The Collapse of American Politics - Ezra Klein - #1114

28:19And the part of the party that is insurgent sort of reacted against that. It's like, well, abundance kind of became for them the face of like the Obama-ism, you know, the sort of the Obama side 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, Zoran Mamdani just this week released a big housing plan and it's a housing plan all about making it easier to build and all about cutting through bureaucracy and red tape and making it faster and cheaper. And in Los Angeles, Nithya Rahman, 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 LA city is suing to stop from becoming affordable housing.

29:07The New Democrats, the Congressional Caucus, released a thing about how to build more clean energy and create clean energy abundance. So one of the hard things for me in judging this debate is that there's an online discourse that, because of the nature of online discourse, becomes very, very factional, and it becomes very angry. And people who are...

29:30people sort of create a fight in it that they're used to. But to me, like the whole thing Abundance is doing is cross-cutting divisions. It exists not just inside the Democratic Party, but also between Democrats and Republicans to sort of create new syntheses on things. And so I just don't see the fights that people are scoring on Twitter there as being even the fights and the difficulties that our ideas really face. Because in practice, it's much more about how hard these things are to get done. And I also think that there's like a whole technology side of abundance that has proven a much, much harder climb because of AI than it was when we were writing that book.

30:10So I'm always happy to be a character in various people's discourse fights, but 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's sort of openly critiquing liberal governance failures. Do you ever feel like you need to walk on eggshells a little because there is a degree of purity spiraling and othering on the left? The right seems to be prepared to welcome anybody with whatever history they've got with open arms. Unless you say Joe Biden won the 2020 election and then Donald Trump will primary your whole career into oblivion.

30:54That 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. What Donald Trump did very effectively is he collapsed purity on the Republican Party down to a single dimensional point, which is loyalty to him. So he is willing to accept a tremendous amount of views, so long as you are loyal to and say nice things about him personally. It's a single ordinating principle. Exactly. The left, which does not have a leader in that respect.

31:29It's got a plurality of ways that you can get in trouble. Exactly. Whereas there's just a unity of ways that you can get in trouble on the right. 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 thing you have to accept. This one, and not just lie, right? The 2020 election stuff is a lie. But the problem they're about to have, the problem they're having right now is that what it means to be loyal to Trump is a more complicated thing than it was in the 2024 election because he's doing things, right, like the war in Iran.

32:01And 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, sign on that you can't break with him on the Epstein files. You see this happening. And so you've had like very MAGA people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey, you know, who 100 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. Single ordinating principle has fractured into.

32:32The Democratic Party, or maybe I'll call it like the broad left. It's not like it was four years ago. but it it what it has is an agenda and a set of um different factions have a like a platform and an orientation and a set of ideas you have to be loyal to right do you believe in medicare for all like how do you feel about billionaires or how do you feel about wokeness if you're sort of more in the set right they're they're trying to create a programmatic um test and you know that has a problem and that 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.

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33:49Gone are the days of needing to buy a load of pills in the gym parking lot from some juice bro in a cyber truck. But if you're unsure about it, AG1's got a 90-day money-back guarantee. So you can try it every single day for three months. and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, an AG1 flavor sampler, and that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. 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?

34:25Because at least with that, people can be dissenting of Trump, but broadly still be seen as part of the right. I'm not convinced that the same amount of ballast is in the system for people that are on the left. Now, maybe this is declining. I think that you're right. It was significantly more pure five or six years ago. But I'm just interested as somebody who seems to be departing or at least criticizing in a manner that I wouldn't have heard five years ago, whether that ever plays into the back of your mind. 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.

35:06I like to think that I have tried to hold this approach to my politics and work for a long time. I mean, the thing that led to the moment I've had over the past couple of years was a sort of early and pretty aggressive argument that Biden should step down. And that was not a popular thing in the Democratic Party when I made it and it caused problems. So I have a view that, and by the way, Abundance, which releases last year, I mean, the columns and essays that led to that started in 2021. So I was writing all this at a different time. I think you have to be self-critical as a party in politics, both for two reasons.

35:45One 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. But to take the broader thing you're saying, because I don't want to present that as too idiosyncratic. I think, one, this has all gotten easier. In part because I think the weird moment in the platforms has fractured. So here's another theory I have. whoever dominates twitter pays for it three to four years later and in 2020 progressives dominated twitter and they convinced themselves of a lot of kind of wild ideas and those ideas came and bit them in the ass in 2024 okay and kamala harris got like really hung out on different um ads that got run against her with things she had said years before.

36:45Even right now, James Tallarico, the attacks that Ken Paxton and Republicans are using against him have to do with things he said like three or four years ago, right? Like God is non-binary, that kind of thing. So the thing is then Elon Musk bought Twitter, made it X, sort of drove a lot of the left off of it, opened up the floodgates to the right on it. And now the right has ended up in a somewhat similar place where they have gotten attached to Nick Fuentes and the more conspiratorial incarnation of Tucker Carlson and the Twitter Anon world and people are talking themselves into much more wild and conspiratorial things and this is going to hurt them, is my prediction, in two or three years when the bill on all this comes due.

37:32Which is all to say that I think you cannot separate the dynamics we are talking about from algorithmic social media. I think that is fundamentally what is shaping these fast rise and fast falls in coalitional purity, in kind of extreme ideas taking hold. And in a sense where you get so consumed in talking to your own side that you lose a sense of where other people really are. And I mean, that's the most dangerous thing in all of this. 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. The problem is when you don't realize you have not done the political work to make those ideas legible to others or to sort of win enough support that you can push other ideas out of the marketplace.

38:27You stop. Instead of doing politics, you're doing posting. and politics is a constant balancing of disagreement. Politics is an act of endless pluralism in a liberal democracy and posting is not. Posting is for your side to and getting a lot of energy to hate on the other side. And posting tends to habituate people to a very, very, very bad and very weak form of politics. So you're saying that people sort of believe their own hype for a while, that becomes its own kind of derangement. And then at some point in future - No, I'm saying that in the way we were talking about the algorithms earlier, people get into these one-up dynamics to sort of prove their purity.

39:13So Mom Donnie, right, here in New York, when he ran for mayor, he just had to straight up disown a bunch of things he had said on Twitter a couple of years ago right like that the nypd is anti-queer and it and a lot of politicians on the on the left are just having to be in a yeah 2020 was a crazy time you know like it like i said some shit and that came from being in a online milieu where people are getting pushed to like see and say stuff that was ever more out of the mainstream as a way of proving that they got it you're optimizing for the platform and when you and 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 as much as many eyeballs as possible eventually somebody when that dust settles a little bit gets to look at it with a clearer set of eyes and go what's this what's this thing that you said not that long ago and sometimes it appears in an ad or you're now running statewide in texas or citywide in new york and all of a sudden it just it wasn't for them you were you were saying something to the person you had seen two seconds ago on social media and now it's being blasted out in an ad running all across el paso and it wasn't for the median voter.

40:40The internet is forever. Do you consider yourself, given this interesting position, and especially with the book, where 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 different things in Europe and other places. And I have fairly recognizable liberal goals. I want universal health care. I want more economic egalitarianism.

41:19I want people to have just the ability to live a flourishing life. But 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 fractious, complex, multi-ethnic democracy function is honorable, important work. And that requires not just policies, but certain political virtues and approaches to politics that keep conflict from spinning out of being constructive and allow it to spin into spaces that are really destructive. If you were to design an incentive to do the opposite of that, it would be social media.

