Rebalancing the Tax Code

Welcome, welcome, welcome to N ourorm ch Chair E expert experts on expert. I'm Dan Shppd. I' joined Lilly Padman. Hi. And today we have a returning guest.. He was last year weeks before shutdown. Yeah, lot's changed. Six years ago. Esra Klleine, he is a political commentator and a journalist. He co founded Vox and is currently a New York Times podcast host columnists ing, That's why he's here. I read an op Eeddie wrote that I really, really liked that we're going to discuss at length. His books include Aundance which is gaining a lot of political att Al also been on so many big lists, Bhill Gates's list, Obama's list, just man, o man. And then why were're polarized, which was how we met him the first time. And of course, listen to his podcast. It is extremely well informed and beautifully executed, the Ezra Klleine show. Please enjoy Ezra Kline This episode is brought to you by American Beverage. 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That's Q U I N C E . com slash dax for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quins. com slash dax He's in our chair Is childer Okay, I do believe you're stronger than you were six years ago. Have you been exercising? Are you doing a weight training program? So this has been coming up up. I amm probably stronger than six years ago when I had a one year old Okay. Then ten years ago, I mean, I've not gone through a stax like hulk out here. Well, I'm much older than the phase could still be in your f fair enough. I was in pretty good shape in my early thirties. You're forty two right now? Yeah, I'm forty two. And then I had kids. Yeah, ye. It brought the curb down for a while. And then I turned forty. I read Peter Ata's outlift. Yeah, ye. veryer persuadive. He really persuaded me that having muscle mass in the long term is important for health. And so I started trying to turn things Okay good. Thank you for noticing. Yeah I consumed a psychotic amount of protein powder, as far as I can tell. So I'm glad people feel like it's doing something. I know SF culture. I don't live there anymore, but I know that world Is the peepptide thing here?? Are you all on peepides? I'm on peptides, yeah. Which pepttides are you on? We're having the most podcast conversation ever here. Yeah. I'm just fascinated by pero by the way, this is going to dovetail beautifully into the piece you wrote that I loved. Yeah, why can't a centrist liberal talk about peptides in lifting weights? Listen, if you can't talk about peptides as a liberal We're not gonna win We're not going for. I'll make a real political point here. I feel like a couple of years ago, eightish, tennish years ago There was a big move on the kind of I never know how to describe this a left, progressive something againgst what I would call like male self improvement. Burnnee Brown and worlds like that were fine, but the way you see this operating in terms of young men both bodily and emotionally, that became a little bit of a no go zone. and I was saying to people then, I was like aspiration, like self improvement is such a fundamental human drive. If you make your politics hostile to that, you will lose. You cannot make aspiration something that you code as right wing. Yeah. I think they're against self improvement physically. Is that what you mean? I think there are two things that happened here. O was that There's a tendency to associate the idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps that everything is personal responsibility and how hard you're working at it with the right. And the sense that that is a way of avoiding a confrontation with societal conditions that need to be changed in order for Goole to thrive. And I am sympathetic to that as far as it goes. We do have a lot of societal conditions that need to be changed in order for people to thrive. And it'd be great if someone pulls them up by their bootstraps. And it does happen. and yes, not on the level that we've been sold, but also it doesn't make it bad. Yes. I always think that as a society you want society to be skeptical of how much falls on the individual. and individuals to be optimistic about how much they can do for themselves. So ye, I'm actually largely a believer that things are pretty socially determined for us in terms of who we're born to and where we're born and the luck we come into contact with in life. I believe that the people who are richest in our society have not done nearly as much as they think to deserve that. And a lot of the people who have fallen through the cracks have just gotten a bad run of luck. And social policy, taxation, universal healthcare, universal childcare, all these things should really reflect that And also it is good for individuals to believe Because it is also true. thinks true because they've done.. that you can make changes for yourself. Yeah. that you would be a better version of yourself in the future than you are today. That's a great We shouldiceperndi for a human, right? I want to be able to look back and go, yeah, I'm a better version of myself Okay, where were we though? We were talking about pes, Ppds. I have to take I have to go back and forth on these, right so your body doesn't get used to them, but they do virtually the same thing, which is I'm on One version of the Morlands There's hpamorlin ororlin. They tell your pituitary gland to make more of its own HGH. So you're not taking exogenous HGH, which is problematic for many reasons, but it tells your body to make more of it. So that one I'm on, I've been on testosterone for eight years, but I'm on a really conservative feel that can you feel my mus. I'm running right now too, so that might be part of it. But I'm on a very, very small kind of conservative dose of that And then there's another one I'm on. I feel ashamed to admit this one because it's very expensive, but SS thirty one and it repairs your mitochondria. And that one I gotta say is the one I think is most impactful. Do you do this? No, I'm scared. Well, I am on a JP one. Sopt. We'll count that as a peptetide. And all of the friends are on all of these different ones and I'm very scared of it. so I don't do it. Is on my mind because I just did an episode about this at little. I don't know when this will come out and when that will come out. I am a little surprised by confident people are with these things that we don't really understandes are very well studied. Not all of them, right? Some of them are new. but Ozempic, at least is a diabetes drug for a long time. My wife is a type one diabetic, These things are known. Yeah. These other things were like, we think it does this. I read an interview with some doctor in the Bay Area and he was talking to people who in pepttides and he was saying, look I'm also a startup founder and I feel like people are reversing the value proposition, to think about doing a startup is your downside is quite limited and your upside is unlimited. wororst case, your startup fails. best case, you're, you know a billionaire and you've changed the world. And these who's saying he worries that it's the reverse. Like best case, you feel a little bit better. right? The upside is somewhat limited. And downside it's a little who knows. Well, let me be really clear for any of in the audience especially if you're a young dude. have a doctor I have a hormone doctor. G it. and I get my guided legally from a pharmacy. I'm not buying them on the black market from China. There's a million things you could point at. So the efficacy of tessamorin very well studied. It was developed for HIV patients in the eighties. It's been around for hours. Yes. And they noticed as a side effect of it, it was like, wow, they lost a lot of abdominal fat In addition to doing what they wanted it to do, so this off label use for it is just very well documented, very well studied been being prescribed to people for forty years. So it's not crazy. But yes, if you're buying it from Jo's Pep Shack on the internet. Now we're not discussing peptides. We're discussing quality control issues and anything you would shove into your body. Which by the way, that is how most people are getting them because most people can't afford to have a peptide And we live in L.A. There are hormone doctors That's not that commalm in other places. And if you go to your they're probably going to say like, no, just don't do it. So it's tricky. these things all get mired in a lot of different issues. Aa, he's been vocal against peptides, which is interesting because I definitely think he does prescribe some to certain patients he has. I think he's probably getting a lot of emails from the Joe's peptide Sack cohort. Yeah. I mean, he doesn't want young dudes who have no knowledge of it firing all this shit into their body without a dosage by a doctor and a supply that's trusted and ted I think that's more the concern than what this peptide that's been studied for a long time actually. What about NADs? Are you on an NAD? peopleeople are really on NAD? I don't know what this is. I guess it's like good for your brain, but then that scares me ' like anything that has an impact on your brain feels scary. Are you on that? I'm not. I have tried that and I didn't notice any cognitive advantage from it, so I just skipped it. I'm already on too much stuff and it's all done with a shock I'm not taking any of this or. I feel like it's easier actually. Yeah, I've gotten over it, but I'm not looking to add more needles to my life. That's not like I didn to get it know When I lean my resolutions for twenty twenty six I feels very substanceancy even when I'm taking the GLP one. I'm like, oh my God, I'm in that movie where you're just injecting yourself with this thing to make yourself look better, feel better Also it it's turnkey for addicts. So all of the dudes I know in recovery, it's like, oh, great, we have something we can obsess about like this, but actually the outcome is beneficial. So it scratches the place little kind of energy. Yeah, and you're talking to yourbody, which then you're doing how much? Like I miss that part of drug abuse. Look, I think so much of life is figuring out whether you can Aarness. your most intense internal energies to something constructive or destructive. Yeah. There's a line I love. I've read it in an Oliver Berman book, but I don't think it's his line. the key quotes somebody, but it's that behind most successful people is anxiety harness to productivity. Yeah, that's right. I think so much of life, it's like so many people who are addicted and going to recovery and then become ultra marathoners. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always feel inside of me there is a constant thrumbing energy. And if it doesn't have somewhere to go, it will go into just ruminating worrying hypochondria. and then I found political blogging. Yeah. And thank God for you, it's just an endless river. will never dry. Rver of things that are pro social to be worried about Okay, so you were here Six years ago and it was right before you were one of the last interviews in person. Tour was bisected on that first book by the pandemic. And you were promoting at the time why we're polarized? Yeah, whichich again, and I may have said it in our first interview, but it's like, I've had a very interesting parasocial observation of you over the years. and it's evolve, which is there was moments I think I was probably introduced to you. in your wonderful arguments with Sam Harris. And I think maybe at that time I had diagnosed you as left of me, and I do consider myself liberal. And then I was like, he might be too liberal for me But then you made some points against Sam that I was like Oh he's incredibly empathetic. You were in a debate about who Sam would come to the rescue of and how obvious it was to you that these people, he seemed to think that they had been persecuted unfairly, which makes so much sense because he himself felt like he was persecuted unfairly and just how transparent the motivation was. And I was like, that's such an intuitive and empathic thing to bring into this debate that could just be about policies or this or that So then I was like, I really appreciate this guy. And then I think I'm right to think that over the years, we seem to have some similar concerns, which is is kind of a non functional camps that ruin everything and a lack of maybe pragmatism and a lack of results from both sides and just for me kind of a little bit of disgs with the whole proposition. notot one side or the other, more than the other, just My goodness, this can't be the way forward I would probably describe myself a little differently than that. Please say, I take more seriously than that that the two sides have different value based views about how the world should be. And I'm probably more comfortable saying I'm on one of the sides than you are. but precisely because of that, I think it's very important to be self critical of my side. That's where we totally agree. Like Monica often and she's right. She'll be like, you have a lot of shit to say about the left. I don't hear you saying much about the right. And to me, I'm like, A, it's kind of sel evident when I hate about the right. B, the right's not listening to me. So I have no chance at changing them, but I have a chance to better our side. People won't listen unless they believe you're really on their side Ezra is very maybe I'm wrong, clearly of center. I think that's true. I'll cop to that.. And you are consistently saying, I'm centrist. Yeah. You don't like the idea of being put in. But I would argue though that it has evolved to a degree where my liberal leanings, which would have been very left ten years ago or twelve years ago, have actually got shoved into the center. Like I don't think I've wavered as much poolls have gotten so dramatic. There's no doubt the Democratic partarty has moved left in that period of time. Yeah, as the right has moved right I think a lot more people feel politically homeless and cynical right now than did. And not even always because they don't have a political home, but I think there's another layered onto what you're talking about which is one the institutions of American life and government have become Croded, corrupted sclerotic in a way that they're just not delivering well And then two the layer of social and algorithmic media. means that who you hear from And what comes to define the debates on both sides and what comes to define both sides is a more extreme part of them than would have been before. I mean, you both work in attention, right on some fundamental level. And so I'd be curious if this resonates for you. I think a lot about attention in politics. I think you have to. We're here in LA. I don't think it's a crazy thing to imagine Spencer Pr winning election I don't think he will, the mayoral election, but getting attention, right? We saw it in New York where his Mom Donny went from one percent to the mayor. We're seeing it in Maine, where a guy nobody had heard of a year ago just pushed the sitting governor out of the Democratic primary for Senate and Graham Platner. If you can dominate attentionally, Donald Trump did this to the entire Republican Party all at once If you can win attention, you can kind of win everything. So the ability to cohere and dominate attentionally is, I think, one of the fundamental political skills of the age. And I was trying to think about, okay, what is the theory of attention beneath that? Like how I describe how attention works? And so I want to see if this resonates you becausecause I literally just thinkin about this morning The way I would describe attention is that it is feeling plus curiosity equals attention At least online. Give me like a hard example of. Yeah. So if you have something that people are really curious about, it's the day after America bombs Iran. then the New York Times can