Kevin Williamson critiques social media as a catalyst for tribalism and demagoguery, arguing that while platforms amplify existing societal fractures, they do not create the underlying economic anxieties driving modern polarization. He defends America's anti-democratic constitutional safeguards, like the Senate, against fleeting passions and warns against viewing the presidency as a religious cult. Despite fears of chaos, Williamson remains optimistic about U.S. resilience due to its accumulated wealth and social capital, predicting that market competition will eventually reassert itself against regulatory overreach while technological advances promise to eliminate diseases by 2030. Ultimately, he advocates for independent thinking to navigate an age of mob politics without losing sight of capitalism's cooperative potential. [Automatically generated summary]
About this time every year, our attention turns to the solemn anniversary of 9-11.
It's a moment when we all take time to reflect on those who gave their lives that day.
Seems weird for those of us who remember it.
What we promised ourselves we would do.
Those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the years to come.
Those who went to war, how are we treating them?
Defending our liberties in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
And now here we are, 18 years later.
We find ourselves seemingly in a state of permanent war.
We're warned that the Islamic State is poised to make a comeback.
We watch as the crescent of Iranian influence extends its long shadow.
And in Afghanistan, our leaders are now negotiating the terms of peace with the Taliban, which I thought we had wiped out at one point.
Well, I want to tell you about a new film that is out.
Ties all of this together.
It's called Mosul.
It is the story of the last battle of the Iraq War, documenting the 2016-2017 fight against ISIS in Iraq's second largest city.
It's directed actually by a CIA officer, Danielle Gabriel.
Mosul is the name of this film.
It's much more than a war story.
It is a journey that will take you up the Tigris River right into the heart of darkness of the ISIS Caliphate, revealing an apocalyptic battle against two unyielding enemies, the violent Islamic extremism and the sectarian mistrust and hatred that will remain long after all of the politicians declare victory.
It's available now on iTunes or Amazon, Vimeo.
Just visit www.moselhashfilm.com.
Monkeys and Misfit Toys00:04:07
Today's podcast guest has chalked out a reputation as an unrelenting conservative voice in media at a time when conservative voices are routinely exiled from the media.
He does a lot of work with us at the Blaze, and you might have seen him on Blaze TV.
He's been exiled.
That's why we have him.
We're kind of the island of misfit toys.
In 2018, he was hired at the Atlantic, only to be fired three days later for a tweet he posted or something he said in a speech in 2014.
It was taken out of context, but that didn't matter.
Currently, he is a correspondent for the National Review, and his articles are often intricate, witty, and spontaneous.
The political guide, the politically incorrect guide to socialism, the dependency agenda, the case against Trump, and his most recent book, The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.
He dives into some of the most pressing issues of our time, and he does it without blinking.
It's not a PG-13 book.
It may not even be a rated R book.
begin there with kevin williamson all right so kevin there's so much of this book i'd like to read Okay, but it's a family show.
Well, not really, but I'm a family man.
This is not a family book.
It's not one for the kids.
I mean, just in your first chapter, if you've ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos that smell very intensely the way you imagine that Bernie Sanders probably smells faintly, you know what monkeys, these particular monkeys, are like.
They not a family part of this episode.
They jerk off, fling poo all over every day, generally using the same hand for both.
No, they fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don't do a hell of a lot else unless there's McDonald's.
When you read this, and I'm going to get into some of this, you compare pretty much everybody to monkeys.
I got a monkey theme in the book.
There is a monkey theme.
Well, yeah, I started off.
You mentioned earlier that I first started working newspapers in India, and I was living in Delhi.
And the city is just covered up by monkeys, partly having to do with the fact that there's a temple there.
It's a Hanuman temple and you can't miss the monkeys.
And people would bring offerings, you know, the monkeys.
And the people who don't know what they're doing, of course, bring bananas and fruit and stuff.
But what they really like is McDonald's.
And I covered the opening of the first McDonald's actually in India, which was a very fun story to work on.
And so it was just a scene that's still in my head of these monkeys eating happy meals and pilgrims and stuff and thinking that's a little bit like modern life in the United States, I think.
And you just swing in, grab the food.
Monkeys kind of are the worst.
But occasionally they kill somebody there.
They cause problems.
I was in our office one day there and it was in a basement and just the lights flicker for a second and I hear and this flaming monkey goes shooting past the window and it had chewed through the power main apparently, and don't know why it was chewing through the power main, but it caused an electricity outage for about four and a half hours, as I recall, which is a pain when you're in the newspaper business hard to get much done, right.
Playing the Political Game00:16:00
So you think that's who we are.
Now I think that social media doesn't change who we are, reveals who we are.
It's like alcohol.
Alcohol doesn't make you a jerk.
You were already a jerk.
It just took away your inhibitions and that is confession in our way.
But aren't our inhibitions I'm happy to say I was a nicer guy when I was drunk aren't our inhibitions what make us human in some regard?
And the things that we're like we have inside and we're like, aren't they?
I don't think I should.
You know, fling poop and jerk off, fling jerk, fling jerk.
I don't think I should do that.
I think our inhibitions are what make us better than human.
I think our inhibitions are a gift from God, right anything?
Well, individuals are a lot like governments right, that you want.
You want divisions of powers and you want stops on things.
And anything that stops me especially but, but any other person, but I'll take myself as a good example of this anything that stops me from doing what exactly I want right then, at the moment, where it comes into my head, is a good thing.
Anything that stops that from happening is a good thing.
And the structure of social media, you know psychologically, is that it.
It rewards theatricality and hysteria and invective and stuff, but it does it immediately, and so people have a tendency to just uh, you know, hit that button post, get that feedback.
And did you hate me on FOX?
You must have hated me on FOX, because that was a lot of theatrics.
Yeah um, I never.
You know, I was on the last episode of your FOX NEWS show, I don't know if you remember this.
And um I, what do we talk about you?
Well you, you ended up at the blackboard.
You know, when Glenn goes to the blackboard, I always kind of wanted to go do something else.
But um, to be honest um, i've never watched a FOX NEWS show all the way through, really not one.
I've never watched any of the shows all the way through, except for the ones that i've been on all the way through, because you just don't watch.
You don't watch television.
Well I, I watch Game Of Thrones and yeah uh, You know, breaking back and stuff like that.
I don't watch cable TV news.
I don't, no.
I think it's predictable and useless.
And it's becoming much more so.
Yeah.
And it doesn't bring out the best in people.
Like I knew Chris Hayes a little bit before he had his own show and all that sort of stuff.
And TV has just taken 30 points off that guy's IQ.
You know, just the way he presents himself.
Well, then the book is about tribalism and TV.
Cable news is about tribalism.
It's about this is our team.
Here's how we here's how we encourage our team.
Here's the cheers for our team.
Here's all that stuff.
And I think that, and here's especially why the other team is bad.
And that's where the real ritual of all this is.
It's this is Old Testament stuff.
It's like a scapegoat ritual.
It's the ritual and ceremony of hating people in public together.
That's what Twitter is really for.
And that's what Facebook is really for.
And to some extent, cable news and some talk radio is really for that.
It's let's abominate the people on the other side together as this communal team building exercise that gives us a sense that we belong to one another, that we're part of something significant and important, and that we are affirming our values in some sort of proactive way that really matters.
That's an illusion.
None of this stuff really matters that much.
There was a great, actually, this is maybe right around the time when you were first on Fox.
