to you, boys. Well, that's unfair, though, Peter, because that was your analogy, which I then said, full disclosure,

I thought it was brilliant. I think it's a brilliant analogy. There's a new book out. Michael Pollan's written a wonderful book. I should say wonderful, but I haven't read it yet. I own it sitting on my desk in my office. There was a one-act excerpt someplace the other day. Yeah, Rod Dreher,

on his wonderful blog, has written and also wrote a great piece in the American Conservative about it from a religious perspective. And I think Rod is a brilliant guy. And so I recommend everybody go there. I would love to have, if you're listening, Michael Pollan on our podcast to talk to about it. Maybe Michael and Rod both talk about it. It's pretty extraordinary stuff. And what I was going to say was that there's all this great research done in the benefits of certain medicine, because it really is brain medicine.

And then it was halted and predominantly halted because of the slapdash, horrible, hippie, nasty, bad name it got from people like Timothy Leary. And in Pollan's book, he sort of rightfully fingers Timothy Leary is the person who, more than anyone, took LSD from being a very, very interesting research drug, for which there's a huge amount of research suggesting how beneficial it can be, to right in your backyard, by the way, Peter, right at Stanford, to this horrible party drug that really did some long-term damage to people. So there you go. Okay, so give me 10 seconds more, or let's make it 90 seconds more.

So you're not actually saying this tongue-in-cheek. This is not a half-funny. No. There are actual medical uses for smallpox. There are huge benefits. Well, first of all, there are huge benefits uses for small children. There are huge benefits. Well, first of all, there are huge benefits to microdosing. That has not yet been studied.

It's being studied right now at NYU. But there are huge benefits, psychological and therapeutic benefits, to controlled use. By that, I mean actually under control with somebody not at a party, I mean, a use of LSD. And then also on a different level, MDMA, which is a party drug that people use called ecstasy, and they usually add amphetamine to it. And that's not a good idea. But the MDMA, I mean, it's not deniable. I mean, it's not deniable. I mean, it's just medical fact. They have all sorts of research suggesting this and proving it.

Soldiers coming back with PTSD, people who have had these sort of big events, the MDMA really helps them cope and sometimes helps them cope in two or three sessions. LSD, Rod writes about this much better. I'm mangling it horribly. But Rod writes about certain people in his life and in his work who have – for whom psychedelic drugs have had a profound religious – have led them to profound religious experiences. And from non-belief to belief, from belief to deeper belief, And Rod's argument is, he's not quite making an argument, he's sort of exploring the topic of whether that really counts,

whether something that you got that way counts. But it's interesting because, you know, the brainwaves of people who are deep in prayer, prayerful trance like monks, and the brainwaves of people who are deep under the influence of a psychedelic, they're almost identical. The brain is doing the same thing.

So there you go. Okay. I see my dog. Oh, I thought that was James after microdosing. No, that's Rob's dog saying, who are you again? Exactly. Yeah. dog saying who are you again exactly yeah this is this is all i feel my first impulse is to wait is to keep you talking until we get to the punch line there has to be humor at the bottom of this

but you're saying no and my second impulse my second impulse is to try to talk you out of it fast right now but of course i realize a you're serious and b i actually know nothing about this if you're telling me that there's actual body of thought which is being developed and written about by intelligent people on our side, such as Rod Dreher, then I have to say, okay, I bookmark that. I'll come back to it. I've got to learn up on it. Gentlemen, let's get back to this. No, it's fascinating. Go ahead.

All right. Let's return to this at the bottom of the hour because there's lots in this to unpack. For example, I am a fan the hour because there's lots in this to unpack. For example, I am a fan of – Now there's the laugh. You see, you're doing it yourself, Rob. Okay, go ahead. No, I live to horrify Peter Robinson. I think that's probably – He's done it again.

My job here on Earth is to horrify Peter Robinson. Go ahead, James. We'll pipe down. Well, there was an elaborate way to get to what I have to say, but we're going to just put that aside for a second and return to it at the end. It had to do with the hallucinogenic nature of pain and hot peppers and the rest of it and ghost peppers and peyote and all of those things that sort of are in Rob's wheelhouse. Now, Rob, Molly Long, we're going to call him from here on in. But I want to tell you that one of the things, whether you're not yours,

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And our thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we bring Andy Kessler to the show. He's the author of Inside View, a column he writes for the Wall Street Journal on technology and markets and where they to the show. He's the author of Inside View, a column he writes for the Wall Street Journal on technology and markets and where they intersect with culture. He's the author of several books, including Wall Street Meet and Eat People,

and he used to design ships at Bell Labs before working on Wall Street for Payne Webber and Morgan Stanley, and then as a founder of the hedge fund Velocity Capital. Andy, welcome. The schools are going to be kicking out lots of grads. What is the best advice you could give somebody if they wanted to go back in time and change their college experience for how to deal with the world to come? Is it necessary to be in the high tech? Do English majors have a chance? Give us the lay of the land.

Yeah, no, of course they do. I mean, my advice is scale or bail. And what I mean is, you know, I admire this generation. They have a fire in their belly, right? They all want to have impact. They all want to change the world, you know, albeit they want to change these misguided, socially conscious things, toxic oppression and food injustice and, you know, mythical privilege and patriarchy. But they're going about it the wrong way. They're volunteering and doing this one-off stuff.

You know, they're building huts in Guatemala and, you know, working at soup kitchens and the like. And, you know, what works, what changes the world, what pushes progress, what makes this, you know, increases the standard of living of everyone is scale. It's the ability to do more with less. It's to come up with an idea and scale it not just to a couple people, but to thousands or millions or billions of people. I mean, that's how you create wealth, and that's how you create societal wealth. And so I would look to figure out how to scale what they do.