put up a very dry straightforward news story about bombing Iran and it's going to get a ton of readers. But if we did that same story about, I don't know, high food prices in Chile right now, unless that story was extremely emotionally laid in for some reason, nobody would read it. Yes. And algorithmically, I think you really see this. for things to create a pop On social media, everything is so crowded and algorithmic media, know, on TikTok and Instagram now, either people have to really want to hear about it Peptides, right? There's a reason we started talking about that right at the beginning. It's a magnetic topic for people. or it has to give you a punch of inspiration, anger, outrage, humor, interest, something. And the way that's different than what that was before, because it's not like we never had people who worked on attention in this way before, is that it used to be gatekeepers plus feelings plus curiosity. It used to be that the New York Times or ABC News or the LA. Times or whomever, had a lot of power over what got coverage. And that was being decided by editors and programmers and so forth. And so you could be a politician who's maybe not that interesting But the people in the political community think you're good at your job and the LA. Times editorial board endorses you John Kery a big deal. John Kerry is a good example of this kind of thing. Like John Kerry couldn't have even made a primary at this point. I think that is totally right. And so I think there is a real shift and that means well what kind of person is good at eliciting Curiosity. and feeling. Well it's usually people are more controversial. You say more outrageous things. And so it is like a subtle, but I think, quite important shift in the individuals Through whom We see politics. Way, way, way more people know Marjorie Taylor Greene's name then can tell me who the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee is evenven though the latter is like in theory, much more politically powerful than the former. Yeah. And I guess I left out probablybably my primary concern or passion about politics is just in general The average person thinks way too much about it. L you should. This is your beat You are dedicated to politics, you have a polyci degree, you're a journalist. You're never going to take your foot off the gas and you shouldn't. But the fact that it has infiltrated every aspect of life where protein is now conservative basis, they littlell like Diet is politicized whereere you buy a car is politicized, where you shop, that to me is a big, big problem. I don't think the average American needs to be spending that much of their free thought. Concerned with ultimately something they'll do every four years or maybe if they're very civilly minded, they will do it every two years And yet they're occupying so much of their time and thought about it. That I think is problematic in general. I think everyone's way too intopuled. I would go further than that. think One being really into What's the line people use on social media? I'm monitoring the situation, right? Isn't that the joke Like I work in the news. We are bringing you the thing that is going to unnerve you most from anywhere in the world at any time of day. That's right. I'm not sure human beings were built for this. You're not sure We were not. We were not. We were designed to live with a hundred people But then the other thing that I think you're getting at, which I feel very strongly is we've become more and more sensitized at picking up signals For are you my kind of person Yeah That's really bad Yeah. becausecause when it flattens people to things that they're not. I've got Trump voters in my family. I've got people I love whose politics are Re, really, really distinant from mine. and they're good complex, highly textured peopleople And two, it's just bad small D deemocratic habits. I think we have lost the sense. When people talk about what the American experiment is of what that ever meant. There were not a lot of democracies when we started Yeah. And we when we started, I think it's fair to say we're not a particularly Democratocr deemocrac because we had like a tremendous amount of the country that could not vote, and some of which was in bondage. Yeah, more than half the people here couldn't vote. And there was like what a remarkable experiment we're trying here. The idea that you would live in a society of more than three hundred million people with as many differences as we have. under rules that are largely democratic Doing that is actually a tremendously complex moral project Early in our country, we talked a lot about what were the habits of thought and practice and generosity that we needed to bring being citizens, to make this work. We understood it was hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you're just born into it, and we're at two hundred and fifty years this year. yeah it just is. It's a given. It's a given and we take it for granted, Yeah. ye. And we take the habits beneath it for granted. And I think that's something that worries me a lot about the current moment And I mean, yeah, we're at the year two hundred fifty and not to get too political on this, but We've got the president of the United States putting his signature on the currency for the first time and putting out passports with his face on him. And I think a lot of people who started this country would find that a little bit ironic. like a bad s. So yeah.. It's not a great sign. And so this idea that we are at this tremendous landmark of this country At the same time when some of the habits of both leaders and citizenry that sustained it even through very hard times seem to me to be in deterioration. It's something that has begun to occupy more and more of my mind. Okay, but Nata, let's go back to what you just said, which I totally agree with, which is no one can really rise to any kind of prominence without attention, massive amounts of attention. And the other thing I get critical of is just so reverse engineer that. You hate this guy So much. It's all you talk about and think about for ten years now This person has occupied people's brains. And so the reward is to give them a lot of attention to secure the fact that you'll have him So it's also just a terrible game plan. I mean, I think you could really make a persuasive argument that if everyone fucking ignored them from the jump, we wouldn't even be in this situation You think you're combating it, but I would argue you're fueling it. What Trump understood, his most fundamental political insight was that It does not matter if the attention you are getting is positive or negative, that attention is a volume game, at least in the modern scenario and you could As long as you are unlocking the energy of attention, you are winning And so he is comfortable in a way that a lot of politicians aren't W negative attention. Also like I rememember those first debates with him for the primaries. The right hated him too, but the right gave him all the attention. You know, it's like there wasn't anybody who wasn't dying to talk about him. He was driving that. againg, as you say on purpose, he knew that. It wasn't like, but we just happened he was a mastermind at that. We cooperated though I mean, you have to take some kind of personal responsibility and that game plan worked and we cooperated. I think for a while though we didn't. I think for a long time, I was like, oh, this is funny. this is happening. And then at some point it was like, oh my God, I think this is happening. I think we need to start paying attention to it. I don't know what the right. It's a very hard I know what the outcome is. So whatever game plan everyone thought was working This is the outcome I think there's like a new generation of politicians are beginning to see emerge And they understand this moment in intention much more natively. Trump had a very specific early taste of it from reality TV and his own kind of relationship to marketing And his own quite unusual use of Twitter when most people in politics, use Twitter in a very careful way. Yeah. Or' even too good for it. Yeah. Barack Obama's Twitter account is not an interesting Twitter account. Like I'm a big, big Obama fan. Sure sure. But Twitter X now is not a space for deliberate, highly nuanced on the one side, on the other side communication. A sixty one percent opinion. Exactly. So Trump got that. And now when you're seeing another shift into vertical video algorithmic video And you're seeing a different group of politicians, Zoron Mamani, James Teler Rico in Texas, Graham Platner, others who have a touch for it. And they're touching it in different ways. I'm interested to see where that goes because I think We are in another generational I'm not sure it'll be this election cycle that the generational turnover happens. Like I think we're gonna go to Gen X in the next election I am a lot more confident in like the younger rou right now than in the kind of middle. Yeah, My hope comes from the well documented pattern of young people hating whatever the people before them did. And what we did was so loud and obvious I can only hope they're just going reject that. That's where my hope lies. Okay, so I read This is why there's no liberal Joe Rogan in the New York Times. You did an op ed on this And I just loved it And I want to go through the points you made in it. Okay. Let's just talk about Joe Rogan for a minute. Becauseuse I'll just tell you historically where we come from, like, A, I don't agree with him on much stuff It's not my brand of masculinity. I respect the work ethic. I respect the thing he's built. I respect that he doesn't seem beholden to binary options. His politics seem to be all over the map. I respect his authenticity. I think he's very fucking true to who he is, pretty unwavering. So I've never joined on the bandwagon of hating him or loving him. So this is where I stand on him I was keying off of this debate that happened among Democrats, like right after the twenty twenty four election where They felt like they had like lost the podcasters. Trump was going on Rogan and Rogan endorsed him. you know, he wass going on Theo Vaugh, Flagrant with Andrew Schultz. Was he on with Lex Friedan I don't remember, but whatever it was there was a real sense that the right had figured out podcasting and the left was nowope we'll stay behind. And the lefte is really giving that a lot of credit. I mean, I was hearing people saying that's why he I don't think it's totally off, by the way. I think there was something very real that was significant there, though don't think, as we will talk about, the left is taking the right lesson. So right after the election, there was this big thing about the left needs Joe Rogan. There needs to be a liber Joe Rogan. As you might guess, people called me personally. And like you need to be The opposite of Joe Rose. I think every in any way left of center male podcaster with any kind of audience. This happened to me. like everybody I know of is like Are you theoerok? Yeah, are you gonna to the Je Rog? Yeah? A couple things worth saying about Rogan. One is he has a first mover advantage that nobody can now replicate Part of what makes Rogan Rogan is that he's been Rogan for so long. He's an institution. He's the Walter Kronkhe of American pun guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the king by such a margin. it's laughable.' get that kind of baseline audience and algorithmic power, just like starting up right now. The second is that he's not fundamentally political, right? I think at this point over the last couple of years, Rogan's politics have become more personally right than he quite lets on in terms of Who he has on, I think he was very offended by fights he had with the left. But for most of his career, I don't think that was true But what makes him interesteresting in politics, and this is true for the Ovan, it's true for you guys is that the great problem for politicians, the great problem for political movements is that they know how to reach the people who are interested And in fact, they know how to reach the people who like them and the people who hate them what they do not know how to reach is people don't care. And the people who did what you were saying earlier about the news are actually checked out of the news, do not want to hear about the worst thing in the world every morning when they pick up their phone. And these are the people who swing elections. right? These are the people who can turn out and in many cases here turn out for Trump in twenty twenty four because they were mad about prices, not because they were hardcore MAGa. And what makes someone like Rogan or in a different way at Theovon or others politically important precisely that they are not mainly political. And so There arere all these people who trust them or love them or like them or tune into them because they find what they do interesting and appealing. And so then If a politician comes on, which only happens once in a blue moon, they get access to an audience that could never otherwise. Yeah if can't be a liberal joe working because the whole point is that he's not a liberal, a conservative, MAGa and anything. And he wouldn't have had an audience had he been political from the Tump. He has an audience because MMA's got a huge audience. You know, he's very well versed in that. L he has a lot of interest that was the bulk bo hunting Yeah, gues hunting, conspiracy theories, you know, all kinds of stuff. The politics was like a tiny sliver. Yeah He was open to having anyone on But now he is considered that whether he is or isn't. Well, here's a line in the article that's so good. He says, the simplest way to tell people which side they're on is to tell them how much your side hates them. Yeah, so years ago, Bernie Sanders wenton on Jo And Rogan in the twenty twenty election He's later said he was high and just screwing around, but you know, whatever. it's the only endorsement he made in that election to my knowledge, saida he would probably vote for Bernie Sanders. There was in this big backlash to Bernie Sanders on the left online because in their view, Rogan is transphobic and is problematic. And I came in and I was like, what's wrong with you? Like the whole case for Bernie Sanders Is that somebody like Joe Rogan would like him? Like the whole case for the Bernie Sanders electibility theory is that there's something about his Schultz loved him too. Schultz Like a lot of people are Bernie Sanders. Yeah. And it's that the way Bernie Sanders talks about politics and cuts through a certain level of bullshit. and voices a certain deep cynicism that I think you all share to some degree makes him someone that someone like Rogan would like. So of course you want Bernie Sanders going into the places where he would reach people who don't normally vote for or like Democrats who aren't going to a DSA meeting And I became a Twitter trending topic because people were yelling at me so much for defending Bernie Sanders for that. And I remember thinking at that time that If you do this You are going to push these people away from you, not Bernie, who's a professional politician, but people like Rogan. And look, I'm sympathetic to some of this. COVID hits. there is a huge fight around Rogan and vaccine misinformation.. There's a lot I disagreed with in both directions on that. My critique of Joe Rogan, by the way, who I've liked many episodes he's done For the amount of power he has, I don't think he takes his job seriously enough That's Malcolm Gladwell's take. I think that he wants to pretend he's a guy who can still just fuck around and spout off and nod. and you can, but when you have that kind of an audience, I do think there's a burden of responsibility on knowing what you're talking about, on knowing what they're talking about. I have this job too, and I'm not as big as Rogan The bigger I've got, and the more seriously I take the preparation I do for every single episode because people are listening Stay tuned for more armchair experts. If you dare, we are supported by all states Checking All state first could save you hundreds on car insurance. N checking that your keys are actually in your hand before you close the car door. 