There was a poll that I found very heartening where they're asking people about various TV pundits.
And it's old enough that Keith Oberman was on the list.
So I remember Keith Olderman being on the list.
And with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, the most common answer in every category wasn't trust him, don't trust him, like him, don't like them.
The most common answer was never heard of him.
And most people don't know about this stuff.
We who work in the media tend to get worked up about these intramedia things that happen sometimes.
So when I went through the nonsense with the Atlantic, you know, there are columns in the New York Times and columns in the Washington Post and all that sort of stuff.
And two weeks after I got fired, I called my dad and he's like, so how's the new job going?
Wow.
Never heard a word about it.
No one knew.
No one cared.
We get real excited about a lot of little things that matter to people who work in news or in media or in television or in politics.
It doesn't really affect the outside world that much.
It's a game.
I was just in Australia and there wasn't one place that I walk into.
Not a hotel lobby, not a restaurant, bar, airport.
No one had cable news on.
That was just kind of playing.
Oh, yeah.
They'd have sport, apparently, sports and horse racing running all the time in Australia.
You'd have sports, but no cable news.
Yeah.
And while you still have Twitter and Facebook and everything else, there's something to that where we are glued in.
When I was over there, I was just minding my own business and doing a charity thing over there.
And I came back and I was like, what's happening?
Because, I mean, none of it's changed, right?
I mean, it's the same crap.
We get so wound up in it.
And I don't know where the balance is on what's important and what's not, what's worth fighting for, and then what's worth leaving alone because I got to live.
Yeah.
You know, the only foreign language I ever studied in school was Latin.
So unless I happen to be at the Vatican, if I'm in a non-English speaking place, I don't understand the news or people's conversations, things like that.
And it's such a relief.
I love being in countries where I can't understand people's conversations.
I can't understand the news.
And you can just kind of be alone with your own thoughts again for a while.
And it's kind of, you know, I hate to say this because I really like Australia.
I would live in Australia if, you know, and I would live there comfortably, not with all the socialism and all the, but it's not my country.
Right.
So I wouldn't care.
I mean, they could go crazy in parliament and be like, all right, well, I'll just move back.
And they're screwing up their country, not my country.
So it wouldn't be the same.
When you're here and you're like, wait, That's going to hurt.
That's going to leave a mark.
And it's your country.
How do you know what's important, what you engage in, what you don't?
Yeah, I think that, well, anything that can be summed up in five seconds on Twitter and the answer to which is people on the other side are evil and we're good, you got it wrong.
There aren't any real simple answers to things.
I have a thing I jokingly call Williamson's first law of politics, which is that everything is simple when you don't know a thing about it.
Jarend deleted there.
And it's true.
Everything is simple when you don't know anything about it.
If you get people who are actually subject area experts in something and talk to them about it, nothing's ever simple.
Nothing's ever cut and dry.
They're always very qualified about their opinions.
You know what's interesting?
You get a guy like Paul Krugman.
You get Paul Krugman writing or talking about his actual area of academic expertise.
Very interesting guy.
His New York Times column could be written by a monkey.
You know, and it may be for all I know.
Back to the monkey.
Back to the monkeys.
You know, he's this angry Twitter rage monkey character that he plays in the New York Times.
I mean, the rumor is he doesn't write his own column.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I really kind of hope for his sake it's not.
I would be less embarrassed for him if he were outsourcing it than if he actually were writing that crap.
But the story we want to tell ourselves is that everything that's wrong with the world is that there's someone evil out there who's causing this to happen.
It's good guys and bad guys.
We're the virtuous ones.
The people we don't like are the evil ones.
And everything would be fine if it weren't for them.
And if you've got a country in which about 40% of the people believe that about 40% of the other people, and those 40% reciprocate that belief, and 20% of the people are just watching The Bachelor or doing whatever the rest of the people do, you're not going to have a healthy democratic culture in the long term.
You know, if you think about a guy like Lincoln who was in office in a much more difficult time, you think?
I think that was actually much more consequential.
And Lincoln was the one out lecturing Americans about, you know, we have to be friends.
We can't think of each other as enemies.
And now we've got President Trump saying, you know, punch that guy in the face and I'll post your bail for you.
I hate that.
That is evidence that if evolution is a real thing, it's in species and not in countries.
And you have people on both sides.
Why they decry it on one side.
They'll do it on the other side.
Sure, of course.
That's on both sides.
It's on both sides.
How did we get here?
Is it Twitter and Facebook and all of that that got us here?
No.
Again, I think those things, they reveal things about us and they intensify things because they give us the opportunity to do bad immediately before we stop and think about it.
But I think...
And then reward you.
Yes, and reward you with attention.
So that's the economy of social media, right?
Is you pay attention to other people and then you go out there and that you hope attention will be paid back to you.
I heard an interview on the radio the day with a woman who's in a band, Sleater Kenny, is that what it's called?
It was big back in the 90s or something.
A lady from Portlandia was in it.
Apparently they're popular.
People shake their heads when I can't remember this.
Anyway, she was talking about this weird thing of being on social media where you set yourself up on this little stage and then you wait for applause.
And for someone who actually is a performer to feel weird about that and to understand that weirdness is one thing, but people who aren't professional performers, who still in their everyday lives are basically trying to live psychologically the same way, I think is really very difficult for them and it's bound to be unsatisfying.
I think a lot of this has to do with changes in the way we live and work in the last 30, 40 years, where a lot of us move more often, we change employers more often, we delay marriage, we delay parenthood, we don't go to church as much as we used to.
So things that used to provide us with relationships and a sense of belonging, status, significance have either been diminished or for many people taken away entirely.
So people go looking for new things to belong to and new sources of identity and meaning.
And unfortunately, they've turned to this really dumb form of cowboys and Indians politics on social media.
And it's, again, you're right.
This is on both sides.
It's a conservative thing as well as a progressive thing.
It's team red and team blue screaming at each other and saying, you're evil, you're evil, you're dumb, you're dumb, you're rotten, you're rotten.
And they somehow manage to convince themselves that they're doing something other than playing a game, but they're really just playing a role-playing game.
That's why things like Antifa are a problem.
I think anytime you've got ordinary political violence happening in a city like Portland, it's a problem.
But in a sense, you know, groups like antifunged groups like the Proud Boys or whatever their opposite number is on the right these days are really just playing a game with one another.
They're not really engaged in serious politics.
They're not really in pursuit of real political power.
They're LARPing.
You know, they've got this role-playing game that they've taken into the public square in places like Berkeley and Washington and some other places.
And they're essentially playing a game.
It's a game in which people actually get hurt and killed sometimes, but they're essentially playing a game because they're bored and they're lonely and they're alienated and they don't know what to do with their lives.
I don't think the SA was playing a game.
No, I think they were a lot more serious.
I think that, and that's the difference really is that.
They were, I mean, they were not so bright.
No, they weren't bright necessarily.
I think that, you know, with the National Socialists, you had more of a coherent ideology.
You had an actual social crisis that was going on, which always helps demagogues.
We don't have an actual social crisis.
So we're constantly inventing one.
Trump is Hitler.
Bernie Sanders is Stalin.
None of these things are true.
The country is two tweets away from the Holocaust or one election away from losing the Republic.
I don't think those things are true.
You don't?
No, I don't think so.
I think that we tell ourselves that story.
