The Collapse of American Politics - Ezra Klein

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CChris Williamson

Mental HealthBooks & LiteratureComputing/SoftwareInternet Technology

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00:00:00Ezra Klein. So hot right now. Oh no. Did you ever expect to be referred to as an unlikely thirst

00:00:06trap? I did not. And I try to ignore that it's happening. It also is this funny quality. Some

00:00:15of this coverage of how now it's like, I took off my glasses and grew a beard and it's very,

00:00:20she's all that. It's like, oh, like maybe he's, I always look the same to me. Well,

00:00:26an unlikely thirst trap feels like the most backhanded insult or compliment. It's like a

00:00:31Rorschach test for whether or not you feel good about yourself. I don't know what way that's,

00:00:36is that, is that supposed to be a nice thing? Unlikely thirst trap.

00:00:39I don't, when you are profiled, it is not supposed to be a nice thing.

00:00:44Okay. So you'll take unlikely thirst trap. I think that's like also an important thing to

00:00:47know about just like the whole genre of profiling. It's never supposed to be a totally nice thing.

00:00:52Usually not supposed to be a totally mean thing. It's trying to create energy.

00:00:58That's interesting. There was a rumor in that, that you'd had to adjust your lighting

00:01:01on your podcast set to make you look less attractive because it was distracting from the real substance

00:01:08of the, it is a not true rumor. Wow. And, and it's going to be a even weirder thing to discuss,

00:01:13like here while you're sitting there, like three times as ripped in front of me,

00:01:16as we talked about whether or not I'm hot. Uh, I know it's, I thought that that was an

00:01:23interesting profile, but yeah. How do you feel about having a mini celebrity moment like that?

00:01:29You try to focus on the work. And I mean that really seriously. I think that, uh,

00:01:33if you start to see yourself in the third person, it is very, very dangerous for doing good work.

00:01:40It's like the, the input of good work is independence of mind. And for me particularly,

00:01:46it's a lot of time spent by myself reading books, thinking about things. Once the world's idea of

00:01:54you gets into your head, it is poison. And I think that's true by the way, for, you know,

00:01:59people get profiled or have many, you know, moments. I think it's also just naturally true

00:02:05for everybody now who has social media profiles and has this kind of constant like front stage

00:02:10that they keep up. I always tell people who like come to me for advice in, in journalism or who are

00:02:16having some kind of pop in the press that you really have to be intentionable. You have to be

00:02:23intentional about maintaining as much of a backstage as you can. And when I see people who aren't having

00:02:29a pop, like destroying their backstage, I worry about them. The streamers worry me like in an

00:02:35almost paternalistic way. I watch the amount of their lives they're putting on online. They're

00:02:40putting in front of a camera, how little is left for them. And psychologically, I think it is going

00:02:46to do a lot of people, a lot of damage. Everyone feels uncomfortable watching that.

00:02:50You ever read Super Saiyan True Love Story by Gary Steingart?

00:02:53No. It's amazing, amazing book. It is as prophetic a book on this moment as anybody has ever done. It was

00:02:58probably done 10, 20, 10, 15 years ago. And everything in it, it's like, it's all about a world of streamers

00:03:07and sort of America coming apart and people having everything around them like rated in public and

00:03:14everybody in it is looks maxing. There's a whole thing about how books smell bad. Like it's sort of

00:03:19like de classe to have physical books. So at least we haven't done that yet. But you can really

00:03:23have these moments right now where you realize we have built the dystopia. We have done the

00:03:31thing the sci-fi writers warned us against doing just in all directions, all at once.

00:03:37And it's just hope it turns out. Well, this time.

00:03:39How do you think about protecting the backstage?

00:03:46Yeah. I keep a lot of time quiet. I don't go to very much.

00:03:55Did you read Lena Dunham's new book? It's great. Fame sick. And she talks a bunch about

00:04:01the way everything creates more of itself. Everything you do creates more of itself.

00:04:05And so if you get on different circuits, it just, it eats you. It eats the time. So for me,

00:04:11it's like the way I think about my work. Most weeks I bring out three things. I bring out two

00:04:16podcast episodes and one call. And the week is just very much organized around that. And I just

00:04:25more and more and more try to cut out like everything that is not directly feeding into one of those three

00:04:31pieces of work or is not my children, my family and deep friendships or like personal care and time.

00:04:40Right. And that's already a lot. Like, even as I say those five ish things to you, I feel tired.

00:04:46It's a pretty full life. Yeah.

00:04:46Yeah. And the fact that I guess one shortcut is to just make all of the other stuff part of the main

00:04:54thing to turn all of the private life into the public life. I think, uh, Mary Harrington talks

00:05:00about a digital hijab that she wears where she's covers up a lot of the parts of her that she doesn't

00:05:06want. Oh, that's a great, the world to see a digital. That's a great quantity.

00:05:10She was this, this thing. She told this story. She finished her first marathon or half marathon,

00:05:15something, some race, she's into running. And, uh, she took a selfie at the end. Cause that's what

00:05:20you do. Right. I'm proud of this thing. And she went to post it and she sort of saw this universe

00:05:26split, which was how much of this is for me and how much of this is for the internet. And yeah, I mean,

00:05:34it is very easy to be distracted from doing work. I'm curious how you handle this because you have

00:05:38a tougher job on this than I do. So my work, I can define it much more tightly. You know,

00:05:45it's primarily about politics, current affairs, geopolitics. I bring in some things I care about,

00:05:49like meditation and, but for the most part, it is not natural. I have to choose to let it colonize

00:05:58the things that are closer to my core, but yours, like the topics you touch on the show,

00:06:05they're very personal. So anything can become content for you.

00:06:08Mm-hmm. It's been a, a purposeful, I think I'm quite by disposition. I'm quite a private person.

00:06:15Like my personal life's always remained very private. And that's been something that a bunch of

00:06:20friends gave me advice on early on. And I'm really glad that I followed it. Once you open that door,

00:06:25I think it's very difficult to reverse it. People are interested in, oh, who are you dating now? And

00:06:29what does this mean? And who's he aligning himself with? As soon as you open that door,

00:06:35it continued, the snowball continues to roll. Mercifully for me, I think almost purposely trying

00:06:43to be as boring as possible with your personal life is a great prophylactic. Like people just get very,

00:06:49very, very, but they'll move on to what is more easily consumable. And for as long as destiny exists,

00:06:56I am not going to be top of the list. Like there was a period where destiny's private life was just

00:07:00made the most public thing over and over and over again. And Hassan will get in bother over and over

00:07:06and over and over again, or Nick Fuentes will come through or Huberman will come through. You know,

00:07:10there's a lot of people that would like easier access than me, who I think my biggest defense

00:07:16is purposefully making my private life very boring and not really talking about it all that much. And

00:07:21people just move on. And that for me is like, I'm completely fine by that as my strategy.

00:07:26The other thing that I think is important is not exposing yourself to the algorithms all that much.

00:07:31So I don't tweet. We've started putting clips up on Instagram and even doing a little bit more

00:07:38of that, I feel the pull of it, the want of it. So I'm a big fan of all these mid-century media

00:07:44theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and Walter Ong. And all of them basically, their main

00:07:50idea is that every medium changes the user. So we think what we're doing when we, you know,

00:07:59turn on the television or turn on X or turn on Instagram or read a book for that matter,

00:08:03is we are consuming content. We are choosing and we can make better or worse decisions, right? We can

00:08:09read better or worse people, watch better or worse shows. And their whole view is no,

00:08:14it is always using and changing you. There's a great Marshall McLuhan quote where he says,

00:08:19I'll butcher it a little bit from memory, but he says,

00:08:22"The content of a medium is the juicy steak thrown to distract the watchdog of the mind."

00:08:29And his point is that while you're sitting there getting mad at a tweet, what's actually happening is

00:08:37that your sense of how ideas should feel and look, how long they should be, while you're sitting there

00:08:46looking at Instagram, your sense of what everything should look like, it's all changing. And as it

00:08:52changes, you change with it. And you, and particularly with these algorithms that create, you know, constant

00:08:57rankings, another super sad true love story thing, it creates a constant feeling of, well, shouldn't

00:09:05I? Shouldn't I be competing here too? And what you can do and what I've seen a lot of people do is they

00:09:13get into local maximums, but long-term minimums or degradations where you're doing a lot to be as

00:09:23competitive on say Twitter or X as you can be. And you don't realize that in the long run,

00:09:29the, like the trade you're making on that influence is the way you think is degrading.

00:09:33And so the long-term work is going to be worse. And in the long run, you know, it's hard to maintain a,

00:09:40it's hard to maintain a career where you have to be interesting over an extended period of time.

00:09:44And I think people who are trying to do that need to be very, very, very intentional in the same way that,

00:09:49like an athlete needs to be very intentional about, you know, avoiding injury and burnout.

00:09:55Getting too captured by one, one black hole being sucked into one particular medium. There's this

00:10:02great story. I think it's Dostoevsky or Nietzsche and the first part of their career, they were writing

00:10:08by hand and the second part of their career, they started writing on typewriter and explain the

00:10:13difference between the first and the second. They say the sentences got shorter and punchier and their

00:10:20thoughts occurred in a different way. Their writing style changed because of the medium. And that's them just,

00:10:25being facilitated by a new output medium, not even absorbing things in a different manner.

00:10:32So when you've got it going both ways, this bi-directional thing, I'm going to be influenced

00:10:35by what I see on this particular platform. Yeah, it's going to be deranging.

00:10:38So one thing that I think about, and I've never quite been able to come up with a clean enough

00:10:44theory to start using it, but we can work it out here together, is I think we need a better politics

00:10:48of attention. And one of the ideas that influenced me, which came from an academic paper that I don't

00:10:54remember the authors to cite, but is to think about attention as a public good or collective resource.

00:11:00And attention then is subject to tragedy of the commons problems. So the tragedy of the commons

00:11:05problem is when, you know, everybody has access to a grazing field. And so it then becomes very

00:11:13quickly a problem where people will begin trying to graze as much of the field they can. And then

00:11:17everybody has to do more. And soon enough, you've exhausted this public good. And I think our attention is

00:11:21like that. And we only have so much of it and we have it as a collective, not just individuals.

00:11:27And we are being like attention fracked. And the more competition there is for our attention,

00:11:33the more aggressive everybody is about trying to get it. I don't know if you get on as many

00:11:36political emails and text message, you know, things as I do.

00:11:38- Zero. - God bless.

00:11:40- Yep. - But they have gotten so loud. They come with all these siren emojis now. And it's always like,

00:11:47it's Chuck Schumer and Ezra and I'm on, I'm on my knees begging it, right? Everything is like

00:11:52the end of the world. Everything is an emergency. You know, a lot of these places are like, I always joke

00:11:57that X is like gain of function research for takes. It's just everybody competing to take like a normal

00:12:05take until you can turn it into something that has viral contagion. And then occasionally they do

00:12:11it too well and it escapes contagion and destroys their life. Like that's how X works.

00:12:18But collectively the effect is our collective attention is irritable, is short, it's changing.

00:12:25The people we want are changing. To again, just stay on the medium thing for a minute. There's a great,

00:12:31it's not a controversy, it's a Neil Postman argument that he makes in Amusing Ourselves to Death,

00:12:35which is always one of my books I recommend to people. And he says that people often say to him,

00:12:41that how can you say television, because this guy's writing, you know, around television,

00:12:45is dreck, like look at Sesame Street. And he says, I don't worry about the dreck on television,

00:12:50I worry about Sesame Street. Because what Sesame Street is doing is teaching kids that education

00:12:57should actually be entertainment. He said the trash on television is no problem. Everybody knows it's trash.

00:13:02It's where you're subtly changing. Masquerading as something else.

00:13:04It's where you're changing your expectations for what everything else should be. So, I mean,

00:13:07right now we're moving into a period in politics where I think in order to be a successful

00:13:11politician, you have to be attentionally capable. You have to be able to earn attention in a way you

00:13:15didn't have to before. Zora Mamdani, Spencer Pratt, Graham Plattner, Donald Trump, right?

00:13:19You can do it from different James Tallarico. You can do it in better or worse ways. But what you

00:13:24can't be in a competitive race any longer is a somewhat boring talker who's just really good at

00:13:32delivering everything.

00:13:32I deliver on the policy. I understand the fundamental economics of this. I'm great with my constituents.

00:13:37Yeah, how's...

00:13:38You need more aura.

00:13:38How are things going for Keir Starmer?

00:13:40I mean, yeah, a man that is the equivalent of a ham sandwich. Did you see this tweet? It's at the

00:13:46very bottom. Did you see that tweet earlier on today? The very, very bottom, it's hiding down there.

00:13:50I did, yes. I saw both of those. Yeah. So I had to double check that at the

00:13:55Democrats is the Democrats' official proper...

00:13:59Democratic National Committee, yeah.

00:14:00Correct, yeah. And I'm like, is this a parody account? It's got to be. So the Democrats tweet,

00:14:07fired up, ready to go. It's time to take back Texas. Stephen Miller replies and says,

00:14:10the Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate.

00:14:15And at the Democrats reply, shut up, you ugly fuck. And that reached at least 50 million people. It's

00:14:22like 300,000 likes. I get it. The he did it first thing of pointing from one side to the other, but

00:14:33maybe this is just my sort of British properness coming through. The thought that a,

00:14:41the online representative account for one of the parties saying, shut up, you ugly fuck.

00:14:48Is that not absurd? Like that feels kind of deranged to me.

00:14:51It is deranged, but, but this is a little bit what I mean about the whole medium, right? Because

00:14:55one thing that does, one thing that every movement like this does, and I take Donald Trump honestly

00:14:59as a bit of a first mover here, is it is shifting people's sense of what political communication should

00:15:03sound like? I agree. So, I mean, that is the outcome, I would say, of a long process of learning that if you

00:15:13tweet like a normal, sober, stall it. Boring institution. Boring. Boring. Barack Obama is, I, I'm a big

00:15:22Barack Obama fan. That guy's Twitter account, not great. Not sexy enough. Not sexy enough. No. And, and so

00:15:27this is the way everything changes. Like it actually, it, it changes the expectations. It changes the people,

00:15:32and it changes what can succeed. And so, you know, sometimes maybe they, I mean, I guess you can ask

00:15:36the Democrats, at the Democrats, if they went too far or not, maybe they, maybe to them it's a huge

00:15:40success. But the, this is what I mean when you have to think about these mediums, you have to think

00:15:45about the attention, you have to think about the norms, you have to think about the discourse as a

00:15:48kind of public good. What that is doing, like that right there is a tragedy of the commons problem.