Andy, Peter here, Peter Robinson, your piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week entitled Scale or Bail. I read that. I went into my Gmail to send it to about five different parents. And by the time I got to Gmail, it had already been sent to me by about five parents. Parents love this. You're saying to kids, wait a minute, you could go do organic gardening or you could go to work for a venture fund that's investing in new ag tech.

Do the latter. It helps more people. Parents love this. Have you gotten any feedback from kids? Yeah, sure. I've been called a condescending jerk i mean they don't know what to do they're gonna have to figure it out for themselves but but you know i'm just trying to just trying to push them to say you know capture that spirit capture that fire in your belly and

and you know the problem is is you go to you go to parties and someone goes oh you know i'm cleaning up tenements in the favelas of Rio. Wow. And everyone fawns over them. Exactly. And someone else says, oh, you know, I'm working at General Electric. I'm working at Google. I'm working at, oh, yeah, I've got some boring job.

But the reality of it is that boring job is what changes the world. Corporations are about productivity. They are about doing more with less. The stock market makes them do that. It drives their profits onward, and profit is the measure of that productivity. And so there are ways that look a little better at parties. I mean, if you take health care

and try to figure out how to save millions of people as opposed to just a few and a doctor's officer in a hospital with early detection, immunotherapy, you know, I think the whole education system could be turned completely upside down because it's one-off or it's one teacher for 30 students when instead you can get the best of breed teachers and scale it to millions, deliver it electronically, deliver it for almost free to millions of people. And so that's my advice is go out and figure out how to scale. Hey, Andy, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. It sounds like your advice is go out and make more money.

No wonder parents like you. What parties are you going to where the kid who's working at Google or at a venture capital has to kind of hang his head and say, oh, I'm ashamed. I'm not quite as cool as the guy in Rio working in the favelas. I mean, I don't know that many millennials, but the ones I know seem like they're very, very interested in commerce. Some. I mean, I don't get invited to those parties, unfortunately. They're great,

by the way. But I mean, are you making a distinction between getting rich? So if I'm listening to this, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm a recent grad, I'm going to change the world, and you know how I'm going to change the world? I'm going to be a investment banker. Are you making a distinction

between being an investment banker and being something else? Sure. Sure. I mean, working at a soup kitchen, ladling soup, of course there's a difference. I mean, you know, yeah, it's about making money, but, you know, that's just a measurement of your impact on society

because whatever money you make, whatever profits you generate, the flip side is what the benefit that you've done for someone else. But what's more important is not so much making money, but is driving productivity, is scaling things, is doing things more with less. Investment bankers, they get bad names and all, but in effect they figured out how to scale financing. They provide capital to all these companies doing productive things. I'm thinking more of, you know, anyone working at a middle-level job,

you know, marketing potato chips. Even that is trying to figure out how to do more with less. And, you know, I guess, you know, there's plenty of recent graduates that have that drive and get it and figure out how to scale. But so many others have been fooled by the media. I mean, they've got to stop watching TV, for God's sake. You know, they think there's this dystopian future ahead of us. They watch Hunger Games and they watch Handmaid's Tale they watch handmade still handmade still is not a documentary right we're not headed

towards this dystopian future it's exactly the opposite and so my my final advice of course was don't listen to me listen to bono right he said entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid he figured it out why because he's been in the aid business for decades, and it doesn't work. It's too one-off. And entrepreneurial capitalism is what creates wealth and creates jobs and allows people to support themselves and drive themselves out of poverty. Can I just jump in? Go, Rob.

I really agree. I totally agree. I just want in? I really agree. I totally agree. I just want to make a little distinction. I don't know if you've watched the show Silicon Valley, but there was a wonderful moment in it a couple seasons ago where the entrepreneur or founder of a tech company wants to change the world and has all

the sort of impulses that you and I are talking about. The funding disappears and he's got to go find a job and he goes to another startup and it's basically a parody of Snapchat. And he looks at all this technology they have and all these engineers and all they're doing is figuring out how to superimpose a dog's head on your head in a photo. And they turn to him and say, isn't this great? We're changing the world. So if you're a recent grad, how do you make a distinction? Or is there a distinction to be made between figuring out how to put a dog's face on somebody's picture

and figuring out how to get refrigerated medicine to the middle of nowhere? I mean, what's the – how would What's the... How would you... Okay. What are the key metrics you would use to decide, all right, this is valuable and this is kind of pointless? It certainly doesn't look valuable. And, you know, Silicon Valley, I think the show is terrific, but it's a parody. I mean, you don't know if it's around, you know, for 24-7, 365 days a year, putting a dog's head on your head.

But in effect, what a company like Snapchat is or is supposed to be, and the reason it has a huge value, is an electronic ad delivery system. So rather than newspapers, I write for one, and magazines and even television, it's a way to deliver targeted ads and lower the cost so that commerce in the U.S. and the world can be done cheaper and better. That's scale. Delivering refrigerated medicine, I think that's terrific. But if there's not a profit mode behind it, it's going to be generating losses and it's not going to scale. So, you know, I'd rather someone work on immunotherapy and have people not be sick in Africa and other forlorn places in the first place. That's what I mean by

scale. So Andy Peter here, here, the kid comes, it's senior year. I'm asking for advice for parents. You've been talking about advice to kids. The kid comes home and says, dad, I've got a choice. I could go to work for the Peace Corps or I could go to work for Goldman Sachs. Now, of course, my impulse would say, are you crazy? That's not a choice. Are you crazy? But what is the way that a parent should say to the child, should tell the child to think about it? You're not allowed to tell 21-year-olds what to do, but you may perhaps suggest how to think