I think that having elected Hillary Clinton in 2016 or electing Elizabeth Warren in 2020 will do a great deal of damage to the country.
I think so, but I think the country is resilient and can withstand a lot.
And we made it through the Civil War and the Great Depression, a lot of other stuff.
And we'll make it through these 100.
I think we have these big watershed moments, though.
Me too.
I just don't think this is one of them.
All right.
So let's talk about it for a second.
Yeah.
9-11 watershed moment changed us.
The Patriot Act was sitting on a dusty shelf already written.
That happened.
Let's take some control.
TARP, Bush actually saying, you know, Mr. President, you're either going to be remembered as Hoover or you're going to be remembered as FDR.
All of them would say FDR.
He did.
I got a, what was he?
He said, I got to violate the free market, save the free market.
That's crazy talk.
Yes, it is.
And that changed us.
Barack Obama, healthcare, changed us.
And we're getting to a point now to where there's almost, I mean, it's we're driving a truck or a or a classic car, and we're driving it like it's a brand new Porsche.
You know what I mean?
And it doesn't handle real well in corners.
It's not meant to go this fast.
You know, it's got all these different things.
At some point, one of these is it just, you've pushed it too far.
And we don't know our own history.
We don't know each other.
We don't like each other for all intents and purposes, it seems.
When and if the economy goes down, you have wolves licking their chops saying free market doesn't work.
Once you take away the free market.
Do you have the United States of America?
No, I don't think you do, but I don't think it probably gets taken away.
I think even if you elect someone who really, really wants to do it and has the political power to do it, I think it's just, it's almost an impossible thing to do just because the way we live is so enmeshed in that.
People will try to raise taxes.
They'll try to have the government take a commanding hand over certain things like maybe energy, labor policy, those sorts of things.
And those will all be bad things, but I don't think the United States is really quite that weak.
You're right about the way change is happening.
It's always, you know, Robert Higgins wrote this famous book, Crisis and Leviathan, and that's the way it always happens.
There's a crisis, government expands, crisis goes away, but it stays where it was.
I sometimes have these funny conversations with my conservative friends, and they'll ask me about my politics.
And, you know, I'm a pretty crazy libertarian, you know, sort of borderline anarchist.
And they were like, that's extreme.
That's crazy.
And I say, well, what do you guys want?
And they say, well, I want us to live under the Constitution.
It was originally understood.
That's kind of like libertarian extremism.
You guys are much more radical than I am.
Do you realize how different this country would be?
I've just been rereading Cult of the Presidency by a guy who works over at Cato.
I've forgotten the author's name.
Forgive me for that author.
And if you just look at the way our conception of what the president is supposed to be and do has changed over the years, it's crazy.
Taft wrote a little pamphlet on it when he was running for re-election about, well, I'm not really supposed to solve every problem.
I'm supposed to just basically be the CEO of the government and make sure the agency is run the right way.
And if you don't like what the law says, tell Congress about it.
That changed with Wilson.
Right.
Who beat Taft.
Right.
Because of a third party spoiler.
Well, yeah, there was that too.
Although, you think Wilson might have beaten him anyway?
I don't know.
I don't know that election very well.
I don't think so.
Yeah, I mean, it's not to say that we couldn't have a crisis.
It's not to say there aren't dangers out there lurking for us.
There always are.
Bumpy Roads Ahead00:15:19
But I think that the United States is a country with a lot of strong and functional institutions, some of which we really don't appreciate very much.
I mean, you take the Fed, every conspiracy theorist hates the Fed.
The president hates the Fed right now.
He hates his appointees to the Fed.
The Fed has basically done a pretty good job of doing what it's supposed to do.
Now, if I were designing the country from the ground up back in the 1700s, I wouldn't have put a central bank there either.
And I think we'd probably get along just fine without one.
Well, without having had one.
Now that we have one, we have a lot of institutions that are built up around that.
I don't think Americans want to be poor.
They don't want to be vulnerable.
They don't want to be miserable.
They know how not to do that.
We know how to make stuff and do stuff.
So you might say that people don't like the Fed and they may actually say, I should have asked this question.
I was with a friend this weekend and he said, Glenn, we just sold our business.
We have some money.
We lost everything in 08.
You know, I just don't know what we're going to do because we just can't afford to lose all of our money again.
And as he's talking, I just started hearing Wilson and all the progressives talk about the Fed.
That's the thing that brought the Fed in.
You know, you had a depression.
Well, it lasted about a year, but you had a depression about every 10 to 12 years.
And you would lose everything and you'd have to start over.
And not everybody would, but a lot of people would.
And there was no room for that pain.
People did not want that pain.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that people like predictability.
And that's part of, I think, where our anxiety right now comes from is that we don't know what's going to happen next.
You know, I think about people in my father's generation who would work for the same company or for two companies over the course of their lives.
Whereas a lot of people in my generation, I think I've had 21 employers or something like that.
Maybe I'm a bad example of this, but can't keep a job.
But we're 21 home addresses and 17 employees or something.
I get them confused.
But we don't have these fixed lives anymore.
And so it's great for a lot of people and people like me especially because it brings opportunity and new things and you can try new things and you don't have to be doing the same thing at the same desk for 25 years the way a lot of people used to.
But a lot of people want to do the same thing at the same desk for 25 years.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
We shouldn't sneer at those people and look down at them.
A lot of people prefer the predictability of life as an employee in an old-fashioned 1960s style corporation to life in an economy in which everyone has to be to some extent an entrepreneur, in which there's no fixity and no security.
And I think that is part of where this anxiety and hysteria and also this desire for autocracy comes from because people are looking at the government saying, be my father.
Be my father, be my chieftain, be my God, solve my problems.
I will give you my allegiance if you'll just make sure that I've got a roof over my head and that my healthcare is taken care of, my kids are educated.
How do you bring America back to where it was?
Well, was when.
When we were.
And do we want to?
I mean, some things we like to bring back, like, you know, there are some aspects of life.
I'm an Eisenhower guy, right?
I'm sort of philosophically irradical, but politically I'm pretty moderate.
I like consensus and bipartisanship in that stuff because I think that's where stability comes from.
And I think instability is the most dangerous thing in a country that has no institutions.
We are so successful because we had cheap energy and stability.
Yeah.
And, you know, rule of law, basic things like that, secure property rights.
Yeah, all the things that go along with that brings stability.
There are a lot of things about that era that I like, a lot of things that obviously we wouldn't like that we'd want to change.
But it's not one of those things where you get to pick the things you like and then leave behind the things you don't.
So everyone who complains about globalization likes globalization.
We like having access to things from all over the world at better prices.
I always point out there's a wonderful passage in the Count of Monte Cristo, it's one of my favorite novels.
And the Count, who is this richest man in Paris and he always does these whimsical things, he has a dinner party at which he serves two different kinds of fish.
And this is a huge thing.
Everyone is just stunned and awed by this display of wealth and ingenuity of having ingenuity of having two kinds of fish.
Now you walk into a Walmart and the poorest people in America can go choose from 70 kinds of fish and we don't think twice about it.
But even you read books like you read Stephen King's The Stand, which was written, I guess it's published in 1980, written in 1978, 1979.
There's a guy who's going home to visit his mother in the Bronx and he's a rock star.
He's made all this money and his mom cleans houses and she doesn't have very much money.
And he goes back home and he finds that she's bought two pounds of butter because she's going to cook for him because it's what mothers do when their sons come to visit.