00:15:53It's very hard for at the Democrats to be noticed. There's a huge cacophony of voices. The voices that get

00:15:59noticed are extreme. So here's the thing. You noticed them. We are here talking about

00:16:04at the Democrats rejoinder to Stephen Miller. I can't remember the last time that I talked

00:16:08about at the Democrats. So they probably just succeeded, but, but it's a tragedy of the commons.

00:16:14Like Stephen Miller, by the way, a deputy chief of staff to the president is tweeting about James

00:16:20Tallarico, who, whatever else you want to say about Tallarico, an incredibly decent person,

00:16:24an incredibly decent man in politics who tries very hard to treat people on both sides with respect.

00:16:29Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, his reaction to Ken Paxton, by the way, it wasn't even like

00:16:35Tallarico won the primary last night. It was, or a couple of nights ago, it was Paxton was first

00:16:40transgender candidate. So again, the, you know, I don't want to sit here and just like tut tut and, and

00:16:47chin stroke, but it is a degradation of the entire system.

00:16:51It sounds so uncool. I can even feel my own sort of cringe-o-meter of being out of touch

00:16:56occurring as we're talking about it. Like, what do you mean? Both within a couple of years of each

00:17:02other, are you really going to be the footy-duddies finger-wagging at people, these kids on the

00:17:06internet having fun or whatever? I'm like, I don't know, man. It feels like extracting from a system

00:17:11that it shouldn't be. It feels like there's something that's going wrong with regards to

00:17:15that. I guess one of the other, one of the biggest talking points that we've had over the last couple

00:17:18of years was around what happened in the 2024 election, especially independent media sort of

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00:18:17MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Do you think if the left had had its own version of Joe Rogan

00:18:25that the last election would have really changed?

00:18:28The election was close enough in the battleground states that I think you end up in a situation where

00:18:38you can change any variable and imagine moving, I don't remember the exact number, but something like

00:18:43you would have needed, I think, 150,000 votes to switch. I mean, those votes would have had to have

00:18:46been correctly distributed, but it was in just a handful of states. So maybe not just Joe Rogan,

00:18:55like I always say that the way to think about this is not a liberal or illiberal Joe Rogan,

00:18:59it's candidates who are comfortable in the kinds of spaces that we mean when we talk about Rogan.

00:19:04Like the point is not getting like one guy who is more on your side. The point is, you know,

00:19:10Harris and Walls having been everywhere and having been capable of talking more effectively

00:19:14to a different kind of person. But let me pull back on something you said a second ago.

00:19:22I've been thinking a lot about virtue and politics. And virtue, I was going to say it's not a word we

00:19:28use that much, but I actually think, particularly like in your corners of the blogosphere,

00:19:33we were talking about blogs before we started of the podcastosphere, it is something we talk about.

00:19:39And I was just doing a show that'll come out shortly about a bunch of the kind of more

00:19:46masculinist philosophies on the right, people like Bronze Age Pervert and Rog Nationalist.

00:19:51And one of the things I was thinking about is how much those visions of masculinity have a

00:19:57primitivism to them, right? It's this desire to rediscover a

00:20:02stereotypical testosterone-soaked, much more competitive, dominance-oriented, aggressive,

00:20:07right? There's a view that modern man has been warped into and constrained into this soft,

00:20:16cooperative, like against their own instincts. Okay. The thing that I was noticing how when I

00:20:21actually read what these guys were writing, the thing that I was noticing was so absent was

00:20:28the idea of self-mastery and self-discipline as a fundamental dimension, not just of manhood or

00:20:34masculinity, but just of humanity. In fact, a lot of these places seem to take self-discipline and

00:20:41self-mastery, with the exception maybe of like a homosocial weightlifting component, as a negative,

00:20:47right? It was evidence of the way modernity had warped us into this attenuated shape

00:20:56that works for, you know, modern feminizable democracy, right? That's the argument.

00:21:02And so you see, I think this is particularly true around Trump, and you see it with Stephen Miller,

00:21:06this gleeful rejection of norms of behavior that once sort of reflected, I think, a kind of self-discipline,

00:21:17right? Politicians don't talk the way Donald Trump talks, right? They are disciplined.

00:21:21They know not to just unleash on the people they don't like in a way that is destructive, most of them.

00:21:26And it was this wiping away of that as a kind of show of that you would not be held back by the

00:21:35system as it existed. And so there's a message in what Miller is saying, and then now you see like

00:21:41the Democrats trying to ape it. But what I do think it's going to create, I think what it's already

00:21:46creating is going to be a swing back to a desire to see political virtue, to see social virtue demonstrated

00:21:55in leaders. Everything creates its opposite in politics always.

00:21:58Mm-hmm. Sort of statesman-like, a bit more decorum.

00:22:01Yeah. It'll have to be a version that works for today.

00:22:03It'll still need to be sexy. You've got to have aura.

00:22:05It can't be Keir Stormer. It can't be Keir Stormer. You need to have aura.

00:22:07Correct.

00:22:08But Tallarico, I mean, the reason Tallarico is dangerous to them, and I'm not saying he's going

00:22:11to win. Texas is a hard state for a Democrat to win in. But the reason Tallarico popped in the

00:22:16first place, the reason he ended up on Joe Rogan in the first place, is he is able to talk through a

00:22:21kind of progressive Christianity in a language of morality and virtue that people found exciting,

00:22:26and that you didn't really hear from Democrats anymore. And I think he was one of the first

00:22:30moments, and he's raised more, I think, than any Senate candidate in the country based on this.

00:22:33Mm-hmm.

00:22:34And I think he's one of the first moments where you really see where the pendulum is going to swing

00:22:37back to, because I think people are looking around and they're seeing what it looks like when we

00:22:43unleash ourselves in a way that conforms to algorithmic media. And I'm not saying everybody

00:22:49dislikes it. Some people feel real excited by it, but I think most people dislike it. Even people

00:22:54I know who are Trump supporters, they don't like the way this all feels.

00:22:57You like it in the way that you like having a McDonald's, that at the time it's kind of enticing,

00:23:02but afterward you feel a bit shitty. And if you have too many of them in a row,

00:23:05you actually start to reject the system a little bit. What's interesting is having this conversation

00:23:10with Arthur Brooks yesterday, and he was saying, the moment that you break any kind of addictive

00:23:14cycle, the first thing that you have to do, at least following evidence for a broad range of

00:23:19aggregated addictions, is you have to get mad. You have to be angry at the thing. Like,

00:23:24I'm sick of being at the mercy of this thing. I'm sick of being at the mercy of porn.

00:23:27I'm sick of being at the mercy of drugs. I'm sick of being at the mercy of alcohol,

00:23:30sick of being at the mercy of scrolling on my phone. Getting mad is a really effective

00:23:35first step. And I wonder at what point people just get bored. Like, cause this is evolutionary

00:23:41arms race of like bullshittery that keeps on happening online. Like now, if the Democrats tweet,

00:23:48shut up, you ugly fuck again, it gets a 10th as much attention. So we've already seen it.

00:23:53Yeah.

00:23:53So unless you're going to continue to play that game, okay, well, what's new? Well,

00:23:57what's new is the equivalent of a sundress and a cake, right? You know what I mean? Like,

00:24:03it's something that feels a little bit more kind of vestigial.

00:24:06I feel like there's been a move. And again, you don't see that tweet set we're using as our text

00:24:12here. A rich text, if spare. I already think there's a move towards something sunnier. I mean,

00:24:19if you had to use one word to describe the aesthetic of Momdani, it's sunny. You can say a lot of other

00:24:25things about him, right? And people disagree with him. And you know, you, everybody can have their

00:24:28arguments about what he believes. You never saw that guy without a smile. He didn't, I mean,

00:24:34if you ever just looked at the Momdani smile, it's like Trump had this scowl, even in his second

00:24:39presidential portrait, this is not me ragging on him. He has a portrait in which he's scowling.

00:24:44It's a very unusual portrait. It's just kind of like looking down. And Momdani, the smile,

00:24:50Anand Girardas had this great piece in his sub "Stack the Ink" about Momdani's smile as rhetoric.

00:24:57And Tallarico, Momdani, you start to see something new working.

00:25:03And of course, it will only work for so long and we'll see where it goes. It's not the only thing

00:25:07working. But that Stephen Miller, the Democrats exchange, it sucks, right? Like who, who wants

00:25:13to feel that way? And so that's a, it's a way in, not a way out. And I do think the winning move

00:25:21in politics in the next couple of years is going to be the way out, not the way in.

00:25:25And at best, it's a sort of gleeful dancing over somebody else done in the same way as two bullies

00:25:33fighting against each other kind of take a degree of satisfaction from having a pop. But it's not,

00:25:39yeah, it's not sunny. It's performing sunniness, right? I care less about what you think of me.

00:25:45Oh no, actually we care even less about what you think of us than you think that we do.

00:25:50Yeah. This arms race sucks. I guess I'm kind of interested. Do you think that you

00:25:57are at the center of a Democrat civil war at the moment?

00:26:00At the center of a civil war? I don't know. Do you think I am?

00:26:03It seems that way on the internet if you read the right pieces. There's certainly an orbiting,

00:26:09and I wonder whether it's because so few people are able to talk on many different sides. That might

00:26:15be it. I think the Democratic Party is having a big debate over what it should be. And I think that

00:26:23the book that Derek Thompson and I released last year, Abundance, which it was one of these things,

00:26:29I mean, I've released a book before. Things catch fire for their own reasons. And Abundance became,

00:26:37in a way that is so remarkable, one of the texts that became the thing people used to have an argument

00:26:47they wanted to have, which was not necessarily the argument we're actually having in the book. But

00:26:54Abundance sort of became at the center of this war between what I'd call the populist wing of the

00:26:58Democratic Party and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. And what was funny about that

00:27:02fight to me, so Abundance, the book we did, was about the way in which liberalism, Democrats of

00:27:09various stripes, left to center, have made it very hard to build where they govern. And so in places

00:27:15that tend to be blue, like New York or California, it's been hard to build homes, hard to build clean

00:27:20energy. Texas, where you live, they build just more homes and more clean energy than blue states do.

00:27:27Not because they're necessarily more pro-affordable housing and definitely not because they're more

00:27:30politically pro-clean energy or worried about climate change. They just have created a structure

00:27:35in which it is easier to build things. I've talked to climate tech entrepreneurs, not just doing sort of

00:27:40normal green energy, but doing things that are much more on the cusp, much bigger projects.

00:27:44And their politics are Californian, and they're just like, "I can get things done in Texas,

00:27:50in Arizona, and I can't get them done here." Right? And what was interesting about the fight that book

00:27:54kicked off then is the book was very much embraced by the people it was actually criticizing. So Gavin

00:27:59Newsom embraced that book, right? He talks all the time now about we need to be, Democrats need to be a

00:28:04party of abundance. He uses another term that I have called a liberalism that builds. And so did a lot

00:28:11of people from outside of the party. Obama's talked about the book, right? The part of the party that

00:28:16was actually in power that we were criticizing kind of grabbed onto it. And the part of the party that

00:28:20is insurgent sort of reacted against that. It's like, well, abundance kind of became for them the face

00:28:27of like the Obamaism, you know, the sort of the Obama set of the party keeping power, and they want sort of

00:28:33a more populous party. Here's the thing. I just think most of this fight is fake because, you know,

00:28:39Zoran Mamdani just this week released a big housing plan, and it's a housing plan all about making it

00:28:44easier to build and all about cutting through bureaucracy and red tape and making it faster and

00:28:50cheaper. And in Los Angeles, Nithya Rahman, Democratic Socialist, running against Karen Bass, who's the

00:28:57Democratic mayor, you know, is also running like, you know, taping things in, you know, overgrown

00:29:02fields that the L.A. city is like suing to stop from becoming affordable housing. You know, the New

00:29:08Democrats, the Congressional Caucus released a thing about how to build more clean energy and create

00:29:12clean energy abundance. So one of the hard things for me in like judging this debate is that there's an

00:29:17online discourse that, because of the nature of online discourse, becomes very, very factional,

00:29:23and it becomes very angry. And people who are—people sort of create a fight in it that they're used to.

00:29:34But to me, like the whole thing abundance is doing is cross-cutting divisions that exist not just inside

00:29:39the Democratic Party, but also between Democrats and Republicans to sort of create new syntheses on

00:29:47things. And so I just don't see the fights that people are scoring on Twitter there as being even the

00:29:54fights and the difficulties that our ideas really face. Because in practice, it's much more about how

00:29:59hard these things are to get done. And I also think that there's like a whole technology side of abundance

00:30:04that has proven a much, much harder climb because of AI than it was when we were writing that book.

00:30:10So I'm always happy to be a character in various people's discourse fights, but I tend to think

00:30:18that the particular one that has been, you know, present here has at this point been pretty belied

00:30:25by the reality of who is embracing these ideas.

00:30:27Well, you're one of the few liberals that's sort of openly critiquing liberal governance failures.

00:30:35Do you ever feel like you need to walk on eggshells a little because there is a degree

00:30:39of purity spiraling and othering on the left? The right seems to be prepared to welcome anybody

00:30:44with whatever history they've got with open arms.

00:30:46Well, unless you say, unless you say Joe Biden won the 2020 election and then Donald Trump will

00:30:51primary your like whole career into oblivion.

00:30:54That is kind of he who shall not be named for joining the right. That's the Voldemort of the right.

00:30:59That's correct.

00:30:59But I want to say something interesting about this because this, I think,

00:31:02reflects the difference in the two parties right now.

00:31:05What Donald Trump did very effectively is he collapsed

00:31:08purity on the Republican Party down to a single dimensional point, which is loyalty to him.

00:31:14So he's willing to accept a tremendous amount of views

00:31:19so long as you are loyal to and say nice things about him personally.

00:31:22It's a single ordinating principle.

00:31:24Exactly. The left, which does not have a leader in that respect.

00:31:29It's got a plurality of ways that you can get in trouble.

00:31:31Exactly.

00:31:32Whereas there's just a unity of ways that you can get in trouble on the right. That's so interesting.

00:31:36Yeah. So the right has, it's a little bit of like the fox and hedgehog thing.

