Developing Intuition and Embodied Wisdom

Ezra Kline so hot right now Oh no Did you ever expect to be referred to as an unlikely thirst trap I did not, and I try to ignore that it's happening It also has this funny quality, some of this coverage of how now it's like I took off my glasses and grew a beard and it's very she's all that. It's like, oh, like, maybe' Al always look the same to me Unlikely Thirst trarap feels like the most backhanded insult or compliment. It's like a roschock test for whether or not you feel good about yourself I don't know what way that's that is that supposed to be a nice thing? Unlikely thirst trap I don't When you are profiled, it is not supposed to be a nice thing. Okay, so you'll take un likely first. I think that's like also an important thing to know about just like the whole genre profiling It's never supposed to be a totally nice thing Usually not supposed to be a totally mean thing It's trying to create energy That's interesting. If There was a rumor in that you'd had to adjust your lighting on your podcast are set to make you look less attractive because it was distracting from the real substance of the It is a notue rumor. Wow It's going be an even weirder thing to discuss like here while you're sitting there like three times as ripped in front of me as we talk about whether or not I'm hot Uh I know it's I thought that that was an interesting profile, but yeah How do you feel about having a mini celebrity moment like that? you try to focus on the world And I mean that really seriously. I think that if you start to see yourself in the third person It is very, very dangerous for doing good work. It's like the input of good work. is independence of mind And for me, particularly, it's a lot of time spent by myself reading books, thinking about things Once the world' idea of view gets into your head, It is poison And I think that's true, by the way, for you know, people get profiled or have many, you know, moments. I it's also just Naturally true for everybody now who has social media profiles and has this kind of constant like front stage. that they keep up I always tell people who like come to me for advice and in journalism or who are having some kind of in the press that you really have to be intentionable You have to be intentional maintaining as much of a backstage as you can And when I see people who aren't having a pop, like destroying their backstage I worry about them. The streamers worry me like in an almost paternalistic way. I watch the amount of their lives they're putting online, they're putting in front of a camera Little is left for them. And psychologically, I think it is going to do a lot of people a lot of damage Everyone feels uncomfortable watching that. You ever read Super Sad Tue Love Story by Gary Steingart? No, It's an amazing, amazing book. It is as prophetic a book on this moment as anybody has ever done. It was probably done ten, twenty ten, fifteen years ago All and everything in it. It's like it's all about a world of streamers and sort of America coming apart people having Everything around them like raidated in public and everybody in it is looks smaxing. There's a whole thing about how books smell bad. Like it's sort of like dec cllasset to have physical books, So at least we haven't done that yet. But you can really have these moments right now where you realize we have built the dystopia We have done the thing the sci fi writers warned us against doing just in all directions all at once And it's just hope it turns out Well this time How do you think about protecting the backstage Keep a lot of time quiet I Got to very much Did you read a Lina Dunm's new book Great, Fameick. And she talks a bunch about the way Everything creates more of itself. Everything you do creates more of itself. And so if you get on different circuits, it just It eats you eats the time. So for me, it's like the way I think about my work Most weeks, I bring out three things. I bring out two podcast episodes and one call And the week is just very much organized around that And I just moreore and more and more try to cut out like everything that is not directly feeding into one of those three pieces of work or is not my children, my family and deep friendships or like personal Caren time, right? And that's already a lot. like even as I say those fiveish things to you. I feel' pretty f tired. Yeah Yeah, and the fact that I guess One shortcut is to just make all of the other stuff part of the main thing turn all of the private life into the public life thinkink of Mary Harrington talks about a digital hijab that she wears where she covers up lot of the parts of her that she doesn't want. Oh, that's great the world to see. A digital That's a great coinage. She was this thing. She told this story. She finished her first marathon, a half marathon, something, some race. She's into running And she took her selfie at the end because that's what you do, right? I'm proud of this thing. And she went to post it and she sort of saw this Universe split. which was How much of this for me and how much of this is for the internet and Yeah, I mean It is very easy to be distracted from doing work. I'm curious how you handle this because you have a tougher job on this than I do. So my work I can define it much more tightly. You know, it's primarily about politics, current affairs, geopolitics, I bring in some things I care about like meditation but for the most part is not natural. I have to choose to let it colonize the things that are closer to my core Yours, like the topics you touch on the show They're very personal. So anything can become content for you It's been a purposeful I think I'm quite By disposition, I'm quite a private person. My personal life's always remained very private, and that's been something that a bunch of friends. gave me advice on early on, and I'm really glad that I followed it. Once you open that door, I think it's very difficult to reverse it. People are interested in who are you dating now? and what does this mean? And who's he aligning himself with? As soon as you open that door contin the snowball continues to roll U, mostively for me I think almost purposeully trying to be as boring as possible with your personal life Great prophylactic L people just get very, very But they'll move on to what is more easily consumable. for as long as destiny exists. I am not going to be top of the list. Like there was a period where Destiny's private life was just made the most public thing over and over and over again and Hassan will get in bother over and over and over and over again. or Nick Fuentes will come through or Hubman will come through. You know, there's a lot of people that are like easier access than me who I think my biggest defense purposefully making my private life very boring and not really talking about it all that much. and people just move on And that for me is like I'm completely fine by that as my strategy. The other thing that I think is important is not exposing yourself to the algorithms all that much And so I don't tweet I we've started putting clips up on Instagram And even doing a little bit more of that, I feel Pull of it. the want of it So I'm a big fan of all these mid century media theorists like Marshall McLluan and Nil Postman and Walter Oong. and All of them basically, their main idea is that every medium changes the user. So we think what we're doing when we, you know, turn on the television or turn on X or turn on Instagram or read a book for that matter is we are consuming we are choosing and we can make better worse decisions, right? We can read better worse people, watch better worse shows. And Their whole view is no, it is always using and changing you. There's a great Marshall McLohan quote where he says I'll butchered a little bit from memory, but he says Content of a medium. is the juicy steak throw and to distract. The watchdog of the mind. And his point is that Well you're sitting there getting mad at a tweet. What's actually happening is that your sense O how ideas should feel and look. how long they should be Wh you're sitting there looking at Instagram Your sense of what everything should look like, it's all changing and As it changes you change with it and you and particularly with these algorithms that create, you constant rankings and another super sad true love story thing. It creates a constant feeling of Well, shouldn't I Shn't I be competing here too And what you can do and what I've seen a lot of people do is they get into local maximums long term minimums or degradations where you're doing a lot to be as Eitive on, say Twitter or exX as you can be and you don't realize it in the long run like the trader making on that influence is the way you think it's degrading. And so been long term work is going to be worse. Yeah And in the long run, you know It's hard to maintain a It's hard to maint a career where you have to be interesting over an extended period of time. And I think people who are trying to do that need to be very, very, very intentional in the same way that like an athlete needs to be very intentional about, you know, avoiding injury and burn out getting too captured by one one bike homele being sucked into one particular medium. This is great story. I think it's Dostevsky, or Nietzse on The first part of their career, they were writing by hand and the second part of their career, they started writing on typewriter. and explain the difference between the first and the second. They say the sentences got shorter and punchier and their thoughts occurred in a different way. Their writing style changed because of the medium. and that's them just being facilitated by a new output medium Not even absorbing things in a different manner. So when you've got it going both ways, this bid directional thing I'm going to be influenced by what I see on this particular platform Yeah, it's going to be deranging. So one thing that I think about And I've never quite been able to come up with a clean enough theory to start using about but we can work it out here together. I think we need a better politics of attention And one of the ideas that influenced me, which came from an academic paper that I don't remember the authors to cite, but is to think about attention good or a collective resource And attention then is subject to tragedy of the Commons problems. So the tragedy of the Commons probleblem is when you know everybody has access to a grazing field And so then becomes very quickly a problem where people begin trying to grae as much of the field they can. and then everybody has to do more and soon enough you've exhausted this public good. And I think our attention is like that And we only have so much of it. And we have it as a collective, not just individuals And we are being like attention fracked and the more competition there is for our attention The more aggressive everybody is about trying to get it. I don't know if you get on as many political emails and text message, you know things as I do er God bless. Yeahah They have gotten so Loud. They come with all these siren emojis now and it's always like, it's Chuck Schumer and Ezra. I'm on my knees begging it right? E is like the end of the world. Everything is an emergency You know, a lot of these places are like, I always joke that X is like gain a function research for takes. It's just everybody competing take like a normal until you can turn it into something that has viral contagion. And then occasionally they do it too well and it escapes contagion and destroys their life I like that's how X works and delete the effect is our collective attention ritable is short, it's changing. The people we want are changing to again, just stay on the medium sink for a minute, there's a great it's not a controversy. It's a Neil Postman argument that he makes in amusing ourselves to death, which is always one of my books I recommend to people And he says that people often say to him that how can you say television? because this guy's writing, you know, around television? track, like look at Sesame Street And he says, I don't worry about the Drek on television. I worry about Sesame Street because what Sesame Street is doing is teaching kids that education should actually be entertainment He said the trash on television is no problem. Everybody knows it's trash. It's where you're subtly changing masquerading as something else. It's where you're changing your expectations for what everything else should be. So I mean right now we're moving into a period in politics where I think in order to be a successful politician, you have to be attentionally capable. You have to be able to earn attention in the way you didn't have to before. Zon Mamani, Sencer Pratt, Graam Platinner, Donald Trump, right? You can do it from different James Telorico You can do it in better or worse ways Can't be. in a competitive race any longer is a somewhat boring talker who's just really good Delliver on the policy. I understand the fundamental economics of this. I'm great with my constituents. How you needa? How are things going for Kir Starmer? I mean, yeah, a man that is the equivalent of a haam sandwich. Did you see this tweet? It's at the very bottom. Did you see that tweet earlier on today? Very very bottom, it's hiding down there. I did, yes. I saw both of this. Yeah. so I had to double check the Democrats is the Democrats official proper because I' a Democratic national committee.orct. Yeah. and I'm like Is this a parody account? It's got to be. The Democrats tweet. fred up ready to go, it's time to take back Texas. Steven Miller replies and says the Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate The Democrats reply, Shut up, you ugly fuck. And that reached At least fifty million people,s like three hundred thousand likes. I get it, the he did it first thing of pointing from one side to the other. Maybe this is just my sort of British properness coming through the thought that A the online Rresentative account for one of the parties saying, shhut up, you ugly fuck. Is that not absurd? Like that feels kind of deranged to me. It is deranged. but this is a little bit what I mean about the whole medum, right? Because one thing that does, one thing that every movement like this does, and I take Donald Trump but honestly as a bit of a first mover here, is it is shifting people's sense of what political communication should sound like So I mean, that is the outcome, I would say, of a long process of learning. that if you like a Normal sober. olid Boring or inststitution, boring. Boring. Barack Obama is I'm a big Barack Obama fan That guy's Twitter account. notot great. Not sexy enough, Not sexy enough. No. And so this is way everything changes. Like it actually it changes the expectations. It changes the people and it changes what can succeed And so, you know, sometimes maybe they, I mean, I guess you can ask the Democrats out the Democrats if they went too far or not mayaybe they maybe to them it's a huge success but the this is what I mean when you have to think about these mediums You have to think