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This episode is supported by Helix All right, let's talk about something we both really care deeply about. sleep It's the most important thing. I've had my Helix mattress for years now and I genuinely think it's one of the best investments you can make for your home. Mine still feels just like it did when I first got it. Well, that's the thing. It's not one of those mattresses that caves in after six months. These things are built to last. And you know, I'm a side sleeper I ordered a side sleeper and I get hot, so I have cooling. and I can't tell you how much more comfortable it is to be in there not sweating and tossing and turning. Cooling is really important. I've read that you're supposed to sleep a little bit cold. So I also have cooling. and they have over twenty models, so it's not a one size fits all situation. You just go take their quiz and they match you to what actually works for your body Plus, they've got cooling upgrades, which heading into summer, non negotiable. Truly Go to helelixleep dot com slash armchair for twenty percent off. That's helixleep dot com slash armchair for twenty percent off. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you Helixleep dot com slash armchair We just had someone who we were supposed to have on and when Staxon research was like, we can't. It would be irresponsible. Yeah, we can't do this. And you do have to think about that. Yeah, but I do think it's worth saying just for people who probably don't know and hadn't read the article like, Rogan's pro choice. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter P universal healthcare. You can't really put him in this box left or right prior to COVID in a very concerted effort to cancel him. Bere Brown quit her show on Spotify in protest. I didn't remember that. So there is then a very organized effort. Spotify' done this huge deal with Rogan. He has people on who are Qesting vacces and there their efficacy. Well, let's just be fair, Questioning a lot of stuff, masking, distancing. Unfortunately for everyone, both sides were wrong and right about a lot of stuff. So that's what I was saying earlier too, that I kind of have sympathy in both directions here. I think a lot of broken stuff on vaccines did not hold up that well. The vaccines were really safe and very effective And There was a lot of going too far in terms of distancing measures, in terms of school closures. And I would say and this maybe gets to one of the larger points I'm trying to make in this piece and in some other things I've been doing I think there was a bad political practice happening which is Even if you are very, very, very pro Vaccine you have to be very careful with one tools of compulsion and coercion. And I wasbody who believed in vaccine mandates, at least in some cases. But more than that, I think you have to be really, really, really careful with considering certain ideas out of bounds because you don't get to tell people what they're allowed to believe, to have questions about, feel uncertain about. Be as I recall, the thing that set the firestorm off, He didn't say I don't believe in the vaccine. He said if I was a young man, I probably wouldn't take the vaccine. I remember it just having to do with guests, but the truth is it's been a long timet look. Just that thought could not be heard, tolerated, debated test But then he was having like RFK Jr on then not really questioning him about any of the things he was saying. I think it went more like that. But I think the broad thing that happened is that there was a sense that Rogan was on the other side He was a very, very powerful voice and a powerful platforming voice on the other side. and he had to be stopped. There was a huge kind of mobilization around that. It didn't end up working, but you could imagine it have gone a different way. That I think is a very, very high profile example of a thing that was happening broader way back then during that sort of period in American life, which is effort to win political arguments by sharply drawing the boundaries of allowable debate and I think that is a very, very dangerous thing to do, partarticularly when you have not done the work of actually persuading people of your side of the debate There's a tendency to move into deciding who is allowable, who should be platformed, et cetera, as opposed to actually doing the work of Not just persuasion, but listening and to the line you just quoted in the piece What that often does For some people, they get cowed and they're willing to not speak the opinion that you're kind of pushing out of the public sphere And to some people, really, really, really turn against you and they come to see you as a threat to them. One of my most deeply held views in politics, and I always say as politicians is that The most fundamental question in politics that people ask about a politician or movement is not whether they like the movement, not whether they like the politician It's where the politician likes them First thing people intuit. is not if they like you, it's if you like them. And when you're talking about entrusting people with power, governmental power, institutional power The question of whether you are safe and you will be seen by these people who want to wield power over you is a very, very, very fundamental question. And so part of, I think a healthy politics is making people feel that If you win Even if you all don't agree on everything, you're not and taken care of. And if a political candidate declares, I will not go on that show because I disagree with him. What that person is saying is that whole audience, I don't like you. Exactly the point you're making, it's a bizarre way to declare. that listener. Oh that person doesn't like me. they won't even come talk to the person. So I've not been on Rogan. I've pitched my books to him a few times, but he's not had beond. But I've been on some of these other shows, right? And one of the things I actually mentioned in this piece is that I was surprised when I go on shows like Andrew Schultz's Flaggrant or Lex Friedman show. This is on my abundance book tour. So this was a year ago basically in March of twenty twenty five April twenty twenty five, maybe. And They would spend time on air on the show. talalking to me and complaining about how They were being called like this right wing broosphere, but they had tried to get Kamala Harris. They had tried to get major Democrats on and none of them would come on. Yeah. The thing was not that this collection of podcasts or this part of the culture had decided like they wouldn't talk to Democrats. it is that to a first approximation, that the Democrats decided they wouldn't talk to them Yeah Anyone, I'll be fair, we almost had Kamla on and then we were talking to her people and I was like, well, if she comes on, we have to talk about this, and we have to talk about this, we have to talk about the we have talk about our life And people who are running the show are afraid and they weren't on the right. They were' say whatever you want to say, no one can like it's just get out there But they're so hyper vigilant on the left about protecting persona. Well this goes back to what I was saying a little bit earlier when I was saying that what the right came to understand under Trump is that attention is a volume game. Yeah. And just being in front of people is the single most valuable thing you can do. whereereas on the left At least up till now, you see someone like Gin Newson beginning to shift their positioning on this, but Kamala Harris very much, she would much rather not get attention than get den get attention.. She did not want to take risks. But you're right, partart of that is because the left will be like, o, she said this bad thing. now we hate her. Can't wait to eat themselves. That happens on the right too How much do they care? All the time, L look at this stuff going on with Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and JD Vance and Vvek Rama Swami, right I mean, there was a mob of people at the Capitol who were chanting hang Mike Pence at a certain point. The idea that the right will not come for you, Marjorie Tayor Green broke with Donald Trump, the death threats she got for that, the right will come for you. The right has begun selecting for personality type I mean, on the one hand, it offers a lot of feelalty to Donald Trump himself, or at least until recently when some people have beun breaking Beyond that is sort of like Yeah, come on. And JD Vance and Ted Cruz and these other people who weren't always like this, but they've created these political personas that are much more edgelord oriented and want controversy because they want to be in front of you. You know, the left is much more Institutional and people who rise up through institutions, they don't w want to be talked to by HR. Yeah. The left had like a kind of personality type of, I don't want to be called in the principal's office. And the right was like cutting school. Yeah Eactly. doing donuts in the park. Exactly. Tell me about Hassan Piker. I was unaware of him until I read this article. This is what this piece was actually about, and I'm just gonna say this for the record because it annoys me so much that this keeps happening So there are two headlines on this piece that people saw. One was Asan Piker is not the enemy. The other is there is no liberal Joe Rogan And by the end of the day, was there was no liiberal Joe Rogan or this is why there's no a liberaloeogganan or whatever. He changed it because, you know, the backlush No, we write a bunch of headlines. There's an automatic popularity testing tool and the winner wins out. and Joe Rogan is a better known name than Han Piker. Yeah yeah. Okay Hisan Pier is a streamer. He is kind of like a leftist, more kind of Marxist politics, very sort of anti colonialist, very anti Zionist And as he has gotten bigger, a fight had emerged. in the Democratic Party. about talking to a son Piker The particular fight I got involved in here was at Third Way, which is a centrist Democratic group. They want the Democratic Party to be more moderate They had written a piece about how Son Piker is an ani Semite and we need to draw a line against the anti Semites. And that had sort of not gone anywhere. Then there was a Michigan Senate race where the more progressive candidate in the race Abduul El Saed did a rally with the Son Piker And then he got denounced by the other candidates in the race for doing that. And there was this big blow up about Piker and whether people like him should be platformed. And this is sort of why I wrote this piece. Look, I got a lot of disagreements with Piker politically. I think he's wrong on a bunch of things. There are other things I think he's right on. You made a crazy statement that the Nazis and the current Israeli administration are the same thing He once said being a liberal Zionist is like being a liberal Nazi, which as I write in the piece, I think is a pretty repugnant thing to say. He's defended that statement as saying he's just against ethnoationalism. But what made the Nazis the Nazis was not that they were an ethnational state. There are a lot of ethnoationalist states. industrialized extermination of the Jews across Europe So I don't love that comment. but I don't think we should focus on the worst or most crude things people say. Piker is a streamer. He sits on air for six to ten hours a day. You're going to find things that people shouldnt have said in that. And he's also somebody has called out anti Semitism in a lot of different formats. He's a Bernie Sanders supporter. You know, he's talked about John Osf as a good presidential candidate for twenty twenty eight. So I think somebody who's repeatedly promoting Jewish Americans for the presidency, that's going be a weird kind of Jew hatred. Yeah. And there are two points I wanted to make about this One was simply that I think that there is an organized effort and I'm Jewish and I have a lot of very now conflicted feelings about Israel, but deep feelings about Israel. I wanted to be on a different path and it's on very very deeply. But so long as Israel is on this path Anti Zionism is going to be a very, very, very potent political force. And the effort among some Jewish groups to conflate it with anti Semitism is going to be very dangerous because if you keep telling people that if they oppose The Jewish state They oppose Jewish people. Eventually, they're going to believe you. And you're making the anti Semit job a lot easier So that's one dimension. And by the way, I know a lot of Jewish anti Zionists, particularly young ones. Like this has been a big thing in New York was where Mam Dan's been running and a lot of conflicts in the Jewish community have emerged. I've done a lot of writing about this. So it's not my first time coming to this issue. I've done a lot of reporting about Israel and Palestine and part since october seventh, and I've gone there. The other thing that I want to say about this is Talking to people is not a reward for their agreement I'm not saying you cannot draw lines. But in the way attention actually works now, when people have earned it, Piker has attention. that is not like up to third way to grant him or not grant him. The decision of whether or not you will talk to him, I mean, you can decide who you think you'll have a productive conversation with. Yeah The idea that people should be off limits for conversation because I get criticized of this like your platform Yeah, your platform The G great cuts through all other arguments. I don't think it is a good way to think about politics in a diverse society. And I think you should be very, very careful with it You can come up with a list of shitty things a lot of people said And you also need to open up space in your own mind that them being in conversation with you and with others is how they will change. and also maybe how you will change and how you will understand them better. And I do believe like going back to the moral imagination of what it means to live in a democracy, Part of it is being open to these complex and difficult conversations with each other. I talk to a lot of people on the right and it's an ongoing thing on my sh that I really try to have people on the right on who I truly disagree with, right? Not like never Trumpers, but people who are foundational theorists of Trumpism And they do want an ethnational state and they want things that I find genuinely Appalling Yeah And I still want to understand them. I want to make myself more understood to them or at least try when I think we can have a productive conversation. I think that there is a genuine challenge we are all going to face. If we want the country to work, whichich is how do we live here with each other? You know, I've been thinking a lot about Obama recently and Obama in two thousand eight, and Obama before that inzero four, when he rises up with his famous speech about there not being a red and blue America, and all of the hold forward in people To be in this country and to be in politics in this country could feel profoundly different than it did then. And now it all looks quaint, right? You the divisions of two thousand four versus the divisions of twenty twenty six are gentle But it didn't feel that way though And I think one of the difficult things is that Obama won and his win had a lot of dimensions to it. But two things that I