00:31:39So the right has this one big thing you have to accept this one. And not just lie, right? The 2020

00:31:46election stuff is a lie. But the problem they're about to have, the problem they're having right now

00:31:51is that what it means to be loyal to Trump is a more complicated thing than it was in the 2024

00:31:58election because he's doing things right like the war in Iran. And so what it means to be loyal to him

00:32:03is not just you're pro-Trump, but you can believe whatever on vaccines. You can believe whatever on...

00:32:09Now you actually have to, as a member of the Republican Party, you know, sign on that you

00:32:13can't like break with him on the Epstein files, right? You know, like you see this happening.

00:32:17And so you've had like very MAGA people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey,

00:32:21you know, who 100% were on board with all kinds of election bullshit from Trump,

00:32:25but they got pushed out over other things now because they weren't loyal on the current policy.

00:32:30The single ordinating principle has fractured into...

00:32:32The Democratic Party, or maybe I'll call it like the broad left. It's not like it was four years ago,

00:32:39but what it has is an agenda and a set of different factions have like a platform and an orientation

00:32:49and a set of ideas you have to be loyal to, right? Do you believe in Medicare for all? Like,

00:32:52how do you feel about billionaires? Or how do you feel about wokeness if you're sort of more in the...

00:32:56Right? They're trying to create a programmatic test. And, you know,

00:33:05that has a problem in that it keeps more cohesive and coherent coalition if you're able to do it,

00:33:11but it makes it much harder to welcome people into it.

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00:34:13We're heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. What if we step outside of the more political

00:34:19dimension of this and we talk about the cultural left, the people that contribute to the discourse

00:34:24online? Because at least with that, people can be dissenting of Trump, but broadly still be seen as

00:34:32part of the right. I'm not convinced that the same amount of ballast is in the system for people that

00:34:40are on the left. Now, maybe this is declining. I think that you're right. It was significantly more pure

00:34:44five or six years ago. But I'm just interested as somebody who seems to be departing or at least

00:34:51criticizing in a manner that I wouldn't have heard five years ago, whether that ever plays into the

00:34:58back of your mind. I mean, I'm going to press post on this thing, but I know the subsequent nuclear

00:35:04fallout that's going to occur once I do. I like to think that I have tried to hold this approach to

00:35:11my politics and work for a long time. I mean, the thing that led to the moment I've had over the past

00:35:16couple of years was a sort of early and pretty aggressive argument that Biden should step down.

00:35:23And that was not a popular thing in the Democratic Party when I made it, and it caused problems. So

00:35:28I have a view that... And by the way, Abundance, which released last year, I mean, the columns and

00:35:34essays that led to that started in 2021. So I was writing all this at a different time. I think you

00:35:39have to be self-critical as a party in politics, both for two reasons. One is you're probably making

00:35:47mistakes. And two is that if you believe in getting things done and you're failing, you have to try to

00:35:51figure out why, whether that getting done is winning elections or that getting done is building homes,

00:35:56whatever it might be. But to take the broader thing you're saying, because I don't want to

00:36:04present that as too idiosyncratic. I think, one, this has all gotten easier,

00:36:11in part because I think the weird moment in the platforms has fractured. So here's another theory

00:36:15I have. Whoever dominates Twitter pays for it three to four years later. And in 2020,

00:36:24progressives dominated Twitter. And they convince themselves of a lot of kind of wild ideas. And

00:36:30those ideas came and bit them in the ass in 2024. And Kamala Harris got like really hung out on

00:36:39different ads that got run against her with things she had said years before. Even right now, James

00:36:46Tallarico, the attacks that Ken Paxton and Republicans are using against him have to do with things he said,

00:36:51like three or four years ago, right? Like God is non-binary, that kind of thing.

00:36:55So the thing is, then Elon Musk bought Twitter, made it X, sort of drove a lot of the left off of it,

00:37:03opened up the floodgates to the right on it. And now the right has ended up in a somewhat similar place,

00:37:09where they have gotten like attached to Nick Fuentes and like the more conspiratorial incarnation of Tucker

00:37:17Carlson and the sort of like Twitter Anon world. And people are talking themselves into much more wild and

00:37:24conspiratorial things. And this is going to hurt them, is my prediction, in, you know, two or three years,

00:37:30when like the bill on all this comes due. Which is all to say that I think you cannot separate the

00:37:35dynamics we are talking about from algorithmic social media. I think that is fundamentally what is

00:37:42shaping these fast rise and fast falls in coalitional purity, in the kind of extreme ideas taking hold,

00:37:52and in a sense where you get so consumed in talking to your own side, that you lose a sense of where

00:38:01other people really are. And I mean, that's the most dangerous thing in all of us. It's not having some

00:38:07of these ideas. I mean, I agree, by the way, with the many of the ideas people like now to write as

00:38:11wokeness. The problem is when you don't realize you have not done the political work to make those

00:38:20ideas legible to others, or to sort of win enough support that you can push other ideas out of the

00:38:27marketplace. Instead of doing politics, you're doing posting. And politics is a constant balancing

00:38:33of disagreement. Politics is an act of endless pluralism in a liberal democracy. And posting is

00:38:41not. Posting is for your side to, and getting a lot of energy to hate on the other side. And posting

00:38:48tends to habituate people to a very, very, very bad and very weak form of politics.

00:38:57So you're saying that people sort of believe their own hype for a while, that becomes its

00:39:00own kind of derangement. And then at some point in future-

00:39:03No, I'm saying that in the way we were talking about the algorithms earlier, people get into

00:39:07these one-up dynamics to sort of prove their purity. So Mamdani, right, here in New York,

00:39:15when he ran for mayor, he just had to straight up disown a bunch of things he had said on Twitter

00:39:21a couple of years ago, that the NYPD is anti-queer. And a lot of politicians on the left are just

00:39:29having to be in a, "Yeah, 2020 was a crazy time." Like I said some shit. And that came from being in

00:39:38an online milieu where people were getting pushed to see and say stuff that was ever more out of

00:39:46the mainstream as a way of proving that they got it.

00:39:48You're optimizing for the platform.

00:39:50And your corner of it.

00:39:52Correct. Yes. You're optimizing for this very specific echo chamber.

00:39:55You've got this arms race of attention, and also you're trying to do something which garners as

00:40:02much, as many eyeballs as possible. Eventually somebody, when that dust settles a little bit,

00:40:08gets to look at it with a clearer set of eyes and go, "What's this? What's this thing that you said

00:40:15not that long ago?" And sometimes it appears in an ad.

00:40:17Or you're now running statewide in Texas or citywide in New York. And all of a sudden it just, it wasn't

00:40:24for them. You were saying something to the person you had seen two seconds ago on social media,

00:40:33and now it's being blasted out in an ad running all across El Paso.

00:40:37Yeah.

00:40:37And it wasn't for the median voter in El Paso.

00:40:39The internet is forever. Do you consider yourself, given this interesting position,

00:40:47and especially with the book, where it's put you in terms of criticizing liberal governance,

00:40:52do you see yourself as further left or further right than previously? Or are you just in exactly the

00:40:57same spot?

00:40:58I don't think my politics are that different. I mean, I see myself as a liberal.

00:41:03And I've been a liberal for a long time. And like the American tradition, it means different things

00:41:06in Europe and other places. And I have fairly recognizable liberal goals. I want universal healthcare.

00:41:15I want more economic egalitarianism. I want people to have just the ability to live a flourishing life.

00:41:24But in the way that I think has traditionally been a big part of liberalism, and think about Obama,

00:41:28for instance, I believe very strongly that the work of making a fractious, complex, multi-ethnic democracy

00:41:40function is honorable, important work. And that requires not just policies, but certain political

00:41:49virtues and approaches to politics that keep conflict from spinning out of being constructive

00:42:00and allow it to spin into spaces that are really destructive.

00:42:02If you were to design an incentive to do the opposite of that, it would be social media.

00:42:07Yes. And so I... Yeah, I think I'm... In some ways, I'm probably further left than my temperament

00:42:17makes people think in terms of what I believe about things. But I also think that policy is not really

00:42:25the way people code other people's ideology.

00:42:31You know, what makes you more far left, right? Is it believing

00:42:34in the maximum level of universal healthcare you can get to?

00:42:38Or is it your view on climate change?

00:42:40Or is it your view on what level of political compromise is okay?

00:42:43A lot of the places where people get really angry at me is I am much more open to political compromise,

00:42:47and I'm very open to Democrats running very different candidates in very different places,

00:42:53including candidates who are much more conservative than me, because I believe disagreement is very real.

00:42:58And one mistake I think a lot of people make when looking at politics

00:43:02is they don't really credit how different people are from them.

00:43:08And so if you're in a political bubble in New York City or Austin or Los Angeles,

00:43:14what it takes for a Democrat like Joe Manchin to win statewide in West Virginia,

00:43:18I don't think it's conceivable. Like you don't know anybody like, like you don't know what it means

00:43:24to win working class voters in West Virginia. He does. He was like the Democratic MVP, right?

00:43:28I don't have Joe Manchin's politics. I find Joe Manchin incredibly irksome. And I also understand

00:43:34that his job is not my job. And so one of the things I worry about, because I worry about where

00:43:43this country's politics are going, and I am like very deeply opposed to Donald Trump and MAGA and like

00:43:48the way the politics are work, is I think it's really important Democrats win Iowa. I think it's

00:43:54really important they are competitive in places like Nebraska, which they used to be. You know,

00:43:59in 2010, Democrats held, I believe, both seats in West Virginia, right? In the Senate. Like,

00:44:04that's unimaginable now. And so the question of what kind of big tent would allow that,

00:44:12where you can have a Zoran Mamdani here, but you know, Rob Sand, who's this more moderate Democrat

00:44:16running statewide for governor in Iowa, who's great, he's running on getting rid of the two-party system,

00:44:21right? He's not running as a Democrat to appeal to liberals in Brooklyn, or leftists in Brooklyn for

00:44:28that matter. He starts every town hall with, he like has Republicans stood up. He says, I want

00:44:34everybody to clap for the Republicans in this room. The Democrats to stand up, everybody come from the

00:44:38independents. And then he has them all do the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the Star Spangled Banner

00:44:42together. And is that my politics exactly? Like, is that how I would run a rally? Probably not.

00:44:48Would I win statewide in Iowa? I sure can put it, man. But Rob Sand might win statewide

00:44:54in Iowa. And Rob Sand is a hero for that. And so you got to believe in things. But also,

00:45:01I do think the question, I mean, I think in the Trump era, I take more seriously than I used to,

00:45:07that building the stability of our politics was an incredible achievement. And many countries don't

00:45:19have that. And in many countries they had it and it was lost. And believing that in America we cannot

00:45:26break this thing is a mistake. And if you do believe we can break this thing, then you actually have to

00:45:32think about what kinds of politics bring it back. And that's why I'm not excited, even if it works

00:45:38intentionally, about seeing a doom loop of vice and venality. Because even if you can win that way,

00:45:47you are breaking the thing by doing it. And so the question of how do you win virtuously

00:45:52is very important to me. Because I think for all the other things I want to have,

00:45:57you actually need a working, peaceful politics to get there.

00:46:00Yeah. Who's your ideal Democratic Party candidate?

00:46:04For 2028?

00:46:05Yeah.

00:46:05They don't exist.

00:46:07I mean, I don't think there's a perfect Democrat for 2028. And to the extent,

00:46:12if there is, we don't know them yet because they've not been under those lights yet.

00:46:17I think I am a sort of unreconstructed admirer of Barack Obama. And if Obama were running today,

00:46:25he would have to run differently than he did then.

00:46:27More aura.

00:46:28He had a lot of aura then, man.

00:46:29Online aura.

00:46:30I think if he were running today, he'd have more online aura. That's the point, right? You can't

00:46:34transpose who he is post-presidentially to now, right? He is a human institution. He's like a

00:46:41monument in some ways. So he's not going to be who he was even when he was running in '08. But I think

00:46:48he did something that's really hard to do, which is one, he contained many of the country's

00:46:54contradictions inside himself and was able to make people even who disagreed with him quite

00:46:58deeply feel seen. And he was able to combine two forms of moral imagination that I think are hard

00:47:03to combine, which is one was a sort of moral imagination of policy of things like universal

00:47:07healthcare, which he basically achieved, right? It's like a lot of people have failed on that before

00:47:13him. Could we make healthcare system better? Always. But Obamacare is no small thing. And the second was a moral

00:47:20imagination on politics itself. In a country that had the kinds of racial divides and legacy we have

00:47:28and had. In a country that in the Bush years felt very divided. He made people feel politics could be

00:47:34different. And the tragedy of Obamaism is that it got worse. That he was able actually to pass quite a

00:47:41lot of the policy he promised, but he was not able to make politics and this country's divisions feel

00:47:47better. In fact, they felt worse. And the thing that I think no one has an answer to

00:47:53is how to resuscitate that side of his moral imagination in a way that does not feel naive

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00:49:02Yeah, it's an interesting one to look to what happens in 2028. You know, it was so fascinating

00:49:08to me being in the UK and starting to come online with realizing just how...

00:49:15how tumultuous America was politically and then observing that unfold and then starting to be a

00:49:21part of the conversation, I guess, because I started Modern Wisdom in 2018. And then to roll it forward

00:49:27and to think about what happens in just two years' time, just two years from now, kind of blows my mind.

00:49:35I don't know what people are looking for on either side in 2028 anymore.

00:49:40Do you follow... I don't know how deep you are in politics. I know you've had Bernie and people like

00:49:43that on the show. Do you look at the Democrats? Do you think that one?

00:49:48No. No. But I also don't look at the Conservatives and think that one either.

00:49:54I mean, my basic read of the field for what it's worth right now is that the ones doing the most

00:49:59interesting things are Gavin Newsom or AOC or Buttigieg. And then the big dark horse, I think,

00:50:08that people should not underestimate right now is John Ossoff, who is the senator from Georgia.

00:50:12He was in a re-election this year. But when I look at the Democrats, those are the four

00:50:20who I think have figured out attention in this era. And one of my views on politics is that attention is

00:50:28its own competency now. And that if you are not capable of earning it and wielding it and using

00:50:37it and breaking through on it yourself, then you actually cannot compete at the highest levels.

00:50:44Certainly not right now with the way that the ecosystem sits at the moment.

00:50:47And I don't think it'll be different in 2020. You've got to play the ball where it lies.

00:50:50So, and there's also something about one of the great, I think, character

00:50:54mistakes of the Democrats and center-left parties, actually, I think you see this with Keir Starmer

00:51:00in a bunch of places, is people who are too formed by institutions,

00:51:07they're afraid. And one way I often put this is I think right now one of the problems in American

00:51:14politics is Republicans are underformed by institutions and Democrats are overformed by them.