about the attention, you have to think about the norms, you have to think about the discourse as a kind of public good. What that is doing Like that right there's a tragedy of the Cments problem. It's very hard for at the Democrats to be noticed There's a huge cacophony of voices. The voices that get noticed are extreme. So here's a thing. You noticed them. We are here talking about at the Democrats rejoinder to Stephen Miller. I can't remember the last time that I talked about at the Democrats. So they probably just succeeded. Its about you. I was a you the comments L likeike Stehven Mill, the way, a deputy chief of staff to the president is tweeting about James Telor Rico, who whatever else you want to say about Telico, an incredibly decent person, an incredibly decent man in politics who tries very hard to treat people on both sides of respect Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, his reaction to Ken Paxton by the way. It wasn't even like Taler Rica won the prrimary last night. It was or a couple nights ago, It was Paxton. was First transgender candidate Again, the, you know, I don't want to sit here and just like tut tut and chinstroke. Is it degradation of the entire. Sounds so uncool. I can even feel my own sort of cringeomet meter of being out of touch occurring as we're talking about it.. Like what do mean Both within a couple of years of each other. Are you really going to be the Foty duddyiess finger wagging people these kids on the internet having fun or whatever and like I don't know, man, it feels like extracting from a system that it shouldn't be. It feels like there's something that's going wrong with regards to that. I guess other onene of the biggest talking points that we've had over the last couple of years was around what happened in the twenty twenty four election, especially independent media sort of being involved in that Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly? is fiber? Well, it turns out that ninety five percent of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Mermens' fibber plus. Most fiber supplements are one trick pony, one type of fiber solving One part of the problem. Fiber pllus is a three in one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get enough fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Mementus offers a thirty day money back guarantee. so you can buy it, try it every single day for twenty nine days and if you don't love it, they willll just give you your money back. pllus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to thirty five percent off your first subscription and that thirty day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livementus. com slash modernisdom and using the code mododern Wisdom Do you think if the leftft had had its own version of Joe Rogan that the last election would have really changed The election was close enough battleground states that I think you end up in a situation where You can change any variable and imagine moving. I don't remember the exact number, but something like you would have needed, I think one hundred fifty thousand votes to switch. I mean, those votes would have had to have been correctly like appated Yeah. But it wasn't just a handful states So maybe not just Je Rogan, like I always say that the way to think about this is not a liberal or illiberal Jer Rogan. It's candidates who are comfortable in the kinds of spaces that we mean when we talk about Rogan. Like the point is not getting like one guy who is more on your side The point is, you know, Harrison Walls having been everywhere and having been capable of talking more effectively comfortable of person. Dummy I'ull back on something you said a second ago I've been thinking a lot about virtue and politics and virtue Let's see it's not a we used that much, but actually think particularly in your corners of the blogosphere. We were talking about blogs before we started of the all right atosphere. All right It is something we talk about And I was just doing a show that'll come out shortly about a bunch of the kind of more masculine philosophies on the right, people like Bronze Age Pervert and Rog Nationalist One of the things I was thinking about is how much those visions of masculinity have a Primitivism. to them, right? It's this desire to rediscover a stereotypically testosterone soak, much more competitive, dominance oriented, aggressive, right? There's a view that modern man has been into and constrained into this soft cooperative, like against their own instincts. Okay The thing that I was noticing how when I actually read what these guys were writing The thing that I was noticing was so absent was The idea of self mastery and self discipline as a fundamental dimension, not just of like manhood or masculinity but just of humanity. In fact, a lot of these places seem to take self discipline and self mastery with the exception maybe of like a Hom a social weightlifting component as a negative, right? It was evidence of the way modernity had us into this attenuated shape that works for, you know modern feminizable democracy, right? That's the argument And so you see, I think this is particularly true on Trump, and you see with Stephen Miller This Gleeful rejection of norms of behavior that once sort of reflected I think, a kind of self disciplined Politicians don't talk the way Donald Trump talks, right? They are disciplined They know not to just unleash on the people they don't like in a way that is destructive, most of them And it was this wiping away of that as a kind of show Oove that you would not be held back by the system as it existed And so there's a message in what Miller is saying. and then I see like the Democrats trying to ape it What I do think is it's going to create, I think what it's already creating. is going to be a swing back. to a desire to see political virtue to see social virtue demonstrated in leaders. Everything creates its opposite in politics always And so this sort statesman likeke, bit more decorum. Yeah, it'll have to be a version that works for today You still need to be sexy. You're to have aura. You need to have storm. You need to have aura. correct. But the Calor Rico, mean, the reason Calor Rico is dangerous to them and I'm noting's going to win, Texas is a hard state for a Democrat to win in. The reason Teler Rego popped in the first place, the reason he ended up on Joe Rogan in the first place is he is able to talk through a kind of progressive Christianity in a language of morality and virtue that people found exciting and that you didn't really hear from Democrats anymore. And I think he was one of the first moments, and he's raised more, I think than any Senate candidate in the country based on this. And I think he's one of the first moments where you really see where the pendulum is going to swing back to. becausecause I think people are looking around And they're seeing what it looks like when we unleash ourselves in a way that conforms to algorithmic media And I'm not saying Everybody dislikes it. Some people feel real excited by it But I think most people dislike it. Even people I know who are Trumps supporters, they don't like the way this all feels. You like it in the way that you like having a McDonald's, that at the time, it's kind of enticing, but afterward, you feel a bit shitty. And if you have too many of them in a row, you actually start to reject the system a little bit. It's interesting, I was having this conversation with Arthur Brooks yesterday and he was saying the moment that you break any kind of addictive cycle, the first thing that you have to do, at least following evidence for a broad range of aggregated addictions is you have to get mad. You have to be angry at the thing I'm sick of being at the mercy of this thing I'm sick of being at the mercy of porn. I'm sick of being the mercy of drugs. I'm sick of being at the mercy of alcohol, sick of being at the mercy of scrolling on my phone Getting mad is a really effective first step And I wonder at what point people just get bored Like because this is evolutionary arms race of like bullshittery that keeps on happening online Now, if the Democrats tweet shhut up you ugly fuck again, it gets a tenth as much attention, that we've already seen it So unless you're going to continue to play that game, okay, well what's new or what's new is the equivalent of a a sundress in a cake. Right? You know what I mean? Like it's something that feels a little bit more kind of festigial and I feel like there's been a move. And again, you don't see in that tweet set we're using as our text here. A rich text if spare I already think there's a move toward something sunnier. I mean, if you had to use one word to describe the aesthetic of Momdami Its sun You could say a lot of other things about him, right? And people disagree with him. and you know everybody can have their argons about what he believes You never saw that guy without a smile He didn't, I mean, if you ever just looked at the Mumdani smile, it's like Trump had the scowl Even in his second presidential portrait, this is not me ragging on him He has a portrait in which he's scowling. It's a very unusual portrait. It's kind of like up and down. Mam Dni, the smile an on geared artist had this great piece in his substacked ink about like the Mamanni' smile as rhetoric And Tel Rico Mom, Donny, you start to see something new working And of course, it'll only worked for so long and we'll see where it goes. it's not the only thing working. But that Stephen Miller, the Democrats exchange It sucks, right? Like who who wants to feel that way? No one And so that' a it's a way in, not a way out And I do think the winning move in politics in the next couple of years is going to be way out, not the way in best it's a sort of gleeful dancing over somebody else. They've done in the same way as Two bullies fighting against each other kind of take a degree of satisfaction from having a pop Let's not. Yeah, it's not sunny. It's performing sunniness, right? I care less about what you think of me. Oh no, actually, we care even less about what you think of us than you think that we do Yeah, this entrey sucks. I guess I'm kind of interested. Do you think that you are at the center of a Dmocrat civil war at the moment. Doave you center of a civil warar? I don't know, do you think I am seems that way on the internet if you read the right pieces There's certainly an orbiting and I wonder whether it's because so few people are able to on many different sides That might be it I think the Democratic Party is having a big debate. over what it should be and I think that the book that Derek Thompson I released last here abundance, which It was one of these things. I mean, I've released a book before things catch fire for their own reasons. And abundance became in a way that is really remarkable onene of Came The thing people used to have an argument they wanted to have which was Uh whichich is not necessarily the argent we're actually having in the book, but abundance sort of became at the center of this war between what I call the populisting andemocat party the liberal wing the Democratic part And what was funny about that fight to me? So abbundance of book we did was about The way in which liberalism Democrats of various stripes left to center have made it very hard to build where they govern And so in places it tend to be blue, like New York or California. It's been hard to build homes, hard to build clean energy, Texas, where you live. They build just more homes and more clean energy than blue states do. Not because they're necessarily more pro affordable housing and definitely not because they're more politically pro clean energy or worried about climate change. they just have created a structure in which it is easier to build things. I've talked to climate tech entrepreneurs, not just doing sort of normal green energy, but doing things that are much more on the cost, much bigger projects And their politics are Californian. and they're just like, I can get things done in Texas and Arizona, and I can't get the done here, right Well, it wass interesting about the fight that book kicked off then Is a book is very much embraced P was actually criticizing So Gavin Newsom embraced that f Right He talks all the time now about we need to be Democrats need to be a party of abundance. He uses another term that I have called the liberals in the Bilds. and So did a lot of people from the outside of the partarty. Obama has talked about the book, right? The part of the party that was actually in power that we were criticizing kind of grabbed onto it. And the part of the party that is insurgent sort of reacted against that. It's like wellalth abundance kind of became for them the face of like the Obamaism, you know, the sort of the Obama set of the party keeping power and they want sort of a more populist party Here's the thing, I just think most of this fight is fake because, you know H on Mobbani just this week we released a big housing plan And its housing plan all about making it easier to build All about cutting through bureaucracy and red tape and making it faster and cheaper. And in Los Angeles, Nathi Raman, Democratic socialist running against Karen Bass, who's the Democratic mayor. you know, is also running like, you know, taping things in, you know, overgrown fields that the L.A. city is like suing to stop from becoming affordable housing know, the new Democrats of the Cgressional Caucus released a thing about how to build more clean energy and create clean energy abundance. So one of the hard things for me in like judging this debate is that there's an online discourse because of the nature of online discourse becomes very, very factional and it becomes very angry. And people who are People sort of create a fight in it that they're used to too me, like the whole thing abundance is doing is cross cutting divisions that exists not just inside the Dmocratic Not just inside the Democratic Party, but also between Democrats and Republicans to sort of create new syntheses on things And so I just don't see the fights that people are scoring on Twitter there as being even the fights and the difficulties that our ideas really face because in practice, it's much more about how hard these things are to get done And I also think that there's like a whole technology side of abundance that has proven a much, much harder climb because of AI than it was when we were writing that book So I'm always like happy to be a character in various people's discourse fights. I tend to think that the particular one that has been present here has at this point been pretty belied by the reality of who is embracing these ideas. Well, you're one of the few liberals that sort of openly critiquing liberal governance failures Do you ever feel like you need to walk on eggshells a little because there is a degree of purity spiraling and oing On the left, the right seems to be prepared to welcome anybody with whatever history they've got with open arms. Well, unless you say, unless you say Joe Biden won the twenty twenty election