think Many people felt it promised. Was one a kind of political reconciliation And to a kind of racial reconciliation. And instead, both things got worse. And I don't think it's his fault. I think he tried very, very, very hard. But the politics became more divided. The Republican Party under Mitch McConnell opposed him relentlessly and eventually went to Donald Trump as their answer to him and a much more kind of ethnonationalist form of politics. And in terms of racial reconciliation, people got very, very frustrated on the left at the lack of progress and was further into a much more aggressive posture and that kind of became wokeness. And on the right, you had a sort of counter response of berarism and more white identity politics. And the reason I bring all this up is that I think a genuinely unsolved question after Obama that nobody has really taken up in a serious way is If we have stopped believing in that Then we have walled ourselves off from one something a lot of people really want. You look at polling even now there's Nework Times poll. Political division is people's second biggest problem in the country. People don't like this. No. But nobody really believes they have an answer to it. Politics can become very choked up When there is something people want they no longer believe it is possible to get. It turns into apathy, cynicism, radicalism. When I've been talking on here about the moral imagination and the habits of what it takes to live, in a complex multiethnic Highly polarized highly disagreeable democracy with each other A democracy where not even everybody really agrees on the fundamentals of democracy agrees on like the legitimacy of elections. We are facing a challenge that is really, really hard. We have come up with Answers to it even a willingness to entertain answers to it because I actually think that the experience of watching The hope of Obamaism turn into the kind of exhaustion of the Democratic Party by twenty sixteen. and the rise of Trump after that, it created for anybody to talk like that, it sounds almost naive now And yet We actually still do need to figure that out. I mean, we need to figure out issues of material plenty and the economy and the cost of living and economic power and a million other things that we all do know how to talk about. and that you know Bernie Sanders or an AOC or An Eise Fk can talk about all the time in their own different ways. We actually do have to have some vision for how you make countountry work at a time when People can feel that It is at the risk of rupture. Yeah. How effective Is cancellation as a tactic? That's a complicated question It is effective if you can do it and you can hold to it. But for a lot of people, particularly people who wield attention to their own political bases, it can actually be the opposite. I mean, I would say Tucker Carlson is more influential today than when he was pushed off of Fox News Donald Trump was banned from every social media platform. and in tremendous legal jeopardy and now he's Pident again Nick Fuentes was pushed off of everything and remains blocked from many things, but has risen influence in the shadows. I think that one thing that happened and this was, I think a stronger reality on the left, although the right has its versions of it too, is that the left had more power prior to Trump winning a second term over a lot of The institutions of American life. And so it wanted to wield power inside those institutions to push people out of them. We get you out of here. We get you banned on X or Instagram or whatever, you're gone. And it turned out you weren't gone. It turned out you created a shadow network. Naomi Klein, the leftist writer and theorist has a great book on this called Dppelganger. It created a sort of shadow world of Steve Bannons and Fuentes thingsings happening outside the sighteline of mainstream politics. and now that shadow politics has become mainstream politics I think just recognizing that you can agree or disagree with particular instances of it, and I have different feelings on different efforts here and im different people here. But as a politics, it failed Donald Trump is president. Yeah Yeah. The results are in. Tucker Carlson is, I think the number one podcast on Spotify like many weeks. They get failed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All And I want to talk about, you give an example of this in the article, which is William F. Buckley and Eldridge Cleaver. Tell us about William F. Oh, it's so great. So William F Buckley is the founder of a conservative magazine called National Review And Buckley is, I think considered the most important conservative coalition builder intellectual of the back half the twentieth century. This was highly entertaining. Highly Watching him debate somebody is worth going. He's got this very patrician and unusual accent. Yeah. And he had a show that I believe was on PBS called Fireing Life. And you might think that on firing line, like William F. Buckley just had on other conservatives or mainstream liberals, but no, you can go and it's on YouTube and it is amazing to watch He has on Eldridge Cleaver, among others from the Black Panthers. And I learned about this reading this biography of Buckley that is great by Sam Tannenhouse. It's such a wonderful episode of Fire Ling to watch because basically Buckley sits down introduces Cleaver And iss like, so under the way you see the world, would you support somebody assassinating Richard Nixon And Cleaver, a Black Panther, basically says, Well, you kill Nixon. they just have another peig behind him. So I'm sure it would accomplish anything. You would also have to assassinate, he says I wouldn't try to stop him. then you know, I know from the biography that Cleaver came over to William F. Buckley's home a couple times for drinks. and Buckley is not endorsing Cleaver who could not possibly be further from Buckley's arch conservative politics, but there is this willingness to have the engagement. Yeah ye And without the engagement being some kind of stamp of approval. And I think we have gotten into a position where we almost like don't believe that's true. You were talking earlier, Dax about platforming and the concept of platforming And I'm not saying it's not a real concept. I actually do believe the question of who I choose to have on my show, who you choose to have on your show is meaningful. But I think we have taken the logic of that, which is one insight about programming a show among many and made it into something bigger than it should be. because one, we don't decide we of any political movement, who is in the public discourse And too, there can be tremendous things learned by moving Outside of that, I mean, that Buckley Cleaver show has hundreds of thousands of views, gets watched Tod because it is kind of an amazing document. the logic of platforming Which is a very social media logic. It's the logic of blocking of muting, right? I think a lot of our politics is now formed by our experience on social and algorithmic media and the way people treat each other there and what it means to win or lose there And it has overwhelmed other logics of communication, of conversation One thing I like about the Buckley Cleaver thing is that sometimes people can treat conversation as purely instrumental, right? How am I going to change X's politics if I won't talk to X as if everybody is simply an object of intellectual charity upon which you should act One thing I like about that is that Bckcy cleaver thing is not about persuasion at all, right? It is literally just a conversation to see what will happen when two very, very different perspectives come into a room together. And you're writing here to write those people out of acceptable political discourse is to back yourself into a shrinking, sanitized corner of the public fehere We had Adam Mosier on recently, his's CEO of Instagram. Instagram ye Yeah. You know, he was just saying that what the internet did One point zero was it made everyveryone a publisher So there's no gatekeepers. Everyone has the ability to be a publisher And that's one huge crazy revolution that we're feeling the effects of. And that AI will be a new paradigm where everyone can be a producer. So like right now, to make a movie, to make a show, to make, know there's a lot of capital required for that, but that soon will be gone as well. So it's like we've had these really fascinating moments that on the surface are very democratizing and maybe good in some ways. And then what we're seeing now and yeah, you call it the algorithmic media is it's a marketplace now. There's no gatekeepers. There's no one deciding. It is a full blown market and anyone can rise to the top. But let me complicate that in one way. And I know Adam and I like Adam, although I have my issues with Instagram, but one thing it isn't pure marketplace, a flat marketplace becausecause the decisions of the people who run these marketplaces make matter And I'll give an example. We're in this moment and you guys do a great job of this, where the view is that every podcast has to be video and every video podcast has be cut up into all these clips. And there's a clips economy where the atomic unit of algorithmic media is vertical video clips, horizontal in some places. And Instagram has an internal structure that they will not recommend a real of over three minutes to a new audience. So what they haveve done is create a marketplace for things that are short. If you have a thought or a conversation or an exchange, and I'm not the world's most concise speaker, so I have a lot of those that takes more than three minutes to play itself out, you are algorithmically punished for that Yeah, but you just slide over to YouTube or you slide over to the shadow thing. We can't say that Instagram is a gatekeeper because we just pointed out all these people that got kicked off. Oh yeah I'm making a different point. I'm not quite making a point about gatekeepers. I am making a point about Different periods of attention, different platforms They reward different things and they still do have power operating in certain ways. And I think one thing that genuinely worries me about The direction I see us going is towards less and less and less and less cont Yeah sure or complexity or nuance. Yeah, we started this as sort of an antidote to the late night talk show. Not that there's any problems with that, but it's a five minute thing. You go, you do your thing, you leave. This was supposed to be the opposite of that. and we're sort of circling back around to that being what it is. two minute clips, five minute clips, and I hate it. She hates it. I have a different Tell me about your point of view. I mean, I'm struggling it myself because I have the show.' a clent show which hopefully you all. Yeah, yeah. It's doing fantastic. I'm grateful people are tuning in. but it is such a project of context. What I think is so beautiful about these conversations is the unfolding and the slight and nuanced energetic movements between people. And first you're making kind of one point about gatekeepers, and then you're kind of like, well, no, that's a good point. Then you're back a little bit. And I'm not saying that the clips we put up as we're doing more of these and other people do many more than we do are bad. They're not. We just had a clip from that abundance one with my Cuthor Dark Thompson talking about what Texas gets right about building housing that California and other places don't. and it's gone viral on Instagram and it's doing great. It always feels to me like doing a kind of violence to this project where it's a project built on the belief that listening to people in complex conversation over an extended period of time gives you this sense of them, this sort of energetic experience of them, an intellectual experience of them, an emotional experience of them And now we're going to like chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop into the things that give you like an instant sensation. Yeah You have enough time to establish character and intention and motive in the long form. And that's great. But here's the way I look at it is I feel like it weirdly parallels the whole point of your article, which is Reverse engineer So I was on a panel this year for the Golden Globes aboutbout podcast And the person kind of asked the why is there no Rogan. Everyone's like,, yeah I don't know why they're so big. And I'm like, guys, it's so obvious. We're not addressing the reality of this, which is You have a huge group of men who in twenty twenty, when we talked, the first third of our conversation was about me too when we interviewed you six years ago. And so you have a whole legion of young men that at that moment in time were being told by some pundits in some shows that somehow young boys were like inherently defective. We have a boy problem. These are headlines. We have a boy problem. We have a male problem So you have this whole group of kids who have just assumed the sins of the boss who was a pig and the powerful man who exploited people. They haven't entered the workplace. They haven't even been on a date. They haven't sexually assaulted anyone. and they're hearing from a lot of the popular me outlets that there's something defective about them. And then lo and behold, some guys show up and they're like, we're not terrible. We're not ashamed of who we are. And you're shocked that they migrated over that. This is not a huge mystery. You tell people you don't like them and they will believe you. Yes. So there's no fucking big question about why they're huge. It's quite obvious. So I go, let me just say, I didn't want to do video, but I would love for young men to hear me I think I'm a good example for young men. Where are young men at They're on YouTube. I can't pretend they're on audio only. That's not a reality. So if I want to reach young men, I got to go where they listen. So I have to be on YouTube if I care about talking to young men. And guess what? A lot of people are only going to consume clips We have not lost our audio only listeners. It's the exact same since we went to video. It's like we already had our audio. They like it that way. They're getting it that way. And then now hopefully we'll have a whole group of people that I got to go to where they're going to consume it. And guess what? Yes, if you see a clip of our show on Instagram, it's not as good as the whole show, but it is better than nothing if that gets to the young booy scrolling So I just think people are being completely unrealistic, naive, and not pragmatic about this whole approach. It's like another version of, well, we want it our way. No. How were they doing it? How No you don't have to. It's just annoying. It changes the fundamental point of what this was originally, which is we used to say, you can't talk to someone for an hour and a half, two hours and leave and not respect them in some way, understand them in some way, like them. Yeah It's hard not like people when you talk going back to the conversation you were just talking about with the Black pants. It's like the reason they hung out is because they spend time together and you start liking each other. And that is what we need. We need people to start liking people who don't agree with us. And clips do not do that They do not give you that. You have one or two minutes and you're not going to start liking someone because of it, especially because we pick clips that are supposed to get people emotional in some way. There's like four things in all this I feel like we we them together. Yeah. I'm sort of where both of you are on this. I've been in media a long time. started a political blog when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz in two thousand. o wasas it? two thousand three? two thousand three, I think So I've like seen