00:51:19So Republicans sort of in the Trump era, they're too contemptuous of institutions,

00:51:24too contemptuous of institutional authority, too contemptuous of the norms of institutions

00:51:28and how you act inside a company. Just rip it all up, doge it, chainsaw it, it's all

00:51:32bullshit anyway. And that's wrong. The problem for the Democrats can be that there can become a party of Tracy Flicks.

00:51:40And they are so framed and molded by, like from birth, having competed their way,

00:51:48you know, through every school, you know, through every competition, through every company, through

00:51:55their politics, in a party that is much more pro-institutions than Republicans are.

00:52:02And people who come through institutions like that, they often reflect those institutions. They begin to

00:52:07talk like them. You can hear the institution when they open their mouth. Keir Starmer speaks like

00:52:12he is the government, right? Like you feel like he's got like, he feels like a bureaucracy.

00:52:19Correct.

00:52:20And I'm not even saying that is a negative on him. At another time, that might have been more,

00:52:25you know, a doable thing. But

00:52:30I don't think that works in this media environment at all. Like you have to feel

00:52:36honest, authentic. You have to like... Like a real person, like an actual human.

00:52:40People can, people can sense that before they can sense anything else about you.

00:52:46And so when I see some of the Democrats who are running, but they still talk like someone who is

00:52:52optimized. And to be fair to them, this used to be a thing you optimize for, and it worked to win over

00:52:58like local editorial boards at small town newspapers. They were optimized to be somebody that the editors

00:53:04of newspapers thought seemed like a competent, decent person. And it might be, and it is, I think, a shame

00:53:12that that has become some kind of a liability, that you need to have

00:53:18some edge of wildness to you, but it is what it is.

00:53:21A new skill set as you rise up through the ranks.

00:53:23Yeah.

00:53:23Yeah. It's interesting. There's kind of a common thread here, which is that

00:53:27you almost get locked into a mode of thinking from a particular domain that you're in, whether it

00:53:33be a platform, from a particular niche that you're in, geographically, culturally, from a particular

00:53:39time that you were in, in your career, and what was useful then, and the inability to

00:53:45be prepared to update that. And also the potential hypocrisy of having updated that,

00:53:50that creates its own challenge too. So you're sort of fighting against it. I guess when we're

00:53:54talking about a more active left, like a building left, right? The word deregulation gets used

00:54:02by Elon Musk, and it also gets used by you.

00:54:04It does.

00:54:05And you clearly don't mean the same thing, but the same word, doing two jobs is a problem in politics,

00:54:11right? It sort of lets one team's project ride the slipstream of the other, and you end up in this

00:54:18sort of semantic game back and forth. How do you tell the difference between your kind of deregulation

00:54:24and Elon's in a simple way that you can explain around the dinner table?

00:54:29They have different goals. I mean, what is deregulation? You are removing rules.

00:54:35What is regulation? You're adding rules. Is adding rules or removing rules good or bad?

00:54:42Well, how the fuck would you answer that question?

00:54:43Depends on the rule. I consider Musk to be a tragedy. This is a guy who is clearly a genius,

00:55:00who is the most capable industrialist of our time, who built those industries on public-private

00:55:08partnerships. Tesla is built on government subsidies, on government tax credits. There is no electric

00:55:16vehicle market in this country without the huge amount of money we, and California by the way in

00:55:22particular, pumped into making that market real. Tesla would have gone under without an Obama-era loan

00:55:27guarantee. SpaceX. SpaceX's NASA contracts. And Musk at some point, and I mean, you can basically chart

00:55:37when it happened because he was sort of a Democrat in semi-good standing. He was like pro-Obama, right?

00:55:42He radicalizes. He's online way too much. He gets Twitter-brained.

00:55:47Twitter has been bad for no one the way it's been specifically bad for the way that guy thinks.

00:55:53And his information environment is so deeply toxic. And there's a world where he joined the Trump

00:56:02administration and tried to increase state capacity. And yes, that might mean chainsawing through some of

00:56:08what the government did, but with the goal of making it possible to do more in space, with the goal of

00:56:16making it possible to do more effective research into battery technology. And instead, he cuts completely

00:56:25indiscriminately. I have friends who got layoff notices that the email read, "Dear first name, last name,

00:56:38you have been terminated for cause." Which cause? Who was that email to?

00:56:45So, like, Musk's project, deregulation is a traditional Republican thing. He didn't make it up.

00:56:51But the point is that right now the government often imposes too many rules on itself. And that makes

00:56:59it hard for it to do things. So if you look at the Mamdani housing plan that came out this week,

00:57:03Block by Block is what it's called. What he is doing in that plan overall is he is removing rules. He is

00:57:10deregulating what is required when New York puts in money to build affordable housing.

00:57:19That in order to build affordable housing in most jurisdictions, certainly blue ones in this country,

00:57:25because you are using public money, it triggers a bunch of government rules that make it much more

00:57:29expensive because a lot of interests have come up and won their way into the fight. And so they've been

00:57:35able to force higher building standards and higher wage standards and higher environmental standards.

00:57:41And all these things might be good on their own. They really might be. But what you've done is make it

00:57:47twice as expensive or three times as expensive or four times as expensive to build affordable housing as

00:57:52to build market rate housing. And so the taxpayers getting a shitty deal and you're not building enough

00:57:56affordable housing. There was a story in Washington, D.C. a couple years ago about how they'd ended up

00:58:02building affordable housing units that were costing $1.2 million per unit. These are affordable housing

00:58:10units with, again, like public and nonprofit dollars. There was one particular build where I'm worried I'll

00:58:16get the numbers wrong from memory, but I think it was something like the same developer built affordable and

00:58:20market rate next to each other. And the affordable cost something like $800,000 per unit.

00:58:24And the market rate was like $400,000. And you just can't achieve... The goal is affordable housing.

00:58:32And so what I care about, the point of abundance, the first sentence of it basically, of the book,

00:58:39is what do we need more of and how do we get it? And so the thing that separates different people in this

00:58:47debate for me, the abundance debate, the debate about plenitude, is first you have to decide what do you

00:58:52want more of? I want a lot more green energy. Donald Trump does not. So the fact that he is deregulating

00:58:59what it means to build coal or oil in this country is not a big abundance win because he's trying to

00:59:05achieve something that I don't support. He's actually made it harder to build wind and solar. So you can

00:59:12regulate government to make it harder for government to act. You can deregulate it. You can use rules

00:59:16well and poorly. And when you get your politics wrapped up on the axle of having emotional reaction

00:59:26to the means, to the tools you're using, then you got a problem. The idea that deregulation is owned by

00:59:33the right or for that matter, that regulation is owned by the left. It's not true, but it's a way

00:59:38of shutting off your thought. The right regulates things all the time. The left deregulates things.

00:59:43Like, it's just a stupid way of thinking this proposal for abundance is a lot about rolling

00:59:50back red tape. But I know a lot of people are concerned about what that means for unchecked power

00:59:57of potential AI overlords. And if you've got a very small number of people who are controlling

01:00:03a massive amount of influence and a massive amount of the economy,

01:00:09how does the rolling back of red tape help with that solution?

01:00:12So, two things. So what I want to say, abundance is not about rolling back red tape.

01:00:17There are places, like building housing in dense blue cities, where you probably do need to roll

01:00:22back what people call red tape. But that is useful where that is the problem. On AI, I believe we need

01:00:32a lot more AI regulation. This is why I don't buy the sort of deregulation, pro-regulation dichotomy.

01:00:36There are places I want to regulate more, places I want to regulate less. I think the abundance

01:00:41question on AI is different. I have a lot of concern about the power concentrating on AI. I've covered

01:00:48these guys forever. I've had Demis and Sam Altman and Dario all on my show. I've been in this since

01:00:56GPT-2, I guess. And you do not want power concentrating with them. And at one point,

01:01:01and some of them will still say that, they don't want power concentrating with them. Although in

01:01:04practice, they don't always act like that now. Sam Altman, I think, in open AI seemed to be more

01:01:09pro-regulation a couple of years ago than in practice. Greg Brockman, its president,

01:01:14has helped fund the super PAC that is dumping money against candidates who want to regulate AI.

01:01:18And so it's like, on the one hand, they'll come to a hearing and say, we want to be regulated.

01:01:22Then somebody will run for office saying, we should do some light regulation. It's like,

01:01:25not you, not by you, we don't. So you have real money in politics problems. And I, by the way,

01:01:34just as a broad thing, this is not something we wrote about in abundance, but I just believe in much,

01:01:39much, much stronger money in politics regulations, you should amend the U.S. Constitution to say money

01:01:46is not speech. Money should not be as protected speech when spent on politics and make it possible

01:01:52to regulate it. There's an effort to do that through state houses happening right now. But I think the

01:01:57abundance question on AI is at two levels. One is, we think of AI models, right? People argue about,

01:02:05are they using Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude? But AI is, you know, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA always makes

01:02:12this point. It's like a five layer cake. And there's an energy level, there's a chips level,

01:02:17there's all this infrastructure you actually need. If we want the U.S. to be, continue to be kind

01:02:24of AI competitive or even AI dominant, you're going to need to get that infrastructure right. And in order

01:02:31to then not make that an energetic disaster, you're going to need to use the data center build out

01:02:36to create a modern grid and create much more of electrostate, not a petrostate, right? Like there's

01:02:41like a whole set of questions that are raised by the physical AI build up. But then the second thing

01:02:47I'm actually writing about this right now is we are having so many conversations about what we don't

01:02:51want from AI. What do we want from it? What is the public agenda for AI? What are the public goods?

01:03:00Because they're not just going to come on their own. Right now, if you talk to any corporation that is

01:03:06really tooling itself for AI, they are spending huge amounts of money on compute, just buying enough tokens.

01:03:12But they are often restructuring themselves as an organization in order to become legible and make

01:03:21their problems legible to the systems. So for AI to be able to solve a problem for you, you need a couple

01:03:27of things. One is there needs to be money behind the problem because if you need a lot of compute to do

01:03:33it, it is costly even now. The second thing is the problem needs to be legible to the system. So what I

01:03:38mean by that, for instance, is AlphaFold, which I think is the most impressive thing AI has done yet,

01:03:43which is the protein folding, solving the protein folding problem. The reason it was possible to do

01:03:48that was there was this thing called the Protein Database, which had been, it was arguably the cleanest

01:03:53scientific database in existence, certainly one of them, where people had been keeping really high

01:03:59quality data on every single protein that we had mapped its structure. And that meant there was one place

01:04:05where the data was structured in a way. We can set the machine learning loose on it and it could learn

01:04:11the data, begin to predict based on the data, and then also begin to create synthetic versions of that

01:04:16data to extend its predictions and then be able to test them backwards and so on and so forth. Okay.

01:04:22There are a lot of problems that might have that shape, but you will have to create the data

01:04:28that the machine learning can work on for them. And in government that's often not done. So here's a

01:04:36very simple use case I keep talking to people about. There's no reason that the IRS can't have,

01:04:43I mean, build it on Claude, build it on ChatGPD, build your own. They could have an LLM that does your taxes

01:04:50with you. The IRS knows how much money you make, so they have ground truth there. They know the tax code,

01:04:58they write it a lot of the time, or at least certainly help in the regulatory system to define it.

01:05:05There's no reason most people have to pay an accountant.

01:05:11More broadly, you could have an AI that act as a concierge to anything the government might be able

01:05:15to do for you because it knows you, it knows your situation, and knows what the government is capable

01:05:19of doing. It's very, very hard to navigate the government right now. But you have to make the

01:05:23underlying data and system legible so the AI can learn what it needs to learn. Drug discovery, energy,

01:05:31there's a lot of questions like this where, for instance, on drug discovery, I don't know how good

01:05:36AIs will be on drug discovery. I've talked to different people who disagree on it. But if you look

01:05:40at what AIs are good at, did you follow the solving of this Erdos theorem?

01:05:48Yes. Yes, I did.

01:05:49Okay. So I talked to some mathematicians about this. My dad's actually a mathematician. I haven't talked

01:05:53to him about it yet. I should. But this particular theorem, what it was able to do was sort of two

01:05:59things. What it was able to do was it knew kind of everything about mathematics. It was able to combine

01:06:05approaches from fields that were not primarily thought to be useful in this particular theorem. But there's one

01:06:10mathematician who was like, "Oh, I had thought about doing this, but it was super labor-intensive,

01:06:13so I just didn't bother." So it also was able to be tireless in doing that. It did not do,

01:06:19I think, what you would call truly new groundbreaking mathematics. It didn't invent a whole new field

01:06:25here. It did something very clever and very labor-intensive. And that is how a lot of advances happen.

01:06:31Synthesis plus hard work.

01:06:33Mm-hmm. So think about what's called orphan diseases. These are diseases. My wife actually has one of

01:06:40them that are quite rare. So there isn't a huge amount of money in solving them. And that means,

01:06:46unlike, say, something like diabetes, where there is just a functionally endless number of drug

01:06:51researchers working on diabetes drugs, and a huge amount of money behind it, and like the best people

01:06:55in the field. On these things, you don't have that. So that's a great place where being able to have a

01:07:03lot of compute, and then the federal government saying, if you invent this thing—this is basically

01:07:09what we did with Operation Warp Speed, right? We said, "If you invent this thing, we will buy it,

01:07:14and then we will hand it out at low cost." Right? That's how we made the COVID vaccines. You could do

01:07:19that across a huge number of diseases and say, "If you're able to solve any of these, here's what we will

01:07:24give you. It is worth it to us, the public, to have cures here, and we will make those cures cheap.

01:07:32And we will put work into making the regulatory system amenable to this." They also did that in

01:07:36Warp Speed. We will put in work to try to create better databases. We'll clean things up for you.

01:07:42But we will create a prize system, an advanced market commitment system. What do we want AI to solve?

01:07:47Because right now, the private market is putting a lot of money into that question. But the public

01:07:52sector is only thinking about what it wants to prevent AI from doing, which is important.