And he thinks to himself, how did she ever get the money to do that?
You know, this was during my lifetime.
I'm not an ancient man.
And so our quality of life has changed just radically over where it was in the 1960s, 70s, to say nothing.
To say nothing in the 1950s.
If the American people were asked to go back to the economy where everybody had a job and these factories are pumping people out, right?
Yeah.
Oh, man.
You talk about that in your book.
I do, yeah.
And people talk about wanting that because they want the stability, but they don't want the standard of living that goes with it.
So they want to get all the dynamism and quality of life that comes with having globalization and the other institutions that we have now and the other economic practices we have now, but they don't want to pay the price that goes with it.
So they've essentially become, you know, as I always say, we're the spoiled children of history.
We're the richest, freest, happiest, best-off people in the world, and we are miserable.
We've never been unhappier.
Where we think that, you know, we're always, it's always 1939 here.
The Great Depression is going on and there are Nazis somewhere.
And that's not really the case.
That's not how we live.
But there have been changes that have gone along with that that are not universally welcomed and do make people's lives less stable, less predictable, and more stressful.
And I think that is really the basic source of our political discontent right now.
I write about this a lot for National Review: that when conservatives look at members of the electorate who don't tend to go along with us on stuff, single women, African Americans, immigrants, if you look at them, these are groups of people who tend to be risk-averse and who often have good reasons to be risk-averse.
The market economy has not always been good to African Americans, not when you're being bought and sold in the market economy.
And this was not a thousand years ago.
And, you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not 500 years ago.
It's not that long ago.
There's a reason for people to be risk averse.
And we look at their preference for big government programs as being personal corruption.
It's being you're lazy, you want welfare benefits, and you're being bought your vote.
Your vote's being bought by the Democrats.
We have this stupid plantation talk that people use as though it's impossible that black Americans just simply prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and maybe have good reasons for doing so.
So we're out there talking about the free market and entrepreneurship and dynamism for people who don't want those things, who are afraid of them, who don't like what they've brought.
And we need to make our argument in the context, I think, of that risk aversion of here's what you stand to lose, first of all, which is your 21st century quality of life and your standard of living, which is very important to you.
Do you know where it comes from?
Do you know how these things happen?
And then people need to understand the trade-offs between these things.
And then to the extent that Republicans and conservatives want to offer social policies, welfare policies, social insurance, those sorts of things, they should be tailored in a way to deal with that specific risk aversion because that's really what's going on.
It's not a bidding contest of we'll give you $60,000 for your vote.
They'll give you $70,000.
And we really misunderstand how this stuff even works.
Like again, if you look at the case of African-American voters, they tend to move to the left, the wealthier they are and the higher income they are.
So they become more supportive of redistribution, higher taxes, social spending when they're wealthy.
So the black voters who are the least likely to benefit from redistribution and from welfare spending are the ones who most support it.
So this is not about someone out there going, how can I get the government to give me money?
It's a whole different set of things.
I've wandered a bit afar from the book here, but that's a reality that I think conservatives and libertarians and free market people need to deal with and need to deal with in a way that's forthright and honest.
So we're looking at, I mean, nobody will talk, and I don't think this is the answer, but I've had a conversation.
Imagine this on talk radio.
I've had the conversation that we have to talk about basic minimum income.
I don't think that's the answer.
But the world is changing so much.
And the wealth will really truly be concentrated in very few hands if the Amazons and the Googles and everything else actually do block people through algorithms or through government regulation.
And we have a situation to where we could be in trouble only because people have to go out and find something new and different.
And, you know, my wife is a good example of this.
She's not cut from the entrepreneurial cloth.
She's an entrepreneurial person with our children.
I mean, she's got it down.
I couldn't do that job.
She couldn't do my job.
What happens to those people?
What happens to people who are happy being a truck driver?
And they don't want to start their own business.
But the truck driving job is going away.
Yeah, I mean, we have to get used to the fact that things change.
They always have.
There are lots of jobs that were good jobs in the 19th century and the 1950s that aren't jobs anymore.
You know, the job my father had for most of his life is a job that simply doesn't exist because of information technology.
So these things are not changing.
And to the extent that we've got demagogues who want to tell people, I can protect you from this, but I can stop these changes from happening by putting tariffs on this or having a Green New Deal or doing this or that or the other.
These are all dishonest.
And I think that people understand that they're dishonest if you really explain to them in some detail why this is the case.
And you shouldn't give in to the temptation to shake your finger at people and say, well, you should just get used to the world as it is.
And yes, you do have to get used to the world as it is.
But there are also things we can do to help people to live in that world and get used to it.
Because I don't care about the idea of popularity very much, I suppose, which is hard when you're trying to sell books.
But I sometimes frame this as the problem, what do we do about dumb people?
And which I don't really mean dumb people.
But so you've got half the population who are at median IQ or lower.
And the 21st century is a really tough world for them.
If you're in the sort of top 20% in terms of your skills, your education, your intelligence, it's a great world.
You've got lots of opportunities, all sorts of fun, interesting things to do.
You can go from one thing to the next.
If you're someone who would have made a pretty good clerk in a hardware store in 1959, and that's really what you're cut out for, and you don't really have the raw materials or the ambitions to do something else to be that entrepreneurial 21st century worker, what do we do about that?
And I think that's a real problem.
People sort of sneer at the so-called gig economy and Uber drivers and that sort of stuff.
But I think there's actually some real value there because human effort and human energy and intelligence and ingenuity are inherently valuable.
So the nice thing about being in a society in which a lot of people have a lot of disposable income and a desire for more time on their hands is they can consume more services.
And, you know, my colleague Michael Brendan Darty sort of sneers about this sometimes.
And, well, why is our economy only creating jobs, detailing cars and, you know, things like that?
And I thought, you know what?
The guy who details my car drives in Mercedes, he's got a really good business.
I have friends who are in the lawn care business who make healthy six-figure incomes.
Now, not everyone's going to do that, but some people are.
And some people are going to be the employees of those companies who make less money.
That's okay.
I'm not a big supporter of the basic income.
I don't think it's a great idea for a lot of reasons.
I prefer the...
It's not worked anywhere it's tried.
I don't think it would work.
I do like the idea of a negative income tax where you can take all the stuff that we do in terms of welfare support and just make a check out of it, which I think is fine.
I think most people can spend their own money and make their own decisions.
I don't think that patronizing, condescending idea about people who receive benefits is very helpful.
But you do it in such a way that it incentivizes work rather than disincentivizing work.
And so I think maybe if we could replace a whole bunch of this stuff with the negative income tax, I think that would be a worthwhile experiment.
So I don't see us turning around on socialism.
I don't see us turning around fast on nationalism.
And I don't see us turning around on socialism.
So where did we go from here?
My read on where we are is that I'm a long-term optimist and a short-term pessimist.
I think that we are in for some bumpy spots ahead of us because if you keep acting like you're in a crisis long enough, you'll get one.
You'll create one of your own.
And by making bad decisions, by swinging back and forth radically on things, by precluding the emergence of that stability that we were talking about earlier.
Sort of like, you know, I say this about tax policy sometimes.
It's not that I don't care whether the top rate is 39% or 34.5%.
I do care.
I think it makes a difference.
But I'd be fine if we would just pick one and stick with it for the next 50 years.
There are things about how I would like to organize the health care system that probably wouldn't be that popular.