and then Donald Trump primary year whole career into oblivion. That is kind of he who shall not be named for joining the right. That's the Voldemort of the right. That's correct. But I want to say something interesting about this because this I think reflects the difference in the two parties right now Donald Trump did very effectively, is he collapsed purity on the Republican Party down to a single dimensional point which is loyalty to him So he's willing to Ecept a tremendous amount of views So long as you are loyal to and say nice things about him personally. This is a single ordinating principle. Exactly left, which does not have leader's gotpect plurality of ways that you can get in trouble. Exactly. Whereas theres just a unity of ways that you can get in trouble in the right? That's so interesting. Yeah. So the right has it's a little bit of like the Fox and hedgehog thing. So the right has this one big yeah thing you have to accept. This one, not just lie, right? The twenty twenty election stuff is a lie The problem they're about to have, the problem they're having right now is that What it means to be loyal to Trump is a more complicated thing than it was in the twenty twenty four election because he's doing things, right? like the war in Iran And so what it means to be loyal to him is not just you're pro Trump But you can believe whatever on vaccines, you can believe whatever on now you actually have to as a member of the Republican Party, you know, sign on to it you can't like be on got to beight you know, you see this happening. And so you've had like very maga people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey You know, who one hundred percent were on board with all kinds of election bullshit from Trump But they got pushed out over other things now because they weren't loyal on the current policy. It's a single orinating principle It's fractured into the Democratic Party or maybe I will call it like the broad leftft. It's not like it was four years ago What it has is an agenda and a set of different factions platform and an orientation and a set of ideas you have to be loyal to,? Do you believe in Medicare for all? Like how do you feel about billionaires? or how do you feel about wokeness if you're sort of more in the set They're they're trying to create a programmatic Um test And You know That has a problem in that it Like it keeps more cohesive and coherent coalition if you're able to do it But it makes it much harder to welcome people into it. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf Right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger. not the DUI of the Tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG onene. 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What if we step outside of the more political dimension of this and we talk about the cultural left, the people that contribute to the discourse online, because at least with that, peopleople can be dissenting of Trump broadly still be seen as part of the right. I'm not convinced that the same level of The same amount of ballast is in the system for people that are on the left. Now maybe this is declining, I think that you're right. It was significantly more pure five or six years ago. Um I'm just interested as somebody who seems to be departing or at least criticizing in a manner that wouldn't have heard fiveive years ago. whether that ever plays into the back of your mind where f I I mean, I'm going to press post on this thing, but I know the subsequent nuclear fallout that's going to occur once I do. I like to think that I have tried to hold this approach to my politics work for a long time. I mean the thing that led to the moment I've had over the past couple of years was a sort of early and pretty aggressive argument that Biden should step down. And that was not a popular thing that Democratic Party when I made it, and it cause problems. So I have a view that And by the way, abundance, which releases last year, I mean, the columns and essays that led to that started in twenty twenty one. So I was writing all this at a different time I think you have to be seelf critical as a party in politics, both for two reasons. One is You're probably making mistakes. And two is that if you believe in getting things done and you're failing, you have to try to figure out why whether that getting done is winning elections or that getting done is building homes or whatever it might be Um I want to but to take the broader thing you'reing because I don't want to present that as idiosyncratic I think One, this is all gotten easier U in part because I think like the weird moment in the platforms has fractured So here's another theory I have. Whever dominates Twitter. pays for it. three to four years later And in twenty twenty P progresses dominated Twit And they convince themselves of a lot of kind of wild ideas Mm, and those ideas came and bit them in the ass. in twenty twenty four And Camel Harris got like really hung out on different As it got run against her with things she had said years before even right now, James Telerico The attacks that Ken Paxton and Republicans are using against him have to do with things he said like three or four years ago, right? L God is non binary, that kind of thing So The thing is then Dl then Elon Muskot Twitter made it X sort of drove a lot of the left off of it. opened up the floodgates to the right on it And now the right has ended up in a somewhat similar place where they have gotten attached to Nick Fuontes and like the more conspiratorial incarnation of Tucker Carlson And the the sort of like Twitter and on world, Pople are king themselves into much more wild and conspiratorial things, and this is gonna to hurt them is my prediction in you know two or three years when like the bill on all this comes due, which is all to say that I think you cannot separate the dynamics we are talking about from algorithmic social media I think that is fundamentally what is shaping these fast rise and fast falls in coalitional purity in the kind of extreme ideas taking hold And in a sense where you get so Consumed in talking to your own side that you lose a sense of where other people really are And I mean, that's the most dangerous thing in all of us. It's not having some of these ideas. I mean, I agree, by the way, with many of the ideas people like now deride as wokeness Cabbing is when you don't realize you have not done the political work to make those ideas legible to others or to sort of win enough support that you can push other ideas out of the marketplace. You stop Instead of doing politics or doing posting pololitics is a constant balancing of disagreement Politics is an act of endless pluralism in a liberal democracy And posting is not. Posting is for your side and getting a lot of energy to hit on the other side. and posting tends to habituate people to a very, very, very bad and very weak form of politics. Heees saying that people sort of believe their own hype for a while, that becomes its own kind of derangement. And then at some point in future. I'm saying that in the way we were talking about the algorithms earlier peopleeople get into these one up dynamics to sort of prove their purity. So Mom Dni, right in here in New York, when he ran for mayor He just hadled straight up dis own a bunch of things he said on Twitter a couple years ago, right? Like that the NYPD is anti queer and A lot of policians on the left are just having to be in a Yeah, twenty twenty was a crazy time. L like I said some shit and came from being in a online millo. where people are getting pushed to like see and say stuff that was ever more out of. the mainstream as a way of proving that they got it. You're optimizing for the platform. And in your corner of it. Correct. Yes. you're optimizing for this very specific echo chamber. You've got this arms race of attention And also you're trying to do something which garners much as many eyeballs as possible. Eventually somebody when that dust settles a little bit gets to look at it with a cleare a set of eyes and go What's this thing that you said not that long ago? And sometimes it appears in an ad? Or you're now running statewide in Texas or citywide in New York And all of a sudden, it just it wasn't for them You were you were saying something person you had seen two seconds ago on social media And now it's being blasted out in an ad running all across El Paso And it wasn't for the median voter The internet. The internet is forever you consider yourself given that interesting position and especially with the book, whereere it's put you in terms of criticizing liberal governance Do you see yourself as further left or further right than previously or are you just in exactly the same spot I don't think my politics are that different. I mean, I see myself as a liberal. And I've been a liberal for a long time and like the American tradition, it means to different things in Europe and other places. And I have fairly recognizable liberal goals. I want universal healthcare I want more like economic egalitarianism. I want people to have just the ability to live a flourishing life. in the way that I think has traditionally been a big part of liberalism, and think about Obama, for instance I believe very strongly that the work of making a frractious complex multi ethnic democracy function honorable important work. And that requires not just policies But certain political virtues and approaches to politics Conflict. from spinning out of being constructive and allow it to spin into spaces that are really destructive. If you were to design An incentive to do the opposite of that, it would be social media. Yes. and So I I think I'm In some ways, I'm probably further left than my temperament makes people think in terms of what I believe about things I don't know also think that Policy is not really the way people code. O people's ideology Um you know, what makes you more far left, right? Is it believing? in the maximum level of universal health carere you can get to O is it your view on climate change? Or is it a review on what level of political compromise is okay? A lot of the plac where people get really angry at me is I am much more open to political compromise and I'm very open to Democrats running very different candidates in very different places, including candidates who are much more conservative than they. because I believe disagreement is very real And one mistake I think a lot of people make when looking at politics is They don't really credit how different people are from them And so if you're in a political bubble in N York City or Austin or Los Angeles takes for a Democrat like Joe Manchin to win statewide in West Virginia I don't think it's conceivable. Like you don't know anybody like.ike you don't know what it means to win working class voters in West Virginia. He does. He was like the Democratic MP. R? I don't have Joeanchin's politics I find Joe Manchin incredibly Uh Irksham Also understand that his job is not my job And so one of the the things I'm One of the things I worry about because I worry about where this country's politics are going. and I am like very deeply opposed to Donald Trump and MAGA and like the way the politics are work I think it's really important Democrats win Iowa I think it's really important they are competitive in places like Nebraska, which they used to be Um, you know, in twenty ten, Democrats held, I believe, both seats in West Virginia, right in the Senate. Like that's unimaginable now. And so the question of what kindind of big tent. would allow that where you can have a on Mandani here. You know, Rob Sand, who's this more moderate Democrat running statewide for governor in Iowa, who's great He's running on getting rid of the two party system Right? He's not running As a like a Democrat to appeal to liberals in Brooklyn or leftist in Brookn for that matter He starts every town hall with He like has a Republicans set up. He says, I want everybody to clap for their Republicans in this room The Democrats just to stand up everybody com comees from the independence. and then of him all do the pledge of allegiance or sing the star Spangled banner together. politics exactly? likeike is that how I would run a rally? Probably not Would I win statewide in Iowa? I sure we can w man. But Rob Sand might win statewide in Iowa and Rob Sand is a hero for that.. And so you got to believe in things. But also, I do think the question, I mean, I think in the Trump era, I take more seriously than I used to building The stability of our politics was an incredible achievement And many countries don't have that And in many countries they had it, it was lost and believing that in America We cannot break this thing is a mistake. And if you do believe we can break this thing then you actually have to think about what kinds of politics bring it back. and that's why I'm not excited even if it works intentionally about seeing do loop of vice and venality becausecause even if you can win that way You are breaking the thing by doing it And so the question, how do you win virtuously is very important to me because I think like it for all the other things I want to have You actually need a working peaceful politics to get there Who's your ideal Democratic party candidate? twenty twenty eight, yeah. they't exist I mean, I don't think there's a perfect Democrat for twenty twenty. And to the extent if there is, we don't know them yet because they've not been under those lights yet One what. I think I am a sort of unreconstructed admirer Barack Obama And if Obama were running today, he would have to run differently than he did then. M aura. He had a lot of aura then, man. Online, Aura I think if you're running today, he'd have more online or. That's the point, right? You can't transpose who he is post presidentially. now, right? He is a human institution He's like a monument in some ways U So he's not going to be who he was even when he was running in away But I think he did something that's really hard to do which is one he contained manyany of the country's contradictions inside himself and was able to make people even who disagreed with him quite deeply feel seen. And he was able to combine two forms of moral imagination, that I think are hard to combine, which is one was a sort of moral imagination of policy of things like universal healthcare which he basically achieved, right? It's like a A lot of people had failed on that before him Um Could we make looks better always? but Obamacare is no small thing And the second was a moral imagination on politics itself in a country that had kinds of racial divides and legacy we have and had in a country that in the bush years has felld very divided He made people feel politics could be different. and the tragedy of Obamism Is that it got worse? He was able actually pass quite a lot of the policy he promised. But he was not able to make politics And this country's divisions feel better. In fact, they felt worse the thing that I think no one has an answer to is how to resuscitate that side of his moral imagination in a way that does not feel naive or're hopeless or cliche. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swoll, the RP strength app is the best place to start. 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Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to fifty dollars off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading torp strength dot com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom A check out. That's Rpstrength. com slash Mern wisdom I modotemnism A check out Yeah, it's an interesting one to look to what happens in twenty twenty eight. You know, it was so fascinating to me being in the UK and starting to come online with realizing just how how tumultuous America was politically and then observing that unfold and then starting to be a part of the conversation, I guess, because I started modernism in twenty eighteen And then to roll it forward and to think about what happens in just two years time justust two years from now It kindind of blows my mind. and I don't know I don't know what people are looking for on either side in twenty twenty eight anymore. Do you follow I don't know how deep you are in politics and I've had Bernie and people like that on the show If you look at the Democrats you think that one But I also don't look at the conservatives and think that one either I mean, my basic read of the field for what it's worth right now is that the ones doing the most interesting things are Gavvin Newsom or AOC are Botage judge And then the big dark horse, I think that people should not undress right now is Jhn Awsf Wh who's the Senator from Georgia. I was in ree election this year U I look at the Democrats, those are the four who I think have figured out tension in this era And one of my views on politics Is it attention is its own competency now and that if you are not capable of earning it and wielding it and using it and breaking through on it yourself. then you actually cannot. compete at the highest levels. Certainly not right now with the way that the ecosystem says in the. I' belie think it'll be different in twenty. G got to play the ball where it lies. And there's also something about one of the great I think, character mistakes of the Democrats And center left parties actually, I think you see this with Kir Starmer in a bunch of places is people who are too formed by institutions They're afraid One way I often put this is I think right now one of the problems in American politics is Republicans are underformed by institutions and Democrats are overformed by them. So Republicans sort of in the Trump era too contemptuous institutions, too contemptuous of institutional authority, too contemptuous of the norms of institutions and how you actually a company. justust rip it all up, doge it, chainsaw it. It's all bullshit anyway. And that's wrong. problem for the Democrats can be that there can become a party of Tracy Flex and they are so framed and molded. by like from birth having competed their way. you know, through every school you know through every competition through every company, through their politics party that is much more pro institutions now than Republicans are. And people who come through institutions like that, they often reflect those institutions. They begin to talk like them. You can hear the institution when they open their mouth. Kir Strarmer speaks like he is Right? Like you feel like he's like got like he feels like a bureaucracy And I'm not even saying that is a negative onem at another time that might have been more a doable thing I don't think that works in this media environment at all Like you have to feel honest authentic, you have to like like a real person, like like an actual human. People can People can sense that before they can sense anything else about you and So When I see some of the Democrats who are running they still talk like someone who is optimized, And to be fair to them, this used to be a thing you optimizeed for and it worked to win over like local editorial boards at small town newspapers. demised to be somebody that the editors of newspapers thought seemed like decent person be and it is, I think, a shame that that has become some kind of a liability that you need to have some edge of wildness to you. It is what a new skill set as you rise up through the ranks. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. There's kind of a common thread here, which is that Um You almost get locked into a mode of thinking from a particular domain that you're in, whether it be a platform, from a particular niche that you're in, geographically, culturally, from a particular time that you were in in your career and what was useful then and the inability to be prepared to update that. and also the potential hypocrisy of having updated that. That creates its own challenge too So you're sort of fighting against it. I guess when we're talking about a more left like a building left right? the word Deregulation gets used by Elon Musk, and it also gets used by you. It does. And you clearly don't mean the same thing The same word doing two jobs is a problem in politics, right? It sort of one team's project ride the slip stream of the other and you end up in this sort of semantic game back and forth. How do you tell the difference between your kind of deregulation And Elon's and a simple way that you can explain around a dinner table They' have different goals I mean, what is deregulation You are removing rules What is regulation? You're adding rules Is adding rules or removing rules good or bad Well how the fuck would it ansect that the rule? Depes on the rule. And so Consider Musk to be tragedy This is a guy who is clearly a genius who is the most capable industrialist of our time thoseose industries private partnerships Tesla is built. on government subsidies Government tax credits. There is no electric vehicle market in this country without the huge amount of money we and California, by the way, in particular. into making that market real. Tesla would have gone under without an Obamaerir loan guaranteee SpaceX SpaceX is NASA contracts and Musk at some point. And I mean, you can like basically like chart when it happened because he was sort of a Democrat in semi good standing. He was like pro Obama, right He radicalizes. He's online way too much. He gets Twitter brained Twitter has been bad for no one, the way it hass been specifically bad for the way that guy thinks His information environment is so deeply ack and There's a world where he join the Trump administration. and tried to increase stay capacity, and yes, that might mean chainsawing through some of what the government did with the goal of making it possible to do more in space with the goal of making it possible to do more effective research into battery technology And instead That's completely indiscrimately. I have friends God layoff notices Eail read Dear first name Last name You have been terminated for cause Which cause Who was that email to Musk's project, Deregulation is a traditional Republican thing. He didn't make it up. Point is that Right now, the government often imposes too many rules on itself. And that makes it hard for it to do things. So if you look at the Mamani housing plan that came out this week, bllock by block is what it's called What he is doing in that plan. Overall is he is removing rules, he is deregulating what is required? when New York puts in money to build affordable housing order to build affordable housing in most jurisdictions, certainly blue ones in this country Because you're using public money It triggers a bunch of government rules and make it much more expensive because a lot of interests have come up and you know, won their way into the fight And so they've been able to U, you know, force higher building standards and higher wage standards and higher environmental standards and all these things might be good on their own They really might be. What you've done is make it twice as expensive or three times as expensive or four times as expensive To to build affordable housing is to build market rate housing And so the taxpayer is getting a shitty deal, and you're not building enough affordable housing There was a story in Washington D.C a couple years ago about how they had ended up building affordable housing units. They were costing one point two million dollars per unit These are affordable housing units with again, like public and nonprofit dollars There wass one particular build where I'm worried I'll get the numbers wrong for memory, but I think it was something like the same developer built affordable and market rate next to each other. And the affordable costs something like eight hundred thousand. And the market rate was at four hundred thousand You just can't achieve goal is affordable housing And so care about the point of abundance, the first sentence of it, basically, of the book. is Do we need more of? And how do we get it And so the thing that separates different people in this debate, for me, the abundance debate, the debate about plenitude is first you have to, do you want more of? I want a lot more green energy Donald Trump does not So the fact that he is deregulating what it means to build like coal or oil in this country is not a big abundance win because he's trying to achieve something that I don't support He's actually made it harder to build wind and solar So you can regulate government to make it harder for government to act, you can deregulate it You can use rules well and poorly And when you get your politics on the axle of having emotional reaction to the means tools you're using thenen he got a problem The idea that deregulation is owned by the right Or for that matter, that regulation is owned by the left, it's not true, but it's a way of shutting off your thoughts. the right regulates things all the time deregulates things. it's just stupid. Yeah, no, I agree.up way of thinkinking. This proposal for abundance is a lot about rolling back red tape I know A lot of people are concerned about what that means for unchecked power of potential AI overloads if you've got a very small number of people who are controlling a massive amount of influence and a massive amount of the economy How does the rolling back of red tape with that solution. So two things. So one I want to say, abundance is not about rolling back red tape There are places like building housing in dense blue cities. where you probably do need to roll back what people call red tape That is That is useful where that is the problem on AI I believe we need a lot more AI regulation This is why I don't buy the sort of deregulation pro reggulation like dichotomy. There are places I want to regulate more, places I want to regulate less I think the abundance question on AI is different I have a lot of concern about the power concentrating on A. I've covered these guys forever. I've had Demmis and Sam Altman and Dario all on my show, right? Like I've Like I've been in this since GPD two, I guess and You do not want power concentrating with them. And at one point, and some of them will still say that, they don't want power concentrating with them. although in practice they don't always think like that now. Yeah. Sam Altman, I think, in opening eyes seemed to be more pro regulation a couple of years ago than in practice like The Greg Brockman as president has helped fund the suuper PC that is dumping money against candidates who want to regulate AI. And so it's like, on the one hand, they'll come to a hearing and say, we want to be regulated. then somebody will run profice saying, we should do some light regulation. It's like not you, not by you, we don't Um So you have like real money and politics problems. And I, by the way As a broad thing, this is not something we learne about in abundance, but I just believe in much, much, much stronger money in politics regulations, you should amend the U. S. Constitution to say Money is not speech Money should not be as protected speech when spent on politics and make it possible to regulate it. There's an effort to do that through state houses happening right now Um But I think the abundance question on AI. is at two levels. One is We think of AI models, right? People argue about are they using Gemini or T or Claud AI is, you know Jensen Wong of Nvideido always makes this point. It's like a five layer cake And there's an energy level, there's a chips level, there's all this infrastructure you actually need If we want the US to be continue to be kind of AI competitive or even AI dominant You're going to need to Get get that infrastructure right and in order to then not make that a energetic disaster. you're going to need to use the dataenter build out create a modern grid and create much more of electrostate and not of petrorate, right? Like There's like a whole set of questions that are raised by the physical AI build up. But then the second thing I'm actually writing about this right now is we are having so many conversations about what we don't want from AI What do we want from it What is the public agenda for AI does the public what are the public goods? becausecause they're not just going to come on their own Right now, if you talk to any corporation, is really tooling itself for AI They are spending huge amounts of money on compute buying enough tokens But they're often restructuring themselves as an organization in order to become legible. and make their problems legible to the systems. So For AI to be able to solve a problem for you, you need a couple of things One is there needs to be money behind the problem Because if you need a lot of compute to do it, it is costly even now The second thing is the prm needs to be legible to the system. So what I mean by that, for instance is Alpha fold, which I think is the most impressive thing A has done yet, which is the protein folding is solving the protein folding problem The reason it was possible to do that was there was a sing called the protein database, which had been it was arguably the cleanest scientific database in existence It's really one of them where people had been keeping really high quality data every single protein that we had mapped its structure And that meant there was one place where the data was structured in a way We can set the machine learning loose on it And it could learn the data begin to predict based on the data, and then also begin to create synthetic versions of that data to extend its predictions and then be able to test them backwards and so on and so forth. Okay. There are a lot of problems that might have that shape But you will have to create the data that the machine learning can work on for them Uh, like and in government, that's often up and done So like here's a very simple use case I keep talking to people about There's no reason that the IRS can't have I mean, build it on Cloud, build it on Chat GPD buildu your own They could have an LLM that does your taxes with you The IRS knows how much money you make. So they have ground truth there They know the tax code. They write it a lot of the time or at least certainly help in