01:07:56I'm a big believer in AI harms. I've been talking about existential risk for years. But you also need

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01:08:55It's interesting. I had Nick Bostrom on the show and superintelligence more than 10 years ago now,

01:09:07in 2014, 15, something like that, when that came out, was kind of my introduction to "holy

01:09:11shit," like there are a lot of ways that this could go very, very wrong. The X risk of X risks. And then

01:09:18his new book was basically, "Okay, what happens if this goes right?" And even on the path to it going

01:09:22right, there were tons of different ways that it could go wrong. It is kind of mind-blowing to me

01:09:28that there is any time being spent on anything that isn't AI safety at the moment. I'm aware climate

01:09:35change, something that we need to keep an eye on. It's not going to happen within the next decade.

01:09:40Birth rate decline, something that I've talked a lot about on the show too. I think that's going

01:09:44to happen more quickly than climate change is, but still not on the timelines that we're talking about

01:09:48here. I'm like, did you see Tristan Harris's new thing, the AI doc?

01:09:54I haven't seen the doc, but I know Tristan.

01:09:55Ah, dude, it's really, really good. It's really, really interesting.

01:09:59I have come, as a person who was in that world for a long time,

01:10:02I've come to a probably slightly different view on the right way to approach it.

01:10:05Are you going to give me a white pill? I really need one.

01:10:08What would a white pill be? I never know the pills anymore. There are too many of them.

01:10:10Hope.

01:10:11Feel better?

01:10:11Hope. No, look, I...

01:10:12You cannot solve a problem whose shape you do not know. You can't. So it's very,

01:10:23it's good to talk about AI safety. We should be pumping money into, say, mechanistic interpretability.

01:10:28We have made big strides on interpretability. Shout out to Chris Ola at Anthropic,

01:10:32who's been a hero in this and is now hanging out with the Pope, I guess, so...

01:10:35Apparently, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:10:36Good thing to see good things happen to good people.

01:10:41We should be trying to understand these systems. But so much of the AI conversation,

01:10:47the mind is attracted to these speculative scenarios: mass automation where there are no more jobs,

01:10:55recursive superintelligence, self-improving superintelligence that slips out of our control

01:10:59like overnight.

01:11:00Yep.

01:11:00Here's the deal. If we create

01:11:03recursive superintelligence that slips out of our control overnight, which is sort of how like the

01:11:07AI 2027 scenario works, we better just hope for the best because I think we are

01:11:13kind of fucked in that scenario. I don't think it will happen like that or that quickly.

01:11:17I agree.

01:11:18But we want as good interpretability as we can possibly have. But here, but the other thing we want

01:11:24is to be in constant work on regulating the existing nature of these systems and at their frontier and

01:11:32testing the systems and working on them constantly. Because in the same way that the AI companies,

01:11:38the ones who are founded on the theory of safety, like OpenAI and Anthropic, were like,

01:11:43well, we can't make it safe unless we build it. You cannot figure out how to regulate it unless you

01:11:47regulate it, both for good and for bad. And so my view is that the political system needs to get in the

01:11:53game on the system that exists right now and not endlessly debate a speculative scenario that it is

01:12:01not going to be able to respond to until you're there. That is not how politics works. It's not how

01:12:06like anything we do works. So yes, like that does imply a certain amount of pessimism if we end up

01:12:12in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario. I don't think we're in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario.

01:12:19And just by the way, I have always thought and have always had this argument with my effective

01:12:23altruist friends and actually Dworkesh Patel, who's like a great AI podcaster,

01:12:27just sent out like a little sub stack making the same point.

01:12:33The capability to wield power is more than intelligence, a lot more. And so the world is

01:12:40full of friction. And the super intelligence scenario has always had this dynamic where it isn't just

01:12:46like the thing becomes recursive approving and super powerful and super, but it also never makes a

01:12:50mistake on its way to taking over a world that doesn't understand. And have you ever dealt with

01:12:59smart people? Like, is Donald Trump the smartest person in the world? No, he's got a like incredible

01:13:05animalistic instinct for power and other people's weakness. And he's made a ton of mistakes. And,

01:13:10you know, Dworkesh in his piece is like, maybe Stalin is a person we're talking about here,

01:13:14but Stalin also is not like the world's greatest genius. I think there's like a real mistake being

01:13:18made on how easy it is to translate intelligence and information into power. And I am just skeptical.

01:13:26Like, again, we can all come up with a sci-fi scenario, but I can't forever argue against the

01:13:32absolute worst thought experiment you get. Like then we're just in a world like, yeah, if all we're dealing

01:13:38with here is an endless effort for you to come up with thought experiments that the regulators can't

01:13:45match, you will outmatch the regulators very quickly. Which is why the regulators should be

01:13:48increasing their competency by actually dealing with AI in the present moment. You get better things by

01:13:53doing them. So you're saying that the most dangerous AI isn't the smartest one, it's the canniest one?

01:13:57I think that's true, but I'm saying that the AI safety debate has been caught in thinking about

01:14:05the future for too long and now we're in the present. And so the thing to do is to figure out

01:14:09how to take some of these fears, which I take as serious. I do not, I'm not somebody who's dismissive

01:14:13of them. I have a P-Doom sitting in the back of my head, but you have to take them and do something

01:14:19in the now, because now we're at the point where AI is here. For a long time, there was nothing really to

01:14:23do because AI was speculative, right? You could try to be running your experiments in these labs,

01:14:28but that's all you can do. Now the thing is here, we actually have quite powerful AI, so we're getting

01:14:31more powerful all the time. Congress, we need to probably build more capable institutions that

01:14:38actually have expertise on regulating it and are able to hire some of the best people because the

01:14:42market for AI researchers is more expensive than the current civil service rules we have for hiring

01:14:48really make possible to compete in. And you have to like be getting your hands dirty and trying to like

01:14:54make what we have work well, and also be like trying to create the goods that can give it a direction

01:14:59that is safer. Well, think about who was involved in the conversation from 2015 to 2020-ish?

01:15:06Philosophers. Yeah. A lot of philosophers. And if you watch the new AI doc, it's a maths grad,

01:15:12computer science programmer, futurist, technologist. It's moving more, but you're saying this goes even

01:15:18beyond that to people who are policy makers. Like we need to bring those sorts of people in to actually

01:15:24get involved in this too. So yeah, it's gone from being as hypothetical and theoretical as possible

01:15:30to now something where the rubbers really met the road. My view on this is not that I am dismissive

01:15:38of the possibility of future AI to slow battle or control, or frankly, even although I am more

01:15:43skeptical of this, the possibility of mass automation. What I am saying is that it is long past time

01:15:52to start working on the systems that we have now as regulators and stop debating a hypothetical. You do

01:16:00not have a way to stop the hypothetical. Like maybe, like, have you read Eliezer Yukowsky's book?

01:16:05Yes. I had him on the show. The argument, as did I. The argument is shut it all down.

01:16:10That's where it goes. And for better and maybe for much worse, maybe he's right. I mean,

01:16:15his view is 90% if we create super intelligence, we're fucked, but we're not going to shut it all down.

01:16:21And so the question is, given what we have and where we are, like start actually

01:16:30bringing the system and the systems under democratic control.

01:16:34What would you do? Let's say that you had God's eye coordination power.

01:16:37All right. I would have like probably three or four buckets. So one,

01:16:40I would put a lot more money into evaluation than we're currently putting in publicly. Actually,

01:16:44Trump and Musk gutted a bunch of that. But I would make our public evaluation capabilities

01:16:50incredibly strong. So that's one thing. They were trying to do that sort of in Biden.

01:16:55I would start doing a lot of regulating AI around kids because I think there's actually a fair amount

01:16:59of consensus on that. And so you could move on that. I think we should be quite careful about

01:17:04running this experiment on children. I think that the idea of kids growing up with a bunch of AI buddies

01:17:10and lovers, I don't think we know how it will warp people's sense of how relationships work when they

01:17:18have those before they have real relationships. I think I've heard you say that the kind of

01:17:22childhood that you had could have fallen prey to this kind of- Yes, I was a very lonely kid.

01:17:26I was bullied a lot. And I was also a smart, nerdy kid. And so what would it have meant

01:17:33if instead of having to sort of fight through that and find my best friends and figure it out,

01:17:38as I did work with the friction the world gave me, which made me who I am, I could have disappeared into

01:17:44frictionless digital relationships. Friends, tutors, lovers. I think that's actually quite scary.

01:17:52I was the same except for being a lot less smart and nerdy.

01:17:55I don't know. I think you're probably underwriting yourself. But so I would do a lot on kids. I would

01:18:02do a lot on actual goods, as I was just saying. I really want to see a public goods agenda for AI.

01:18:09And I think there are harms we can begin looking at now in the way AI is used and what it is given

01:18:16autonomy and power over on when human beings need to be in the loop.

01:18:19I think that there's a pretty good thinking on safety. You know, something that is in the AI 2027

01:18:26thing that I think is smart is AI should always have to keep a legible chain of reasoning notepad

01:18:33in English that the moment we start letting them come up with our own languages and we really have

01:18:38no capacity to see how they're reasoning. The black box has a black box.

01:18:41I don't want to make the black box too black boxy. And so you want to start working with what you have

01:18:47now. And, you know, I'm not saying I have like all the ideas in my head, but there's enough on the

01:18:53table that I think we could begin. And I also, by the way, I thought whether you want Anthropic doing

01:18:58it is like we can argue. I think having a fair number of restrictions on how AI can be used for

01:19:04surveillance for, um, kill chain questions is wise. And I particularly worry about surveillance. I am

01:19:13both in a, a kind of macro way against using AI to create the panopticon, but in a micro way,

01:19:19a lot of the machine learning tools being used to make the lives of workers measured and miserable

01:19:26right now are in. Why is that being used? You read a lot about this on, you know, with Amazon

01:19:33and delivery drivers, I've read things about, uh, like eye tracking software. There's all kinds of

01:19:37software being used in different places. I don't want to do it by memory because there's a minutes

01:19:41as I looked at the report, but to just track how productive workers are, it's like having somebody

01:19:46always watching you to make sure you're never slacking off. And what I would say is that turning,

01:19:51using machines to turn people into machines is inimical to human flourishing. And I do think we

01:19:58need to think harder in politics and AI is going to push this on what actually human flourishing means.

01:20:03What does it mean to be a human being in the, in the age of AI? What does it mean to learn

01:20:07like a human being? I mean, what is human dignity, right? The Pope is right about that.

01:20:10People are already feeling this like thought entropy thing kicking in. There's like lifting with an

01:20:18exoskeleton suit on that my capacity to actually be able to think properly is being degraded. And

01:20:23I know Pema Chudran, you're one of your favorite writers talks about sitting with uncertainty instead

01:20:29of running from it. AI is like, in a sense, the most powerful uncertainty killer ever built,

01:20:36right? You have instant answers straight away. You never need to wonder again, even, you know,

01:20:41I think about the, the before times of internet use, there was friction, even in your search,

01:20:48right? To go onto Google, to look for a thing, to go, oh, is that how reliable is that particular

01:20:55forum? How reliable is this particular poster? Have they got an agenda on the, oh, the, it's not got a

01:21:00security certificate on this particular website, or I'm going to have to scroll for a little while to

01:21:05find the specific type of answer that I'm looking for. And then I'm going to have to scan the document,

01:21:09as opposed to having the equivalent of sort of refined NASA, ready to eat dehydrated,

01:21:17reconstituted food that you can just squeeze from a toothpaste tube into your mouth.

01:21:21My like, the simplest thing I tell, I sometimes do college speaking, I'll get asked by kids, you know,

01:21:26what should I do? You know, AI. My answer is always read books and paper. You should have a practice

01:21:34of cultivating the form of attention, the form of sustained attention, without reaching to resolve

01:21:43every question that occurs in your mind that books create. People think of books, I think, as a

01:21:50technology of information, that they, you download information from a book into your head. But they're

01:21:56a technology of thinking. They are a scaffold for thinking. And what is happening when you read a book

01:22:01in paper and are not distracting yourself every two seconds is connections are being made in your mind.

01:22:07Like the value of a book is not just the information on it. It is what happens in your mind when you read

01:22:13it. And one of the things I feel very strongly about with my kids, one of the things that I worry about

01:22:19with integrating AI into schools is, you know, we talked about attention at the beginning here,

01:22:26we need as human beings to cultivate healthy forms of attention. And AI, one of its seductions,

01:22:32even for smart, agentic, as we now call them people, is the constant feeling and simulacra of

01:22:42productivity it gives you. Yep. So you're, you're reading something and you go and you look it up and you're,

01:22:46and it all feels very productive because you are this constant information, those back and forth.

01:22:52And, and I do, I use AI for research. I learn things from it. I'm not, I mean, I think you can hear

01:22:56in this conversation, I'm not, uh, like a pure hater, but if you are not spending time thinking and

01:23:04reading away from screens, you're just, you are allowing something to atrophy that you will not get back.

01:23:10And what I worry about with a lot of smart people I know is that AI makes you feel superhuman and

01:23:14it's making you less than human. And I've watched a lot of people who seem to use AI a lot more and

01:23:18their work is not getting better. It's getting worse. Uh, I, I hear about people of all these agents

01:23:23running on their behalf now and they come in in the morning and it's prepared this huge summary of

01:23:28everything. And it's like, what about reading a physical newspaper instead of now absorbing tons of

01:23:36book reports from your AIs, right? Like where is your space? Where is your mind? The, the ghost of

01:23:46productivity, the illusion of productivity is something that you have to fight so hard. I think

01:23:52in this era, because I mean, even prior to AI, it sure feels like you're doing something productive to

01:23:58sit there on your laptop, on your iPad. And even when your brain has stopped really working, you're flicking

01:24:04back and forth to the news, to your email, you're seeing things on social media that sort of poses

01:24:09information, but it's all distraction wearing productivity's clothing. Yes. And you have to be

01:24:16really vigilant against it because deeper productivity often doesn't look or even feel like productivity.

01:24:22It's taking a walk and having an idea. Correct. It's like the second hour reading an actually pleasurable

01:24:28good book in a coffee shop, right? Like these things are deeply human experiences that the reason books

01:24:33worked and the reason we festoon rooms in them when we want the rooms to look smart,

01:24:40which is what we're doing in here. There's a reason we associate them with intelligence because

01:24:45they're not about what's in the book. They're about the way that people who read books are trained to

01:24:50think and attend. And like that will ultimately make you much better at using AI.

01:24:54Desperately compensating with all of the books behind. No, I noticed with myself that one of the

01:25:02best questions that I asked myself on an annual review a couple of years ago was,

01:25:07what do I think is productive that isn't? And what do I not think is productive but is? And going for a

01:25:14walk without AirPods in. What did you come up with on your second list there? I want to hear it.