42:07Yes. And so I, yeah, I think I'm, in some ways, I'm probably further left than my temperament makes people think in terms of what I believe about things. But I also think that policy is not really the way people code other people's ideology. You know, what makes you more far left, right? Is it believing in the maximum level of universal health care you can get to? Or is it your view on climate change? Or is it your view on what level of political compromise is okay? A lot of the places where people get really angry at me is I am much more open to political compromise and I'm very open to Democrats running very different candidates in very different places, including candidates who are much more conservative than me, because I believe disagreement is very real.

42:58And one mistake I think a lot of people make when looking at politics is they don't really credit how different people are from them. And so if you're in a political bubble in New York City or Austin or Los Angeles, what it takes for a Democrat like Joe Manchin to win statewide in West Virginia, I don't think it's conceivable. to you. Like, you don't know anybody like, like, you don't know what it means to win working class voters in West Virginia. He does. He was like the Democratic MVP, right? I don't have Joe Manchin's politics. I find Joe Manchin incredibly irksome. And I also understand that his job is not my job.

43:37And so one of 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, is I think it's really important Democrats win Iowa. I think it's really important they are competitive in places like Nebraska, which they used to be. You know, in 2010, Democrats held, I believe, both seats in West Virginia, right, in the Senate. Like, that's unimaginable now. And so the question of what kind of big tent would allow that, where you can have a Zoran Mamdani here, but, you know, Rob Sand, who's this more moderate Democrat running statewide for governor in Iowa, who's great, he's running on getting rid of the two-party system, right?

44:22He's not running as a Democrat to appeal to liberals in Brooklyn or leftists in Brooklyn, for that matter. He starts every town hall with he has Republicans stood up. He says, I want everybody to clap for the Republicans in this room. The Democrats to stand up, everybody clap for the independents. And then he has him all do the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the Star-Spangled Banner together. And is that my politics exactly? Is that how I would run a rally? Probably not. Would I win statewide in Iowa? I sure fucking would, man. But Rob Sand might win statewide in Iowa. And Rob Sand is a hero for that.

44:57And so you got to believe in things. But also, I do think the question, I mean, I think in the Trump era, I take more seriously than I used to, that building the stability of our politics was an incredible achievement. And many countries don't have that. And in many countries, they had it and it was lost. And believing that in America, we cannot break this thing is a mistake. And if you do believe we can break this thing, then you actually have to think about what kinds of politics bring it back. And that's why I'm not excited, even if it works intentionally, about seeing a doom loop of vice and venality.

45:45Because even if you can win that way, you are breaking the thing by doing it. And so the question of how do you win virtuously is very important to me because I think for all the other things I want to have, you actually need a working, peaceful politics to get there. Who's your ideal Democratic Party candidate? For 2028? Yeah. They don't exist. I mean, I don't think there's a perfect Democrat for 2028. And to the extent, if there is, we don't know them yet because they've not been under those lights yet. I think I am a sort of unreconstructed admirer of Barack Obama. And if Obama were running today, he would have to run differently than he did then.

46:27More aura. He had a lot of aura then, man. Online aura. I think if you're running today, he'd have more online aura. That's the point, right? You can't transpose who he is post-presidentially to now, right? He is a human institution. He's like a monument in some ways. So he's not going to be who he was even when he was running in 08. But I think he did something that's really hard to do, which is, one, he contained many of the country's contradictions inside himself and was able to make people even who disagreed with him quite deeply feel obscene. And he was able to combine two forms of moral imagination that I think are hard to combine, which is one was a sort of moral imagination of policy, of things like universal health care, which he basically achieved, right?

47:09A lot of people had failed on that before him. Could we make health care system better? Always, but Obamacare is no small thing. And the second was a moral imagination on politics itself in a country that had the kinds of racial divides and legacy we have and had, in a country that in the Bush years felt very divided. He made people feel politics could be different. And the tragedy of Obamaism is that it got worse. That he was able actually to pass quite a lot of the policy he promised, but he was not able to make politics and this country's divisions feel better. In fact, they felt worse. And the thing that I think no one has an answer to is how to resuscitate that side of his moral imagination in a way that does not feel naive or hopeless or cliche.

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49:06You 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 being starting to be a part of the conversation, I guess, because I started Modern Wisdom in 2018. And then to roll it forward and to think about what happens in just two years time, just two years from now, kind of blows my mind. And I don't know what people are looking for on either side in 2028 anymore. Do you follow, I don't know how deep you are in politics and we've had Bernie and people like that on the show.

49:44Do you look at the Democrats? Do you think that one? No. No. But I also don't look at the conservatives and think that one either. I mean, my basic read of the field for what it's worth right now is that the ones doing the most interesting things are Gavin Newsom or AOC, are Buttigieg. And then the big dark horse, I think, that people should not underestimate right now is John Ossoff, who is the senator from Georgia. He was in a reelection this year. um but when i look at the democrats those are the four who i think have figured out attention in this era and one of my views on politics is that attention is its own competency now and that if you are not capable of earning it and wielding it and using it and breaking through on it yourself, then you actually cannot compete at the highest levels.

50:44Certainly not right now with the way that the ecosystem sits at the moment. And I don't think it'll be different in 2020. You've 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 Keir Starmer in a bunch of places, is people who are too formed by institutions, they're afraid. And one way I often put this is I think right now one of the problems in American politics is Republicans are underformed by institutions and Democrats are overformed by them. So Republicans sort of in the Trump era, they're too contemptuous of institutions, too contemptuous of institutional authority, too contemptuous of the norms of institutions and how you act Just rip it all up, doge it, chainsaw it.

51:32It's all bullshit anyway. And that's wrong. The problem for the Democrats can be that they can become a party of Tracy Flicks. 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. in a party that is much more pro-institutions than the Republicans are. And people who come through institutions like that, they often reflect those institutions. They begin to talk like them. You can hear the institution when they open their mouth. Keir Strummer speaks like he is the government, right?

52:15Like you feel like he's got, like he feels like a bureaucracy. And I'm not even saying that as a negative on him. At another time, that might have been more, you know, a doable thing. But I don't think that works in this media environment at all. Like, you have to feel honest, authentic. You have to, like— Like a real person, like an actual human. People can sense that before they can sense anything else about you. Yeah. And so when I see some of the Democrats who are running, but they still talk like someone who is optimized. And to be fair to them, this used to be a thing you optimize for and it worked to win over like local editorial boards at small town newspapers.

53:02They were optimized to be somebody that the editors of newspapers thought seemed like a competent, decent person. and it might be and it is i think a shame that that has become some kind of a liability that you need to have some edge of wildness to you but it is what 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.

53:47And also the potential hypocrisy of having updated that, that creates its own challenge too. So you're sort of fighting against it. I guess when we're talking about a more like active left, like a building left, right? the word deregulation gets used by Elon Musk and it also gets used by you. It does. And you clearly don't mean the same thing, but the same word doing two jobs is a problem in politics, right? It sort of lets one team's project ride the slipstream of the other and you end up in this sort of semantic game back and forth. How do you tell the difference between your kind of deregulation and elons in 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 you answer that question Depends on the rule.