There are things from the...
Like what?
I think that the people who came up with the original version of Obamacare were essentially trying to adapt the Swiss system to the United States.
I think the Swiss system is actually pretty good for Switzerland.
I don't think it's going to work very well for us.
You go over to those countries and you see, I mean, when I walked into Sydney, I always thought Sydney was a giant city.
It's about the size of Pittsburgh.
And then there's nothing else.
If we moved everybody in New York onto that entire continent, that's it.
You would notice them.
You know, things work differently when you don't have 350 million people.
That's true.
But there are things that I think that come from the left on what they want to do with healthcare reform that I could countenance, even though they're not my preferences.
Like an individual mandate I could actually countenance.
The Corporatism Irony00:15:25
I think if you're going to have one, you need to enforce it and you need to make sure you've got Swiss style 99.9% compliance that changes your market a lot.
I'd be willing to accept some of those things in return for policy stability.
And that's what we used to do.
We used to work toward compromise and consensus.
And again, this is a big part of what the book is about, is that if we're going to have a political culture in which we interact with one another only as mascots and as representatives of the team and the tribe we don't like, rather than as individuals and citizens having a conversation in the context of the democratic institutions of a democracy, then we can't forge consensus and we can't ever have policy stability.
And so we get these swings back and forth, back and forth.
Like Joe Rogan's joke about this, you know, we go right, left, right, left, dumb, smart, dumb, smart.
And I don't think he's exactly right on that.
And I don't think a lot of the smart people have been as smart as they think they are.
But we do that.
You know, there's no coherent explanation of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump.
That's not a country that's thinking things through real carefully, I think.
That's a country that's just having a hissy fit.
And it depends on which side is having the bigger hissy fit in any given moment.
So do you see us turning?
I see us evolving in the right direction.
Ultimately, yes.
I think that Americans will make the right decisions about things once they've exhausted all their other options.
Again, we don't want to be poor.
We know this.
We know where our wealth actually comes from.
We know why we trade.
We know why we allow for entrepreneurship.
Yes, some people resent the fact that Jeff Bezos has so much money or that Martin Zuckerberg has so much money.
You know, here's the funny thing I wrote.
I read this back in 2012 during that election that Mitt Romney shouldn't be ashamed of his wealth.
Right.
Because Americans don't really hate rich people for being rich.
And the example I used was, look, they turned into their television to watch Donald Trump fire people.
I never thought we'd actually make him president when I read that.
Americans, there's some resentment and envy out there.
And anything that's old enough to have a prohibition against it in the Old Testament is just part of human nature.
It's going to be there forever.
But I don't think we're going to let those things ultimately turn us into Venezuela or Haiti or Somalia or someplace like that.
I just don't think we're that dumb.
And I don't think we're that self-hating.
Did I read the opening first paragraph?
Americans are idiots as voters.
And they're not idiots as people, though.
That's the thing about our country where we are so we're so mixed.
We do these amazing, inventive things, and then we have a 2016 presidential election.
It's Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, which would be embarrassing as a mayor's race of New York City, much less president of the United States of America.
Actually, it'd be a pretty good New York mayor's race.
I'd like to talk about.
I'd like you just to read.
What do you want to read?
No, this is about democracy.
No, this is about the voting.
This is about the voting public.
I'll put on my glasses for this.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I know.
This is that there's no special virtue in consulting morons and cretons simply because they exist.
There's no special moral value in bundling together complex problems and policy ideas and asking 50% plus one of a sprawling and almost pristinely ignorant group of barely improved chimpanzees, only a relatively few generations of evolution removed from habitual public masturbation and ritual poo-flinging, what they think about those bundles and which of them they prefer.
Yeah, this is why I'm not a huge believer in democracy.
Well, neither were their founders.
Right.
And who I quote extensively in there.
So democracy is really important procedurally because it's our substitute for violence.
You say you want this guy to be our representative.
I say we want that guy.
We have a vote.
We go on to it.
But the idea that policies or positions or principles or moral propositions become more true because a whole bunch of people believe in them at any given moment is preposterous.
And I don't think any serious person can really believe that.
But we talk as though we believe that because we use democracy as a synonym for good stuff.
We believe in democracy.
Well, slavery was democracy.
If you had a vote on slavery, slavery would have won 70-30.
Yeah, probably.
So you have democracy, and that's why we don't have a democracy.
Right.
Just because, you know, I love this.
Well, that's settled law.
What do you mean it's settled law?
It's settled law.
We can change those laws.
We can't change rights.
We can't change responsibilities.
But the laws, the interpretation, if somebody passed it because 90% of the American people said slavery was good, I wouldn't think slavery was good.
Right.
You know, everyone has to account for their own soul and think for themselves.
It's funny where we get with this stuff.
I was reading an essay the day, some idiot writing in Slate, and he was coming down on Clarence Thomas about something.
And he was shocked, or at least pretended to be shocked, by the idea that Thomas didn't think himself bound by precedent in cases in which that precedent was unconstitutional.
So he wouldn't support the precedent if he thought the precedent was wrong.
So I thought, well, what is your alternative here?
That he's supposed to take something he thinks is plainly unconstitutional and support it because it exists?
And someone in 1830 thought this was a good idea?
Because we've got some decisions you might want to revisit if that's what you think.
We've had some awful precedents and awful presidents too.
And I'm glad they're both gone and are overturned.
I think that the great thing about the American system of government and why I do wish we would return to something more like our actual constitutional architecture is kind of what we started talking about, which is that it says, whoa, you know, it keeps things from happening too fast.
And all of the best aspects of our government, I think all the ones I really admire the most, are the anti-democratic aspects of the government, like the Bill of Rights.
You know, the Bill of Rights always describes the great big list of stuff that you idiots don't get to vote on because we've already settled this and it's done.
You don't like free speech?
Fine.
You don't like free speech.
We're not voting on it.
We've already decided on this.
70% of you don't like it.
90% of you don't like it.
Sorry.
You've got a right to free speech.
You don't get to vote on this.
The presidency, as it originally was conceived, was thought to be a break on the House of Representatives, which the founders thought would be too eager because it was too Democratic.
The Senate, of course, was the same thing.
The Supreme Court is there to keep Congress from being too Democratic, from being too demagogic, and responding to what the founders used to refer to as the passions of the moment.
And not only our constitutional architecture, but also our political culture and I think our culture more broadly would do well to return to some of that wisdom and to learn some of those lessons.
You know, if what's worse about Twitter, and I don't exempt myself, by the way, from any of this, social media never brought out the best in me.
It certainly doesn't bring out the best in most people, I think.
Is the immediacy would be completely different if we all just shut it off.
Yeah, and not any worse.
I haven't used any social media in a couple of years now, and I don't find that I miss it.
You know, I thought it was good for marketing.
I was wrong about that.
It doesn't really affect my readership at all, as it turns out.
So I can't think of a good reason to do it.
Although, the reason I really used to do it, of course, Twitter is great if you're a writer and you procrastinate because you don't want to do your real work.
So let's see who's being stupid tonight.
And, you know, and you always end up arguing and slapping around some undergraduate at Lehigh University or something like that, who's maybe not the best investment of your time.
And because they're at Lehigh, they're not educable.
And oh, I'm sorry.
I mean, and I usually say Texas tech, but I've had to stop doing that.
So, you know, just was never a real good use of time, never brought out the best in me.