about that choice. And what would you say? Well, I'd say, look, the Peace Corps, wonderful, they do wonderful things, but it tends to be one-off. They're doing things one at a time, and therefore there's a bit of selfishness to it. It's more about psychic gratification of the person working for the peace car, where someone else who has that real job, and maybe Goldman is a bad example, or maybe not, but any other quote-unquote boring job, well, your friends are out there, you know, digging ditches. They're getting psychic gratification while you'll get the job done. And, you know, it's a longer discussion because, unfortunately, at universities, they don't teach the word scale or the word productivity or how the economy really works

because we're stuck in this Keynesian economic model. But it would be a very difficult discussion. I'd have to have a whiteboard or a chalkboard and explain it. But, you know, I would strongly convince them that, you know, the Peace Corps is, you're doing it for yourself while any other job, you're doing it for the rest of the world andy great advice um i have a daughter who's graduating from high school in a week and um i'm going to tell her scale or bail because i've been telling her fail or flail and for some reason that just doesn't have the same effect on her thanks so much we'll see you in the wall street journal to read you elsewhere and we appreciate you coming on the podcast today. Turn it into a book, Andy.

Turn it into a book. I will buy a dozen copies immediately. I need to sell a million or it won't scale. Thanks, Andy. He's absolutely right about the dystopian future that kids think that they're going to be living in it about two weeks or so, there was this meme that was being passed around on Twitter the other day that said it started out as all of these businesses now that are huge that began in garages. Google began in a garage. Mattel began in a garage. Disney's and so forth.

And by the time I saw it start to pop up in my Twitter feed, people were taking it apart. And they were saying that this is now impossible because today's graduates, today's youth can't afford to get a house, can't afford to have a garage. And after that, somebody trying to up that and virtue signal about how they are concerned said, well, it's not only true, it's that those people had privilege that backstopped them so that when they failed again, they could do something more. And everybody had to find something wrong with the idea that these six big companies were started with garages. And you know that it began by somebody trying to make a hopeful point about the American economic system, that these enormous enterprises could arise from these very small little garages, not because the guys had the privilege and the money.

In most cases, they were poor. In the case of Google and Disney, it was somebody else's garage. But it's more satisfying to think that this is the worst of all possible worlds for some reason. Because you're praised on the internet for the quality and the sophistication of your negativity. And if you're uplifting and positive about something, then you're a Pollyanna idiot who doesn't know exactly how bad this place is. But let's say you're a couple of guys who just want to figure out how to do something with your life and not be working at Subway. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But you want a job that's going to give you something in the future. What do you do? You look around, and as Rob was saying, you either come up with something silly like a Snapchat idea where a head is put on your dog for all eternity, or you find an industry to, and here's the word that we hate, disrupt.

I hate that. Every time I turn on my browser now, it's these Minneapolis teens are disrupting this $90 trillion industry. How? Well, sometimes this disruption is just as simple as finding out what people don't like about something and fixing that. One of the things that people didn't like, for example, about shaving was paying for really high blades. So what if you're a couple of guys who say, how about if we get better blades and we sell them at a cheaper cost? Wow, what an idea. Did it work?

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And her last book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was an international sensation and changed parenting forever. Her latest book is Political Tribes, Group Instinct, and the Fate of Nations. Tribes, Amy, are really in the news these days. People are saying it's a bad thing, it's a new thing, and they're trying to understand exactly what sort of long-standing anthropological history goes into the creation of them. What don't we get about tribes, and is there something positive here that we can learn for our modern politics? Well, I mean, in a sense, tribalism is exactly the opposite of being a new thing. I mean,

human beings are naturally tribal. We're hardwired to want to belong to groups. We actually, we need to, and it's very predictable how we act. And tribalism isn't always bad. You know, like you can be tribal with your family over the U.S. political system in a way that actually is kind of similar to the way it did in countries like, believe it or not, Venezuela and Iraq. And that is very dangerous because once you belong to a tribe, once you connect to a political tribe, you tend to just see everything through that tribe's lens

and think it's right in any way. So any news item comes up now, and I don't even have to read or know what people say. I could predict what both sides are going to say. It's almost like the facts don't matter. Policy doesn't matter. You just kind of stick to your side and tow the party line. And the result is that you can get absolutely nothing done. And you're seeing that. I mean, our key issues like immigration, you know, these are huge problems that we need to debate and discuss.

And we just go absolutely nowhere. You're right. We've always had tribes, political, ethnic, and otherwise. But maybe what made America different was we had the idea of a supra-tribal identity. In other words, we had the idea of a supra-tribal identity. In other words, we had a civic identity that was primary. As long as all the tribes pledged an intellectual agreement to the notion of America, we're going to get somewhere. Are you saying that we're simultaneously seeing a rise of tribalism at the same time we're seeing a breakdown in the sense

of a national identity? Yeah, you know, I phrase it slightly differently. I think that people don't realize that there is something incredibly special and impressive about the American experiment. And so it's what you say, but I describe it as America alone among the major powers. I mean, not France, not England, not the U.K. We are what I call a supergroup. And what that is, to be a supergroup, you need to satisfy two requirements. The first is what you refer to is a very strong, overarching, collective identity, American. The second