the regulatory system to define it There's no reason Most people have to pay an accountant. More broadly, you could have an AI that act as a concierge to anything the government might be able to do for you because it knows you, it knows your situation and knows what the government is capable of doing. It's very, very hard to navigate the government right now. but you have to make the underlying data and system legible So the Iy can learn what it needs to learn Drug discovery, energy, there's a lot of questions like this where Fs on drug discovery I don't How good AIs will be on drug discovery. I have talked to different people who disagree on it But if you look at what AIs are good at, like did you follow The the solving of this rdos theorem Yes, Yes, I did. Okay. So I talked to mathematicians about this. My dad's actually a mathematician. I haven'ted to him about it yet. I should. All it But this particular theorem What it was able to do was sort of two things. What it was able to do was it knew kind of everything about mathematics. So it was able to combine approaches from fields that were not primarily thought to be useful in this particular theorem. But there' was one mathematician who was like, o, I thought about doing this, but it was super labor intensive. so I just didn't bother So it also was able to be tireless in doing that It did not do, I think, what you would call like truly new groundbreaking mathematics. It didn't like invent a whole new field here. It did something very clever and very labor intensive And that is how a lot of advances happen. Synthesis plus hard work Think about what's called orphan diseases These are diseases. My wife actually has one of them that are quite rare So there isn't a huge amount of money in solving them And that means Unlike say something like diabetes where there is just a functionally endless number of drug researchers working on diabetes drugs and a huge amount ofoney behind it and like the best people in the field On these things, you don't have that So that's a great place where being able to have a lot of compute And then the federal government saying, if you invent this thing B basically what we do with operation wararp speed, We said, if you invent this thing, we will buy it And then we will hand it out at low cost Right That's how we made the CVD vacc You could do that across a huge number diseases and say, if you're able to solve any of these, here's what we will give you it is worth it to us, the public to have cures here and we'll make those cures cheaper And we'll work into making the regulatory system amenable to this. They also did that in warp spepeed. We in work to trying to create better databases, like we'll clean things up for you. But we will create a prize system, an advanced market commitment system. What do we want AI to solve? Because right now the private market is putting a lot of money into that question The public sector is only thinking about what it wants to prevent AI from doing, which is important. I'm a big believer in AI harms. I've been talking about existential risk for years You also need a theory of AI goods right now we don't have one. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a Seet. It's salty, orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. 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The X risk of X risks and then His new book was basically, okay, what happens if this goes right? And even on the path to it going right tons of different ways that it could go wrong. it is It's kind of mind blowing to me that there is any time being spent on anything that isn't AI safety. at the moment. Uh, you know I'm aware, climate change, something that we need to keep an eye on. It's not going to happen within the next decade birth rate declined somethingomething that I've talked a lot about on the show too. I think, you know, that's going to happen more quickly than climate change ises, but still not on the timelines that we're talking about here you see Tristan Harris's new thing, the AI doock? I haven' seen the doc, but I know Tristan. Oh, dude, it's really, really good. It's really, really interesting. I have come as a person who is in that world for a long time. I've come to a probably slightly different view on the right way to approach this. You can to give me a white p I really need one. What would a white pill be? I never know the pills anymore. There're too many of them. Hope. feeleel better. Hope. No, look, canannot solve a problem whose shape you do not know So it's very it's good to talk about AS safety. We should be pumping money into say mechanistic interpretability. We have made big strides on interpretability. Shout out Chrisola at Anthropic, who's been a hero in this and is now hanging out with the pope, I guess. So apparently you know, good thing to see, good things happen to good people . We should be trying to understand these systems so much of the AI conversation The mind is attracted to these speculative scenarios, mass automation, where there are no more jobs Um, Re recursive super intelligence, self improving super intelligence that subs out of our control like overnight. H's deal If we create Wecs a super intelligence that slips out of our control overnight, which is sort of how like the A twenty twenty seven scenario works. better just hope for the best because I think we are kindind of fucked in that scenario I don't think it will happen like that or that quickly. I agree. We want as good interpretability as we can possibly have, But here but the other thing we want is to be Constant work on regulating the existing nature of these systems and at their frontier and testing the systems and working on them constantly. because In the same way that the AI companies, the ones who were founded on the theory of safety, like open AI, which and anthropic were like Well, we can't make it safe unless we build it cannot figure out how to regulate it unless you regulate it Both for good and for bad And so my view is that the political system needs to get in the game on the system that exists right now. and not endlessly debate a speculative scenario that it is not going to be able to respond to until you're there. That is not how politics works. It's not how like anything we do works. So yes, like that does imply a certain amount of pessimism if we end up in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario I don't think we're in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario. Just by the way, I have always thought and have always had this argument by my effective Alaltuous friends. and actually Dorkesh Patel, who's like a great AI podcaster, just sent out like a little substack making the same point The capability to wield power is more than intelligence. And so the world is full of friction And the super intelligence scenario has always had this Dynamic where it isn't just like the thing becomes recursive improving and super powerful and super but it also never makes a mistake. on its way to taking over a world that doesn't understand and dealt with smart people Is Donald Trump the smartest person in the world? No, he's got a like incredible animalistic instinct for power and other people's weakness. And he's made a ton of mistakes And you know, Dorkish in his piece was like, maybe Stalin is a person we're talking about here, but Stalin also is not like the world's greatest genius. I think there's like a real mistake being made on how easy it is to translate intelligence and information into power And I am just skeptical. Like again, we can all come up with a sci fi scenario, but I can't forever argue against the absolute worst thought experiment, you like, like they were just in a world like, yeah, all we're dealing with here. is endless effort for you to come up with thought experiments that the regulators can't match, you will outmatch your regulators very quickly.. Which is why the regulators should be increasing their competency by actually dealing with AI in the present moment. You get better at things by doing them. So you're saying The the most dangerous AI isn't the smartest one, it's the canniest one. I think that's true, but I agree. I'm saying that the AI safety debate has been caught in thinking about the future for too long an h in the present And so the thing to do is to figure out how to take some of these fears, which I take is serious. I do not, I am not somebody who's dismissive of them. I have a P doom sitting in the back of my head You have to take them and do something in the now because now we're at the point Rya is here For a long time there was nothing really to do becausecause AI was speculative, right? You could try to be running your experiments in these labs, but that's all you can do. Now the thing is here. We actually have quite powerful AIs are getting more powerful all the time Congress We need to probably build more capable institutions that actually have expertise on regulating it and are able to like hire some of the best people because the market for AI researchers is more expensive than the current civil service rules we have for hiring really make possible to compete in. And you have to like be getting your hands dirty and trying to like make what we have work well and also be trying to create the goods that give it a direction that it is safer. Well think about who was involved in the conversation from twenty fifteen to twenty. twenty ish Philosophers Yeah, a lot of philosophers And if you watch the new AI doc, it's maths grad, computer science, programmer, futurist, technologist. It's moving more, but you're saying this goes even beyond that to people who are Picymakers we need to bring those sorts of people in to actually get involved in this too. So yeah, it's gone from being as hypothetical and theoretical as possible. to now something where the rubber is readingat. I am like my view on this is not that I am dismissive of the possibility of future adis out of or control Or frankly, even although I amm more skeptical of this, the possibility of mass automation I am saying is it it is long past time start working on the systems that we have now as regulators and stop debating a hypothetical. You do not have a way to stop the hypothetical May like have you read Ez ykowski'sook Yes How you on the show? The argument as did I. The argument is shut it all That's where it goes For better and maybe for much worse, maybe he's right. I mean, his view is ninety percent if we create super intelligence per fucked. We're not going to shut it all down. And so the question is given what we have and where we are, St actually bringing the system and the systems under democratic control. What would you do? Let's say that you had so I would go coordination power. I would have like probably three or four buckets. So one, I would put a lot more money into valuation than we're currently putting in publicly. Aually Trump and Musk I did a bunch of that But I would make our public evaluation capabilities incredibly strong. So that's one thing They were trying to do that sort of in Biden I would start doing a lot of regulating AI run kidits, because I think there's actually a fair amount of consensus on that. And so you could move on that. I think we should be quite careful about running this experiment on children I think that the idea of kids growing up with a bunch of AI buddies and lovers I don't think we know how it will warp people's sense of how relationships should work when they have those before they have real relationships. I think I've heard you say that kind of childhood that you had could have fallen prey to this kind of. I was a very lonely kid. I was bullied a lot. like I if there're and I was also a smart nerdy kid And so what would it have meant? If instead of having to sort of fight through that and find my, you know, best friends and figure it out as I did Like work with the friction the world gave me which made me who I am I could have disappeared to frictionless digital relationships friends, tutors lovers I think that's actually quite scary. I was the same except for being a lot less smart and nerdy. I don't know. I think you're probably underrating yourself. I would do a lot on kids I would do a lot on actual Goods, as I was just saying, like I really want to see a public goods agenda for AI And I think there are harms we can begin looking at now in the way AI is used. and what it is given economy and power over on when human beings need to be in the loop I think that there's a good thinking on safety Um, you know, something that isn't in the AI twenty twenty seven, thing that I think is smart. A I should always have to keep a legible chain of reasoning notepad in English that the moment we start letting them come up with our own languages and we really have no capacity. to see they their reason the black box has a black box. I don't want to make the black box too black boxy. And so that's. So you want to start working with what you have now Uh, and, you know, I'm not saying I have like, all the ideas in my head But there's enough on the table that I think we could begin. And I also, by the way, I thought whether you want anthropic doing it is like we can argue I think having a fair number of restrictions on how AI can be used for surveillance for kill chain questions is wise. And I particularly worry about surveillance. I am bothoth in a kind of macro way against using AI to create the Penopticon But in a microway, a lot of the machine learning tools being used to make the lives of workers meeasured and miserable right now are it was being used You read a lot about this on know, with Amazon and delivery drivers. I've read things about like eye tracking software. There's all kinds of software being used in different places I don't want to do it by memory, because was a minutees as I looked at the report to just track how productive workers are. It's like having somebody always watching you to make sure you're never slacking off And what I would say is that Turning using machines to turn people into machines is inimical to human flourishing And I do think we need to think harder in politics. and AI is going to push this on what actually human flishing means? What does it mean to be a human being in the age of AI? What does it mean to learn like a human being? mean What is human dignity, right? The Pope is right about that. People are already feeling this thought entropy kicking in this lifting with an exoskeleton suit on my capacity to actually be able to think properly is being degraded. And I know Pemet Chudran, you one of your favourite writers, talks about sitting with uncertainty instead of running from it AI is in a sense the most powerful uncertainty killer ever built, right? You have instant answers straight away. you never need to wonder again. even you know I think about the before times of interternet use There was friction even in your search R to go on to Google to look for a thing to go. Is that how releliable is that particular forum how reliable is this particular poster? Have they got an agenda on there? Oh, it's not got a