54:45And so, look, I consider Musk to be a tragedy. This is a guy who is clearly a genius, who is the most capable industrialist of our time, who built those industries on public-private partnerships. Tesla is built on government subsidies, on government tax credits. There is no electric vehicle market in this country without the huge amount of money we, and California, by the way, in particular, pumped into making that market real. Tesla would have gone under without an Obama-era loan guarantee. SpaceX. SpaceX's NASA contracts. And Musk, at some point, and I mean, you can basically chart when it happened, because he was sort of a Democrat in semi-good standing.

55:40He was like pro-Obama, He radicalizes. He's online way too much. He gets Twitter-brained. Twitter has been bad for no one the way it's been specifically bad for the way that guy thinks. And his information environment is so deeply toxic.

56:00And there's a world where he joined the Trump administration and tried to increase state capacity. And yes, that might mean chainsawing through some of what the government did. But with the goal of making it possible to do more in space, with the goal of making it possible to do more effective research into battery technology. And instead, he cuts completely indiscriminately. I have friends who got layoff notices that the email read, dear first name, last name, you have been terminated for cause. Which cause? Who was that email to? So, like, Musk's project, deregulation is a traditional Republican thing.

56:50He didn't make it up. But the 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 Mamdani housing plan that came out this week, block by block is what it's called. What he is doing in that plan overall is he is removing rules. He is deregulating what is required when New York puts in money to build affordable housing. That in order to build affordable housing in most jurisdictions, certainly blue ones in this country, because you are using public money, it triggers a bunch of government rules that make it much more expensive.

57:30Because a lot of interests have come up and, you know, won their way into the fight. And so they've been able to, you know, force higher building standards and higher wage standards and higher environmental standards. And all these things might be good on their own. They really might be. But what you've done is make it twice as expensive or three times as expensive or four times as expensive to build affordable housing as 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'd ended up building affordable housing units.

58:04They were costing$1.2 million per unit. These are affordable housing units with, again, like public and nonprofit dollars. There was one particular build where I'm worried I'll get the numbers wrong from memory. But I think it was something like the same developer built affordable and market rate next to each other. And the affordable cost something like$800 ,000 per unit. And the market rate was like$400 ,000. And like, you just can't achieve, the goal is affordable housing. And so what I care about, the point of abundance, the first sentence of it, basically, of the book is what do we need more of and how do we get it?

58:43And so the thing that separates different people in this debate, for me, the abundance debate, the debate about plenitude is first you have to decide, what do you want more of? I want a lot more green energy. Donald Trump does not. So the fact that he is deregulating what it means to build 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, wrapped up on the axle of having emotional reaction to the means, to the tools you're using, then you got a problem.

59:31The idea that deregulation is owned by the right, or for that matter, that regulation is owned by the left, it's not true, but it's a way of shutting off your thought. The right regulates things all the time. The left deregulates things. Like, it's just stupid. Yeah, no, I agree. Stupid way of thinking. This proposal for abundance is a lot about rolling back red tape, but I know a lot of people are concerned about what that means for unchecked power of potential AI overlords. And if you've got a very small number of people who are controlling a massive amount of influence and a massive amount of the economy, how does the rolling back of red tape help with that solution?

1:00:13So 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. But that is useful where that is the problem. On AI, I believe we need a lot more AI regulation. This is why I don't buy the sort of deregulation, pro-regulation 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 AI. And I've covered these guys forever.

1:00:49I've had Demis and Sam Altman and Dario all on my show, right? Like I've been in this since GPT-2, I guess. And you do not want power concentrating with them. And at one point, and some of them will still say that, they don't want power concentrating with them. Although in practice, they don't always act like that now. Sam Altman, I think, in OpenAI seemed to be more pro-regulation a couple of years ago, then in practice, like the Greg Brockman, its president has helped fund the super PAC that is dumping money against candidates who want to regulate AI. And so it's like, on the one hand, they'll come to a hearing and say, we want to be regulated.

1:01:22Then somebody will run for office saying we should do some light regulation. It's like, not you, not by you, we don't. So you have like real money in politics problems. And I, by the way, just as a broad thing, this is not something we wrote about in abundance, but I just believe in much, much, much stronger money and politics regulations. You should amend the U.S. Constitution to say money is not speech. Money should not be as protected speech when spent on politics and make it possible to regulate it. There's an effort to do that through state houses happening right now. But I think the abundance question on AI is at two levels.

1:02:01One is we think of AI models, People argue about, are they using Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude? But AI is, you know, Jensen Wong of NVIDIA always makes his point. It's like a five-layer cake. And there's an energy level. There's a chips level. There's all this infrastructure you actually need. If we want the U.S. to continue to be kind of AI competitive or even AI dominant, you're going to need to get that infrastructure right. And in order to then not make that an energetic disaster, you're going to need to use the data center build out to create a modern grid and create much more of an electrostate, not a petrostate, right?

1:02:41Like there's like a whole set of questions that are raised by the physical AI build out. 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? What does the public, what are the public goods? Because they're not just going to come on their own. Right now, if you talk to any corporation that is really tooling itself for AI, they are spending huge amounts of money on compute, just buying enough tokens. But they are often restructuring themselves as an organization in order to become legible and make their problems legible to the systems.

1:03:25so for ai to be able to solve a problem for you need a couple of things one is there needs to be money behind the problem because if you need a lot of compute to do it it is costly even now the second thing is the problem needs to be legible to the system so what i mean by that for instance is alpha fold which i think is the most impressive thing as done yet which is the the protein folding um is solving the protein folding problem the reason it was possible to do that was there was a thing called the Protein Database, which had been, it was arguably the cleanest scientific database in existence.

1:03:54It's only one of them, where people had been keeping really high quality data on every single protein that we had mapped its structure. And that meant there was one place where the data was structured in a way where you could set the machine learning loose on it, and it could learn the data, begin to predict based on the data, and then also begin to create synthetic versions of that data to extend its predictions and then be able to test them backwards and so on and so forth. 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.

1:04:32And in government, that's often often done. So here's a very simple use case I keep talking to people about. There's no reason that the IRS can't have, I mean, build it on Claude, build it on chat gpt build 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 uh 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 i can learn what it needs to learn um drug discovery energy there's a lot of questions like this where for instance on drug discovery i don't know how good AIs will be on drug discovery.

1:05:38I've talked to different people who disagree on it. But if you look at what AIs are good at, like, did you follow the solving of this Erdos theorem? Yes. Yes, I did. Okay. So I talked to some mathematicians about this. My dad's actually a mathematician. I haven't talked to him about it yet. I should. But this particular theorem, what it was able to do was sort of two things. What it was able to do was come, it knew kind of everything about mathematics. So I 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, oh, I thought about doing this, but it was super labor intensive.

1:06:13So I just didn't bother. So it also was able to be tireless in doing that. It did not do, I think, what you would call truly new groundbreaking mathematics. It didn't invent a whole new field here. It did something very clever and very labor intensive. And that is how a lot of advances happen. Synthesis plus hard work. So think about what's called orphan diseases. These are diseases, my wife actually has one of them, that are quite rare. So there isn't a huge amount of money in solving them. And that means, unlike, say, something like diabetes, where there is just a functionally endless number of drug researchers working on diabetes drugs and a huge amount of money behind it and the best people in the field, on these things, you don't have that.