But this culture of immediacy, of wanting things immediately, needing immediate feedback, immediate attention.
Someone pay attention to me.
Listen to what I have to say right now.
Give me what I want from the government right now.
The time for debate has passed.
It's time for the government to act.
Well, the time for debate has passed.
Why?
Because you say so?
Because I want to debate about this stuff.
And that's always the mark of a demagogue, right?
Yeah.
Is that we must act right now or the world is ending.
But the world isn't ending.
It keeps just not ending.
I've been shocked on how resilient this country is.
Yeah.
Got a lot of money, a lot of smart people.
We've got a lot of accumulated social capital, which unfortunately I think we're spending down a bit of, and we need to reinvest in some of that.
But I'm not a super jingoistic American.
A lot of conservatives, for some reason, hate Europe.
Conservatives like France is a hellhole.
Well, it's not.
France is a perfectly nice place.
I like Switzerland a lot.
I kind of think about moving there sometimes and maybe I will.
But it is true that when you travel and especially if you do business abroad, you come to appreciate certain things about the United States you don't.
Like I heard not a super left-wing, but a pretty up and down the line progressive Silicon Valley executive a year and a half or so ago who just sounds like Milton Friedman again talking about doing business in Germany.
He's like, thank God, the United States, it's the only place we can do business.
So hard abroad.
You know, the taxes are nuts and the regulation is nuts.
And we tend to think we have a pessimism bias.
We always notice all the worst stuff.
Because we're spoiled.
Well, because we're spoiled, yeah.
I think that's a big part of it.
And we undervalue the good things.
And again, this is something I think conservatives especially really need to work on because conservatives hate a lot of the stuff that's successful about America.
You know, we hate Silicon Valley.
We hate Hollywood.
We hate Wall Street.
We hate the university system.
There's criticisms to be made of all those things, but they're also really, really valuable institutions that we should show a little love for from time to time.
I don't think I hate any of those things.
Maybe not you.
Read my mail.
Read your mail.
You've got someone to read.
When you read the mail, do you get more optimistic or less optimistic?
Oh, I get less optimistic when I read the mail, obviously.
But you never read the comments through the mail.
Although often you'll get some interesting, intelligent commentary from people too.
It's not as though we're in some hierarchy-bosch painting or something like that.
It's not the actual country.
The one thing I can't figure out with our system that I haven't, I don't mind how much money you have.
I really don't.
I don't care.
You made it legally.
You made it ethically.
If I didn't do anything wrong, you're guilty after you're, you know, you're innocent and then you're proven guilty.
So I have no problem with business and et cetera, et cetera.
However, I have tried to figure out, you know, the Robber Barons were not the Rober Barons, but they were also, they also had, you know, not enough Hank Reardon in them.
Sure.
And every time I look at the system, I think, okay, there's a few things going on.
One, it's globalist and distorted capitalism.
And when I say globalist, what I mean is people are worrying about their jobs.
They're worrying they're seeing their hometown, the white picket fence.
Everybody's moving away because there's no jobs there.
They're told, well, you're going to have to move someplace else.
Well, I don't want to leave my little town.
I like my little town, you know.
And so they're feeling disenfranchised and they're not, nobody's listening to them, et cetera, et cetera.
And then they're being told that they're racist, you know, or they're a Nazi or whatever.
So there's that disenfranchisement that they're trying to get through.
Then they're worried with globalist, with globalization.
They're worried about just having a job.
You know, they're not, most are living paycheck to paycheck or pretty close to paycheck to paycheck.
And they don't, they're worried about their job.
They're worried about their heritage.
They're worried about their town.
They're worried about their kids.
What happens when you have the robber barons coming in?
They made things great.
They created a lot of jobs.
But once you get to a certain level, you can kick the door behind you closed.
You're seeing it with, you know, you saw it with Vanderbilt and the railways.
You're seeing it now with Google and Facebook.
They're going in for regulation.
So the little guy can't compete.
That's what I think they're worried about with globalization.
I think they're seeing their towns, their heritage being destroyed, the jobs changing.
Nobody's really talking to them about what your future is going to be.
Nobody's articulating this.
Politicians are only saying, I'm going to bring your job back.
No, you're not.
Because those jobs aren't going to exist.
They're not going to just exist for Chinese.
You know, it's just not going to happen.
Yeah.
One of the great ironies of our current politics is that the complaint you're talking about is essentially a complaint about corporatism, where you've got a partnership between big business and big government, and each of them trying to use the other for its own advantage.
And what's been offered as a cure for that is more corporatism.
It's corporatism with us in charge instead of these other SOVs in charge.
And that, of course, is not going to work the way people want it to.
This is, of course, really the great rebirth of corporatism as a political idea is really one of the characteristics of our time where you've got people on the left with these crazy Green New Deal things, people on the right saying, well, we're going to have government manage trade and we're going to have government oversee the technology companies so that they're being patriotic or whatever it's supposed to be.
And that's all, of course, nuts, and it's all doomed to failure.
And I was just going to tell people, have you flown recently?
Do you want the people who organized the TSA to try to run Silicon Valley or banking or anything?
Or a two-car parade?
You know what I mean?
I don't want them running the airports.
Yeah, I think ultimately you end up with real market competition reasserting itself over attempts to try to quash it because it's just very difficult to keep that sort of thing down.
And, you know, when you're talking about these guys in Silicon Valley now taking a more open approach to being regulated, you're right.
Competition Reasserts Itself00:08:56
They're worried about competition.
And you talk to these guys and they always say the same thing that we're not worried about any company you've ever heard of.
You know, we're worried about some guy in his garage because that's who we used to be 30 years ago.
We were some guy in the garage and we know what we did and how we quote unquote disrupted things.
And that's another funny thing about our times.
Everyone loves the word disruption, but everyone actually hates disruption.
Hates it.
And if you actually are disruptive to an institution, if you are disruptive to your university or to a little magazine that employs you or something like that, that's the one thing that corporations will not actually deal with.
And whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, whether it's the New York Times, whether it's anyone else.
An odd period, I think, for that particular reason.
But I don't think these guys are ultimately going to be able to control what goes on in the markets because even if they really, really hold their regulators hostage, and they often can, the power of markets and capital right now is such that the power of states can no longer really adequately control it.
And I think that's one of the things that Americans, American governments going to have to get used to is that there are a lot of these businesses that employ a lot of people and generate a lot of wealth that don't have to be in California.
They don't have to be in the United States at all.
If I were an American tobacco company, why are you incorporating the United States of America?
I'd be in Singapore or someplace like that, someplace that doesn't hate you.
And there are a lot of places in the world that like to be home to these companies and they're going to say, come here.
And they'd like to be home to the next one too.
So Facebook's already out there, but eventually they're going to get a real competitor.
They've already got competitors for some aspects of their business.
But in the same way that there was such a thing as MySpace, which no one really remembers that Facebook just sort of swept away, it's not as though Facebook is the utility company.
It's not U.S. Steel.
Even U.S. Steel isn't U.S. Steel anymore.
It used to be a huge company.
Now it's a tiny little company.
These companies are not immune from competition.
And that competition doesn't have to be any particular place.
You can incorporate in Switzerland or you can incorporate in Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Singapore.
Lots of places love to have the business.
Do you see anybody on the horizon that you say that person's inspiring?
In politics, you mean?
Yeah.