security certificate on this particular website? or I'm going to have to scroll for a little while to find the specific type of answer that I'm looking for, and then I'm going to have to scan the document as opposed to having the equivalent of sort of refined NASA ready to eat dehydrated reconstituted food that you can just squeeze from a toothpaste tube into your mouth. My like The simplest thing I tell I sometimes do cege speaking. I'll get asked by kids, you know, what should I do? you know, AI Mlows Read books and paper. You should have a practice of cultivating the form of attention the form of sustained attention without reaching to resolve every question that occurs in your mind create People think of books, I think, as a technology of information that you download information from a book into your head are a technology of thin They' a scaffold for thinking. And what is happening when you read a book in paper and you're not distracting yourself every two seconds. is connections are being made in your mind Like the value of a book 's not just the information on it. It is what happens in your mind when you read it And one of the things I feel very strongly about with my kids One of things that I worry about with integrating AI into schools is you know, we talked about attension in the beginning here We need as human beings to cultivate healthy forms of attention. and AI, one of its seductions Even for smart agentic as we now call them people is cononstant feeling and simulacra of productivity it gives you. So you're you're reading something you go and you look it up and you're It all feels very productive. Because you are, there's constant information, there's back and forth. and I do. I use AI for research. I learn things from it. I'm not, I mean, I think you're hear in this conversation, I'm not Uh, like a pure hater If you are not spending time thinking and reading away from screens. you're just, you are allowing something to atrophy that you will not get back And what I worry about a lot of smart people I know is that AI makes you feel superhuman and it's making you less than human And I've watched a lot of people confuse AI a lot more in the work is not getting better get getting worse I hear about people of all these agents running on their behalf now And they come in the morning and it's prepared this huge summary of everything What about reading a physical newspaper instead of now absorbing tons of book reports from your AIs, right? Like where is your space? Where is your mind The ghost of productivity, the illusion of productivity is something that you have to fight so hard, I think in this era because I mean, even prior to AI It sure feels like you're doing something productive to sit there on your ear. cup on your iPad And even when your brain has stopped really working, you're flicking back and forth to the news, to your email You're seeing things on social media that sort of poses information But it's all distraction wearing productroivities clothing. Yes And you have to be really vigilant because deeper productivity often doesn't look or even feel like productivity. It's taking a walk and having an idea. It's like the second hour reading an actually pleasurable good book in a coffee shop, right? Like these things are deeply human experiences that the reason books worked and the reason we fistoon rooms in them when we want the rooms to look smart. which is what we're doing in here There's a reason we associ them with intelligence because they're not about what's in the book. they're about the way that people who read books are trained to think and attend. And like that will ultimate make you much better using AI desperately compensating. All of the bxs find. No I u I noticice with myself one of the best questions that I asked myself on an annual review a couple of years ago was Um What do I think is productive that isn't? And what do I not think is productive but is and going for a walk without airPods in. What did you come up with? on your second list there? I want to hear it? Dving without consuming anything. So no music, no podcasts, no nothing else. The same with going for a walk. A dinner with friends massively productive, hugely productive. come home and I've got five new ideas or I feel a little bit more peaceful or I've just got to listen to someone else entertain me or get a new perspective on something, or I've not thought about my shit. E simply the space that you create, the void that you create between thinking about your shit and thinking about your shit. by hearing somebody else extemporaneously think about their shit to you. You're like, oh, brilliant. I thought about some else's shit for a bit Um, that stuff that isn't productive but I thought was sitting in my desk when I'm not working I've just got the laptop open. L maybe I'll pick up some productivity pennies. here Slack almost ever Um being on callals when I don't need to Like just just checking in calls They have all of the trappings of something that looks like progress and productivity. But when you think about what's actually happened at the end of it, it's almost never anything productive Hh lying in a hamock. lying in a hammock, unusually productive Uh so What comes to my view A bunch of those I'd agree with traravel Huge. And I always want to be careful about the language of productivity here because the point is not to like do it in travel. Yes, yes, yes We For me, the absolute best thing I can do for my productivity is go to a coffee shop or some beautiful space. the aesthetic richness of the space is meaningful for me. and Paper books for a long enough time to get into a state where my mind has settled on that being what it's doing So that's very, very, very Like that is, I think the most important thing I do for my work walking I don't listen to or read things for the most part on the subway anymore. I just sit there Like a psyopath. Like asychopath. It is amazing how much it's like sitting there straing forward. You feel weird now on the subway. Do you know the Rory Sutherland line about this to do with smoking He says, um And sometimes You just want to stand in the corner of a room and stare out of the window The problem is if you do this without a cigarette, you look like a friendless idiot. But if you do it with a cigarette, you look like a fucking philosopher.. So aesthetics come for a lot. They do. So Really just taking breaks in general I mean that, like, I think actually the thing, if you want just boil down a lot of what we just said aside meing It's that Just staring at a screen Elessly is bad for you It's good for you When you're doing it intentionally and for long enough I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I have solved a problem on a column that I've been banging away at the keyboard on for hours or days by just leaving. You can't white knnuckle creativity Yeah dude. You don't get to white knnuckle it. So there's so there's a lot of that. I mean, the gym is obvious, you know, you get a lot of ideas. there' showers. I mean, this shit is all, it's all there. but I think to draw it out of the creativity space that or the productivity space, the thing that is being said here is You need to make space for yourself to be a human being and do human being thingsks And AI is going to be better at being a machine than we're going to be at being machines. And so trying to make yourself into a better machine Like everybody thinks we're using the AI as a prosthetic But again, the lesson of McLuhan and Postman and others is eventually the guys going be using you as a prosthetic. O certainly, maybe be more specific the organization that pays for both you and the AI is going to be making you a prosthetic of the AI in the same way that Amazon has made people a prosthetics of the boxes they pick up in the delivery ants they drive and tryrying to be as little. like a machine is possible Uh or at least create big spaces where you're not acting as a machine is I think can be really important. If I had to make a bet on how I would educate my kids and you told me, You can put them in a school that is going to be at the cutting edge of using AI. like a h the school or whatever. orr you can put them in to school is like Stain. Johns University or something And it's like going to be all paper and pens. I would go the I would go that one Because there will be AI. it will be out there. What I need to develop in them is the ability to be a human being And one of the dangers whenever we get really excited about new technology is we over adopt it in a thoughtless way. And then the technology colonizes our minds and then we can't realize how much we have Lost attentionally in terms of our own independence in terms of our own depth. So just like All the things we're talking about Bak stick walk. Yeah. It is so. it's the sort of shit that your friend mom would happily give you an answer for. Yeah. And she's happily got the answer for it What's that line? Is it? I think it might be a nature one where it's like, I beg you my friend I sleep well and go for more walks. It's just always a solution. So o my Godd, really advice Nietzsche should have taken? Yes, agreree You mentioned earlier on about this challenge this positioning that we've got at the moment around encouraging people bothoth sides encouraging people to better themselves, perhaps a little bit of an aversion of this self determination personersal development, at least traditionally coming from the left, but maybe also coming from the right now the left talks a lot about structural barriers for women. Do you think it's got an equally serious account of what's going wrong for men at the moment? I don't. I think it knows it doesn't, and it's beginning to try to think about what to do about that. People like Gavin Nsom are taking a lot more seriously I want to get it the thing you said underneath that because I think it's important though I think a very damaging thing that happened On the left I'll call it liberalism to be more of my own stream here is that it began to see individualistic explanations as excuses for structural dysfunction And so it became hostile to any politics or moral structure that was also about self improvement And one that's a betrayal the long history of liberalism, which has always been about self cultivation, like a reader, Cer, John Mills or for that matter, your, you know greatreat liberal politicians like Frederick Douglas or MLK or FDR Linol. When you give up on that, you're giving up on one of the fundamental drives So you want a society that is taking seriously all the ways in with structures, oppress, and coerce and impede people's flourishing and also what you're trying to create space for is for them to use their agency and their energy and their will to flourish. And so you need both sides of that. You need the vision of the just society, and you need the vision of the flourishing, self cultivating person And I do think the left became hostile to this and particularly become hostile to it when it was mail coded So when it was coded in the way that self help is for women, right more therapeutically more relationally. It was, you know, much easier. Estra Prell, Berne Brown, other people like that who have more of a vision in that, that went down easily in the mailpace where it's a little more testosteroney when it got associated with the Joe Rogans and modern Wisdoms and some I shouldn't say that, but the Jordan Peters since is may the better way to put it. I think there was like a pushback because also some of those people did have very aggressive right wing politics. And so these things got like linked together in their minds. And instead of saying, okay, how can we take the impulse in here that is clearly making Jordan Peterson into some kind of international phenom. and also try to answer it and have something constructive to say about it. There wass sort of rejection of it. disiscarded entirely because it's rejecting the structural inequalities that people are facing by saying that there are things that you can do and to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What is surprising to me, and I'd be very curious for what you think happened here because you know this world a lot better than I do, Not the right politically but somewhere this went is I don't really the way that Peterson and maybe Doug Murray and people like that, it seemed to like what came after that was Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes and people who have, I think, no real concept of virtue Right? I got my disagreements with Jordan Peterson on lots of things. but that I thought a lot about virtue, thought about myth, thought about, you know Overthought about it. oververthought about it someomehow the right, like Bronze Age Purvert, it pushed towards Vvice So the left gave up on virtue and the right rejected it Now, I shouldn't say the left and the right because lots of people in both normal ass people. Raising kids and loving their partners and doing their job and volunteering in their community and going to church Maybe it's like an algorithic dimension of things quiet middle three quintiles. Yes. But at like the apex of the attention economy I do feel, I watch this happen. L you're not gonna to convince me it didn't. Like the left became quite hostile to sort of ideas of individual cultivation. likeike, oh, that's just say you using your privilege And the right became the right moved in a way where it became Vice maxing to you use the term that like our person and uses kind of caricatured it T a degree the most extreme version of this. I mean, certainly I think if Jordan hadn't had his time away if he hadn't done the God pivot. in the same way. if youd continuue to do the clean your room. get your bootstraps and pick yourself up by them I do think that that would have probably curtailed a lot of the vacuum that other voices got sucked into Wh knows how that would have actually played out, but I definitely get the sense that Wow, there is this big cohort of largely men, largely young men who have increasingly grown up in fatherless homes, which is a problem that the left should be very concerned about, right Uh, They're looking for a patriarch, figure. They're looking for someone to tell them like how do I become a It's the equivalent of Dad, how do I shave O I fancy this girl in school. How do I talk to her It's equipent for that, but life wide And If you open up that market but then remove yourself from it It's just going to suck in. anybody that can service it, but perhaps not quite at the level that first mover had been able to do. And I think that that was definitely a big part of it. It's been kind of fascinating to see this conversation unfold because Everybody is talking out at both sides of their mouth, which, for instance, one of the big criticisms that I can certainly have of Most of the pro mail advocates and most of the people that are on the right Uh Um, Men's mental health isn't taken seriously until it affects women or other people. Um lip serv is paid to that, but no one really cares and there aren't very many