1:06:59So that's a great place where being able to have a lot of compute and then the federal government saying, if you invent this thing, this is basically what we did with Operation Warp Speed, right? We said, if you invent this thing, we will buy it. And then we will hand it out at low cost. Right? That's how we made the COVID vaccines. You could do that across a huge number of diseases and say, if you're able to solve any of these, here's what we will give you. Like it is worth it to us, the public, to have cures here and we'll make those cures cheap. And we'll put work into making the regulatory system amenable to this.

1:07:35They also did that in Warp Speed. We'll put in work to try 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. but 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, but you also need a theory of AI goods. And right now we don't have one. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element.

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1:08:44Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. It's interesting. I had Nick Bostrom on the show and super intelligence 10, more, more than 10 years ago now, 2014, 15, something like that, when that came out was kind of my introduction to, holy shit, like there are a lot of ways that this could go very, very wrong, the X risk of X risks. And then his new book was basically, okay, what happens if this goes right?

1:09:20And even on the path to it going right, there were tons of different ways that it could go wrong. It is kind of mind-blowing to me that there is any time being spent on anything that isn't AI safety at the moment. I'm aware, climate change, something that we need to keep an eye on. It's not going to happen within the next decade. Birth rate decline, something that I've talked a lot about on the show too. I think that's going to happen more quickly than climate change is, but still not on the timelines that we're talking about here. All right. Do you see Tristan Harris's new thing, the AI doc? I haven't seen the doc, but I know Tristan.

1:09:56Ah, dude, it's really, really good. It's really, really interesting. I have come, as a person who was in that world for a long time, I've come to a probably slightly different view on the right way to approach it. You're going to give me a white pill? I really need one. What would a white pill be? I never know the pills anymore. There are too many of them. Hope. Feel better. Hope. No, look, you cannot solve a problem whose shape you do not know. You can't. So it's very, it's good to talk about AI safety. We should be pumping money into, say, mechanistic interpretability. We have made big strides on interpretability.

1:10:30Shout out to Chris Ola at Anthropic, who's been a hero in this and is now hanging out with the Pope, I guess. Apparently. Good thing to see good things happen to good people. We should be trying to understand these systems. But so much of the AI conversation, the mind is attracted to these speculative scenarios, mass automation where there are no more jobs, recursive superintelligence, self-improving superintelligence that slips out of our control like overnight. Here's the deal. If we create recursive superintelligence that slips out of our control overnight, which is sort of how like the AI 2027 scenario works, we better just hope for the best because I think we are kind of fucked in that scenario.

1:11:14I don't think it will happen like that or that quickly. I agree. But we want as good interpretability as we can possibly have. But the other thing we want is to be in constant work on regulating the existing nature of these systems and at their frontier and testing the systems and working on them constantly. because in the same way that the AI companies, the ones who are founded on a theory of safety, like OpenAI and Anthropic, were like, well, we can't make it safe unless we build it. You cannot figure out how to regulate it unless you regulate it, both for good and for bad. And so my view is that the political system needs to get in the game on the system that exists right now and not endlessly debate a speculative scenario that it is not going to be able to respond to until you're there.

1:12:04That is not how politics works. It's not how anything we do works. So yes, that does imply a certain amount of pessimism if we end up in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario. I don't think we're in the extraordinary fast takeoff scenario. And just by the way, I have always thought and have always had this argument with my effective altruist friends and actually Dorkesh Patel, who's like a great AI podcaster, just sent out a little substack making the same point.

1:12:33the capability to wield power is more than intelligence a lot more 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 approving 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 have you dealt with smart people? Like, is Donald Trump the smartest person in the world? No, he's got a like incredible animalistic instinct for power and other people's weakness. And he's made a ton of mistakes. And, you know, Dworkish in his piece is like, maybe Stalin is a person we're talking about here, but Stalin also is not like the world's greatest genius.

1:13:16I think there's like a real mistake being made on how easy it is to translate intelligence and information into power. Yeah. And I am just skeptical. Like, again, we can all come up with a sci-fi scenario, but I can't forever argue against the absolute worst thought experiment you get. Like, like then we're just in a world like, yeah, if all we're dealing with here is. an endless effort for you to come up with thought experiments that the regulators can't match, you will outmatch the regulators very quickly. Which is why the regulators should be increasing their competency by actually dealing with AI in the present moment.

1:13:52You get better things by doing them. So you're saying that the most dangerous AI isn't the smartest one, it's the canniest one? I think that's true, but I'm saying that the AI safety debate has been caught in thinking about the future for too long and now we're in the present. And so the thing to do is to figure out how to take some of these fears, which I take as serious. I do not. I'm not somebody who's dismissive of them. I have a PDOOM sitting in the back of my head. But you have to take them and do something in the now because now we're at the point where AI is here. For a long time, there was nothing really to do because AI was speculative, right?

1:14:26You 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. We're getting more powerful all the time. Like Congress, like we need to probably build more capable institutions that actually like have expertise on regulating it and are able to like 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 like trying to create the goods that can give it a direction that is safer.

1:15:00Well, think about who was involved in the conversation from 2015 to 2020-ish. philosophers. A lot of philosophers. And if you watch the new AI doc, it's a maths grad, computer science programmer, futurist, technologist. It's moving more, but you're saying this goes even beyond that to people who are policymakers. Like 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 rubbers really met the road. My view on this is not that I am dismissive of the possibility of future ads about our control.

1:15:41Or, frankly, even, although I am more skeptical of this, the possibility of mass automation. What I am saying is that it is long past time to start working on the systems that we have now as regulators and stop debating a hypothetical. You do not have a way to stop the hypothetical. like maybe like have you read eliazor yukowsky's book yes i did on the show the argument as did i yeah the argument is shut it all down that's where it goes and for better and maybe for much worse maybe he's right i mean his view is 90 if we create super intelligence we're fucked but we're not going to shut it all down and so the question is given what we have and where we are like start actually bringing the system and the systems under democratic control.

1:16:34What would you do? Let's say that you had God's eye coordination power. I would have like probably three or four buckets. So one, I would put a lot more money into evaluation than we're currently putting in publicly. Actually, Trump and Musk gutted a bunch of that. But I would make our public evaluation capabilities incredibly strong. So that's one thing. They were trying to do that sort of in Biden. I would start doing a lot of regulating AI run kits 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.

1:17:05I 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 work when they have those before they have real relationships. I've heard you say that the kind of childhood that you had could have fallen prey to this kind of…

1:17:49lovers. Like, I think that's actually quite scary. I was the same, except for being a lot less smart and nerdy. Oh, I don't know. I think you're probably underrating yourself. But so 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 autonomy and power over on when human beings need to be in the loop, I think that there's a pretty good thinking on safety. You know, something that is in the AI 2027 thing that I think is smart is AI should always have to keep a legible chain of reasoning notepad in English that the moment we start letting them come up with our own languages and we really have no capacity to see how they're reasoning.

1:18:40The black box has a black box. I don't want to make the black box too black boxy. Yep. And so that's smart. So you want to start working with what you have now. And, you know, I'm not saying I have like all the ideas in my head, but there's enough on the table that I think we could begin. And I also, by the way, I thought whether you want Anthropic doing it is like we can argue. I think having a fair number of restrictions on how AI can be used for surveillance for kill chain questions is wise. And I particularly worry about surveillance. I am both in a kind of macro way against using AI to create the Panopticon, but in a micro way, a lot of the machine learning tools being used to make the lives of workers measured and miserable right now are inimical.