I probably think more highly of Ben Sasse than I do of anyone else who holds public office, at least at the federal level.
I think he's the real.
I think Sass and Mike Lee.
Yeah.
I'm more of a SAS guy than a Lee guy, but maybe I don't know as much about Lee.
So I think he is honest.
I think that he is a genuine patriot in the sense that he cares more about the country than it does about the party or his particular life.
He is one of the few people you meet in politics who doesn't have the psychological need for it.
There's some people who just need to be in office or they need to be famous.
They need to be in the media.
They need to have that attention.
You know, Bill Clinton was famously this way, but he's not the only one.
I think Sas could quit politics tomorrow and go back and do something that made a lot of money and spend more time with his kids back in Nebraska.
I think he'd like it more.
He probably would, yeah.
I think he is one of the few people you can point to and say with some confidence that he really is there out of a sense of service and out of a sense of patriotism.
And so I wish there were more like him out there, certainly.
You said that earlier you said, you know, 40, 40, that's 80, there's 20%.
I think there's more than that myself.
But what do they rally around?
Anything?
I don't know.
I used to be a Republican.
I haven't been in a long time.
I quit the Republican Party over Arlen Specter, which seems quaint in retrospect.
It really does.
You were a Philly guy for a while.
And speaking of Philadelphia, you know, we were talking about being in Australia and no news on the televisions.
The thing I loved about the Union League in Philadelphia, there's no television anywhere.
Unless you could go have lunch and not have a television.
And if someone took out a cell phone, they would make you put it away or ask you to leave, which I thought was great.
And more places should be like that.
I should have one of those James Bond ejection sheet things for that sort of thing.
But if I were a Republican, what would I want to rally around?
I don't know.
And I think to some extent, the habit of looking for a person and a personality to rally around is part of the problem.
I agree.
And especially when it comes to the presidency, which is this weird, distorted thing now.
You know, after I wrote this book, I told myself I wasn't going to write another political book.
But I think I want to write a book about the presidency as a religious phenomenon.
In the sense that people talk about the cult of the presidency.
There's a very good book called The Cult of the Presidency.
But the problem with the book, The Cult of the Presidency, which, by the way, is an excellent book, it doesn't actually treat the presidency as a cult.
And I think it actually has become a cult in the religious sense of that word.
Don't you think politics have?
I mean, you look at the left, the Uber left.
That's a cult.
That is an absolute God-worshiping cult.
I'm not God-worshiping, earth-worship.
Lowercase.
Yeah.
Lowercase G.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that there is a, particularly when it comes to the presidency, there's an increasingly ceremonial aspect to it and spiritual aspect to it.
So if you've ever read The Golden Bough by James George Frazier, which it's one of the book Kurtz has on his desk when he's killed at the end of Apocalypse Now.
It's a wonderful book.
It's about priest-king cults in the ancient world.
And essentially, that if the rains didn't come and the crops didn't come in, it was assumed that the priest-king hadn't propitiated the gods in the right way and he'd be murdered and replaced by someone else.
We do just kind of a fancy version of that now.
It's a little less violent.
But you know, if there's a 2% contraction in GDP, you can be darn sure that Donald Trump's out and we'll put in a new guy who's going to make it rain and make the crops grow and make the cattle fertile and all the rest of it.
And I know you're clutching your head over there, but that is how we think about this stuff.
I know.
So I think I do want to write a book maybe about the presidency as there's a word I learned from George Will, Caesaropapism, which I think is a great word.
So one part Roman emperor, one part pope.
And that's really how we think about that office now.
And I think that's a big part of actually what drives the politics that I'm talking about in the book, because if you look at that swing back and forth we were talking about earlier, what happens is 2012 or 2016 rather, the Republicans don't just want to beat the Democrat.
They are so frustrated and loathing of Barack Obama and they feel so humiliated by him that they want someone who represents a national cultural and spiritual repudiation of Barack Obama.
They come up with Donald Trump, who's pretty good, actually.
If that's what you're looking for, Donald Trump's a good candidate.
And the Democrats are going to fall into the exact same problem, I think, in 2016, or 2020, rather, where there are all sorts of normal people they could have picked and nominated for that job.
And if they would have picked one normal one, they'd want a huge one.
Probably, yeah.
But they won't.
What they want is someone who represents a repudiation of Trump.
And so they're going to come up with the craziest person that they can, the most, you know, left-wing, confrontational, emotionally validating candidate they can find.
Probably.
I mean, I may be wrong about that, but that seems to be where they're leaning.
And I mean, they're taking seriously people like Beto Rourke, who's in no normal society is a real presidential candidate.
No.
Or Bernie Sanders or people like that.
And so we get these swings back and forth because each of the tribes feels that if the other tribe has its man in the White House, then they are marginalized and disenfranchised and humiliated.
And so they have to swing back the other way.
And if we could ever come up with a way to get over that politics, which is what I try to point to a little bit in the book, what's going to overcome that is reconceiving, among other things, the presidency as a guy who's there to act as the chief administrator.
And he's not the embodiment of the nation.
He's not an elected monarch.
He's not the symbol of the country.
He's not our national moral leader.
He's not the conscience of the country.
He's a guy.
He's just a guy with an administrative job to do who sometimes has some bigger things to do during courses of a national emergency.
And I've always quite liked the thing about the Swiss where they've got this weird presidency that's got sort of a nine-member rotating council.
And no one knows at any given time who the actual president is.
Like you ask the typical Swiss person, they'll be like, oh, oh, yeah, it's that lady.
Just a Guy with a Job00:11:36
I forgot.
Yeah, this month.
And I was in Zurich some years ago, and the lady who actually was the president of the Swiss Federation at the time apparently took the subway to work.
And, you know, when the deputy in Switzerland.
Switzerland.
But if you go to Washington and the deputy under Vice Secretary's Secretary of Agriculture goes to lunch, and it's like a Roman triumph, as imagined by P.T. Barnum.
You know, it's like 75 armored cars and traffic comes to a stop and everyone stops to look and Secretary of Agriculture.
Nobody cares about the Secretary of Agriculture.
He's the guy that we put in the little, you know, well-upholstered Heideholder in the State of the Union because we don't think anyone would bother to murder him.
Right, right.
now kevin uh what's what's on the horizon that excites you or keeps you awake at night Excites you in a good way?
Yeah.
Keep you awake at night.
I think that we are on the verge in terms of how we just live materially, particularly medically, of unprecedented and unimagined, in many cases, advances.
We're very, very close to a lot of things that are going to be really, very important, I think.
I told somebody, they said last night, my husband just made it through another cancer test.
And I said, just make it to 2030.
Yeah.
And she said, why?
And I said, oh, it may happen way before that, but we are so close to unlocking so many doors.
If we don't piss away freedom and don't hand it over to some system like China, it's freedom literally beyond our imagination, beyond anything you've ever read in any utopian book.
It's that kind of freedom and success and freedom.
But if you look at my short lifetime, even at the time since I got out of high school, even which wasn't that long ago, the number of people who die of things like famine and collapse, number of people who die in war, way down.
It made it worse this week because I just finished a book called The Volunteer.
And I don't know if you've read that or heard it, but it's fantastic.
And it's talking about this guy who was in Auschwitz and the typhus.
I come in in the morning and I look at the front page of the paper and it says Los Angeles suffering from typhus.
And I'm like, that's like saying, you know, the mayor's got scurvy.
Yes.