many iterations of this now And You don't get to choose where the media goes. Look, I think the movement towards short algorithmically pushed vertical video is bad for people's minds. I think that we are fracturing and weakening our capacities for attention in a way that is bad for us. I worry about my kids. I worry about myself, I worry about my friends. I'm like a big believer in more of the John Heyight kinds of ways of thinking about All this Are you guys personal friends? Becauseuse I always say Jonathan Heite, but you went John H. Jay Hite JJ J man J. I wouldn't tell you what I really call. I've known John a long time. We R eight that email. Youn't believe what his name on Fortnite. Look, I don't like where it's going. and I think that the literal experience of being on these platforms and flicking, flicking, flicking, having your mind trained to want to be hit with an attentional shock so fast. likeike I genuinely believe it's bad for us I don't get to fucking decide if TikTok is a thing. worike nobody came and asked my permission. Yeah. And so I'm a little bit on that where you are. But the other thing that I do want to say, like I really, really agree that the way the toxic masculinity discussion went. ended up being itself quite toxic and pushing people away and One of the things that I always thought was really interesting And some of the figures on the right or who later got coded is right who rose in that period, you're sort of Jordan Peterson and some of them before you got to the real nonoxious stuff of Andrew Tate, was that there was a lot of talk about virtue And a lot of talk about myth and religion And what brought people to at least some of these figures, and I mean, Peterson got big on Rogan in part was again, going back to this thing we were talking about at the very beginning, the human desire for self improvement and self cultivation is a very, very, very powerful drive and I think people feel of all genders and types right now relatively adrift in a society that is aside from wanting you to make money pretty neutral about how you live here life. And by the way, this is not how politics used to be, not how liberalism used to be. Liberalism used to be very much built on ideas about self cultivation and freedom not as the ability to do whatever you want, but as an output of self mastery, right? Freedom came. you look at how the founders talked about it. Freedom was something you had as you began to master the self and its drives and its passions So you have all these young men and just men in general who are looking for some guidance on how to live. Even before we get into the question of feeling rejected by some part, the people who are offering that guidance And we're doing so enthusiastically and in a way that was more yoked to the drives and culture of young men. I'm a middle aged man now, but I was a young man once. Yeah, it's very Broy because that's just a word you're using to describe men. Bys And boys. I think that one thing that I want to see come back into the politics I am nearer to and more associated with And believe in more It is actually just like a dialogue about virtue, a belief that the way we cultivate ourselves, particularly in this same moment of AI And social adriftness is really, really, really important. that the question of what it means to be a human being is more fundamental than what it means to have good politics even. And I think if you are talking to people's desire to be a good Not just a good. be a kind of like a great human being They are going to listen to you more when you begin to connect into other things like politics But if you sort of Push that away or if they feel pushed away by you They will never listen to you on anything else in part because you are not listening to them. Stay tuned for more armchair experts If you dare This episode is sponsored by Better Help So Monica, here's something that really stuck with me. 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So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with maail bodies on the same level as I am? They never are. To learn how to put AI to work for people Visit serviceNow. com Well, look, there's hard and fast data on this. There's any segment of our society that has declined the worst in the last fifteen years. It's young men, educationally, employment wise. And I think if it were any other group, there'd be an all hands on deck situation. And so you have a guy like Jordan Peterson, who I personally can't stand. I mean, he is very entertaining to watch argue. He's an incredible debater. But what he really was offering was young men. He had a program for what it meant to be a man and to have virtue. He was wowing them with his debate, but he had something to offer, not one I agreed with, but that was a big component of his popularity Be he was addressing young men. This is you should be a provider. All these calls to action to better yourself. He was there to do it and no one else was. Yeah. And so I think it's not just about, I mean, YouTube and all that is very, very important. and being in the place that people actually are is very, very important seeeeing people as full people is very important. and being fundamentally oriented, being compassionate towards their desires is very, very important And I think that was just something that a different part of the political sphere Or what eventually became a different part of the political sphere is was offering more often to young men. And that's a political failure. It's a failure on a lot of levels, but it's a political failure too. I don't think people should be surprised by the results they got from that. And I always like want to say this to my friends on my side. Donald Trump is a genuinely remarkable historic figure. Oh He is a figure who is himself a rupture in history And also, he is a very, very, very vulnerable political figure and always has been We want again in twenty twenty four because inflation had been really high the year before and because Joe Biden was in his eighties and not in his sixties. and letting two hundred fifty thousand immigrants in a month. And by the way, that reflected some of this like not being willing to listen to people who you thought had bad politics, but part of Trump's weakness is that he is a virtuess person? Yeah, he has no real ideas about anything. I think he has ideas, but people know he's kind of a jerk They know he says things are untrue all the time. He's got a lot of personal force to him But he's not at any level a good man. He's not been good to his wives. He's not been to the people he disagrees with. beliefs? I think Trump has actually held a couple real beliefs, particularly on trade and immigration for a very, very, very long timeiod.nteresting. Since the eighties, he hass felt the way he feels about trade since it was Japan, not China. Like one of my critiques of Tump He doesn't update what he thinks about anything. He's got like the same views he had in nineteen eighty seven Tue, whichich is a weird thing about him. But you can go back to a playboy interview where he's talking about what he wants to do do to Karg Island in the eighties or nineties. I mean I talked about it on my show. A lot of, I think understanding him in Iran has to do with the fact that he his views formed about Iran during the hostage crisis seventy nine. Yeah. But the thing that it's interesting because on the right, if you look at its culture, there's a lot of talk about virtues, There's JD Vance converting to Catholicism and now writing a book on it At the very top of it, the people are very corrupt, they're often very cruel. Trump doesn't read. There's not a deep push for personal cultivation or high standard behavior. And to me both that is a shame because you want more character in your leaders, but it's also a kind of political opportunity because I think we know this hunger exists out there And people are looking for leaders and media figures and other places that help them think through it and answer it. One of the things that helped the right was that it had found this language and it found this audience and one of the things that is hurting the right right now is that its actual leader does not embody this way of living. Trump is a successful man, but not a good one. And that creates a lot of opportunity for people who are willing to take some of what the left has done well and then integrate some of what it has not. But again, what you or a lot of people would see as an Achilles for him, weirdly If you're among a group that has been told you're a piece of shit Or at least you perceive that you're being told you're toxic in a piece of shit. And you see a man who is actually toxic in a piece of shit win and dominate despite that and get rich and have his family and have all that Guess what? that's pretty fucking appeing becausecause you're being told your piece of shit. Well, okay, this guy represents I could have a lot Despite how you feel about me, of course that's appealing. I'm not arguing. But I think that's why you really want to create an answer not a mirror. One of my biggest worries is that when I look at the Democratic field right now I think there's a lot of desire for somebody who is able to mirror parts of Trump. Democrats want to fight her. I don't see many people offering an answer to the question Trump ose the question you're asking, which is like if he can get this far doing This, this rich being that way, this powerful being that way Why shouldn't I be that way too? And calling people to their higher selves is tough work Yeah I think workworth Again, that's also framing it as it provokes an entitlement and I'm maybe arguing it's a sab It's like, I'm a toxic piece of shit. No one wants me in this world. Well, this guy's going fuck you. I don't give a shit if you think that way about me. I'm still going win comforting It's not even necessarily that he induces some entitlement. I think and you really saw this, I think, after the assassination attempt in twenty twenty four I think there's a sense that Trump for a moment, at least embodied a form of aggressive, ambitious, hypermasculinity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that watching him rise from the ashes of his own career and then in that moment of danger put up his bloodied fist. It was a moment when I saw a lot of people think, oh, there's something different about this figure. And what I'm saying is the weakness of him is that he can't actually fulfill , Trump is a very unpopular president. they're probably going to lose him mid tterms quite badly. He's gotten us in a very unpopular war with Iran. There's a lot going wrong. Oh yeah,. You see his shortcomings. The answer to, I think, what is being looked for there, and by the way, not just for men, we've been talking about young men here, but I think it's a more societal thing. We could talk about this. I think AI is going to supercharge his question of what it means to be human I think the desire for a politics that will answer this, not by mirroring it on the other side, but by offering some different vision of like how it might feel to be in this country and what it might mean to be a human being worthy of respect and esteem I just think that's on the table. A new role model, a new version of masculinity. It can still be someone masculine. I'll do it. I'll do it. Okay This is a unique opportunity for me to pressure test this kind of theory I've been mlling over on hikes. I'm embarrassed that I can't remember the author of the book. You're so good at that. Everyone you talk about, you reference, they deserve the credit. I can't think of his name, but I read a book about kind of a different framing of the political parties. You'll know it, I bet. And it was basically saying, instead of thinking about Democrats and Republicans and libertarians as issues driven parties, it's better to think of them as Their worldview, which is the conservative worldview is life is a battle between law and order and barbarism And on the left, the worldview is life is a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. And the libertarians, I can't even sum up right now I've forgotten. But I love that framing. Every time I see one of these dust ups, it seems quite evident to me that that's what's going on. You even look at the fissure on the left right now over Israel and Palestine, which you cover in this piece. The left's like, what the fuck do we do? Which oppressed person do we decide as the oppressors? There's this huge tension on the left Here's my current thought on this. I accept that. I think that's a really good breakdown of the political parties. What I think is they form those identities when those worldviews were very, very pertinent I think they're vestigial at this point I think that In the seventies, law and order was a big fucking issue. I mean, the homicide rate what was happening in New York, every newspaper, like you had a huge crime epidemic. That has just steadily fallen and fallen and fallen. This place has gotten safer and safer and safer. and the logic behind the worldview is kind of eroding. And I would argue on the left as well. in nineteen sixty, there were a ton of oppressed people. gay people could not get married. There was redlining. There were real issues and we've made great progress. It's not done. I understand there's still racism, but you'd be insane to pretend it hasn't improved dramatically. So I'm wondering as I see the driving force erode from the identity of both of these parties that were formed in different that don't feel as relevant anymore. I'm noticing more and more our battles are becoming more and more hypothetical. When I see with the fights that are raging right now, it's not even something that's happened. it's something that could happen because we don't really even have those issues in the same way we did when these parties were formed and the ideology was cemented. What do you think of that as a theory I think it probably explains more about social media than it does about politics. So when I think about the fights that are live in politics right now, which is more of the world I'm in. Trump's immigration policy, which is a very real policy, which is affecting real people's lives, The deportations, ice and custom and borders patrolled in the streets. that has led people to risk their lives. I mean, it's led to American citizens being shot. There's a real fight over something that is not just kind of oppressed and oppressor that has more to do with National character, actually, I think to something of you're saying about law and order, I think the thing that is very salient about that on both sides is feelings of disorder people begin to associate Democrats Even though crime was not that high with the feeling of disorder, disorder in LA with like tent encampments and SF with people in the streets, And then Trump beginning to create domestic disturbances by sending in armed troops and people in masks created a new kind of disorder, and that became unpopular. Quickly, he's cracking down with this hypothetical notion that these illegal immigrants are creating lots of crime There's no data for that. In fact, there's data in the opposite direction. So it's a hypothetical fear of what these people are That might be. I take that as an explanation. And my frustration with that whole thing is like, and I could be Ryan and pull everyone. But what feels very obvious was Everyone kind of wanted them to stop letting two hundred fifty thousand people a month in And everyone didn't want them to kick everyone out that's already here. And there's no option for us could have stopped at sealing the border. Y And he would have been a hereular. He's got a lot of things where he could have just not gone as far as he did and his issues at least would be at sixty percent in the polls. I think