1:19:29Why is that being used? You read a lot about this on, you know, with Amazon and delivery drivers. I've read things about, like eye tracking software. There's all kinds of software being used in different places. I don't want to do it by memory because there's a minutes as I looked at the report, but to just track how productive workers are. It's like having somebody always watching you to make sure you're never slacking off. And what I would say is that using machines to turn people into machines is inimical to human flourishing. And I do think we need to think harder in politics. And AI is going to push this on what actually human flourishing means.

1:20:03What does it mean to be a human being in the age of AI? What does it mean to learn like a human being? What is human dignity? The Pope is right about that. People are already feeling this thought entropy thing kicking in. There's lifting with an exoskeleton suit on that my capacity to actually be able to think properly is being degraded. I know Pema Chudran, one of your favorite writers, talks about sitting with uncertainty instead of running from it. AI is, in a sense, the most powerful uncertainty killer ever built. You have instant answers straight away. You never need to wonder again. Even, you know, I think about the before times of internet use.

1:20:46There was friction even in your search, right? To go onto Google, to look for a thing, to go, is that, how reliable 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.

1:21:21My like, the simplest thing I tell, I sometimes do college speaking, I'll get asked by kids, you know, what should I do? You know, AI. My answer is always read books and paper. You should have a practice of cultivating the form of attention, the form of sustained attention, without reaching to resolve every question that occurs in your mind. That books create. People think of books, I think, as a technology of information, that you download information from a book into your head. But they're a technology of thinking. They are a scaffold for thinking. And what is happening when you read a book in paper and are not distracting yourself every two seconds is connections are being made in your mind.

1:22:07Like the value of a book is not just the information on it. It is what happens in your mind when you read it. And one of the things I feel very strongly about with my kids, one of the things that I worry about with integrating AI into schools is, you know, we talked about attention at the beginning here. We need as human beings to cultivate healthy forms of attention. And AI, one of its seductions, even for smart, agentic, as we now call them people, is the constant feeling and simulacra of productivity it gives you. Yep. So you're reading something and you go and you look it up and you're and it all feels very productive.

1:22:49Because you are this constant information, those back and forth. And I do. I use AI for research. I learn things from it. I'm not I mean, I think you can hear in this conversation, I'm not like a pure hater. But if you are not spending time thinking and reading away from screens, you're just you are allowing something to atrophy that you will not get back. and what I worry about with a lot of smart people I know is that AI makes you feel superhuman and it's making you less than human. And I've watched a lot of people who seem to use AI a lot more and their work is not getting better. It's getting worse.

1:23:21I hear about people who have all these agents running on their behalf now and they come in in the morning and it's prepared this huge summary of everything. And it's like, what about reading a physical newspaper instead of now absorbing tons of book reports from your AIs, right? Like, where is your space? Where is your mind?

1:23:45The ghost of productivity, the illusion of productivity is something that you have to fight so hard, I think, in this era. Because, I mean, even prior to AI, it sure feels like you're doing something productive to sit there on your laptop, on your iPad. And even when your brain has stopped really working, you're flicking back and forth to the news, to your email. you're seeing things on social media that sort of poses information but it's all distraction wearing productivity's clothing yes and you have to be really vigilant against it because deeper productivity often doesn't look or even feel like productivity it's taking a walk and having an idea correct 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 And the reason we festoon rooms in them when we want the rooms to look smart, which is what we're doing in here, there's a reason we associate them with intelligence because they're not about what's in the book.

1:24:46They're about the way that people who read books are trained to think and attend. And that will ultimately make you much better at using AI. Desperately compensating with all of the books behind. No, I noticed with myself that one of the best questions that I asked myself on an annual review a couple of years ago was, what do I think is productive that isn't? And what do I not think is productive but is? And going for a walk without AirPods in. What did you come up with on your second list there? I want to hear it. Driving without consuming anything. So no music, no podcasts, no nothing else. The same with going for a walk.

1:25:26Dinner with friends. massively productive, hugely productive, come home and I've got five new ideas, or I feel a little bit more peaceful, or I've just got to listen to someone else entertain me or got a new perspective on something, or I've not thought about my shit. Even simply the space that you create, the void that you create between thinking about your shit and thinking about your shit by hearing somebody else extemporaneously think about their shit to you. You're like, brilliant. I thought about someone else's shit for a bit. That stuff that isn't productive, but I thought was sitting in my desk when I'm not working.

1:26:01I've just got the laptop open. I'm like, oh, maybe I'll pick up some productivity pennies here. Slack, almost ever. Being on calls when I don't need to. Like just checking in calls. They have all of the trappings of something that looks like progress and productivity. But when you think about what's actually happened at the end of it, it's almost never anything productive. uh lying in a hammock lying in a hammock unusually productive uh so what comes to my view a bunch of those i'd agree with um travel huge uh and i always like want to be careful about the language of productivity here because the point is not to like do it in service yes yes yes yes the for me the absolute best thing i can do for my productivity is go to a coffee shop or some beautiful space.

1:26:55The aesthetic richness of the space is meaningful for me and read paper books for a long enough time to get into a state where my mind has settled on that being what it's doing. So that's very, very, very, like that is I think the most important thing I do for my work. Walking, I don't listen to or read things for the most part on the subway anymore. I just sit there. Like a psychopath. Like a psychopath. It is amazing how much it's like sitting there staring forward. You feel weird now on the subway. Do you know the Rory Sutherland line about this to do with smoking? He says, sometimes you just want to stand in the corner of a room and stare out of the window.

1:27:40The problem is, if you do this without a cigarette, you look like a friendless idiot. But if you do it with a cigarette, you look like a fucking philosopher. Yeah. Yeah. Aesthetics count for a lot. They do.

1:27:55So really just taking breaks in general. I mean, I think actually the thing, if you want to just boil down a lot of what we just said, aside from reading, it's that just staring at a screen endlessly is bad for you. It's good for you when you're doing it intentionally and for long enough. but i mean i cannot tell you how many times i've solved a problem on a column that i had been banging away at the keyboard on for hours or days by just leaving you can't white knuckle creativity yeah you don't get to white knuckle it and 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 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 things.

1:28:47And 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 you're using the AI as a prosthetic. But again, the lesson of McLuhan and Postman and others is eventually the AI is going to be using you as a prosthetic. Or certainly, to maybe be more specific the organization that pays for both you and the ai is going to be making you a prosthetic of the ai in the same way that amazon has made people into prosthetics of the boxes they pick up in the delivery vans they drive and it trying to be as little like a machine as possible uh or at least create big spaces where you're not acting as a machine is i think gonna be really important.

1:29:35If 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 an alpha school or whatever. Or you can put them in a school that is like St. John's University or something. And it's like going to be all paper and pens. I would go that one because there will be AI. It will be out there. What I need to develop in them is the ability to be a human being. And one of the dangers whenever we get really excited about a 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.

1:30:20So just like all the things we're talking about, take breaks, take a walk. It is so basic. It's the sort of shit that your mom would happily give you an answer for. Yeah. And she's happily got the answer for it. What's that line? I think it might be a Nietzsche one where it's like, I beg you, my friend, sleep well and go for more walks. It's just always a solution. Oh, my God. Really advice Nietzsche should have taken. Yes. Agreed. you mentioned earlier on about this challenge this positioning that we've got at the moment around um encouraging people both sides encouraging people to better themselves perhaps a little bit of an aversion of this uh self-determination personal development at least traditionally coming from the left but maybe also coming from the right now i think the left talks a lot about structural barriers for women do you think it's got a an equally serious account of what's going wrong for men at the moment?