requirement to be a supergroup is that you have to be a country that allows all kinds of individual subgroup identities to flourish. You know, so I'm Irish American, I'm Lebanese American, I'm Chinese American. And those two things, amazingly, in America have been able to coexist in the United States. You could be, you know, I'm Croatian American, I'm, you know, Syrian American, and incredibly patriotic at the same time. And that's what's under threat right now. And it's a fun experiment if you just start going through the countries of the world. China, very powerful country, is not a super group because it's got the first requirement, Han Chinese identity, incredibly strong,

but it doesn't satisfy the second requirement, allowing the Tibetans and the Uyghurs and their identities to flourish. But the problem is that in the United States right now, partly because of the massive demographic change that we've seen, what you're seeing is that every group in America now feels threatened. It used to be really just kind of minority groups that felt threatened. But now, you know, whites feel threatened as well. And it's when people feel threatened that they retreat into tribalism. And so I see on the left a kind of an attack on the whole overarching national identity. I mean, the idea that it's

like, you can see now I teach on a college campus, it's no, you know, it's like they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's not just, what I do believe is that we've always had this amazing constitution with incredibly important principles, but that we have repeatedly failed to live up to many of those ideals, and we must try harder. The rhetoric you're seeing now in a lot of progressive circles is America is a land of genocide. You know, we're not built on principles of equality. We're built on principles of white supremacy. And I think it's a huge mistake to make that. It might sound like a small rhetorical difference, but I think it's a huge mistake.

And, you know, what I say in this book is that if America really is nothing more than the land of genocide built on white supremacy, then it's unclear why it's a country even worth fighting for. So I think that we need to kind of get back to the idea where we say, look, we can criticize our country, but we need to kind of figure out a way to have that connective tissue again that ties all Americans together. Hey, Amy, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us.

By the way, before we go, I want to ask you just a quick follow-up on your first book, Battle of the Tiger Mother. But before I do, I just want to ask you a question about these tribes because it seems to be that one of the causes of the rise of tribalism, and I think you saw it in big empires in the past, has been that there have been spoils to be divided. That it's one thing if you come to this country and you keep to yourself and you have a little enclave as they did in the Lower East Side of Manhattan or Irish Boston or a Mexican in Los Angeles. It's another if you feel like, well, wait a minute, if we form a coalition of our tribe, we get some spoils. I mean, as long as there are spoils to divide, won't there be this kind of toxic tribalism? I think that's part of it. I think that's, I mean, people have been writing about this since the 70s. And I actually think that that's kind of breaking, I think it's ineffective.

You know, one of the things I write about is that you're actually seeing a kind of oppression Olympics on the left actually again on a college campus I don't see these coalitions are almost they're pathetic and they don't make sense actually and you know we now have and I support this again

I go back to the super group idea it's really in vogue right now to be the new liberalism which is like we need everybody to assimilate. And look, that would be a great world if we could have that. But because I have been studying tribalism and ethnic identity, it's easier said than done just to say, hey, you know, just drop that identity. It would be like telling you if you're a Yankees fan just to stop it. You belong to like the world of world baseball. But what I'm seeing right now is actually we have the Black Students Association.

They go off to their retreat, and then you have the Asian Association. They go to their retreat, the Muslim Association. So yes, the spoils are – I don't know if it's exactly one giant coalition anymore. I think it's like maybe at the national level, if you're thinking about like national politics, but at a smaller level, it's almost like I see the danger that it's kind of turning into like a game of zero sum political tribalism. Like, you know, Asians with the affirmative action problem. And I see this kind of breakdown that people just don't see fellow people in this country. They don't see people belonging to other tribes as fellow Americans.

It's almost like this is my team and other people are trying to take stuff away from us. So I do see the spoils problem, but it's divided up in all kinds of pretty destructive ways, actually. Yeah, I was going to say, and now I think you have a segment of the white population saying, hey, wait a minute, us too. And there was a huge part of the Trump voter was saying, hey, if you're giving stuff out, why are we not getting some? We don't have the privilege you think we do.

Absolutely. And I sympathize. You know, again, the book is kind of unusual because I really don't feel like I'm in one of the normal tribes. I very, you know, and what I do see with this constant check your white privilege thing is that even from the point of view of the left, that that was just a foolish move because it's human nature to want to feel proud of your tribe, to want to belong to a group that you think is positive. It's not human nature to believe, oh, I belong to the worst group. And so, again, it's a problem of overcorrection.

I think it's really great and important that we said, you know what? Our founding fathers were flawed. You know, guess what? We haven't been telling our history. We did commit genocide. But I think this push to this extreme, especially on college campuses, which is whiteness is a disease, you're the worst thing on earth. At a certain point, if somebody comes

along and says, you know what, you may be a white guy, but you're not that bad. And you know what, the founders weren't that bad. It's going to be really appealing. And then you couple that with the spoils thing, which is, you know, people, believe it or not, out of a class of 200 people in the class of, I think, 2019, we have actually a lot of minorities because we recruit for that. We look for that. But we had only one poor white person. And talking to him, it's exactly what you say. He's like, wait a minute. You know, he's below the poverty line.

His dad has had three heart attacks. They have no health insurance. And yet he's constantly know, he's below the poverty line. His dad has had three heart attacks. They have no health insurance. And yet he's constantly told that he's privileged. And he just feels like everything he says, he's from South Carolina, he's attacked for being racist and misogynist. And at a certain point, he's like, of course he's going to vote for somebody that offers something else. So to me, I was actually somebody that predicted that Trump would win. So I wasn't in the main camp. Amy, Peter Robinson here. So you're saying

that tribal identity, especially on college campuses, has gone too far and become destructive. And we need to reassert an overarching American identity. And yet there you are teaching at Yale Law School. What kind of pushback do you encounter right there in New Haven? Um, amazingly, amazingly, you know, I got into a huge amount of trouble for the Tiger Mom book, but maybe it's because of who I am. Like, you know, I'm a minority woman professor. Um, I'm independent. Uh, I haven't, I, I, I haven't gotten in huge trouble. Oh, really? So you get to say whatever you want.