01:25:18Um, driving without consuming anything. So no music, no podcasts, no nothing else. The same with going

01:25:25for a walk, uh, at dinner with friends, massively productive, hugely productive. Come home and I've

01:25:31got five new ideas or I feel a little bit more peaceful or I've just got to listen to someone else

01:25:36entertain me or got a new perspective on something or I've not thought about my shit. Even simply the,

01:25:42the space that you create, the void that you create between thinking about your shit and thinking about

01:25:47your shit by hearing somebody else extemporaneously think about their shit to you. You're like,

01:25:52oh, brilliant. I thought about someone else's shit for a bit. Um, that stuff that isn't productive,

01:25:57but I thought was sitting in my desk when I'm not working. I've just got the laptop open. I'm like,

01:26:02oh, maybe I'll pick up some productivity pennies here. Uh, slack almost ever. Um, being on calls,

01:26:12when I don't need to like just, just checking in calls her, they have all of the trappings of

01:26:18something that looks like progress and productivity. But when you think about what's actually happened

01:26:22at the end of it, it's almost never anything productive, uh, lying in a hammock, lying in a hammock,

01:26:29unusually productive. Uh, so what comes to my view?

01:26:35A bunch of those I'd agree with, um, travel. Huge. Uh, and, and I was like, want to be careful

01:26:41about the language of productivity here because the point is not to like,

01:26:44do it in service. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The, for me, the absolute best thing I can do for my productivity

01:26:52is go to a coffee shop or some beautiful space. The, the, um, aesthetic richness of the space is

01:26:59meaningful for me and read paper books for a long enough time to get into a state where my mind has

01:27:09settled on that being what it's doing. So that's very, very, very big. That is, I think the most

01:27:14important thing I do for my work walking. I don't listen to or read things for the most part on the

01:27:20subway anymore. I just sit there like a psychopath, like a psychopath. Um, I, it is amazing how much

01:27:26it's like sitting there, staring forward. You feel weird now on the subway. Do you know the Rory

01:27:31Sutherland line about this to do with smoking? He says, um, sometimes you just want to stand in the

01:27:38corner of a room and stare out of the window. The problem is if you do this without a cigarette,

01:27:43you look like a friendless idiot, but if you do it with a cigarette, you look like a

01:27:47fucking philosopher. Yeah. Yeah. So aesthetics count for a lot. Yeah, they do. So

01:27:55really just taking breaks in general. Yeah. I mean that like, I think actually the thing,

01:27:59if you want to just boil down a lot of what we just said aside from reading, it's that just staring at a

01:28:06screen endlessly is bad for you. It's good for you when you're doing it intentionally and for long enough.

01:28:13But I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I've solved a problem on a column

01:28:19that I had been banging away at the keyboard on for hours or days by just leaving. You can't white

01:28:25knuckle creativity. Yeah. You don't get to white knuckle it. And so there's, so there's a lot of that.

01:28:29I mean, the gym is obvious, you know, you get a lot of ideas or showers. I mean, this shit is all,

01:28:34it's all there. But I think to, to draw it out of the creativity space that, or the productivity

01:28:40space, the thing that is being said here is you need to make space for yourself to be a human being

01:28:45and do human being things. And AI is going to be better at being a machine than we're going to be

01:28:50at being machines. And so trying to make yourself into a better machine, like everybody thinks you're

01:28:55using the AI as a prosthetic. But again, the lesson of McLuhan and Postman and others is

01:29:01eventually the AI is going to be using you as a prosthetic or certainly to make, maybe be more

01:29:06specific, the organization that pays for both you and the AI is going to be making you a prosthetic of

01:29:14the AI in the same way that Amazon has made people into prosthetics of the boxes they pick up and the

01:29:22delivery vans they drive. And it, trying to be as little like a machine as possible

01:29:31or at least create big spaces where you're not acting as a machine is, I think it'd be really

01:29:34important. If I had to make a bet on how I would educate my kids and I had to, you told me you can

01:29:40put them in a school that is going to be at the cutting edge of using AI, or you can put them in

01:29:45a school that is like St. John's university or something. And it's like going to be all paper and

01:29:51pens. I would go the, I would go that one because there will be AI, it will be out there. What I need

01:29:56to develop in them is the ability to be a human being. And one of the dangers, whenever we get really

01:30:02excited about a new technology is we over adopt it in a thoughtless way. And then the technology

01:30:10colonizes our minds and then we can't realize how much we have lost attentionally in terms of our own

01:30:17independence, in terms of our own depth. So just like all the things we're talking about.

01:30:23I would take breaks, take a walk. It's the sort of shit that your mum would happily give you an answer

01:30:31for. And she's happily got the answer for it. What's that line? I think it might be a Nietzsche one where

01:30:36it's like, I beg you, my friend, sleep well and go for more walks. It's just always a solution.

01:30:42Oh my god, really advice Nietzsche should have taken.

01:30:45Yes, agreed. You mentioned earlier on about this challenge, this positioning that we've got at the

01:30:52moment around encouraging people, both sides encouraging people to better themselves,

01:30:58perhaps a little bit of an aversion of this self-determination, personal development,

01:31:04at least traditionally coming from the left, but maybe also coming from the right now. I think the

01:31:08left talks a lot about structural barriers for women. Do you think it's got an equally serious

01:31:14account of what's going wrong for men at the moment? I don't. I think it knows it doesn't. And it's

01:31:18beginning to try to think about what to do about that. People like Gavin Newsom are taking that a lot

01:31:22more seriously. I want to get at the thing you said underneath that, because I think it's important,

01:31:25though. I think a very damaging thing that happened on the left, I'll call it liberalism to be

01:31:33more in my own stream here, is that it began to see individualistic explanations as excuses for

01:31:40structural dysfunction. And so it became hostile to any politics or moral structure that was also

01:31:51about self-improvement. And one, that's a betrayal of the long history of liberalism, which has always

01:31:56been about self-cultivation, like go read your Kant or your John Mills, or for that matter, your

01:32:03great liberal politicians like Frederick Douglass or MLK or FDR, Lincoln. But

01:32:14when you give up on that, you're giving up on one of the fundamental drives. So you want a society

01:32:19that is taking seriously all the ways in which structures oppress and coerce and impede people's

01:32:27flourishing. And also what you're trying to create space for is for them to use their agency and their

01:32:35energy and their will to flourish. And so you need both sides of that. You need the vision of the just

01:32:40society and you need the vision of the flourishing self-cultivating person. And I do think the left

01:32:48became hostile to this and particularly became hostile to it when it was male-coded. So when it was coded in the

01:32:55way that self-help is for women, more therapeutically, more relationally, it was much easier. Esther

01:33:03Perel, Brene Brown, other people like that, who have more of a vision in that, that went down easily.

01:33:09But in the male space where it's a little more testosterone-y when it got associated with the Joe

01:33:16Rogans and modern wisdoms and some of that, I shouldn't say that, but the Jordan Peterson's is

01:33:20maybe the better way to put it. I think there was like a pushback because also some of those people

01:33:25did have very aggressive right-wing politics. And so these things got like linked together in their minds.

01:33:31And instead of saying, okay, how can we take

01:33:35the impulse in here that is clearly making Jordan Peterson into some kind of international phenom

01:33:42and also try to answer it and have something constructive to say about it?

01:33:46There was sort of a rejection of it.

01:33:47Discarded entirely because it's rejecting the structural inequalities that people are facing

01:33:52by saying that there are things that you can do and to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

01:33:56What is surprising to me, and I'd be very curious for what you think happened here,

01:34:00because you know this world a lot better than I do. Not the right politically, but somewhere this went.

01:34:05I don't really, the way that Peterson and maybe Doug Murray and people like that, it seemed to,

01:34:13like what came after that was Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes and people who have, I think,

01:34:20no real concept of virtue, right? I got my disagreements with Jordan Peterson on lots of

01:34:24things, but that guy thought a lot about virtue, thought about myth, thought about, you know.

01:34:27Overt thought about it.

01:34:29Overt thought about it. Somehow the right, like Bronze Age Pervert, it pushed towards vice.

01:34:39So the left gave up on virtue and the right rejected it.

01:34:45Now, I shouldn't say the left and the right because lots of people in both, just like normal-ass people,

01:34:50raising kids and loving their partners and doing their job and volunteering in their community and going

01:34:54to church. But maybe it's like an algorithmic dimension of things.

01:34:58The quiet middle three quintiles.

01:35:00Yes. But at like the apex of the attention economy, like I do feel, I watched this happen,

01:35:09like you're not going to convince me it didn't, like the left became quite hostile to sort of ideas of

01:35:13individual cultivation. Like, oh, that's just like you using your privilege. And the right became,

01:35:18the right moved in a way where it became like vice-maxing, to use a term that-

01:35:23You kind of caricatured it to a degree that the most extreme version of this, I mean, certainly,

01:35:31I think if Jordan hadn't had his time away, if he hadn't done the God pivot in the same way,

01:35:37if he'd continued to do the clean your room, get your bootstraps and pick yourself up by them,

01:35:44I do think that that would have probably curtailed a lot of the vacuum that other voices got sucked

01:35:50into. Now, who knows how that would have actually played out, but I definitely get the sense that,

01:35:56wow, there is this big cohort of largely men, largely young men who have increasingly grown

01:36:03up in fatherless homes, which is a problem that the left should be very concerned about, right?

01:36:09They're looking for a patriarch figure. They're looking for someone to tell them how, like,

01:36:13how do I become a, it's the equivalent of dad, how do I shave? Or I fancy this girl in school,

01:36:18how do I talk to her? It's the equivalent for that, but life-wide. And if you open up that market,

01:36:25but then remove yourself from it, it's just going to suck in anybody that can service it, but perhaps

01:36:32not quite at the level that that first mover had been able to do. And I think that that was,

01:36:37that was definitely a big part of it. It's been kind of fascinating to see this conversation unfold

01:36:43because everybody is talking out of both sides of their mouth, which for instance, one of the big

01:36:48criticisms that I can certainly have of most of the pro-male advocates and most of the people that

01:36:54are on the right are men's mental health isn't taken seriously until it affects women or other people.

01:37:03Lip service is paid to that, but no one really cares. And there aren't very many therapeutic

01:37:08models that sort of speak to men in the way that they want to be spoken to with regards to

01:37:12understanding their desire for progress and conquer and mastery, and also providing them with solutions

01:37:17that they can move forward on, as opposed to just, "Hey, come in here, talk about your feelings. Your issue

01:37:21is that you're a defective woman," as opposed to a man who needs assistance moving forward linearly.

01:37:27But also that same group of people that say that that's a big deal and claim to be advocates for men

01:37:35will happily mock a guy who opens up about his emotions on the internet. If you see a video of

01:37:40a guy who's crying or is really struggling or is down on his luck, there is not this sort of camaraderie

01:37:46that you're claiming that is supposed to be there. It's just a huge hypocrisy. Men are good. Tom

01:37:53Golden's got a sub stack. And he identifies this. It's like, guys won't help other guys that are

01:37:59struggling emotionally in that sort of a way, whilst saying that men's mental health needs to be taken

01:38:03more seriously. It's the equivalent of not putting your money where your mouth is with regards to this.

01:38:08But on the left, the kind of complete denial of self-agency, of sovereignty, of modern men being

01:38:18made to pay for the sins that their grandfathers benefited from, a patriarchy that they no longer

01:38:24feel a part of, as Christine Ember says. And you go, okay, well, on both of those sides,

01:38:32it doesn't feel like much progress is being, at least much productive progress is being made.

01:38:35And then if you do begin to try and have this conversation, I'm aware, like looking the way

01:38:40that I do, maybe it's the British accent, maybe it's the whatever, like as soon as you start talking

01:38:44about the problems of men and boys, unless you have this painful throat clearing land acknowledgement

01:38:52before you fucking do it, every single time, the same boring accusations get thrown at you.

01:38:58You don't care about women, that this is misogyny rebranded, that this is the thin end of the

01:39:02wedge, that it's a gateway drug to something that's much more pernicious down the line,

01:39:06that talking about birth rates or coupling, or it's you trying to pull women out of the

01:39:12boardroom and put them back into the kitchen. And it's boring and fatiguing when you're trying

01:39:18to make genuine progress. And you say, okay, well, at what point can we have this conversation

01:39:22without having to prostrate ourselves for all of these issues that have come before?

01:39:25Let me ask you something though, because I think you're right about the world of a couple

01:39:30of years ago. But I go on podcasts like this one, sometimes I was just on with Dax and Armchair

01:39:36Expert and have done others. Who are we shadow boxing with here? Because is this still true?

01:39:46I actually do think there's a period where you would get a lot of, I mean, a lot maybe is even a strong

01:39:52word, but in both directions, there was like pretty toxic and weird social media dynamics. It got very,

01:40:03very gendered. And we're very identitarian. And now I think there's a lot of hangover of that,

01:40:14but it, and I'm not saying you can't find it somewhere on the internet, you can find anything

01:40:19somewhere on the internet. But is it really still there in that way? Like I see, for instance,

01:40:24Gavin Newsom on the left is trying to engage his conversation, you know, fairly successfully,

01:40:30I think. And in who he's having on his podcast, which has been, I think, a very interesting project.

01:40:35And, you know, I see Ryan Holiday, right, who I know has been on the show and I think Obama made a

01:40:39pivot not long ago. I mean, his post, I mean, Obama was always, this is a thing, right?

01:40:43This was a very, this, this thing we're talking about is a very punctuated moment because Obama

01:40:48had a very aggressive politics of self-cultivation, right? A very big, there's a society and there's

01:40:54the individual and you have to act in a certain way. You have to be a certain thing for your family.

01:40:59And his post presidential project was about young men, right? That was like a big thing he did.

01:41:06And it's like, there was this period online where things got really fractious between the genders

01:41:12and other things. And I think everybody is having some trouble knowing if they can declare it over.

01:41:19- Yeah, I understand what you mean. - So do you still experience it is, I guess,

01:41:24the question I was going to ask you. - Absolutely.

01:41:26- From where? Like who? - If I was to put out any kind of a reel online that talks

01:41:30about sex differences, still the blank slate-ism will come in. There was one that came out yesterday.

01:41:35There was one that came out yesterday that said the differential in terms of housework around the

01:41:42house between men and women, a really interesting study. If you look at the amount of housework

01:41:47time that is spent by single men and single women living on their own, women do 200% the amount of

01:41:53housework. Their standards for a home tend to be more clean than men's do. And I mean,

01:41:57this has been shown up in The Simpsons and Family Guy and all of the kind of cliches for a long time.