1:31:16I don't. I think it knows it doesn't. And it's beginning to try to think about what to do about that. People like Gavin Newsom are taking that a lot more seriously. I want to get at the thing you said underneath that, because I think it's important, though. I think a very damaging thing that happened on the left, I'll call it liberalism to be more of my own stream here, is that it began to see individualistic explanations as excuses for structural dysfunction. And so it became hostile to any politics or moral structure that was also about self-improvement. And one, that's a betrayal of the long history of liberalism, which has always been about self-cultivation, like go read your Kant or your John Mills, or for that matter, your great liberal politicians like Frederick Douglass or MLK or FDR, are Lincoln.

1:32:14But 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 which 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. That you need the vision of the just society and you need the vision of the flourishing, self-cultivating person. And I do think the left became hostile to this and particularly became hostile to it when it was male-coded. So when it was coded in the way that self-help is for women, right, more therapeutically, more relationally, it was, you know, much easier.

1:33:03Esther Perel, Brene Brown, other people like that who have more of a vision in that. Um, that, that went down easily, but in the male space where it's a little more testosterone, when it got associated with, uh, the Joe Rogans and modern wisdoms and some, I shouldn't say that, but the Jordan Peterson's has made 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's sort of a rejection of it.

1:33:48Discarded 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 guy thought a lot about virtue, thought about myth, thought about, you know, and overthought about it, overthought about it.

1:34:32Somehow the right, like Bronze Age Pervert, It pushed towards vice. So the left gave up on virtue and the right rejected it. Now, I shouldn't say the left and the right because lots of people in both, just like normal ass people, raising kids and loving their partners and doing their job and volunteering in their community and going to church. But maybe it's like an algorithmic dimension of things. The quiet middle three quintiles. Yes. But at the apex of the attention economy, I do feel, I watched this happen. You're not going to convince me it didn't. The left became quite hostile to ideas of individual cultivation.

1:35:14Like, oh, that's just you using your privilege. And the right moved in a way where it became vice-maxing, to use a term that Derrick Thompson uses. kind of caricatured it to a degree that the most extreme version of this i mean certainly i think if jordan hadn't had his time away uh if he hadn't done the god pivot in the same way if he'd continued to do the clean your room get your bootstraps and and pick yourself up by them i do think that that would have probably curtailed a lot of the vacuum that other voices got sucked into Now, who knows how that would have actually played out, but I definitely get the 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?

1:36:09They're looking for a patriarch figure. They're looking for someone to tell them, like, how do I become a, it's the equivalent of, dad, how do I shave? Or I fancy this girl in school, how do I talk to her? it's the equivalent for that but life-wide and if you open up that market but then remove yourself from it it's just going to suck in anybody that can service it but perhaps not quite at the level that that first mover had been able to do and i think that that was that was definitely a big part of it it's been kind of fascinating to see this conversation unfold because everybody is talking out of both sides of their mouth which for instance one of the big criticisms that i can certainly have of most of the pro-male advocates and most of the people that are on the right are men's mental health isn't taken seriously until it affects women or other people.

1:37:03Lip service is paid to that, but no one really cares. And there aren't very many therapeutic models that sort of speak to men in the way that they want to be spoken to with regards to understanding their desire for progress and conquer and mastery, and also providing them with solutions that they can move forward on, as opposed to just, hey, come in here, talk about your feelings, your issue is that you're a defective woman, as opposed to a man who needs assistance moving forward linearly. But also that same group of people that say that that's a big deal and claim to be advocates for men will happily mock a guy who opens up about his emotions on the internet.

1:37:39If you see a video of a guy who's crying or is really struggling or is down on his luck, there is not this sort of camaraderie that you're claiming that is supposed to be there. That's like, it's just a huge hypocrisy. This is a men are good. Tom Golden's got a sub stack and he identifies this. It's like guys won't help other guys that are struggling emotionally in that sort of a way whilst saying that men's mental health needs to be taken more seriously. It's like, it's the equivalent of not putting your money where your mouth is with regards to this. But on the left, the kind of complete denial of self-agency, of sovereignty, of modern men being made to pay for the sins that their grandfathers benefited from, a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of, as Christine Ember says.

1:38:27and you go, okay, well, on both of those sides, it doesn't feel like much progress is being, at least much productive progress is being made. And then if you do begin to try and have this conversation, I'm aware, like looking the way that I do, maybe it's the British accent, maybe it's the whatever. As soon as you start talking about the problems of men and boys, unless you have this painful throat clearing land acknowledgement before you fucking do it, every single time, the same boring accusations get thrown at you. You don't care about women, that this is misogyny rebranded, that this is the thin end of the wedge, that it's a gateway drug to something that's much more pernicious down the line, that talking about birth rates or coupling, or it's you trying to pull women out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen.

1:39:14And 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 i think you're right about the world of a couple of years ago but i go on podcasts like this one sometimes i just saw them with uh dax and armchair expert and and have done others do you ever who who are you who are we shadow boxing with here because is this still true 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 in both directions, there was pretty toxic and weird social media dynamics.

1:40:03It got very, very gendered and were very identitarian. And now I think there's a lot of hangover of that. And I'm not saying you can't find it somewhere on the Internet. You can find anything somewhere on the Internet. but is it really still there in that way? Like I see, for instance, Gavin Newsom on the left is trying to engage his conversation, you know, fairly successfully, I think. And in who he's having on his podcast, which has been, I think, a very interesting project. And, you know, I see Ryan Holiday, right, who I know has been on the show and I think Obama made a pivot not long ago.

1:40:40I 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 because Obama had a very aggressive politics of self-cultivation, right? A very big, there's a society and there's the individual, and you have to act in a certain way. You have to 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 so there was this period online where things got really fractious between the genders and other things. And I think everybody is having some trouble knowing if they can declare it over.

1:41:20Yeah, I understand what you mean. So do you still experience it is, I guess, the question I was going to ask you. Absolutely. From where? Like who? If I was to put out any kind of a reel online that talks about sex differences, still the blank slate is and will come in. There was one that came out yesterday. There was one that came out yesterday that said the differential in terms of housework around the house between men and women, a really interesting study. If you look at the amount of housework time that is spent by single men and single women living on their own, women do 200 % the amount of housework.

1:41:54Their 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 all of the kind of cliches for a long time. But a ton of the comments are to do with, well, the only reason for that is because women are socialized into thinking that they have to have high levels of presentability and that it's 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 about anything that's to do with male self-improvement and the challenges that they're facing with regards to that.

1:42:35I mean, a good example of this was there was a study that said men need two guys nights out per week in order to maintain optimal mental health. It's a pretty big study. It was pretty well researched. Every single comment was boo-hoo, poor patriarchy, tell me that you're a man-child without telling me that you're a man-child. I think when you see Sabrina Carpenter at the moment, the lyrics, the broad culture that's happening is not unifying. And it's not unifying from both sides. I would agree. It's not unifying. But I think this is the thing I'm trying to get at here a little bit. Because I'm not disagreeing that either these comments are real or some of these dynamics are real.