the big thing I was going to say, although I actually think you're correct up on the immigration side that is right is that if you look at a lot of the leaders, I just don't think the left and the right break down so much on those lines So you know you just think about George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden. I mean, these people are in our lifetime, It's not a million years ago pololitics are just more complicated and one of the things that I believe about good politicians is that they are able to contain a thing and then a certain amount of the things opposite. at the same time So Obama is a particular master of this. It's almost like a verbal tick where he would start telling you the right wing position of a thing and what its good points were before he would then tell you his version of the thing. Like go read the Audacity of Hope, It all has that structure. orr you think about his famous speech on race. Obama in his own background, in his own person, is somebody who has the racial contradictions of America inside of himself and is holding both of them and both narratives at the same time. And the leftft is not just about oppressed and oppressed. One of the good critiques of maybe not the left, but the Democratic Party is that it sure has a lot of people who are the winners in this society. The Democratic Party is another the party of college educated Americans and overwhelmingly wins people with postgrad degrees. To saying you're the party of the oppressed donon't win working class Americans. I don't think it's a party of the Oress. I think it's a party dedicated to protecting the oppress. But see I think that the contradiction of it is that oftentimes it's not. One of the critiques of it is that it perpetuates itself. I mean, abundance the book I wrote last year, one of the big arguments of that book, is that one reason liberal governance often fails is that it has become so wrapped around its own dominance of institutions and it listens so much to its own procedures and its own lawyers that it can't get anything done because ineffective. It is the party of the institutions and the institutions don't work. So it then has to explain away all the institutional failures. And it is very hard to have both moral imagination and be the party who is like Well, you know, we just can't get any of this done. And so that's a dynamic on the left. And on the right, the question of is the right conservative or revolutionary or counterrevolutionary? The right is in a lot of flux. Donald Trump himself was such a disrupt figure in it now there's this Trump Tucker Carlson break that is happening. You know, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson are very different figures now. I think that the parties are very, very, very unsettled Yeah, yeah, there's no cohesion. That's why I don't think you can look at issues because they keep flopping you. I had Bench up here on my show, and I was wondering if his book, Lions and Scavenger is part of what's in mind there. I don't know if that's the one you I haven't read that. One of the arguments he's making in that book, I remember having him on the show, and I found that book really weird because I was reading and thinking He's not naming who he's talking about, Who are the lions, who are the scavengers. I remember at some point In our interview reading him these JD Vance quotes As again Vance is scavenger And it became clear as I was talking to Shapiro At least a big part of why he was writing that book was his feeling The right that was emerging was not his right. It wasn't the right that was trying to conserve reaganism, that it was something else and it was a white identity politics, and that Tucker Carlson, in a way was his like mental foil. So there is just like a very Unsettled dimension What great politicians do and I think that we don't always credit them for this, is they are able to balance forces inside of themselves that don't seem reconcilable, not by necessarily even compromising, but just by kind of absorbing Parts of both points. know, Bill Clinton and welfare reform. I'm not fan of welfare reform the way it was actually done, but Clinton's recognition that people were angry at the Democratic Party because they felt that it was not asking for enough responsibility from the people that it wanted to help. That was a very potent part of his politics. and is part of why he won voters that Democrats no longer win. And I think selected against a lot of social and algorithm mia to be able to do what some of these people are able to do, which is to have a view And at the same time, there is space in that view for the vision of the other side and particularly the moral structure of the other side. So I recognize that sounds abstract, but I think if you go through a lot of different issues that have been a lot of the big fights of our era, the people who do it well are the people who are able to kind of hold both things at the same time Okay, on abundance, which has been out for a year now. I loved I was reading something out of there. This was a year ago, probably when it came out. You made this really kind of elegant and efficient. argument that in my opinion, is really necessary, which is this kind of move to just Clinch down, scale back and consumerism. and just again, the lack of reality of that position and why we need to I'm probably I can see by your mind. I'm trying to think it through the You' very to remember maybe I've fucked it all up. But I just thought you were very frank about how we need to get ourselves out of these issues. Abundance is weirdly a bad word for some group inside of certain Lanings That's why I loved Bill Gates' book on the ennvironment. He's like, lookook, we have to develop. It's the fastest way to education and low infant mortality rate. L we just have to do that And we got to figure out how to do it. You took kind of a radical view of how to help us handle housing, a lot of different issues. and it's kind of gotten some steam. So just what's the kind of main theme? You kind of have curiosity about some conflict. Yes. Aun is among the reasons that it has both done well and been controversial is that it is fundamentally a critique of why liberals often fail when they govern And I'm a Californian and I was in California for much of the writing of the book. You know, the fundamental problem in California is that it doesn't build. It is too hard to build things here. It is too hard to build homes. One of the reason I'm in California right now and talking to you all is I'm hosting a governor's forum in a couple of days and it'll probably out by the time this comes out You know, it's about housing. and I have the top five Democrats in the race talking about, look, Governor Newsom and the California legislature have passed dozens of housing bills over the past couple of years. And the rate of housing production hasn't gone up. And as a result, in LA in San Francisco in San Jose and many places in this state, it is extremely hard. to say be a firefighter And be able to afford a home in the city that you protect from burning down.. There is a simple reason that is true and is that we don't build enough homes. And when you look into why, it is that within the innards of liberal governance, we have made it too hard to do things and too easy to stop things. And this affects clean energy. It is very, very hard to site and build enough clean energy to meet either the decarbonization goals we have on the left We can't build public transportation in this state. Can you ride the high speed rail in California yet? Like no. It's laughable. And so how do you create a liberalism that actually builds? a liberalism that delivers what it promises? It is able to solve problems not just through redistribution, the redistribution is important but also through the creation of more things in the real world It's really important. Now there is, as you say, steam and heat around that and one of the places where it is like attracted a lot of internal argument in the Democratic coalition is this argument that well the realm is corporations is a corporate power Cpperations corporate power often are A huge problem. PC money, the AI packs that are now trying to nuke any candidate who wants to regulate AI in any serious way. cororporate money is a real problem in politics. It was a big part of my first book actually. And also The realities that you're building things Things get built by corporations. And the money gets lent by coror. And so you need a way to be aligning. All these different institutions in society from the government to the corporations, to the unions, to the interest groups, to all these different things. The question is like, what are you trying to create more of? and how do you get there? As opposed to sort of categorizing yourself as I'm pro corporation or ant corporation or pro union or anti union. I've been a member of unions. I want to make it much easier to unionize. I want there to be higher union density in this country. I am pretty far on the position of we need more union power That doesn't mean unions never make decisions I disagree with. And also unions often have very different views. The building trades in California have been really bad actors on housing The carpenters unions have been really good actors on housing So the unions are not one thing, the corporations are not one thing, but I do think there can be a tendency in politics to want to say like, these are my allies and I'm on their side and these are my enemies and I'm against them But partly when you're talking about giant groups of institutions or people, you know, what we talk about is Nimb' not in my backyard. I don't want to see us build mixed use apartment buildings in bigig cir. Right There are places we should not build over. And also near mass transit in LA and San Francisco, it should be easyest shit to put up a tall building that people can live in. Yeah. And so even there there are times when it is a very valuable thing to try to block things, but we need to be able to act. And the fact of the matter is that the reality that Texas is more able to build clean energy Even though it itss politics are pretty anti clean energy. O that they've got the best housing story in America. Yeah like that should be problematic. That st. thing we worry about and try to learn some lessons from. Okay, so the last thing I want to ask you about is something that's burbling up right now. and this will be my complaint of this state. They have gotten enough votes. It seems that they're going to put this billionaire net worth tax on the ballot. So this will tax all billionaires five percent of all their assets. We just ran this experiment. This to me is so short sighted and so lacks pragmatism, which is we did a millionaire's tax on housing, right? We defined a certain echelon of houses that you'd pay an extra amount of tax on in hopes of getting more tax revenue All it succeeded in doing was killing velocity of those home sales. We're never resetting the tax base. We've lost way more money by trying to get that extra bit of money. And I just cannot foresee how on earth you're going to tell everyone that owns a company here. because again, if you're not thinking it through, you're like, oh yeah, that guy has one billion dollars of cash Give me five percent of it billionaire owns stock in a company. So are you saying sell five percent of your holdings of your company? Do you think that's what's going to happen That's not going to happen. That person's going to bounce. Everyone's going to fucking bounce. The amount of money is going to get lost by this extra grab to me, Is a little emblematic of the lack of pragmatism or reverse engineering reality that we are virtuous and we have great thoughts, but it doesn't feel realistic. So I've done some reporting on this. I've talked to the union that has put this on the ballot. I've talked to some of the tax experts about it. I have complicated feelings about it for some of the reasons that you describeed. So let me frame the issue in a slightly broader way. Trump and the Republicans passed a bill that across the country, but in California also completely guts Medicaid. So there is, I believe it's a multibillion dollar hole in the Medicaid budget coming up in California. This is true for a lot of states You're going to see millions of people kicked off of the rollles of health insurance and nobody really has an answer to it So one of the big healthca unions in California has pushed this one time five percent wealth tax on the richest Californians as a kind of way of plugging this hole. You tax them this money and you plug the ho Wealth taxes have some Big problems. I amm a believer and I want to say this super clear. I just had an episode on my show that was great with his tax expert Ray Madoff. on how do you bring more of the assets of the rich into the taxable world becausecause basically you're Elon Musk Gu Jeff Bezos, your wealth is tied up in unrealized company stock. R. And what you can do is borrow against it to fund your life, which is not that expensive compared to how much money you have. And then one day you die and the rules under which it gets passed down are incredibly advantageous. And so it actually really never gets taxed in the way that like my income or a normal person's income gets taxed because it's never really treated as income. This is insanely unfair. L the very, very rich, not the surgeons, but the startup founders evading taxes. We had this leak of tax documents a couple of years ago, the guy went to jail for it, but we saw that Bezos takes the child tax credit because his taxid income was like eighty thousand dollars or under eighty thousand dollars. Aese people are making like a couple dollars a year because all of this compensation is not being treated as income. Okay. Yeah. So we really, really, really need to fix that. I want to say publicly, I agree with it. Yeah. The question of the wealth tax in California is, I think two big things. One is, can you administer it effectively? No way peopleeople disagree, but it's hard and how much of the paintings worth. And to what degree do you then drive people who start things out of California? Now the union is doing this will say, hey, it's a one time tax to do a one time thing. It's not that much of their money. The thing is and I think this is legitimate. These billionaires are like If people begin to realize you could just put a gallet measure on to tax our wealth. And by the way, the way the thing is constructed, it would be a tax on anybody who's living here now. So moving after the thing passes would not hide your assets from the tax. That would end up in court. I looked into this a bit and we have done taxation this way before and it is held up I don't know what would happen this time. I'm not a tax law expert. You could have Ray out for somebody like that on to do that. I don't think you can retroactively tax somebody. We've done it before and it's worked. I was surprised to find that we have done that before and. But I will say that the answer they will give you is that is a tried and tested approach to doing this. I can't adjudicate that particular question.. But even if you could, the question of would you push those people now to Texas, to New York, to Colorado, to Miami to somewhere else, where they are not under this threat of ballot based taxation every time there's a budget hoold to plug is a very real one. The thing I would like to see is national level tax reform does this in a much firer and more coherent way and then does not have the issue of like pushingact billionaires around to different states. Does anyone think it's going be a net game? I mean, the people pushing it think that. And they have tax experts on them. I mean, you could have somebody like Emmanuel Saz or Dave Zuckman