Good for you. Great. Well, I don't exactly. It's a little bit different. I have a class called International Business Transactions, and I think it's lucky that the class isn't like constitutional law. Like, I'm not debating about death penalty and abortion, right? But I do talk about democracy and ethnic conflict and

these issues. So my class is pretty famous for being the most diverse in the law school. It's a very popular class, but it's diverse in a way that I'm proud of. Yes, ethnically and racially and a lot of women, but it also has always had a very large block of our conservative students, members of the Federalist Society. So for example, the last time I taught it, I had 16 African-American students, but I also had 16 members of the Federalist Society. And I structured the debate in a way, I'm like, okay, here are the ground rules.

You know, respect, and if you hear somebody and they say something in a way that is not the way that you would say it, instead of immediately saying, oh my God, racist, misogynist, homophobic, just cut them a break and assume that maybe they just use the wrong vocabulary. We're going to listen to each other. And it's actually gone pretty well, again, because the topics aren't the most hot button.

And I will say that after the election of President Trump, it got a lot harder. That, you know, everyone was like, it's really hot in here. Can we open the windows? But if I structure it and there's kind of like a, so I actually do believe that campuses, that colleges and universities, we need more leadership because I think it can be done. So I, and to clarify, I don't mean to get rid of the tribes. I think it's great that students have, are able to go into groups to feel solidarity, but it's what you said.

Simultaneously, there's also got to be something that connects the country or even just like your law school. You know, like you just, because once you start dividing, it just is ever, it'll just keep getting smaller and smaller. And this is the kind of intersectionality point, which is, wait a minute, you might be gay, but you're not a, you know, Latina woman. You know, it a minute, you might be gay, but you're not a Latina woman. It actually gets very...

It's just hard to have a conversation at a certain point. Amy, you're absolutely right, because you can parse this into ever thinner slices of identity, but maybe the youths of today would say, we already have a super-tribal identity. We reject the American ideal because it was predicated on Genesis, oppression, lies, hypocrisy, whiteness, etc. What we have is a new doctrine of intersectionality that assumes a wonderful transnational leftist utopia to which we all are moving. That's their overarching idea. Now, I don't know whether or not that's based on a negative and whether or not you can actually create a society out of constantly thrashing.

Yes, that's a great way of putting it, and I have sort of three responses. First, that view, you can apply it globally, too. There's the cosmopolitans, which is, we're not tribal at all. We belong to sort of, we're citizens of the world, and we embrace Africans and Libyans and Venezuelans all equally. And one of the things I say in the book is that, of course, is itself a very tribal identity. It's a very, I like it. I mean, I'm a very kind of cosmopolitan person, but we must recognize that that is a very elite identity that is actually very exclusionary.

And the second point is that it's really, it may be described that way, like, oh, this is the identity we want to move towards. But I think deep in everybody's heart, they know it's an us versus them, right? Because half the country doesn't like that. So I don't see any hope in that. That's not that is what I mean by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Now, what I do think is that I think the right makes mistakes, too. They a lot of people on the right, they just take this easy way out. And I want to say, look, being patriotic and believing in the American project is not just about singing the anthem really loudly. You know, these things take work and our population is getting more diverse.

And if they're large segments of, you know, people who feel marginalized, just don't feel the system treats them legitimately, like they don't feel that their people or people who look like them are accorded the same kind of respect and dignity that dominant groups are, then of course, they're not going to believe in the American project. So, I mean, the problem with tribalism is we can't even talk about this now. I do think we need to kind of figure out how do we describe this American national identity now in a way that can embrace, you know, immigrants and non-immigrants, old people and young people, and also descendants of slaves as well as descendants of slave owners.

And the thing that you mentioned, this kind of multicultural, mosaic thing, that's just not going to be enough to hold the country together. I mean, for reasons I could go into. Again, it kind of cuts against human nature. I mean, it's just, they tried this, you know, right after the Berlin Wall fell in the kind of the 90s when I really started writing about this stuff. The idea was like, wait, it's going to be the end of the nation state. And, you know, I remember there was a time when people said, you know, Turkey and Saudi Arabia may join the EU.

And, you know, maybe the United States can join the EU. The U.S. will join. And even at the time, I was just a young academic. I was like, that will never happen. It's just – Hey, Amy, it's Rob again. I know we've got to let you go, but before we do, your first book, Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother, came out in 2011, so seven years ago. Right.

You see young people coming through your classrooms every year. Absolutely. Have they changed at all? Do you see if you show up and you think to yourself, I bet you your mom or dad read this book? Actually, that does happen to me a lot. I was just at my daughter's college graduation, and it was an interesting feeling. You're right. Seven years is a long time, and some people really hate me and then some people have the opposite view. So it's been

interesting. But I absolutely think that the student population has changed. I used to have so much fun making these provocative classes where people would say outrageous things and it would just, I would generate a debate and it would be very lively and people would all go out for a drink afterwards. And it's just so much harder to do that now. This kind of, you know, that your words are injuring me. It's much, much more difficult for me to do it. I'm sort of stubborn. I, along with, I actually would like to believe that because of the Trump election, we're

going to, we reached a tipping point and that things are actually going to move back in the other direction. That, that even progressives have seen that it's just kind of gone too far and that actually contributed to the intellectual result that they didn't like, you know, that people just can't feel they can say anything. But I've, I've seen that in my own students, that it's just I have to be much, much more careful. I'm constantly trying to ramp up on my vocabulary. So I, you know, Latinx is the right term now.