1:43:21I think one of the things that we have to get over in the culture is, one, expecting anything to be unifying. But treating the comment section like the actual reaction. What would be a more real reaction? I think the other people in the conversation, I mean, because my perception of this, right, which I track more what the people in politics are saying and what the other journalists are saying, is that this conversation about men doing poorly is everywhere. I mean, Richard Reeves' book was a big deal. And it's completely at the set, like the Democratic Party, like it had this like sort of ridiculous thing where it's going to spend tens of millions of dollars on its like problems on men.

1:44:07But 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 shadowboxing with it. So, I mean, I, again, like I'm a well-known liberal commentator out here talking about how much we need liberal politics of virtue and probably 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.

1:44:43That 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 insofar or useful insofar as it allows you to find a solution. That to me still gets the hackles up of a lot of people on the internet. And whether comments are tastemakers, how top-down versus bottom-up is this?

1:45:20It'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 by algorithmic media. And I think a couple of years back, people reflected 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. And I think that has stopped to a large degree. And I think people have sort of reasserted independence from it. But obviously, like the buzz is still there. But not mistaking the buzz is like the thing.

1:46:00So like, look, I don't know what the solutions are that you're describing. I'm sure there are like some I might agree with, some I might not. I don't feel, I will say that even compared to what I thought was true a couple 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 and like the, you know, take the shackles off of men right seems wrong to me is that you have to, I think, start any vision of masculinity with the reality that men are stronger and through testosterone more aggressive.

1:46:36And so self-mastery has always been an important part of visions of masculinity. Like self-mastery and the constructive channeling of those impulses is like foundational to any healthy masculinity. And mostly I think people understand what I'm talking about when I say that. I have boys, I think about this a lot. The capacity for restraint is increasingly important. Yeah, you're not going to convince me that I don't have to channel their aggressive impulses in healthy ways. And I just think in politics, I mean, you know, again, I think Newsom is interesting because he's somebody who, and you should have him on the show, it'd be a very interesting conversation.

1:47:13But he's somebody who I think is very, he's 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's book, which is not a high bar, obviously. They should put that on the front cover. It is very much about this question of, I mean, you could really understand that book as a confrontation with a certain kind of maleness. And he's very explicit about that in a way I find interesting. So to me, my sense is that the water has changed here. I will say I think the other thing, though, is that I have often thought the division of the problems into male problems and problems into female problems, I agree that there are different questions for men and women.

1:47:56I also think that there's a broader set of questions that are part of the AI thing and are a little bit more unifying about. We actually need to find ways for human beings to just continue to be human beings and become more so. This is one of my obsessions, and it's not to change the subject. We can keep talking about men. But I think there are more things that everybody is going to need and ways in which we have turned modernity as a try to keep people useful in the ways the economy needed them to be useful. They're going to need to be rethought in more fundamental fashions, starting with education.

1:48:35And that actually has some specific male questions around it. I think Richard Reeves is right when he says that modern education is not well built for boys. But in a funny way, like the competition, like we've been so used to framing this as a competition between men and women, that the possibility of framing at least some things correctly as competition between humans and machines opens up some avenues and pathways, I think, to talk about things that are more innate to humans of both sexes and also separately innate in both sexes that maybe would have been harder to do five years ago. it's certainly going to be easier to unify if you have a common enemy because that happened previously it was just between each other as opposed to together against something else yeah yeah i look it's it's interesting it definitely feels to me like i hope that it's not just lip service that's being paid to something because evidently in 2024 that was a blank space that because left untouched resulted in a lot of people going to the other side right from the left like that young men really, really seemed to depart from.

1:49:41They didn't feel like they were a part of the... What was that line? There was a group for underprivileged or underserved communities, and there was 13 of them, and the only one that was missing was men. That there was every different version of this. This is Richard Reeves' big post about this. In 2024, that wasn't true. There was a men for Harris thing that, like, there's a whole... The white guys for Harris movement? I think that, right? Yeah. I have mixed feelings about that. Sure, but you live by the affinity group, you die by the affinity group. That's true. Can't be like, there's no affinity groups for me, and then they do one.

1:50:14Well, it's interesting on the, what are the groups that are falling behind? That was the issue that Richard took with it. I don't know what he thought about the white guys for Harris group. There was definitely some sort of prostrating of the self there that felt a little strange. I'm interested, as you sort of think about being somebody who has public opinions, who is putting these sorts of things out on the internet, having the changing landscape and having this sort of very long career of saying things that might have felt true at the time, but can be pointed to in future, how do you avoid being too deranged by the criticisms?

1:50:51By the criticisms? Yeah. That's not where I thought you were going to go with that. I don't know. I think it's the same thing we were talking about earlier. You have a backstage. age. I have people whose reactions to things are a bellwether for me. And if there's a huge amount of critique of me at a certain moment, and that happens every so often, I try to take it seriously and think about it. Doesn't mean I always change my opinion on it. But I think you need your own internal compass. Again, I will say I have pretty aggressive algorithmic media hygiene. And so I'm not out there looking for reaction.

1:51:30The reason I ask is, you know, we're talking about a 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 warping than audience capture. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've not read that article, but I think there's something really to that. It's one of the most canonical things that I've read for the modern age. It's so good. And it basically says that people begin to change their positions more to either in advance defend against or as a reaction to the existing or potential criticisms that their work is going to receive.

1:52:17I think that it is a very tricky thing. I will say this for me, it is a very tricky thing to know the difference between absorbing critique and synthesizing good points from it and absorbing critique and not wanting to touch the stove. And because they kind of feel the same inside. And there's not like one way to do it. but I do think it is important. I try to think about this a lot that critique is often a form of in-group disciplining.

1:53:04One thing I've found over the years is that nobody is hated like an apostate. So the right, you know, to start there and I know this from my friends there, it's like if you are on the right and you turn anti-Trump, the hell you get is nothing like what I get as a forever anti-Trumper. Openly anti-Trump. Nobody cares. In fact, I have perfectly good relations with people I have to report on for the Trump administration because they never saw me on their side. It's a stable relationship in a way. Similarly, on the left, nobody's hated an apostate. The small differences make the most noise. Yeah, but also it's a possibly effective action.

1:53:51Get in line. Yeah, get in line. And maybe you will. And so you have to be very careful about that inside yourself. On the one hand, you want to be able to hear critique. And on the other hand, you don't want to be scared of it. One of my practices is when there's a lot of critique of me, I will often invite one of the critics on the show and just kind of talk it out and see where I agree and disagree. And if I can sort of pull it into the spaces where I can deliberate about it. But if all I'm doing is exposing myself to the roar of anger at a moment, what is getting algorithmically boosted. I don't that's not constructive.

1:54:30I will say the other thing that I'll sometimes do is I find it's quite important for me in terms of how thoughtfully I can integrate feedback when and in what context I absorb it. And so being at dinner and getting pinged on my phone where somebody sends me a mean article about me, sometimes friends are like, did you see these terrible things people are writing about you? And it's like, thank you. They didn't have my personal, you know, way to reach me, but you do. And now you brought it to my attention at dinner. Yeah, you're a conduit. Yeah, I didn't need you to be a conduit. I know people are mad at me, I'm aware.

1:55:08But the thing that I'll now do is if there's stuff collecting, I will put it together and I will go print it all out. Or if it's videos, watch a video at 9.30 a.m. when I'm resourced and have energy. Resilience is highest. and can think about it during the day as opposed to at the end of the day when I'm trying to transition between the subway and my kids or 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.