on here and they would give you the case for it. I have also, however, talked to very progressive tax experts who think it won't work and it's a bad idea. And so what I will say is even among people who are values aligned with this tax and spend all of their time thinking about how to tax rich people more, there is a lot of debate over whether not this tax is well structured and doing it in one state is a good idea. Yeah I guess time will tell if it passes, but I think there'll be a lot less tax revenue if that passes. If you begin to push, if you really do push billionaires out of the state, then you will over time get like a laafrker phenomena where you have reduced the total tax f revenue So the question of whether or not people leave because of the tax And again, there's disagreement on this question. It's not that much of their money. It's over five years. You could do one percent of your wealth over five years. I mean, if these people are doing investments in any reasonable way, they're making more of that on interest or on returns. But if you feel that in California, you're going to get a very specific bad deal, you will not get in Florida, or even that you will not get in New York. We're not doing this in New York. Right Yeah ye, ye. Or you not get in Connecticut or whatever. anywhere anywere Califoria. And that's why you don't see Gavin Newson behind this I've had Gav Newim on my show. We talked about wealth taxes. he is pro them nationally, but does not want this one in California because as a guy responsible for making sure California has enough revenue, he does not feel in the long run, this would be good for California. biggest economy in the world It's hard to leave the country It is not hard No to move to Austin. No exactly. I have Aust in Tennessee. I choose to be a resident here and I'm happy to pay the taxes. to a point if you tell me that after I've already paid half of it, which I was happy to give away, that I now need to give The shit I saved another half of that. I like Tennessee. I'll be there. I think everyone has a limit. I think there are limits. The thing the union behind this will say is like, hey, it's a one time thing. It's a one time thing. And the thing is people don't believe it's one time thing. Once you show that the move works, the feeling is the move will be repeated. Yeah. And it probably will. And so like if their taxary is right and you can do it in this retroactive way, well that actually increases the incentive to move before somebody does that to you again I don't know how many would move. On some level, I think the point of being rich is to not have to live in places you don't want to live as much as the place you do w to live. But money's a sickness. You don't think rationally. I've met people who have a counter on their phone to make sure they are spending enough days in Florida. Y. So they are taxed in Florida as opposed to in New York. That's right. And so I wouldn't do that. Oh and then I just w to say out loud as well I don't mind that this place already has the highest taxes across the board because you have to acknowledge that you cannot start Google elsewere I can't ever make the amount of money I ended up making in Michigan. and I should have to pay for that. If I could have stayed in Michigan and made that amount of money, I can't and all of these companies cannot. So you do have to pay for that. You have to pay for what is creating Eically give back to the place that gave you. creates great wealth and that should come with a price tag. So I am in favor of that, but this to me just seems insanely short sighted, and I do think you'll see a massive migration out of here. I mean, there's already been a pretty significant migration and it wasn't even that bad. I have met people with the kinds of wealth that would be targeted under this tax. And one of the things that I think even many of them understand is that The tax code as it exists is really, really, really unfair in their favor. This is the Warren Buffet speech. Warren Buffet kind of thing. The key thing I think to understand is that income is taxed at a very high level and assets are not. And by the way, what's even more unfair about it is that the wealth most people have which is a home does get texted. Right? There is a straightforward tax on a home that is paid year on year. I mean, California's taxes are your property tax. Yeah. But if you sell it, yourre capital gains twenty. Yeah. This C gains, what you can do with shares of a company You were able to do so many weird tricks and then eventually pass things on that it just kind of forever can protect too much from being seen as what it is, which is income. And so it creates this push for people to move all their compensation out of salary and inter stock, And even many of the people who benefited from it said to me like this isn't fair. The estate tax it's not even a thing anymore. We've gone from having a couple hundred thousand filings on it every year to in the low thousands because we have just made it so full of holes. And we really, really, really need like a comprehensive national restructuring of the tax code, not because billionaires are bad.. Not because rich people are immoral, but just because we should have fundamental fairness across society in the way different forms of income are treated. And this to me is part of where I think like being able to balance a couple of things, you know in politics at once are important There is a tremendous engine that benefits America. in the amount of corporate ingenuity we have. It is good for America that we are as innovative as we are and we want to keep that going. You know, if you want to imagine universal child care, In New York, it is only possible because so many people made so much money in New York. Th those two things are actually quite linked. But the fact that it is not bad to have enterprise does not mean that it is good. to have the kinds of dynastic wealth we're now seeing does not mean that any way you hide your money from the government is actually a moral thing to do. I think the right way to think about the politics here is both to be certainly on the left. I wish there was more appreciation for how much benefit can come from corporate ingenuity. There's also corporate malfeasance, but there is real benefit from corporations doing great work. Like if we're going to layer this whole country in solar panels, it's going to be corporations doing that. But at the same time to have let the fucking tax code Become blind So the primary ways wealth, particularly mass wealth is now being made and how rich the very richest people have gotten. Ag, not the Beverly Hill sururgeon, but the Bezos Musk who's closing in on a trillion dollars.. I don't even think we know how to conceive of that kind of wealth now. right. And now they're using that money very aggressively politically to buy things like Twitter and then use it more politically to move into elections because citizens United cate these huge loopholes for money. We really, really need to do a rebalancing. where we're just trying to make A more stable and fair playing field for everybody, not to punish people, but just to create a fundamental sense that society works in a transparent and fair fashion. I think the side that can crack that code will actually have cracked something pretty big.. Yeah. Well, Azra, you're so smart. I love that you are a terrible student. I just what? two point two grade point graduating in high school it. I was not good. It's a long story, but I really had a lot of trouble in school. If I could have made it better by caring, I would have made it better. I did not enjoy it. Okay, Well that's for people who And then his fucking dad's a man. Yeah, my f' an immigrant competition. It was not a thrilling period in the household for me. So I love em poor students. That was the David Letterman schcholarship I don't know if you know I did't know that. Yeah, I think he had his scholarship standing in like Muny, Indiana. and it was for average students ' he was a shitty student. It was not It's great. It's like let's let this person. Yeah Let's this person. Yeah. So as a fellow two point two great pointo average high school graduate, I see you. I appreciate you. I love when you're on. I can't wait for you to come back. It's great to see you both. Oh, and by abundance Stay tuned for the fact check It' R the partyZ It feels like it's Friday. It does. I have Friday energy. Yesring Yeah, me too. We had a busy work week. We did. We're ending it now with this fact check We had a busy week and what I'm reminded of is We used to do much harder weeks I'm feeling my age We did eight in a week at times. Yeah. We've done eight plus some armchair anonymous. We might even gotten to ten in a week. Yeah, I'm sure we have ool This was pretty hefty. Yeah, but do you think you're getting weaker? I'm getting a little weaker. Yeah, probably But you're also much younger than me twenty years. Well, age is just a number as we know to some extent Speaking of aging You had a cough attack in the middle of an episode we just recorded. And then I started to have a cough attack. I don't know if you noticed. I heard you do like a sneeze. No, there was two sneezes And coughing and cough attacks And then I really got in my head. Well, I did cough earlier this morning, but I didig get in my head that, o, this is so psychosomatic Oh, sure, contontagious like yawns. Exactly like ywns. A Yawn, Y A W N the motion you make with your mouth not. Young, notot young Is that how it's spelled? Yeah I see saying urine. Yeah, urine is yum. Oh, I've heard you say that. I didn't You never put together that was your own? No, I thought there was just something you said We Josh and I, Josh Nathan, my favorite person to write with when I was at the ground leag and I had a sketch we tried to get on stage for a whole year To the point where we would have a showcase at the end of the year for like whatever executives would come Yeah Yeah, kindind of like a professional showcase and you got to pick your own. So Josh and I were like Let's do it because she's not going to put it in the show. And it was two old men in the south sitting Creek and they were obsessed with nuts Oh, surel like peanuts. Cashews, walnuts, No That is a jacketet nut And then it somehow involved who they were opening up and one guy had to admit to the other guy that He was using your bathroom and I I donon't know what came over me, but I saw your wife's pantyhoe and Oh my God. I decided in that moment to filter my ywn. Oh wow. There' this ho comoming clean about having filtered his yarns. It's about secrets being revealed. Yeah through a pantyhoe that he found in his friend's house, but they were also eating a tremendous amount of different nuts. and they kept going That is a j nut. Oh wow. And we had dumb hats on, a bunch of mustaches and stuff. And guess what? It worked. It worked you have an agent? No, I mean like it was people laughed Yeah, it was a very successful sketch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was fun because I did love our director It's not like I didn't love her, but she was like She to admit it. It kind of worked. She just g us a kind of worked. Good work. Yeah and we got to do it once. Well that's really c So for years I used to say that is a decadent Nut out of nowhere and no one really knowew where that came from. And Yon is also an outgrowth of that. It's really funny how these tiny little things about your personality and no one's like that com What is he doing? I thought it was a word for it. I am now I'm learning all this. Oh. Like you think I don't listen to you, but I do and I then I It's just upside down a little bit.side down Do you ever talk to him still? Not enough Not enough for the amount of love and respect and admiration I have for him. Yeah, not enough. He moved away. He became a professor. Oh. Yeah.. He just like regrouped, I think somewhere in Orange County. Oh cool Professor of Nuts of decadent nuts, only decadent nuts. whichich you'll find that we thought most nuts were pretty decad. They are decad. They are actually. they are. They're rich. What's your favorite nuts It would be a toss up. U. The Marcona almond. You do love a Marcona. Mostly and we just had a chef on, Digning name. previous interview where I coughed Talk about texture. What I love about a Marcona almond is you can put it between your molars and crack it perfectly in half. And then the inside is the most decadent You love the smoothness. Felties. Sede. Its just so soft. It's very smooth. It's almost pornographic What the tenderness of the inside of that Now feels when you rub your tongue out. I've done it. I agree it's very soft Do you think it's sexual It's smooth It's so smooth and tender. but it's not really tender because you have to crunch into it. No, the inside when it pops open in half. Yeah, that freshly revealed inner nut. Yeah is It's very smooth. But I don't I still Classified as tender because like it's still hard. Of course it's hard. It' it's just This it's soft on the insidees. I do love that I do love that nut What's your favorite night Um go on. But truly If calories weren't a thing whichich they're not on your birthday. See, that's another one of these things. Yeah callback that no one knows about. Yeah.. U a macadamian. Oh that's your face.. Yeah. I mean it's like eating a stick of butter and crunch and sweet They're so good. Do you like a Macadamian I don't dislike it, but I don't think about them. me Right. Unless you're in Hawai. That was mine Macadamian? Yeah. What or not, right? Y You ever filter your yarn through a panio? Okay, well mine is pretty basic I'll up if you say one There's one n, I'll throw if you say Paint nut No but I can't eat peanuts. It's not a peanut. I know But if you said walnuts? I love walnuts. That's not what I was say I do love walnuts. They're great, but if that was your favorite nut, I would say I eat those the most because I cook I have some dishes that require walnuts. if I'm being honest with myself and you I probably consume walnuts the most of any nut. Okay. Okay. Okay. L A wana is so good in a salad. It's great in a salad. It is So good. But it's got the opposite thing that a Marcono almond has in that it's like a it's aly atrophied testicle. No scrot up. This is so convoluted and nubby and gross Look the texture is gnarly. No. You would agree. It looks like a brain. That's why they thought they were good for your brain. Well, they are good for your brain. 'causeuse they look like a brain? No, 'cause they have good stuff in there. Okay. I don't think to me Uh looks or feels like a testicle ' it's still, unless your testicles are like extremely hard. Freeze dried testicles. there. Stop. okay,op. rightight? Now you understand. No, I don't w want to do this. I love wnuts. Okay, pistachios are probably my favor You don't mind the wor eating Exactly. I don't love that part, but I love the taste. St buy a bag of pre shelled? I will, but they're much better shelled. They taste better shelled with the shell. Yeah. Pistachios or u I also like a raw cashew I don't like it when they're like smoked or salted or the way it's hard to find a raw cashew. I do like a cashew In fact, that was one of the nuts in the scat that got a lot of attention. Cashew nut ye. The only thing I'll complain about a cashew is when you get going on a bunch of ' them. It can become a cud What do you mean? I know my ass in your mouth. How's Jew bazzillion pounds of grass in their mouth and they form it into a cud. It's like a it's like a big blob of paste., you're ruining so many. Y. and think Cashews in particular have that tendency to like you've had a bunch ofem and you're like, o, I gota wash I gotta brush my teeth or swallow a lot of water or something. No don't get that experience that.. You' probably not eating them at the velocity th. No, I don't. I eat them one by one. Sure. That's healthy. Yeah. I'll grab a handful and just pop them. Yeah. People do that. That's very Indulgent? No Aroant? No, it's kind of a sign of something like older men do. Yeah. They like, you know, have like a ha what notot. have not what the sketch was about. Oh yeah Yeahes men older men love their nuts. They'll carry around you'll see older men with a little sack of nuts. They always have nuts. I can't wait for that phase of my life where I'm like gettingver. 