It's constantly changing so that you don't offend somebody. And I think, again, that's a bit of a wrong way to go, this kind of gotcha game. I don't think it's helping to halt oppression in any way. I think it's just become – it's actually very elitist. It must be very depressing for you as a teacher to be at a great institution and then suddenly be concerned that the equivalent of the intellectual stasi or whatever reporting on you. I mean, I guess you occupy a kind of a safe space, but there must be some younger professors who are not quite as secure in their position who might think, well, what the hell, just go along. Well, there are many, many.

You're absolutely right. I mean, there are topics now that white male professors won't teach. It's just too dangerous. And so there are a lot of problems. I'm an optimist, and what I actually think, and this is true, I think, both at the national level and at the level of the university, is that, and I haven't done a big empirical study on this, but I have a very strong intuition that it's actually a relatively small number

of very loud voices on both the extreme right and the extreme left that kind of almost like bully people into having these views. But if I talk to a large number of students or even just get people from opposite political stripes and just have a conversation over a beer, over lunch as individuals, I think actually most people are reasonable and good. So again, I'm a naturally optimistic person. So I kind of believe that with some leadership and inspiration, it's not going to be as bad. It's really just a few,

it's a smaller group than you'd think that is leading things in the wrong direction. Well, that actually is very, very, very good to hear, frankly. I was expecting something a little bit more depressing. Yeah, I hope you're right, too. Well, Amy, you're a parent, an author, a professor of law at Yale. You make the rest of us feel like shapeless sacks of inert protoplasms. No, no, just the opposite.

I just wish I could be a podcaster and be able to do what you guys do. I do the same thing all the time. Oh, we'd love to have you. And until the day comes when we can have you regularly, Ricochet, we advise everybody to read Political Tribes, Group Instinct, and The Fate of Nations. Thanks so much for coming on.

We want to have you on as soon as possible. Again, for whatever possible reason, it's been a delight. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Amy. Thanks, Amy. You know, yes, Rob, go on. I was going to say, I suspect that there are some, maybe it hasn't quite been enough time. Seven years is probably not enough time, but there's probably a next... In the next five or ten years, she will

see young people in her classroom who were raised from infancy, almost, by parents who read her book and took it to heart. I wonder if that's... I wonder how weird that'll be when you're... If you're Amy Chua, suddenly

you have this army of young people in your head who already know all your tricks. It'll be great if we could have microtagged them with chips subcutaneously inserted both the Tiger Mom generation and her students and just see how they disperse into the world and change everything. How's your coffee,

Rob? Coffee's excellent, thank you. Because I love the fact that I could actually hear you foaming your milk, so to speak. Is that what it was? I'm pretty sure it was. No, you couldn't actually. What was that?

I heard the hissing, the sound that usually accompanies the foaming of milk for a nice sound. Sadly, I think that was a piece of electronic static, not a nice foam of milk. I don't drink that. I don't drink the dairy in the coffee anymore. I found it was easy to cut out, and if you can cut it out, I'd cut it out. I heard some sort of sound, and it could indeed have been static because, well, you know, a lot of people, when they're using wireless communications like this, will find strange things happening to them, dropouts, or they just get too far away. If you're one of those people who's dissatisfied with your wireless system at home, we need to talk about Aero. Aero was created in order to build the Wi-Fi system that we all wish we had in our homes. A fast, reliable connection in every

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and the upgraded one makes things on my computer visibly faster. Go ahead. I think they're called beacons. Beacons, yes, that's it. The arrow beacon. So it has gone from – the whole family used to be – the kids would complain because before arrow, there was one room in the house that had so-so coverage. Now, not only does every room in the house – we have one, two, three. I think we have three beacons in the house now. And every room in the house has coverage and so does the backyard the kids go out there my daughter goes out there hauls out of a chair picnic table chair and sits

down there and works in the backyard very happily that's right it's summertime you want to get them out of the house stop sitting inside staring at your glowing rectangles go outside and stare at your glow i need this zero i totally need it. I'm going to order one today. I have no idea why, because Rob lives in a series of small apartments in metropolitan cities, and I don't get it. I mean, you're in New York now. You got, what, 40 square feet? Get out of here. But let's say that Rob goes back to his palatial estate in California. He'll want one of these systems, and he'll get one for just $399. That includes one arrow router and two beacons,

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the Ricochet podcast. Now, Rob, you're probably, if you've been microdosing with your coffee as we began this thing, you're probably starting to see small, not huge anacondas of a terrifying nature come out of the walls, but perhaps charming little garter snakes

at the periphery of your vision. No, none of that. That doesn't happen. And also, I would draw the distinction terrifying nature come out of the walls, but perhaps charming little garter snakes at the periphery of your, you know, none of that, that doesn't happen. Uh, and also I would, I would draw this danger between, you know, the,

the major dose and the microdose. The microdosing is something that people are trying. I haven't tried it, but they, they, they're trying because they feel that it makes them when they're in a, doing creative project more, more productive.

Um, and it, it sort of removes a certain kind of blocking. See, that's, isn't that dangerous? That's the, that's why writers smoked. That's in the old days. That, isn't that dangerous? That's why writers smoked.

In the old days, that's why they still drink. That's why some writers – that's Timothy Leary territory, isn't it? Both things more dangerous than microdosing. Truly. Yeah. Smoking and drinking. I mean drinking has never helped writers. It's helped them maybe in their own – I mean I'm not saying somebody doesn't – I love to drink.