1:55:51And I'm not saying I always do it well. It's not a thing I would say I've mastered. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's fascinating for me to see somebody who, I'm just, however cantankerous and controversial and inflammatory some of the topics that I talk about are or have been, none of them ever come close to politics. Politics is always going to be ground zero for this, right? It's always going to be ground zero. And just the preparedness to step into that over and over again, for me, is pretty fascinating. I think in the past, I've heard you describe journalism as organized curiosity.

1:56:34Given how the last few years have gone, I remember as well you talking about Vox on the idea that better information leads to better politics. Do you still believe that? Do you still believe that now? I'd probably alter it a little bit to say that it's not just the information, it's the information environment.

1:56:57Because it's hard to say, did we get better or worse information? What we got was more information. And then the way the information was sorted, algorithmically and other things, 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

1:57:27but is it a 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 abundance is synthesizing things like the YIMBY 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 you 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.

1:58:01And I have watched, I have watched in a matter of a couple of years, ideas that were quite marginal. I mean, the first piece on this I did before we called it abundance, I called it supply-side progressivism. Then I got to a liberalism that builds. Way less sexy. Yeah, right. Then liberalism that builds, which is pretty good. And then Derek got abundance. But the point was that the left didn't talk about supply. We only talked about demand. We talked about how to redistribute. We talked about how to subsidize, which are important things. But we didn't talk about how to create more of the goods we needed.

1:58:30Now we do all the time. So, like, there was a big intellectual argument. Again, not just mine. And it worked. And now everybody from Newsom to Maura Healy to Westmore to Mamdani to everybody, right? Like, I just did a California governor's forum where the top five Democrats in the governor's race did a housing forum with me. And they were all just talking about how to make it easier to build and how to cut construction costs. So, like, I have watched good information, good argumentation. There's a RAND study about how much it costs to construct per square foot in California, Texas, Colorado. They were all familiar with it.

1:59:04This one study had been incredibly influential on all of us. So it can happen. What are you paying the most attention to over the next couple of years? I mean, AI. I'm trying to help create a better liberalism, more capable of competing with illiberalism. I'm trying to create a better liberalism, more capable of competing with illiberalism. I obviously pay a lot of attention to politics. I cover Israel-Palestine a lot, which is just a tough-ass issue.

1:59:35there's a bit of a mix of I'm paying attention to everything you would think I'm trying to pay attention to and also the constant curves in the road, right? Did I expect us to be spending the year talking about war in Iran? I didn't really, but now we are. And 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 connected to the news, connected to longer range intellectual efforts in politics and then connected to shows that are more about the point of all this, which is a more like beautiful and humane world with novelists and meditators and people like that.

2:00:18And so it's all like for me, it's this constant calibrating of am I too far in this direction, too much news, not enough ideas, too many ideas, not enough news, too much politics, not enough humanism. and you know there's no way to do it but by feel and by attending to the moment it sounds terrifyingly human it does it does it sounds like it sounds unusually in touch i think with what people's experiences of life are and certainly being on the outside and watching sort of what goes on with politics so much of it seems to be this very sterile detachment from what people's normal day-to-day lives are like the reporting on it too also doesn't take that as if people wake up on a morning and all that they're doing is mainlining politics and political governance into their veins you really don't want to let the algorithms replace your intuition what's that mean that i think a lot of people because they give their attention over to the algorithms and then the algorithms decide what they want to see that that process i just talked about where you're constantly calibrating and recalibrating and really trying to think about what am i attending to well if you if the way you get information is you open up x in the morning or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, the algorithm is who decided what you're attending to.

2:01:33There's much more room for intuition when you're reading a 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 you were saying it sounds very human. It's all human in a way. We're all humans doing it, though. I think different spaces make us feel less that way. but i try to create a lot of space for my own judgment to exist and to like feel what different things feel like uh one thing that i have one way i believe my own mind works differently than i did 10 years ago is i just am much more in touch with how embodied it is and the signals come from the body not just the mind including in a i don't know how much you feel this way but i was thinking about in podcasts.

2:02:23I have a questions document. I don't follow it. How do I know where I'm going? It's like my skin prickles. What the fuck is that? And yet, what makes me a good podcaster is not the questions document. It's the skin prickling. 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. And yet is the one of the most, if not the single most important thing that you can continue to develop.

2:03:05But I think you can teach and I think you can help people cultivate the connection those things need to come through. Even just explaining the primacy of it. Like this is something that's important that you should pay attention to. 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 disembody us. Correct. And I never know less about my body than when I'm really strolling. Do you ever do that where you move from a paper book to your phone, which I will sometimes have both out, and you can really feel the difference.

2:03:40Like how much I'm in touch with the body on the physical print, slow, versus here. You really do become a brain in a bat. And I'm not saying it's all bad. I don't want to be overly a Luddite here. I have a phone, I have a computer, I work on the internet. But I do think, yeah, developing intuition, developing taste, that's a very personal, very mysterious thing. but developing the ability to listen to what's happening inside of yourself that through meditation and movement practice 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 um need to push particularly in this era harder or i would like to see us push harder on, I don't even know what to call it, like the art of thinking, the art of feeling just as much.

2:04:41I always think that going back to some of the, you know, trends in podcasting a few years back, when I guess it was Ben Shapiro's line, you know, facts don't care about your feelings. I always thought it was a big, I was really discreet with that line. Because it's not that facts care about your feelings. Facts don't care about anything. They're a fact. But you should care about your feelings. Feelings are very intelligent. And the dismissal of them is, which is not obviously just a Ben thing, it's a mistake, right? You want to be in touch with the way things feel. There's a lot of intelligence in that.

2:05:14And 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 and 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.

2:05:58And you can just continue to scale that all the way up to, well, you can try and reverse engineer virtue from first principles, but it's like actually a really hard, it's a very difficult and clunky thing to do as opposed to, you know, when I did, you know, when I behaved in that way, I didn't feel good. I didn't feel good when I said, when I lied to that person, As opposed to having to be able to show me your proof of why lying is wrong on this whiteboard, it's way harder. And yeah, I'm completely on board. I think the demand is going to be for people to feel more. Although I would take this in both directions, actually.

2:06:38We mentioned Pema Chodron, 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 to tolerate. And one of the reasons I think it's very important to be in touch with what you're feeling is not always because you should listen to it. sometimes actually i think so much of life is driven by these little embodied contractions we barely even notice but because we don't even notice that they're happening we follow them 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.

2:07:27And so having the information is there so you can make good judgments about it. But if you don't know that that information is happening in you, you're actually going to be much easier, much more easily moved by it than if you do. I have become one thing that I'm proud of myself because it has been very hard work for me, like genuinely hard work for me, particularly in personal relationships, I have become better at knowing that I am uncomfortable. And so I don't run away from it. But when I didn't know it, 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 because I wasn't like fully feeling it.

2:08:09You're just reacting to it. I was just reacting to it. So that to me is like some of the genius of getting better at listening to your own body, you actually know if something's happening that you're going to need to sit through rather than react to. Heck yeah. Ezra Klein, ladies and gentlemen. Ezra, you're great. That was a pleasure. What's coming up next? Who did I just tape with? Just tape with Ian Bremmer. Had a great conversation about the crazed state of the world. That could be a title for pretty much everything that you're doing at the moment. I appreciate you, man. Thank you very much.

2:08:39All right. See you next time, everyone. Dude. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. The message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.