therapeutic models that sort of speak to men in the way that they want to be spoken to with regards to understanding their desire for progress and conquer and mastery, and also providing them with solutions that they can move forward on, as opposed to just, hey, come in here, talk about your feelings. Your issue is that you're a defective woman as opposed to a man who needs assistance. Moving forward, linearly. But also that same group of people that say that's a big deal claim to be advocates for men will ly mock a guy who opens up about his emotions on the interternet If you see a video of a guy who's crying orre he's really struggling? or he's down on his luck There is not the sort of camaraderie that you're claiming that is supposed to be there That's like it's just a huge hypocrisy. This is men are good. Tom Golden's got a substack. and he Ididentifies this. It's like guys won't help other guys that are struggling emotionally in that sort of a way whilst saying that men's mental health needs to be taken more seriously. It like it's the equivalent of not putting your money where your mouth is with regards to this. But on the left complete denial of self agency, of sovereignty, of modern men being made to pay for the sins grandfathers benefited from, a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of, as Christine Ember says and okay, well on both of those sides It doesn't feel like much progress is being at least much productive progress is being made. And then if you do begin to try and have this conversation, I'm aware Looking the way that I do, maybe it's the British accent, mayaybe it's the whatever. Like as soon as you start talking about problems of men and boys unless you have this painful throat clearing land acknowledgement before you fucking do it every single time the same boring accusations get thrown at you. You don't care about women, that this is misogyny rebranded, that this is the thin end of the wedge, that it's a gateway drug to something that's much more Pnicious down the line that talking about birth rates or coupling, or it's you trying to pull women out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen? And it's it's boring and fatiguing when you're trying to make genuine progress. and you say, okay, well at what point can we have this conversation without having to prostrate ourselves for all of these issues that have come before. Let me ask you something though. Because I think you're right about the world of a couple of years ago Could I go on podcasts like this one? sometometimes there's just some with Daxon Armtra Expert and I haveve done others Dear Wh Who are you be shadowboxing with here Because is is still I actually do think there's a period where you would get a lot of I mean, a lot, maybe is even a strong word, but bothoth directions there was like pretty toxic and weird social media dynamics, it got very gendered And we're very editarian. And now I think there's a lot of Hangover of that And I'm not saying you can't find it someomewhere on the internet you can find anything somewhere on the interternet. But is it really still there in that way?ike I f fruits, it's Gav Nsom on the left trying to engage this conversation You know fairly successfully, I think U and in who he's having on his podcast, which has been, I think, a very interesting project. And you know, I see Ryan Holiday, right? who I know's been on the show and think Obama Obama made a pit Obama ago. Yeah. I mean, his post, I mean, Obama was always this is a thing, right? This was a very this thing we're talking about is a very punctuated moment. becausecause Obama had a very aggressive politics of self cultivation Right, a very big There's a society and there's an individual and you have to act in a certain way. you have to be a certain thing for your family. And his post presidential project was about young men, right? That was like a big thing he did And' like there was this period online where things got really fractious between the genders and other things I think everybody is having some trouble knowing if they can declare it over Yeah, I understand what you mean. Did you still experience it? is I guess the question I was Absolutely. From where, like who? If I was to put out any kind of a real online that talks about sex differences, still the blank slatism will come in. There was one that came out yesterday. There was one that came out yesterday that said u the differential in terms of housework. around the house between men and women. a really interesting study. If you look at the number the amount of housework time that is spent by single men and single women living on their own. Women do two hundred percent amount of housework. The standards for a home tend to be more clean than men's do. And I mean, this has been shown up in the Simpsons and Family Guy and you know all of the kind of cliches for a long time on of the comments to do with, Well, the only reason for that is because women are socialized into thinking that they have to have high levels of presentability and that it's U judgmental and social conditioning that's caused this thing to happen. I don't think that that's the case. I think that you can make a pretty easy evolutionary psychology explanation to understand why that would not be the case. If you talk ever anything that's to do with male self improvement and the challenges that they're facing with regards to that. I mean, a good example of this was there was a study that said men need two Gu nights out per week. in order to maintain optimal mental health. It's a pretty big study and it's pretty well researched Every single comment was boohoo, poor patriarchy, tellell me that you're a man child without telling me that you're a man child. I think when you see Sabrina Carpenter at the moment, the lyrics the H the broad culture that's happening is not unifying and it's not unifying from both sides. I would I agree it's not unifying, but I think this is the thing I'm trying to get out here a little bit, because I'm not disagreeing that that either these comments are real or some of these dyamics are real I think one of the things that is We have to get over in the culture is One expecting anything to be unifying Treating the comments section like the actual reaction What would be a more real reaction? O people in the conversation, I mean, because my perception of this, right, which I track more what the people in politics are saying and what the other journalists are saying is that this conversation about men doing poorly is everywhere. I mean, Richard Reeves's book was a big deal. And it's completely at this like the Democratic partarty, like it was It had this like sort of ridiculous thing it was going tond tens of millions of dollars on it like problems on men. but But the idea that you can just say like toxic masculinity be done with it, I'm not saying you won't find that in a comment section. I'm just saying that it actually doesn't feel to me like where the zeitgeist is But I think there's a lot of Sadow boxing with So I mean, I again, like I'm a well known liberal commentator out here talking about how much we need liberal politics of virtue and broadly getting a good reaction to that. Not never getting shit for it. But I don't know, I don't expect to never get shit. It's interesting, I wonder whether the accelerator was pressed and we're still sort of coasting close to maximum speed, but it's not actually being increased. That might be a way to look at it At least in my perspective You're right that talking about the problems of men and boys, talking about the problems of men and boys. is not seen with the same dismissiveness that it would have been two years ago talking about the solutions for the problems of men and boys which is really what matters. Like identifying the problem is only interesting or useful insofar as it allows you to find a solution to me it still gets the hackles up of a lot of people on the internet and whether comments are tasteemakers, how top down versus bottom up is this? it's kind of hard. What are you aggregating it from? Well that's what I mean that I think is very hard. I think we have very distorted views of the public And this has been one of the ways we've been deranged algorith with med And I think a couple of years back, People reflect at that They thought it was real. And so the tastemakers and the elites began to sort of like fall in line to it a little bit I think that has stopped to a large degree. and I think people have sort of reasserted Um Independence from it But obviously like the Buzz is still there But not mistaking the buzz is like the thing. So like look, I don't know what the solutions are that you're describing. I'm sure there are like some I might agree, some I might not. I don't feel, I will say that even compared to what I thought was true a couple of years ago I don't feel this particular conversation to be Electric fenced Right? Like I believe there are differences between men and women. Like something I've said on different shows is that One reason I think that some of the vision of masculinity I'm seeing in like the Take the shackles off of men right seems wrong to me is that you have to, I think, start any vision of masculinity with the reality that men are stronger and through testosterone more aggressive And so Self mastery has always been important part of vision's of masculinity ass Mastery and the constructive channeling Of those impulses is like foundational. Is any healthy masculinity Mostly I think people understand what I'm talking about when I say that ys I think about this a lot.y for restraint is increasingly important. Yeah, you're not going to convince me that I don't have to channel their aggressive impulses in healthy ways All And I just think in politics, I mean, you know, again, I think Newsom is interesting because he's somebody who, and you should him on the show, it would be a very interesting conversation. He's somebody who I think is very H' a very sensitive touch for the politics of a moment. And I mean, you look at his book, like Young Man in a Hurry, the one he just released, which is unusually interesting for a politician' b, whichich is not a high bar, obviously. They should put that on the frank bl. It is very much about this question of I mean, you could really understand that book is a confrontation with a certain kind of illness And he's very explicit about that in a way I find interesting. So to me, my sense is like the water has changed here I will say I think the other thing though is that I have often thought like the division of the problems into mail problems problems and female problems, I agree that there are different questions for men and women I also think that there's a broader set of questions that partart of the AI thing and are a little bit more unifying about We actually need to find ways for human beings to just continue to be human beings and become more so. L I this is one of my obsessions and it's not to change the substject. We can keep talking about men I think there are more things everybody is going to need and ways in which we have modernity is try to keep people useful in the ways economy needated them to be useful They're going need to be rethought in more fundamental fashions, starting with education. and That actually has some specific mail Q questions that. I think Rich Reeves is right when he says that modern education is not well built for boys in a funny way, like the competition, like we've been sa framing this as a compition between men and women The possibility of framing at least some things correctly is competition between humans and machines. opens up some avenues and pathways, I think to talk about Things that are more innate to humans of sexes, I'm also separately innate in both sexes that maybe would have been harder to do five years ago It's certainly going to be easier to unify if you have a common enemy because that happened previously. it was just between each other as opposed to together against something else Yeah Yeah. I look, it's It's interesting. It definitely feels to me like I hope that it's not just Lp S service that's being paid to something because Evidently in twenty twenty four, that was blank space that becomes left untouched resulted in a lot of people going to the other side. Right fromom the left, like that young men really, really seem to depart from they didn't feel like they were a part of the deum. What was that line that was a for underprivileged or underserved communities and there was thirteen of them and the only one that was missing was men There was every different version of this. is Richard Reeves big big post about twenty that wasn't true. There was a there wass a men for Harris thing that like there wass a whole The White Gu for Harris movement. I think that, right? Yeah. I mixed feelings sure. But you live by the affinity group, you die by the affinity group. That's tr It' be like there's no affinity groups for me and then they do one. And Well, it's interesting on the what are the groups that are falling behind, that was the issue that Richard took with it. I don't know what he thought about the White guys for Harris group There was definitely some sort of prostrating of the self there that felt a little strange U I'm interested, you know, as you sort of think about being somebody who has public opinions, who is putting these sorts of things out on the internet Having the changing landscape and having this sort of very long career of saying things that might have felt true at the time but can be pointed to in future How do you avoid being too deranged by the criticisms? By the criticisms, ye U That's how I thought you were going to go with that. I don know. I think it's the thing we were tal about earlier. You have a backstage. I have people whose reactions to things are bellweather for me. And if there's a huge amount of critique of me at a certain moment and that happens every so often. I try to take it seriously and think about it doesn't mean I was changeed my opinion on U I think you need your own internal compass Again, I will say I have pretty aggressive algorithmic media hygiene And so I'm not out there looking for reaction The reason I ask is, you know, we're talking about need for a degree of resilience, degree of resilience in terms of individual agency, now up against what's going to be happening with AI, already up against what's been happening with social media and screens and distraction. and There's a great article by Ethan Strauss, which is called Criticism Capture is more wararping than Audience Capture. Oh yeah. And I've not read that article, but I think there's something really to that. one of the most canonical things that I've read for the modern age. It's so good. And it basically says that people begin to change their positions more to either in advance defend against or as a reaction to the existing or potential criticisms that their work is going to receive I think that It is a very tricky thing. I will say this for me. This is a very tricky thing to know the difference between