But I don't know one writer who was better when he was drunk. I know writers who got the work done because they were drunk. But their work would have been better if they – work would have been better sober. And it's a great story. I mean all the research was really done at Stanford and now it's being done at Stanford kind of and also here at NYU and at Sloan Kettering actually. The use of MDMA for people who are terminal, have terminal cancer, has been like hugely beneficial to them. It doesn't cure you obviously, but it makes that process – So in what way? Peace of mind? Peace of mind. It helps to connect them to sort of whatever their religious faith is or was or helps them see some kind of path and meaning and helps them accept, helps them forgive, helps them be forgiven, helps a lot of things happen that are really meaningful. But I would just say that the difference between – so that's sort of of the larger dose but the micro dosing is something that people are trying

um and it really comes out of this this idea that the insight that happened i think in the 60s where a bunch of people were talking about their sort of uh scientific insights and the guy who discovered the double helix uh the sort of structure of human DNA, did so under the influence of – I think it was LSD. It was psychedelic because it helped him – helped his brain sort of visualize what he was – the data he was receiving in his research. Watson and Crick? Watson or Crick was – isn't that the – James Watson? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Really? Yeah, the American one yeah no actually actually they both got

really baked on some quality weed and they were eating twizzlers okay they were eating in their dream he saw twizzlers that's all that was don't don't you mock me james this is i feel like a teenager i stormed my room and slammed my door. You don't understand me or my generation. That's what I went through yesterday having a discussion with my daughter about animism. Animism? How did that come up? It's hilarious. She was waiting for her yellow fever shot at the place where you get your yellow fever shot, because she's going to Brazil. And I don't know how it came up, but she mentioned that animism is increasingly popular in Brazil. And I made some disparaging remarks about that I really didn't put a lot of stock in something that imbued everything with consciousness and intelligence and rejected Cartesian dualism.

And then she starts throwing back at me the hypotheticals. Oh, so without any basis whatsoever, any evidence whatsoever, we're to assume an intelligent overarching design. And the woman who's to give her the shot walks in as we're arguing about this. When she left, I think we were just talking about where we were going to have lunch, and she comes back two minutes later, and we're arguing about animism, which actually continued on to the rest of the day.

It was very frustrating, but also just the sort of conversation that I'm going to miss with her. Now, the idea, however, that you're getting from Rob... Are you worshipping the dog now? Who won? I lost. I lost because I was pulling some sort of cultural scale.

The nature of which, it's not what I'm saying, actually, that she disagrees with. It's just she builds in a certain set of assumptions about why I'm saying it. That's another thing. I mean, it's part of the whole, Dad, you think you know everything, and unfortunately I do. But what Rob was talking about at the top of the podcast, when chanting,

the brainwaves of the people who are in deep chants are similar to the people who are in certain microdosing or certain drug-induced states. I mean, there's a couple of ways we can go with this. You can say that that frequency

that they are attaining is the key to opening up the doorway into the divine. Or that simply this is a series of biochemical rhythms that exist in the brain, which themselves are responsible for the human need to invent and apprehend the divine. That's the kind of thing. If I was having the argument with my daughter, that's the right go. I'm not sure it matters because if the objective is to get to a sort of nirvana state, being here on this mortal plane, what can we do but get what we can and hope to find out after we die whether we are right or we are wrong, if you lack, of course, the sort of faith that Peter has.

But it is fascinating. I mean, because essentially you're right. The hippies ruined it because they binged and they stoned and they wrote this ridiculous stuff. And we're supposed to admire the idea of the rebel writer who goes out of the Las Vegas and the Nevada highway with his life and all that BS. That's all indulgent. I mean it's also fair to say just as a general rule, hippies ruined everything. Yes. Well, yes, except I don't think hippies ruined the idea of socialistic communal living.

I think hippies pretty much proved they did us a big favor. They may have ruined sexual morality in the 60s, but they did us a big favor because we got to see what happened when the chalks are off. They didn't ruin hygiene. They just gave us a very stark example of what happens when everybody takes that sort of Manson-esque approach to sleep. So, I mean, the hippies may have been, well, depending on whether or not we admire them. Peter, you had your hippie fates, right? I mean, there was a time when you wore your sweater really loosely around your neck. And there was a time when I wore a tie-dyed sweater over my shoulders.

Oh, pictures. All right. Well, now we know what the graphic of this podcast is going to be. There we go. I have an older brother, and my older brother went through a hippie phase, which I found as his little brother watching it all happen, I found so unsettling that it just inoculated me. I just – I wanted nothing to do with it. So I had a sort of a special circumstance for a reason for avoiding a hippie phase. Rob?

But I – no, I did not. I mean I did have a very liberal phase. It wasn't really a hippie phase. But I kind of feel like the hippies ruined a lot of things that we actually now, I mean, are unfortunately even now, my conservative friends will roll their eyes at certain things that I'll do or say that aren't, that shouldn't be imbued with any kind of left-right politics. I mean, like, you know, like there's a certain amount of, for instance, I think it was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who probably is egregious in a million different ways, but his plan, which he helped who now are helping clean up the guanus canal um which is a super fun site has been a super super fun site for 30 years and of course the federal government can't do anything right so it takes entrepreneurial vision to do it

right um and you know that there's nothing wrong with wanting to have uh the rivers be clean there's nothing wrong with that doesn't mean that you're against business it just but the hippies ruined everything and created this kind of weird partisan toxic atmosphere so that things that are really not political have to are first given a label and you know people like me who are you know decent conservatives i'm not you know i'm not an arch paleo conservative like some people on this podcast but I'm a decent one. You're still working your way through your liberal phase as far as I'm concerned. Well, as far as you're concerned. But there's absolutely zero reason why an interest in psychedelic research should be – has anything to do with my views on American foreign policy or domestic policy or tax policy or economic policy or entrepreneurial capitalism.