'cause where are mine? Where's my nuts Cment So pivot Yeah yesterday, I played Maja Oh yeah, with who? Neighborhood. Oh the neighborhood ones. Yeah, neighborhood gals. And Did you get neighborhood gossip? I do get really good gossip, but not about the neighborhood. Not about the neighborhood. No. Dart it. But I do get really good gossip. Really? Yeah. In our industry? Yeah. Well, in our industry and industries. Oh It's fun. you know, they're new friends. Yeah. And new friends are interesting when you're older. How so Well, it's also fun because so Rachel was there, one of my oldest friends. Rachel is fantastic. Okay. Good time Charlie to the Max. Oh yeah. And this is a shout out. If you live in LA. And you want to learn Majong? You really should reach out to Rachel, Rachel Field. Oh You really put her on black. No, she. Is she now teaching? Yeah, she should she's been playing since she was seven. Oh wow. Her mom is a big majong player. Her mom plays tournaments and stuff. likeike she's very, very Skilled and good and a great teacher. Okay. So and Ajon's really hot right now. So if you're wanting to learn, We've noticed it's a bit gendered. We were just having a conversation about Mjon. Yeahah. I know a lot of women that are super into Magjon. I don't know any dudes that are into. I know a couple and I think you would actually really like it. Really? Yeah this There' strategies, but there's also like, yeah, you would like it and you feel reallyie H U But Winning is fun. Winning is fun. It just is I wonder earmark that Okay. let's earark that. But anyway, so reach out to Rachel, if you want to learn Majong. I highly recommend her. But she was there and she's an old friend, one of my oldest LA friends and then I have these new friends. You're presenting the new you. Right. But then there's this old lady there. Yeah, knows everything. Yeah, she knows everything. the dome sketches and the des. Yeah. So it's good. It kind of keeps you in your place. You can't like really put on a chameleon personality because like I was telling I shouldn't Well, yeah, I was telling. Can I just point out, I love how many times you decide I shouldn't say this. and then I watch And the time gets shorter and shorter, by the way It's just gonna to be that I'm gonna I'm going to be able to detect it in an eyebrow raise and then you're going motor on. but it it does get shorter and shorter. Well, how am I gonna and then you just go, yeah, I'm just gonna yeah. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. Oh So it seems like most times you do. Well, you don't know. Okay. And sometimes it's to protect others, sometometimes it's to protect myself. That's right. Normally if it's to protect others, I it Well not always. Yeah, yeah yeah I know. It's really tricky. It's hard. It's hard its probably hard to be my friend. You don't know And exciting. You just never Some friends like it and then some friends I don't think like it. Well, you know, we spent like a whole fact check basically talking about Anna the other day. and I almost texted her like, hey, like we We talked about you a lot on the fact check. But I didn't tell her. didn it? I know it will get back to her because she has family members listen. she doesn't herself listen rude. Yeah. and u But I'm just gonna let her find out on her own. Okay. Yeah. Anyww, so I was telling them Thou something I did that I was proud of Okay. And it felt kind of weird to sayay in front of Rachel for some reason. It was not like you were braay.. No, no, no I put myself out there. Okay in a way that I don't normally do. Sexionally, like romantically? Romantically. Okay. o, I want to know. I'll tell you. Okay. I don't I'll just leave it at put myself out there sort of romantic. Okay o. And I was proud of myself. But when I was telling them, it was it's like with a different voice than if I was just telling Rachel. Right. Yeah. I felt kind of like caught in between Fraud am Am I the old me or the new me? Yeah. The crisis of identity. Yeah. I think did she did you then discuss it with Rachel likeike, hey did that seem? I mean more like the new girlfriends are like Oh God, I love this. This is so exciting. I love this look for you. Yeah, basically. And Rachel's like, I'm so proud of you. Light. She understands the weight of it. Yes, the journey. But she also probably doesn't wna be like, Monica. Yeah, yeah. This is great. Yeah. You know, in front of my new friends. put you on blast trying to make a good friend with your new friends. Exactly Is there a specific friend in the group that you most want the approval of? No they're both friend they're both just cool. Okay and and smart and They're suucccessful ladies. They're successful ladies. D. I love it.' lady. Stay tuned for more armchair experts. If you dare Okay, on games. Yes. So we went last night up to Mess Hall. Fun. And you know what's interesting about Messll? First of all, I love it. Yeah. Let's just start there. I love Mess Hall But it is a really hard restaurant to gauge how many people are going to be there because of and I didn't think of this until we arrived They get Greek theater traff. sameame with little Doms. o. So people come to see a show at the Greek theater and they're there early because Parking's a nightmare and driving sem and they said tell let's have dinner. So we pulled up and like the parking lot was full where they were having to move ten cars to get one car off. What is going on? Yeah. Get in there. nototice a lot of people are in cowboy gear Oh, this is great. So immediately, Oh, there's a show of the Greek and it's country Western Cry Western. sit down next to a group of people. I kind of brought this on myself. Okay. I say Are you guys going to the Greek? and they're like, Yeahah and it's like, For thirty somethings, mixed gender, probably couples and then an older lady. Oh o. And I'm like You guys went to the Greek and they're like, Oh, yeah yeah. And I go, yeah, and you seem to have a bit of a country and western theme is And they're like, Ohh yeah, it's and so I didn'tcognize the name. Yeah. You got to listen to him. But was it Russell Dickerson? Yes, Russell Dickerson. You know Russell Dickerson? I do not. mee either. But everyone there was fun. I bet he's great They're also playing country on the on the high fight. They're keeping in. Yeah I like that. I was like, o, the managerers paying attention. I love that It was all great. We were sitting outside. So we're playing spades as a family. And we've had a couple nice interactions with this table right next to us And Lincoln's my partner. She has gone nail And I have probably six cards left And I have Joker low, two high, two L, Qeen. nine, eight, six left Sades. All spades. left. And pretty. Yes. I'm in the middle of like And then the old lady leans over and she goes Your dad has all spades. Oh no. And no Oh and oh no, they don't know how you get. Well, no, this is great. You're already where my family is, which makes me think maybe I am worse than I know. But so I just laugh. And then the younger guy goes Oh, so and so they make a joke about her drinking And then I look at her in the eyes. This is the older one, you see? Yeah, the older one. And then I look at her in the eyes and I just immediately muscle memory I know this woman so well. You've been there. I've been there a million times. I'm in Michigan. one of the ladies is too hammered and I can't control her All I literally did was just clock, Oh right, that's that person. That's who we're dealing with. Okay. And then We continue on and then someone says Oh, I hope that didn't ruin anything. What are you guys playing? And I go, spades And then they know it's space. So well, the younger people, two of the people that were younger knew. so they knew that basically just completely blew the whole you we should just throw it in. Yeah. And now they're kind of apologizing more. And then and then Our older friend is like, now she's kind of getting more involved, whatever. Oh. I was super I thought it was super nice. Again, this is back to the last fact check. It is. but we're leaving, we were done. We were playing after the meal and we paid the bill and then that hand was over and then we packed it up and left. Okay. And then we got in the car and there was this little moment between the ladies And they were like, I don't know if one of the girls said it first or Kristin said it first. Are you a little mad back there, dad And I go, no, I wasn't mad. I just I just kind of clocked who who I was dealing with. Yeah And then one of them said Are you sure I didn't see a nostril flare? Yeah. Yeah. You can't really help it. It's okay. And I'm like, I'm so sincere in my heart. I know when I'm mad at somebody. and I know when I feel aggressive and defensive. L I was just really nicer. If I'm mad at someone, I let them know. No I generally don't hide it. being mean to her. No, I was totally nice to her. Yeah. And if I really was angry at her, I would have made a kind of cutting joke Right? Right. I'd have been like, oh, you might want to stop at that table and I would llicit a high stakes thing that she could have rined, right? Like I would have found a way to burn her in a joking way. if I was angry. Right. Beuse that's kind of what I'll do, right? If a guy is getting a little aggressive, I'll make a joke that's more aggressive But I didn't do anything that. I didn'ticice. nor did I feel And I was like Gys, I know you saw what you saw and I don't want to gaslight anybody, but I know in my chest when I'm angry. Yeah. And I wasn't. It was more just acknowledgement. But person is present. Mbe like three seconds before you did the right thing that you like That's what they're claiming that they saw the nostrils flare up when I when she outed my head like I can like, I know what laugh you did. M. It's a specific class. So anyways. Whatever, that sucks. That is annoying. I I wasn't even I thought it was funny because again, I had what I had. It wasn't going to impact anything. I was going win the next like seven anyways It's like. It's more like the You were clearly playing a game. Yeah. No one ever wants to know what someone has. And then on top of it, the game was spades, which is hilarious. It's also just like mind your own business. I mean, there's a lot here that is annoying objectively. Yeah. And I was just more like, o right, this person's in the state of mine. Yeah. intontxication wise where they thought that was going to land really big. I get it. She saw cute little girls. She said your dad. Yeah. She thought These girls are going to love this. She doesn't even know who there's partners. She probably thinks it's me We're all against each other.. And so good pick on the big guy that you should do So I wasn't I understood at all. I just was like What what come what does this lady do next? Yeah, that's No it's coming That's a lot. That's exhausting. That's That's frustrated. I would be frustrated. and I would probably I knew immediately how embarrassed the thirty year olds were. Yeah. I could see them pan the heart And my heart went straight to them. So I was just like, was no big deal. you know, like I was laughing off for their benefit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so fun to play games at restaurants. This is kind of like the family hack. Yeah, you guys play a lot of We bring M, Not Majan. We bring Rummy cubes. Yeah, Oh fun. spades. Yeah. And I think the best thing we've best parenting decision we ever made in our lives was forcing them to learn how to play spades. And you need four, like this is the issue with spades. This is always the issue. You need four people who know how. I know, I God, I wish there was a two person spades that was just as invigorating There's not that many guysames. Theres play game. You haven't really been playing much, huh? I play when my parents were here, just taught my parents. remember? Oh, yeah, I do. That was really fun. probably the last time I played. I don't get to play that often again because We need four. U two person games, there aren't as many good ones. There just aren't Sometimes Jess and I play solitaire together as a team Two M Euchre pretty fun. Okay It's pretty funy, Aaron and I have played a couple million hands of two hand Euuchre, but it's a little bit it ends up being back and forth, right? Like if you deal, you kind of have a bigger advantage R And then there's a lot of just that's your turn. you're going to get points in my turn with exceptions but. yeah Yeah. well, Yeah Yeah I haven't played in a while. I would love to play soon Summer's upon us. Are you so excited? I'm starting to think a lot about summer. Me too It's starting to feel summery here. I went on a night walk last night with Rachel after Sy coyotes No I did tell her though I was like, be prepared for some coyotes. I said, Do we have to do? You just keep walking and you act confident and you don't run away like I did. Yeah. But we didn't see any.. And and it was it was like the sun was going down, but it was like eight. Oh, it was so nice. And I've grilled Twice now. Oh, you did it again I'm becoming a grill master times It only took you. Yeah. take some people I know it's gonna take me a long time, but I'm becoming like I have a an oath to myself to get really good at it So far I'm just doing chicken. You don't love steak, right? I love steak. You do. I do love steak. You haven't wanted to cook a steak yet I do want to, but I'm not ready. Okay They just smells so good. When they're cooking, even if you don't even eat it, if you just get to cook it I know so good. But wantna cook I wantna make a steak salad. Okay. Max makes steak salads in the summer and now I wan tona make st. Summertime steak salads. Yeah And, um So I'm going to do that, but I'm not ready yet. I'm going I'm going do chicken a couple more times. Okay. I don't think I have a good Do you Do you ever do chicken? I thought you were about to say. Do you ever microwave your chicken? He you ever I used to cook chicken. U. I used to cook a lot of wings Yeah. I ha'tin. I haven't cooked chicken in a long time. and support everyone with my steak journey. but I ate steak all growing up. Yeah. you did. And you may remember about eight years ago, I was like, what am I missing? Yeah? I went to the store and I got every cut And then I ate all of them And then I discovered, oh I do love steak if it's ribeye. Yeah, you like ribeyes. I'm obsessed with a ribeye. Yeah Since I've been cooking those, that's all like I cook hamburgers or I cook Spashburgers I thought about it, I thought about it when I was grilling, I was like,, Dax hasn't made smmashburgers in a long time or he has and he hasn't invited me over. I have really fallen off. I made them over fourth of July in Nashville. Um, But yeah, I've fallen off and that's unacceptable. I should ish should do a big smmash burger Soon. I would love that. Okay. So good. Yeah anyy burger that you eat three or four of is a good sign. So good. Anyway M. I think I'm doing too much marinade. Okay And I'd like to figure out a better situation. Back off a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. becauseuse it's too flavorful like the m. No no, it's just like, I think it's too wet. Okay on the grill. Yeah and all that sugar burns Yeah and it takes it up really. Yeah, do you have a good device to clean it off? Yeah bought