01:42:03But a ton of the comments are to do with, well, the only reason for that is because women are

01:42:07socialized into thinking that they have to have higher levels of presentability and that it's

01:42:12judgmental and social conditioning that's caused this thing to happen. I don't think that that's

01:42:17the case. I think that you can make a pretty easy evolutionary psychology explanation to understand

01:42:23why that would not be the case. If you'd talk ever about anything that's to do with

01:42:30male self-improvement and the challenges that they're facing with regards to that. I mean,

01:42:35a good example of this was there was a study that said men need two guys' nights out per week

01:42:41in order to maintain optimal mental health. It's a pretty big study. It was pretty well researched.

01:42:47Every single comment was, uh, boo-hoo, poor patriarchy. Um, uh, tell me that you're a man

01:42:54child without telling me that you're a man child. I think when you see what Sabrina Carpenter at the

01:42:59moment, the lyrics, the, uh, the broad culture that's happening is not unifying and it's not unifying

01:43:09from both sides. I would agree. It's not unifying, but I think this is the thing I'm trying to get

01:43:14at here a little bit because I'm not disagreeing that, that either these comments are real or some

01:43:18of these dynamics are real. I'm, I think one of the things that is, we have to get over in the culture

01:43:28is one expecting anything to be unifying, but treating the comment section, like the actual

01:43:36reaction. What would be a more real reaction? I think the other people in the conversation,

01:43:43I mean, cause my, my perception of this, right, which I track more what the people in politics are

01:43:48saying and what the other journalists are saying is that this conversation about men doing poorly

01:43:54is everywhere. I mean, Richard Reeves book was a big deal and it's completely at the set,

01:43:59like the democratic party, like it had this like sort of ridiculous thing was going to spend tens

01:44:05of millions of dollars on its like problems on, uh, on men. But, but the idea that you can just say

01:44:10like toxic masculinity be done with it. I'm not saying you won't find that in a comment section. I'm just

01:44:15saying that it actually doesn't feel to me like where the zeitgeist is, but I think there's a lot

01:44:21of shadow boxing with it. So, I mean, I, again, like I'm a well-known liberal commentator out here

01:44:28talking about how much we need a liberal politics of virtue and broadly getting a good reaction to that,

01:44:33not never getting shit for it, but I don't know. I don't expect to never get shit.

01:44:37It's interesting. I wonder whether, uh, the accelerator was pressed and we're still sort of

01:44:40coasting close to maximum speed, but it's not actually being increased. That might be,

01:44:44that might be a way to look at it. At least in my perspective, you're right that talking about the

01:44:49problems of men and boys, talking about the problems of men and boys, is not seen with the

01:44:55same dismissiveness that it would have been two years ago. Talking about the solutions for the

01:44:59problems of men and boys, which is really what matters, like identifying the problem is only

01:45:04interesting insofar or useful insofar as it allows you to find a solution. That to me still gets the

01:45:11hackles up of a lot of people on the internet and whether comments are tastemakers, how top-down

01:45:18versus bottom-up is this? Like, I, it's kind of hard. What are you aggregating it from?

01:45:23Well, that's what I mean that I think is very hard. I think we have very distorted views of the public,

01:45:29and this has been one of the ways we've been deranged by algorithmic media. And I think a couple of

01:45:34years back, people reflected that. They thought it was real. And so the tastemakers and the elites

01:45:43began to sort of like fall in line to it a little bit. And I think that has stopped to a large degree,

01:45:48and I think people have sort of reasserted independence from it. But obviously, like, the

01:45:56buzz is still there. But not mistaking the buzz as like the thing. So like, look, I don't know what

01:46:01the solutions are that you're describing. I'm sure there are like, some I might agree with, some I

01:46:04might not. I don't feel, I will say that even compared to what I thought was true a couple years

01:46:10ago, I don't feel this particular conversation to be electric fenced. Right? Like, I believe there are

01:46:16differences between men and women. Like, something I've said on different shows is that one reason I

01:46:21think that some of the vision of masculinity I'm seeing and like the, you know, take the shackles

01:46:28off of men right seems wrong to me is that you have to, I think, start any vision of masculinity

01:46:32with the reality that men are stronger and through testosterone more aggressive. And so self-mastery has

01:46:39always been an important part of visions of masculinity. Like, self-mastery and the constructive

01:46:45channeling of those impulses is like foundational to any healthy masculinity. And mostly, I think

01:46:51people understand what I'm talking about when I say that. Like, I have boys, I think about this a lot.

01:46:57The capacity for restraint is increasingly important.

01:46:59Yeah, you're not going to convince me that I don't have to channel their

01:47:02aggressive impulses in healthy ways. And I just think in politics, I mean, you know, again,

01:47:08I think Newsome is interesting because he's somebody who, and you should have him on the show,

01:47:11it'd be a very interesting conversation. But he's somebody who I think is very,

01:47:16he has a very sensitive touch for the politics of a moment.

01:47:21And I mean, you look at his book, like Young Man in a Hurry, the one he just released,

01:47:24which is unusually interesting for a politician's book, which is not a high bar, obviously.

01:47:29They should put that on the front cover.

01:47:30But it is very much about this question of like, I mean, you could really understand that book is a

01:47:37confrontation with a certain kind of maleness. And he's very explicit about that in a way I find

01:47:42interesting. So, so to me, my sense is like the, the water has changed here. I will say, I think the

01:47:46other thing though, is that I have often thought like the division of the problems into male problems and

01:47:52problems and female problems. I agree that there are different questions for men and women. I also think that there's a broader set of questions that

01:47:59are part of the AI thing and are a little bit more unifying about, we actually need to find ways for

01:48:05human beings just like continue to be human beings and become more so. I, like I, this is one of my

01:48:10obsessions and it's not to change the subject, we can talk, keep talking about men, but I think there are

01:48:17more things that everybody is going to need and ways in which we have turned modernity as a, try to keep people

01:48:26useful in the ways the economy needed them to be useful. They're going to need to be rethought in

01:48:30more fundamental fashions, starting with education. And that actually has some specific male

01:48:37questions around it. I think Richard Reeves is right when he says that modern education is not well built

01:48:42for boys, but in a funny way, like the competition, like we've been so used to framing this as a competition

01:48:49between men and women that the possibility of framing at least some things correctly as competition between

01:48:55humans and machines opens up some avenues and pathways, I think, to talk about things that are

01:49:00more innate to humans of both sexes and also separately innate in both sexes that maybe would have been

01:49:06harder to do five years ago. It's certainly going to be easier to unify if you have a common enemy,

01:49:12because that happened previously. It was just between each other as opposed to together against

01:49:15something else. Yeah. Yeah. I look, it's, it's interesting. It definitely feels to me like I hope

01:49:22that it's not just lip service that's being paid to something because evidently in 2024, that was a

01:49:30blank space that because left untouched resulted in a lot of people going to the other side,

01:49:36right from the left, like that young men really, really seemed to depart from, they didn't feel

01:49:41like they were part of the, what was that line? There was a, a group for, uh, underprivileged or

01:49:46underserved, uh, communities and there was 13 of them. And the only one that was missing was men,

01:49:52that there was every different version of this is Richard Reeves big, big post about that.

01:49:55In 2024, that wasn't true. There was a man, there's a men for Harris thing that like,

01:49:59there's a whole. The white guys for Harris movement.

01:50:01I think that, right? Yeah. Uh, I've mixed, mixed feelings.

01:50:05I'm sure. But, uh, you, you, you live by the affinity group. You die by the affinity group.

01:50:09That's true. That is.

01:50:11Can't be like, there's no affinity groups for me. And then they do one and.

01:50:14Well, it's interesting on the, uh, what are the groups that are falling behind?

01:50:18Uh, that was the issue that Richard took with it. I don't know what he thought

01:50:21about the white guys for Harris group. Um, there was definitely some sort of prostrating

01:50:26of the self there that felt a little strange. Uh, I, I'm interested, you know, as you sort of.

01:50:32Think about being somebody who have has public opinions, who is putting these sorts of things

01:50:36out on the internet, having the changing landscape and having this sort of very long

01:50:41career of saying things that might've felt true at the time, but can be pointed to in future.

01:50:48How do you avoid being too deranged by the criticisms by the criticisms?

01:50:52Yeah. Uh, that's not where I thought you were going to go with that. Um,

01:50:58I don't know. I think it's the same thing we were talking about earlier. You have a backstage.

01:51:01I have people whose reactions to things are a bellwether for me. And if there's a huge amount

01:51:08of critique of me at a certain moment and that happens every so often, I try to take it seriously

01:51:12and think about it. It doesn't mean I always change my opinion on it. Um, but I think you need

01:51:18your own internal compass. Again, I will say I have pretty aggressive algorithmic media hygiene.

01:51:25Mm hmm. And so I'm not out there looking for reaction. The reason I ask is, you know, we're

01:51:32talking about a need for a degree of resilience, degree of resilience, uh, in terms of individual

01:51:38agency now up against what's going to be happening with AI already up against what's been happening

01:51:42with social media and screens and distraction. And there's a great article by Ethan Strauss,

01:51:48which is called criticism. Capture is more warping than audience capture.

01:51:52Oh yeah. And I've not read that article, but I think there's something really to that.

01:51:56It's one of the most canonical things that I've read for the modern age. It's so good.

01:52:01And it basically says that, um, people begin to change their positions more to either

01:52:09in advance, defend against, or as a reaction to the existing or potential criticisms that

01:52:16their work is going to receive. I think that it is a very tricky thing.

01:52:22I will say this for me, it is a very tricky thing to know the difference between

01:52:29absorbing critique and synthesizing good points from it and absorbing critique and not wanting to touch

01:52:38the stove. And because they kind of feel the same inside.

01:52:46And I, there's not like one way to do it, but I do think it is important. I try to think about this a lot

01:52:56that critique is often a form of in-group disciplining.

01:53:04One thing I've found over the years is that nobody is hated like an apostate.

01:53:10So the right, you know, to start there, and I know this from my friends there, it's like,

01:53:16if you are on the right and you turn anti-Trump, the hell you get is nothing like what I get as a

01:53:23like forever anti-Trump. Openly anti-Trump.

01:53:27Nobody cares. In fact, I have perfectly good relations with people I have to report on

01:53:31for the Trump administration because they don't, they never saw me on their side. It's like,

01:53:36it's a stable relationship in a way. Similarly on, you know, the left, like nobody's hated like an

01:53:43apostate. The small differences make the most.

01:53:45Yeah. But, but also it's a possibly effective action.

01:53:50Get in line.

01:53:52Yeah. Get in line. And maybe you will. And so you have to be very careful about that inside yourself.

01:53:59On the one hand, you want to be able to hear critique. And on the other hand, you don't want

01:54:03to be scared of it. One of my practices is when there's a lot of critique of me, I will often invite

01:54:09one of the critics on the show and just kind of talk it out and see where I agree and disagree.

01:54:16And if I can sort of pull it into the spaces where I can deliberate about it.

01:54:21But if all I'm doing is exposing myself to the

01:54:25roar of anger at a moment, what is getting algorithmically boosted, I don't, that's not

01:54:29constructive. I will say the other thing that I'll sometimes do is I find it's quite important for me

01:54:35in terms of how thoughtfully I can integrate feedback when and in what context I absorb it.

01:54:43So being at dinner and getting pinged on my phone where somebody sends me a mean article about me,

01:54:52sometimes friends are like, did you see these terrible things people are writing about you?

01:54:55And it's like, thank you. They didn't have my personal, you know, way to reach me,

01:55:00but you do. And now you've brought it to my attention at dinner.

01:55:03Yeah, you're a conduit for this horrible thing that happened on the internet.

01:55:06I know people are mad at me, I'm aware. But the thing that I'll now do is if there's stuff

01:55:14collecting, I will like put it together and I will go print it all out. Or if it's videos,

01:55:20you know, watch a video at 9:30 AM when I'm resourced and have energy.

01:55:27Resilience is highest.

01:55:28And can think about it during the day, as opposed to at the end of the day,

01:55:32when I'm like trying to transition between the subway and my kids or, you know, dinner and bed,

01:55:38whatever it might be. So it's like everything else, right? You need a certain,

01:55:42if you're getting a lot of it, I think you need a certain level of discipline and you need to walk

01:55:46this balancing line between not getting overwhelmed and not shutting out. And I'm not saying I always

01:55:52do it well. Like I'm not, it's not a thing I would say I've mastered.

01:55:56Yeah. It's fascinating for me to see somebody who, I'm just, however cantankerous and controversial

01:56:07and inflammatory some of the topics that I talk about are or have been, none of them ever come

01:56:12close to politics. Politics is always going to be ground zero for this, right? It's always going

01:56:17to be ground zero. And just the preparedness to step into that over and over again, for me,

01:56:23is pretty fascinating. I think in the past, I've heard you describe journalism as organized curiosity.

01:56:31Given how the last few years have gone, I remember as well, you talking about Vox on the idea that

01:56:41better information leads to better politics. Do you still believe that? You still believe that now?

01:56:49I'd probably alter it a little bit to say that it's not just the information, it's the information

01:56:54environment. Because it's hard to say, did we get better or worse information? What we got was more

01:57:02information. And then the way the information was sorted algorithmically and other things,

01:57:09you can have better information than in any time in history and worse. And we did.

01:57:16And so the way I would say it is I do think better and worse information environments, attention

01:57:20environments. I really do take that layer as we've been talking about pretty seriously. But

01:57:28is it a direct thing? I don't know. I will say one of the things that has weirdly made me very hopeful about

01:57:34how politics still can work is the experience I've had on abundance. And the point is not that just like

01:57:39me and Derek did this. Abundance is synthesizing things like the YIMBY movement, the Yes In My Backyard

01:57:44housing movement. It's synthesizing where I think some of the smartest green groups went on

01:57:48decarbonization and recognizing you need to do that by accelerating green technology and then figuring out

01:57:53how to deploy it at scale. There were a lot of people and ideas and so forth that we were kind of

01:58:00putting into that. And I have watched, I have watched in a matter of a couple of years, ideas that were quite

01:58:07marginal. I mean, the first piece on this I did before we called it abundance, I called it supply side

01:58:12progressivism. Then I got to a liberalism that builds. Way less sexy. Yeah. Right. Then liberalism that builds,

01:58:16which is pretty good. And then Derek got abundance. But the point was that the left didn't talk about

01:58:22supply. We only talked about demand. We talked about how to redistribute. We talked about how to

01:58:25subsidize, which are important things, but we didn't talk about how to create more of the goods we needed.