Or even the right way or the wrong way to live your life. But I think we've allowed ourselves or I think the hippies started it by creating this incredibly factious, moral, wet blanket on everything. So that if you eat a hamburger, certain people look at you like you've gone to the dark side. And if you say, hey, good for Robert F. Kennedy for cleaning up the Hudson River, suddenly you're on the other side, which you shouldn't be.

Rob Long reclaiming tripping for the tasseled locusts. Yes, and I recognize that's absurd, all right? So I'll give you that. But I don't think it's wrong. I think it's something that we should – you know who my north star here in this – and this is going to sound really pompous. And I'm not comparing myself to him in any way other than this.

My north star here is Bill Buckley who had a wide curiosity on a lot of different things and wrote about a lot of different things. And I'll just leave it at that. I just imagine Bill Buckley full of molly at a rave, just hugging everybody and just getting – See, again, the molly is like – that's ecstasy. That is the party version of MDMA, which includes amphetamines. So you can dance for 17 hours straight and it's horrible and it's completely useless. There you go. I'll probably end up saying saying too much. But but but the the the substance itself, the chemical substance itself, has neither value nor no value.

It really is all about the set and the setting and the context in which the person takes it. Okay, so I can see it now. First, you're going to work on a revival of Cheers. If that doesn't come together, it's a revival of Gilligan's Island with Thurston Howell III microdosing. That's right. Thurston Howell will have a glow stick necklace, and he'll be dancing in the poem on the island with ginger. Oh, you two are just mocking me.

No, no, no. Put your daughter on the podcast, James. I think she and I would get along. I look forward to exploring this knowledge and this expertise that I before had not known. And I can't wait to see the little MDMA pills with the Gucci logo on them. And as you know,

this one is almost too rich for James. The Gucci is almost too easy. The Gucci logo has two Gs mirroring each other, so you know exactly where to slice the razor blade down the two if you want to start out at a smaller dose.

This will be great. No, it is fascinating. It's time to reclaim these things from the dirty, smelly hippies and realize that brain chemistry is something that is another frontier. And while I hate to think of a sort of brave new world idea of people taking the happy sauce and looking at the feelies, I mean, because that is a nightmare, we have been going on this massive program of giving people all sorts of brain chemical drugs for the last

20, 30 years. And they're supposed to make everybody get back to normal. I mean, my daughter has a generation of cohorts who grew up on these pills and have to ask themselves, who am I actually? These things are changing and repressing in order to help me. Who am I really? Am I the sum of the interactions of my drugs and brains, or is there a me that's being stifled?

I mean, that whole experiment, everybody shrugged because guys in white coats were handing out the script. But when it's the subculture... I agree. Yeah. But also, I know we have to run, but I just want to add one more thing to that, which is that all of those drugs that people have been prescribing are chronic.

You're supposed to take them forever. You get a prescription for months and months and months, and the kids who are medicated for months and months and months. I think in many ways that is probably right. I think that in many ways these medications are kind of great for people. But it does feel like they're being overprescribed. And the great thing about psychedelics is it's really a one-time. You just do it once, once or twice, and you're kind of done. Yeah, that's because you go to the top of the building and you jump off.

Okay. All right, Jack Webb. I've seen that art link letter. Yeah. No, Jack Webb was against reefer, as a matter of fact, because the baby was drowned and he went into the camera with this very powerful gesture of twisting the bag of reefer in his hands,

which reminds me of something that Amy said, and we'll leave with that. She used the phrase, throw the baby out with the bathwater, which makes me wonder whoever actually did that. Who would pick up the bath, which is obviously going to be heavy because it is a baby and what do you do are you going to the window and you're throwing it out yes because you're tripping on the

sort of stuff that rob long wants to sell you pusher man we'll leave it at that um we'd like to thank everybody here for listening to the podcast rob you there i'm here okay i'm just waiting for you to to bark back uh But no. Eero.com. No, I accept. Harrys.com. No, this is actually – we should have another podcast just on this very subject alone. And HelloFresh.com, which is delicious when you're hungry, by the way. Support us by supporting them.

If you enjoyed the show, go to iTunes, leave a message, leave a review. Your reviews help the new listeners to discover us, and that keeps the show going. Thank you for listening, and that keeps the show going. Thank you for listening, and we'll see everybody in the comments. And see you guys next week on Ricochet 3.0. Thanks, fellas. Thanks, guys. Rising up back on the street Did my time, took my chances Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet

Just a man and his will to survive So many times it happens too fast You change your passion for glory Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past You must fight just to keep them alive It's the eye of the tiger, it's the cream of the fight Rising up to the challenge of our rival. And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night, and he's watching us all through the night.

Love the tiger. Face to face, out in the heat Hanging tough, staying hungry Let's deck the odds till we take to the street For we kill with a skill to survive It's the eye of the tiger, it's the cream of the fight Rising up to the challenge of our rival And the last non-survivor stalks his prey in the night And he's watching us all through the eye

Of the tiger Ricochet! Join the tiger. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Rising up straight to the top Have the guts got the glory With the distance

now I'm not gonna stop Just a man and his will to survive. It's the eye of the tiger. It's the cream of the fight. Rising up to the challenge of our rival. And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night. And he's watching us all through the eye of the tiger.