absorbing critique synthesizing good points from it. and absorbing critique and not wanting to touch Du stouff and Be they kind of feel the same inside and There's not like one way to do it I do think it is important. I try to think about this a lot that Pak is often a form of in group disciplining One thing I have found over the years is that Nobody is hated like an apostate So the rate you know, to start there And I know this from my friends there. It's like If you are on the right and you rent Antie Trum how you get is nothing like what I get as a forever and openly anti Trump. U Nobody cares. In fact, I have perfect good relations with people I have to report on for the Trump administration because they don't they never saw me on their side. It's like it's a stable relationship in a way U Similarly, on, you know the left, like nobody's hated like an apostate The small differences make the most sense. Yeah, but also It's a possibly effective action G in line Yeah, get in line and maybe you will. And so you have to be very careareful about that inside yourself On the one hand, you want to be able to critique and on the other hand, you don't want to be scared of it. One of my practices is when there's a lot of critique of me I will often invite one of the critics on the show and just kind of talk it out and see where I agree and disagree And if I can sort of pull it into the spaces where I can deliberate about it If all I'm doing is exposing myself to the roar of anger at a moment when is getting algorithmically boosted. I don't that's not constructive. I will say the other thing that'll sometimes do is I find it's quite important for me in terms of how thoughtfully I can integrate feedback when and in what context I absorb it So Dinner And pinged on my phone where somebody sends me a mean article about me. sometometimes friends are like, D you see these terrible things? people are writing about you? And it's like, than you. They didn't have my personal You know, way to reach for me, but you do and And now you brought it to my attention. Yeah At dinner. Yeah, you're a connduit. Yeah. I think this's horribleu. I know' more than mad of me. I'm aware. Yeah But the thing that I'll now do is If there's stuff. I will like put it together And I will go print it all out. or if it's videos, you know Watch a video. you create a portfolio of c thirty AM When I am resourced and have energy. Resilience is highest and can think about it during the day as opposed to at the end of the day. When I'm like trying to transition between the subway and my kids or you know, dinner and bed, whatever it might be. So it's like everything else, right? You need a certain if you're getting a lot of it, I think you need a certain level of discipline and you need to walk this balancing line between not getting overwhelmed and not shutting out I'm not saying I always do it well. You like I like I'm not, it's not a thing I would say I've mastered Yeah, you've it's fascinating for me to see somebody who I'm just however Ctankoris and controversial and inflammatory some of the topics that I talk about. or have been None of them ever come close to politics. Politics is always going to be ground zero for this Right? It's always going to be ground zero. And just the u the preparedness to step into that over and over again me is pretty fascinating. I think in the past I've heard you descri journalism as organized curiosity given How the last few years have gone. I remember as well, you talking about Vox on the idea that Bet information leads to politics You still believe that You still believe that now I'd probably altered it a little bit to say that it's not just information, it's the information environment. because It's hard to say, did we get better or worse information What we got was more information Uh, and then the way the information was sorted, algorithmically and other things. You can have better information than in any time in history And worse, and we did. And so the way I would say it is I do think better and worse information environments, attention environments, I really do take that layer as we've been talking about pretty seriously But Is it like a direct thing? I don't know I will say one of the things that has weirdly made me very hopeful about how politics still can work is the experience I've had on abundance. And the point is not that just like me and Derek did this. abbundance is synthesizing things like the YMbi movement, the Yes in my Backyard housing movement. It's synthesizing where I think some of the smartest green groups went on decarbonization and recognizing we need to do that by accelerating green technology and then figuring out how to deploy it at scale There were a lot of people and ideas and so forth that we were kind of putting into that And I have watched I have watched in a matter of a couple of years idedas that were quite marginal. I mean, the first piece on this I did before we called it abundance I called it supply side progressivism. Then I got to liberal less Yeah, right. Then liiberal sym builds which is pretty good and then Derek up abundance point was that The left didn't talk about supply. we only talked about demand. We talked about how to redistribute, we talked about how to subsidize, which are important things, but we didn't talk about how to create more of the goods we needed. Now we do all the time. So like there was a big intellectual argument, againg, not just mine it work And now everybody from Newsom to Moraheli to West Mor to Mamani to everybody, right? Like it's I just did a California govern's for. where the top five Democrats in the governance race did a housing forum with me They were all just talking about how to make it easier to build and how to cut construction costs. So like I have watched Good information, good argumentation. There's a RAN study about how much it costs to construct per square foot in California, Texas, Colorado, they were all familiar with it. This one study had been incredibly influential on all of us. can happen. What are you paying the most attention to over the next couple of years I need AI I'm trying to help create a better liberalism more capable of competing with the liberalism I'm trying to create a better liberalism. more capable of competing with illiberalism I obviously pay a lot of tension politics. I cover Israel and Palestine a lot, which is just a tough ass issue Um There's a bit of a mix of I'm paying attention to everything you would think I'm trying to pay attention to and also the constant curves in the road. rightight? Did I expect us to be spending the year talking about warar in Iran, I didn't really. uh, but now we are and like that's part of what I'm paying attention to. And so more things will happen that I'm not expecting and seeing My work is a mix of being to the news to to longer range intntellectual efforts in politics and then connected to u shows that are more about point of all this, which is a more like beautiful and humane world with novelists and meditators and people like that. And so it's all like for me, it's this constant Uh calibrating of am I too far in this direction? Too much news, not enough ideas, too many ideas, not enough news politics, not enough humanism And you know, there's no way to do it, but by feel and by attending to the moment S's terrifing the hum It it does, it does. It s it sounds like It sounds unusually in touch, I think with what people's experiences of life are and certainly beinging on the outside watching sort of what goes on with politics. so much of it seems to be this very sterile detachment from what people's normal day to day lives are like And reporting on it too also doesn't take that As if people wake up on a morning and all that they're doing is mainlining politics and political governance into their veins. You really don't want to let the algorithms replace your intuition mean that I think a lot of people, because they give their attention over to the algorithms And then the arguments decide what they want to see. that that process I just talked about, we are constantly calibrating and recalibrating and really trying to think about what am I attending to Well, if you if the way you get information is you open up X in the morning or Instagram or TikTok or whatever The algorithm is decided what you're attending to There's much more room for intuition when you're reading print newspaper you looked around and looked at what you were interested in and turned the page and maybe saw something you didn't think you were interested in, but you were. and I you were saying it sounds very human It's all human in a way. We're all humans doing it though, you know differenterent spaces make us feel less that way try to create a lot of space for my own judgment to exist and to like feel what different things feel like One thing that I have one way I believe my own mind works differently than I did ten years ago Is it is a much more in touch with how bodied it is And the signals come from the body, not just the mind includcluding in a, I don't know how much you feel this way, but I was thinking about this in Podcasts I have a questions document Follow it How do I know where I'm going? It's like my skin perarkles But the fuck is at And yet What makes me a good podcaster is not the questions document. it's the Skin Parkling. correct And trying to become more and more and more in touch with that Over time Again, these are the kinds of things that I wish school would do more of. It's like, I want to teach my sons how to listen to their bodies It's very difficult to teach instinct to teach taste. It's not scalable, it's going to be different and idiosyncratic for every person U and yet, is one of the most if not the single, most important thing that you can continue to develop. But I think you can teach and I think you can help people cultivate connection those things that need to come through. even just explaining the primacy of it, like this is something that's important that you should pay attention to. Yeah. Do not outsource your taste to the AI. Yeah, but you have to feel, right? This is one of the worries I have about a lot of things is they disembbody us And you I never know less about my body then when I'm really strolling Do ever do you ever do that where you like move from a paperbook to your phone, which I will sometimes have both out And you can really feel the difference, like how much I'm in touch with. The body on the physical, like print slow versus here You really do become a brain and a bat And I'm not saying it's all bad. I don't want to be overly A ludight here. I have a phone, I have a computer, I work on the interternet , but do think Yet developing intuition, developing paste That's a very personal, very mysterious thing developing the ability to listen to what's happening inside of yourself that through meditation and movement practice and other things It's like, I just would like to give people kids A lot more meta training in their attention and mind and You know, I think we do we are over torqued on information and need to push redicing in this era harder, or I would like to see a spush harder. on I don't even know what to call it. the art of thinking The art of feeling just as much I always think that going back to some of the, know, trends in podcasting a few years back U When I guess there's been Sapiir'sine, you know, facts don't care about your feelings I was thought this was big. I was really discrewed with outline Itcause's not that facts care about your feelings, facts don't care about anything. They're facts. You should care about your feelings. Feelings are very intelligent and the dismissal of them is, which is not obviously just a ben thing, it's a mistake, right? You want to be in touch with the way things feel. There's a lot of intelligence in that And again, you know, the AI can't feel the way things feel, but you can And so like that's a capacity to cultivate It's fascinating. I had a conversation with Alex O'Connor and he was explaining how the sort of modern world of rationalism, focus on science trying to optimize your thinking tools in the dismissal of religion, story, mythology, narrative, narrative arc, personification was getting people to reject that that felt most real to them in place of something that you told them was more real but felt as fake as it could be. Like if you see facts and figures, they're not as compelling as a story of a person that this affected And you can just continue to scale that all the way up to you can try and reverse engineer virtue from first principles. It's like actually a really hard, it's a very difficult and clunky thing to do as opposed to you know when you know I behaved in that way? I didn't feel good I didn't feel good when I said when I lied to that person, as opposed to having to be able to Show me your proof of why lying is wrong on this whiteboard It's it's way harder. And u yeah, I I'm completely on board, I think De. demand is going to be for people to feel more. Although I would take this in both directions actually. We mentioned Pema Chojren, who's a Buddhist teacher was recently on my show, and I'm a very big fan of a lot of her work And her work is very much about tolerating the feelings we don't want tolerate And one of the reasons I think it's very important to be in touch with what you're feeling is not always because you should listen to it. sometimes Actually, I think so much of life is driven by these little embodied contractions, we barely even notice But because we don't even notice that they're happening We follow them unthinkingly. And so it's such a weird balance. On the one hand, I completely agree with, you said it was Alex O'Connor, what he was saying On the other hand, of course, there are many, many, many times when the way the world works, violates what feels true to us And so Having the information is there so you can make good judgments about it But if you don't know that that information is happening in you, You're actually going to be much easier much more easily moved by it than if you do. But I have become one thing that I'm proud of myself because it has been very hard work for me genuinely hard work for me and partly the in personal relationships I have become better at knowing that I am uncomfortable And so I don't run away from it didn't Kn it I was much more led around by it because I just knew I didn't want to be there. But I didn't take time to sit in the space It wasn't like fully feeling.ust reacting to it. just reacting to it So that to me is like some of the genius of getting better at listening to your own body You actually know if something's happening that You're going to need to sit through rather than react to T you as recline, ladies and gentlemen. right. Thank you. great. Thats a joining up Uh who did I just take with? Just stay with Ian Bremmer, had a great conversation about praised state of the world That could be a title for pretty much everything that you're doing at the moment I appreciate you, man. Thank you very much.ci being. Allright.ee you next time, everyone.