01:58:30Now we do all the time. So like there was a big intellectual argument, again, not just mine, and it

01:58:36worked. And now everybody from Newsom to Maura Healy to Wes Moore to Mamdani to everybody, right? Like

01:58:44I just did a California governor's forum where the top five Democrats in the governor's race did a

01:58:49housing forum with me. And they were all just talking about how to make it easier to build and how to cut

01:58:53construction costs. So like I have watched good information, good argumentation. There's a RAND study

01:58:58about how much it costs to construct per square foot in California, Texas, Colorado. They were all

01:59:04familiar with it. This one study had been incredibly influential on all of us. So it can happen.

01:59:09What are you paying the most attention to over the next couple of years?

01:59:12I mean, AI. I'm trying to help create a better liberalism, more capable of competing with illiberalism.

01:59:19I'm trying to create a better liberalism, more capable of competing with illiberalism. I obviously pay a

01:59:26lot of attention to politics. I cover Israel-Palestine a lot, which is just a tough-ass issue.

01:59:32There's a bit of a mix of

01:59:37I'm paying attention to everything you would think I'm trying to pay attention to,

01:59:40and also the constant curves in the road, right? Did I expect us to be spending the year

01:59:46talking about war in Iran? I didn't really.

01:59:49Yeah. But now we are, and that's part of what I'm paying attention to. And so more things will happen that I'm

01:59:54not expecting and seeing. My work is a mix of being connected to the news, connected to longer range

02:00:04intellectual efforts in politics, and then connected to shows that are more about the point of all this, which is a

02:00:13more beautiful and humane world with novelists and meditators and people like that. For me, it's this

02:00:19constant calibrating of am I too far in this direction, too much news, not enough ideas, too many ideas, not

02:00:27enough news, too much politics, not enough humanism, and there's no way to do it but by feel and by

02:00:34attending to the moment. It sounds terrifyingly human. It does. It does. It sounds like it sounds

02:00:42unusually in touch, I think, with what people's experiences of life are and certainly being on the

02:00:49outside and watching sort of what goes on with politics. So much of it seems to be this very

02:00:53sterile detachment from what people's normal day-to-day lives are like. The reporting on it,

02:00:57too, also doesn't take that far as if people wake up on a morning and all that they're doing is

02:01:01mainlining politics and political governance into their veins. You really don't want to let the

02:01:05algorithms replace your intuition. What does that mean?

02:01:09That I think a lot of people, because they give their attention over to the algorithms

02:01:15and then the algorithms decide what they want to see, that that process I just talked about where

02:01:19you're constantly calibrating and recalibrating and really trying to think about what am I attending to?

02:01:24Well, if the way you get information is you open up X in the morning or Instagram or TikTok or whatever,

02:01:30the algorithms have decided what you're attending to. There's much more room for intuition when

02:01:35you're reading a print newspaper. You looked around and looked at what you were interested

02:01:39in and turned the page and maybe saw something you didn't think you were interested in, but you were.

02:01:42And you were saying it sounds very human. It's all human in a way. We're all humans doing it,

02:01:48though I think different spaces make us feel less that way. But I try to create a lot of space

02:01:57for my own judgment to exist and to feel what different things feel like. One way I believe my

02:02:08own mind works differently than I did 10 years ago is I just am much more in touch with how embodied it

02:02:14is. And the signals come from the body, not just the mind, including in a, I don't know how much you feel

02:02:20this way, but I was thinking about this in podcasts. I have a questions document. I don't follow it.

02:02:28How do I know where I'm going? It's like my skin prickles. What the fuck is that? And yet,

02:02:34what makes me a good podcaster is not the questions document. It's the skin prickling.

02:02:39Correct. And trying to become more and more and more in touch with that over time. Again,

02:02:45these are the kinds of things that I wish school would do more of. It's like, I want to teach my

02:02:49sons how to listen to their bodies. It's very difficult to teach instinct,

02:02:52to teach taste. It's not scalable. It's going to be different and idiosyncratic for every person.

02:02:57And yet is the one of the most, if not the single most important thing that you can continue to

02:03:04develop. But I think you can teach and I think you can help people cultivate

02:03:09the connection those things need to come through. Even just explaining the primacy of it. Like,

02:03:14this is something that's important that you should pay attention to. Yeah. Do not outsource your taste

02:03:19to the AI. Yeah. But you have to feel right. This is one of the worries I have about a lot of things

02:03:23is they disembody us. Correct. And you, I never know less about my body than when I'm really

02:03:29strolling. Do you ever, do you ever do that where you like move from a paper book to the, to your phone,

02:03:36which I will sometimes have both out and you can really feel the difference, like how much I'm in

02:03:41touch with the body on the physical, like print, slow versus here. You really do become a brain in a

02:03:48vat. And I'm not saying it's all bad. I don't want to be overly a Luddite here. I have a phone,

02:03:53I have a computer, I work on the internet. But, but I do think, yeah, developing intuition,

02:03:59developing taste, that's a very personal, very mysterious thing. But developing the ability

02:04:06to listen to what's happening inside of yourself, that through meditation and movement practice and

02:04:12other things, it's like, I just would like to give people, kids a lot more meta training in their

02:04:19attention and mind. And, you know, I think we do, we are over torqued on information and need to push

02:04:28probably in this era harder, or I would like to see us push harder on, I don't even know what to call it,

02:04:36like the art of thinking, the art of feeling just as much. I always think that going back to some of

02:04:43the, you know, trends in podcasting a few years back, when I guess it was Ben Shapiro's line,

02:04:49you know, facts don't care about your feelings. I always thought it was a big, I was really

02:04:53disagreed with that line. Because it's not that facts care about your feelings, facts don't care

02:04:57about anything, they're a fact. But you should care about your feelings. Feelings are very intelligent,

02:05:03and the dismissal of them is, which is not obviously just a Ben thing, it's a mistake,

02:05:09right? You want to be in touch with the way things feel. There's a lot of intelligence in that. And

02:05:15again, you know, the AI can't feel the way things feel, but you can. And it's like, that's a capacity

02:05:21to cultivate. It's fascinating. I had a conversation with Alex O'Connor, and he was explaining how

02:05:29the sort of modern world of rationalism, focus on science, trying to optimize your thinking tools,

02:05:37and the dismissal of religion, story, mythology, narrative, narrative arc, personification,

02:05:43was getting people to reject that that felt most real to them, in place of something that you told

02:05:50them was more real, but felt as fake as it could be. Like if you see facts and figures, they're not as

02:05:55compelling as a story of a person that this affected. And you can just continue to scale

02:06:00that all the way up to, well, you can try and reverse engineer virtue from first principles,

02:06:05but it's like actually a really hard, it's a very difficult and clunky thing to do, as opposed to,

02:06:12you know, when I did, you know, when I behaved in that way, I didn't feel good.

02:06:16I didn't feel good. When I said, when I lied to that person, as opposed to having to be able to

02:06:22show me your proof of why lying is wrong on this whiteboard, uh, it's, it's way harder. And, uh,

02:06:29yeah, I am completely on board. I think the demand is going to be for people to feel more.

02:06:35Although I would take this in both directions. Actually, we've mentioned Pema Chodron,

02:06:40who's a Buddhist teacher that was recently on my show, and I'm a very big fan of a lot of her work.

02:06:45And her work is very much about tolerating the feelings we don't want to tolerate.

02:06:49And one of the reasons I think it's very important to be in touch with what you're feeling

02:06:53is not always because you should listen to it. Sometimes, actually, I think so much of life

02:07:01is driven by these little embodied contractions we barely even notice. But because we don't even

02:07:07notice that they're happening, we follow them unthinkingly. And so it's such a weird balance.

02:07:14On the one hand, I completely agree with, you said it was Alex O'Connor, what he was saying.

02:07:19On the other hand, of course, there are many, many, many times

02:07:22when the way the world works violates what feels true to us. And so having the information is there

02:07:32so you can make good judgments about it. But if you don't know that that information is happening in

02:07:36you, you're actually going to be much easier, much more easily moved by it than if you do.

02:07:42I have become one thing that I'm proud of myself because it has been very hard work for me,

02:07:46like genuinely hard work for me, particularly in personal relationships. I have become better at knowing

02:07:53that I am uncomfortable. And so I don't run away from it. But when I didn't know it,

02:08:01I was much more led around by it because I just knew I didn't want to be there.

02:08:04But I didn't take time to sit in the space because I wasn't fully feeling it.

02:08:09You're just reacting to it.

02:08:09I was just reacting to it. So that to me is some of the genius of getting better at

02:08:15listening to your own body. You actually know if something's happening that

02:08:19you're going to need to sit through rather than react to.

02:08:21- Heck yeah. Ezra Klein, ladies and gentlemen.

02:08:24- Thank you, man. That was a pleasure.

02:08:25- What's coming up next?

02:08:26- Who did I just tape with?

02:08:28- I just taped with Ian Bremmer. Had a great conversation about the crazed state of the world.

02:08:33- That could be a title for pretty much everything that you're doing at the moment.

02:08:37I appreciate you, man. Thank you very much.

02:08:39- Thanks, man. Appreciate being here.

02:08:39- All right. See you next time, everyone.

02:08:42Congratulations. You made it to the end of a full podcast episode.

02:08:45You are not so TikTok-brained that you've completely dissolved into nothingness.

02:08:50Why not watch another one? Right.

02:08:54Go on. Press it.

Key Takeaway

To survive the deranging effects of algorithmic media, individuals and political movements must intentionally cultivate 'backstage' spaces and prioritize slow-attention practices like reading paper books over the immediate, dopamine-driven feedback loops of viral content.

Highlights

Maintaining a 'backstage' of quiet, private time is a necessary defense against the psychological damage caused by excessive online exposure.
The content of a medium—whether television, Twitter, or Instagram—distracts the user while the medium itself fundamentally changes the user's perception and cognition.
Politics has shifted into an attention-based arms race where success requires 'aura' and the ability to earn virality, rather than just technical policy competence.
Attention functions as a public good, and its aggressive extraction for viral content creates a 'tragedy of the commons' that degrades the entire political system.
While the Democratic Party and the broad left are fractured by diverse, programmatic litmus tests, the Republican Party has consolidated its internal purity standards around a single principle: loyalty to Donald Trump.
The most dangerous threat to human cognition in the age of AI is not just mass automation, but the atrophy of the ability to think and attend without constant technological mediation.

Timeline

Protecting the Backstage in an Attention Economy

Public figures must intentionally maintain a private, offline 'backstage' to avoid the psychological harm of constant public performance.
Every medium changes the user's cognitive structure, making the specific content consumed secondary to the medium's influence on how one thinks.
Long-term professional success in an attention-based economy requires the same intentionality toward burnout and injury as professional athletics.

Public profiling is not designed for the benefit of the subject but to generate energy and clicks. Engaging in constant social media display is framed as a long-term psychological risk, where the 'backstage'—or private self—is eroded. Media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are used to argue that digital platforms are not neutral tools; they degrade the capacity for sustained thought and change how users perceive time and complexity. Protecting mental independence requires radical curation of one's media diet.

The Tragedy of the Political Attention Commons

Political discourse has become a 'tragedy of the commons' where aggressive, extreme messaging is required to break through the noise of competing for finite collective attention.
Successful modern political communication rewards 'aura' and entertainment value over sober institutional expertise.
Politics is currently locked in an evolutionary arms race of 'takes' designed to achieve viral contagion, which inevitably degrades the quality of public discourse.

Attention is a limited collective resource. As political entities compete for this resource, they resort to emergency-framing, siren emojis, and inflammatory rhetoric to gain traction. This environment incentivizes 'gain of function' research for opinions, where takes are refined until they are sufficiently toxic to go viral. The shift from sober, institutionally-focused communication to performative, attention-seeking behavior is reshaping what voters expect from leaders, pushing the political pendulum toward extreme personas.

Partisan Purity and Institutional Governance

The Democratic Party suffers from a plurality of programmatic litmus tests, while the Republican Party has collapsed its purity standards into a single dimension of loyalty to Donald Trump.
Liberal governance faces a significant failure in its inability to build essential infrastructure—like housing and energy—due to bureaucratic over-regulation.
Algorithmic social media causes political movements to rapidly cycle through extreme positions as they compete for purity in online echo chambers.

The political 'civil war' on the left is framed as a struggle over policy and governance, specifically around 'abundance' or the capacity to build. In contrast, the right's purity standard is simplified to personal loyalty to a single leader, which makes it easier to welcome diverse views as long as the leader is supported. Online platforms force movements into 'one-up' dynamics where they adopt increasingly extreme positions to prove their ideological worth to their specific echo chamber, creating a 'future bill' that comes due during general elections.

Human Flourishing in the Age of AI

AI regulation should focus on tangible public goods—such as disease curing and administrative navigation—rather than solely debating speculative existential risk.
The primary threat of AI is its potential to turn human beings into prosthetics of the machine, prioritizing efficiency and measurement over human dignity.
Physical reading of books is a critical 'scaffold for thinking' that builds sustained attention and prevents cognitive atrophy.

The debate around AI is stuck in speculative 'fast takeoff' scenarios that offer no actionable policy path. A more productive approach involves using AI to solve specific public problems like drug discovery for orphan diseases or simplifying government interactions via an AI concierge. However, there is a serious need to resist 'productivity' that is actually just distraction wearing work's clothing. True productivity often involves 'low-information' activities like walking without headphones or reading paper books, which allow for genuine synthesis and idea generation.

Cultivating Virtue and Resilience

Liberalism has historically relied on a vision of self-cultivation and individual agency that the current left has become hostile toward.
Criticism capture—the tendency to change one's positions to avoid potential future critique—is more warping to one's mind than audience capture.
Developing intuition and taste requires listening to embodied signals rather than outsourcing judgment to algorithms.

The left's abandonment of personal virtue and self-improvement discourse allowed external figures to dominate the space of advising young men, creating a vacuum that was eventually filled by less virtuous voices. Resilience in the public sphere requires maintaining a backstage, filtering feedback to periods of high energy, and deliberately cultivating the capacity to sit with discomfort. Developing individual intuition and 'skin prickle'—a physical response to truth—is an idiosyncratic, non-scalable process that is essential for maintaining independence from algorithmic influence.

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