Seeing the mayor of Los Angeles?
Look at where we, in the name of progress, we are going backwards so fast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's a disease of affluence, I think.
You know, people who get afraid of things like vaccines, you're in a pretty fancy place in life when you're worried about vaccines rather than worried about having your whole country wiped out by something like that.
But on that same, you know, on that same token, if you look at some of the amazing things that have been done, you know, a bunch of Rotarians not that long ago got together at lunch and said, let's wipe out polio around the world.
They're pretty close to it.
They've gotten real close, except for a couple of places where they just can't operate, like parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the rural parts of Nigeria.
Pretty well did it.
There's a bunch of guys who sing goofy songs around lunch and who are local business leaders in Mayberry and places like that.
People, and particularly American people, because we have so many resources at our disposal, can do remarkable things when they set their minds to it.
And I think that if more people spent more time doing that sort of thing, they would be a lot more satisfied than screaming at people and calling them Nazis on Twitter because they would be involved in something that actually was important.
It actually did change the world.
Well, I was at a VC conference about a year ago, and I was speaking of venture capitalists or Viet Cong?
Venture capitalist.
And either way with you, though.
I know.
You never know.
So I'm speaking.
The guy after me is the biggest VC guy probably in the world.
And he's from India.
And he said, he gets up to speak and he said, here's how the world's going to change.
And it was just this crazy view.
And I read enough science now and technology, science and technology to know that's not crazy.
That probably is going to be very close if we don't blow it.
And he said, the problem is going to be meaning.
And he said, people who have a religion, he said, they're going to make the first adaptation.
They will be the first adapters because it will free them up to do the things that their faith has taught them gives them meaning.
Go serve.
He said, those without a service faith or something, he said are going to have a real hard time adapting.
So when you look at this beautiful utopian world that we could be headed towards, how do we stop people?
Our problems now is we're fat.
We are well-fed.
We don't have a single problem among us.
I mean, real problem when you go to the rest of the world.
And look at what we're doing.
We're just flushing it all down the toilet because we're bored.
And we're spoiled.
We'll find some problems.
You always do.
No, I know.
What I'm saying is, how do we, when you don't have to work and you can 3D print anything you want and it's no big deal, where do you, how does that work with a, in the transition, long term, maybe, in the transition, how?
This reminded me of a conversation I had 25 years ago with someone in India.
And I remember what he said.
He said, you know, we're poor, but you are barbarians.
And if we had your conception of family life, we would look worse than Somalia.
We'd be lord of the flies.
India was a lot poorer back in the 90s than it is now, but I think that's still true.
You know, I'm someone who thinks about things in economic terms a lot, and I think that's an important way to look at things from a public policy point of view because you can have all sorts of disputes and conversations when you're well-fed versus when people are hungry and they're going to eat each other.
And, you know, you don't want that.
So I think that material well-being is not the end-all-be-all of life, obviously, but it's not to be sneezed at either.
And I think that, you know, if we continue to work on those things and we continue to press toward what we actually can achieve on that front, there's meaning in that as well.
You know, it may very well be that the last person who's ever going to die of cancer has already been born and that the person who are going to have a whole different world where cancer is like diabetes.
You know, it's a pain, but you manage it.
And if you do the right things, maybe shortens your life a little bit, but it's not a death sentence.
There's a lot of meaning in that.
There's meaning in making the world a better place.
There's a guy I wrote about a couple of years ago, and there's also meaning in doing good work.
And I think people forget about this.
There's a guy I wrote about a couple years ago as a wonderful company in Brooklyn called Cut.
And he makes these very, very fancy kitchen knives.
And they cost like three grand a piece.
And you can't buy one.
You can't make them fast enough.
At least this is true a few years ago.
And he was a guy who went and got an MFA and wanted to be a novelist and went and started writing.
Turns out he's not a very good writer.
And he didn't enjoy it very much because writing is being alone in a room, which I'm fine with.
That's where I belong, but it's not where he belonged.
And so he started making knives and he wasn't very good at it, but he got on YouTube and figured out how to get good at it.
And I don't know if he makes a lot of money.
I think he probably makes an okay living.
But he gets up every day and he makes something that is one of the best examples of that particular thing that you can get.
And I think there is some real value in that.
There's a sense of accomplishment in that.
And whether you are someone who is out researching cancer cures or you're someone who's making fancy kitchen knives or you're someone who's detailing a car, there's honor and dignity and meaning in work and in being of service to people and of being productive.
And I think that we sneer at that too much.
We particularly sneer at people who work with their hands, which is really dumb because a lot of these people do make a lot of money, do real well for themselves.
But even the ones who don't, we should be, I think, more respectful of that.
But I've always been confused by these guys, they work in offices and they play with spreadsheets and they make $62,000 a year.
And, well, they went to college, so there's something.
And they go home and they watch television shows about guys who build motorcycles who make a million dollars a year.
And I think, well, if that guy had only gone to graduate school, he really could have amounted to something.
You know, and that's just, that's weird, but we're, but we're that way.
I just, you know, there's a, I read a story a few years ago about a, about a guy who was a federal attorney and in Washington, D.C. His mom was so proud.
He was the first African-American.
He was an African-American family, first one in his family to go to college.
His mother had worked and slaved away to be able to pay for it.
He went to a good college.
He promised her when he was little that, yes, mom, I'll make something of myself.
Yes, ma'am, I'll go to college.
Yes, ma'am, I'll be an attorney.
And he did.
And he also loved to bake.
And he would bake birthday cakes for people and everything else.
And everybody just loved his cakes.
And that's where he really found his joy.
Well, as it turns out, he kind of became almost addicted to the baking thing.
He loved it so much.
And he ended up in the hospital.
And he was so torn.
He was baking injuries?
No.
Baking so much all the time, making cupcakes and cakes for friends and families.
And he wasn't sleeping.
And he would have to do his work.
He'd work till late and then he'd cook till, you know, bake until four o'clock in the morning.
Crazy.
And then he'd get up and he was hospitalized.
And the doctor said, you have to choose.
You have to choose.
Are you going to please your mom and do that responsible job over there?
Or are you going to enjoy your life and be a baker?
And he opened up a shop called Cake Club and left.
And his mom was happy.
He was just so afraid of seeing it.
But I think there's a lot of people that can do that and find that.
But like we said earlier, there's a lot of people that just want to be, they just want to punch in, do their eight hours to punch out.
They don't want to do that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And the fact is that when you've got a really, really wealthy and enormously productive society like ours, there's room for people who have just regular punch-the clock jobs to make a good living and have a good standard of living.
Worlds Apart in Wealth00:07:39
One of the things that I think is very interesting and strange about our time right now is we spent all this time talking about inequality.
And I think it's the wrong conversation to have because what we should really care about is what's happening to the absolute standard of living for people at the bottom and how we can bring that up.
Yes.
Not how much distance there is between them and the top.
But for people at the very top, you know, your Silicon Valley CEOs, your Wall Street CEOs, and things like that.
You know, this probably from having been in New York and being in that world a little bit.
Their lives really have gotten strange.
Like, their lives are radically different from, you know, people who are top 10%, top 5%, top 10%.
You look at Charles Murray's stuff.
Back in the 1960s, the top and the bottom were not that different.
Now they are different worlds.
Yeah.
I mean, the sort of billionaire and up world is their lives have become really, really alien, I think, to a lot of people, including very wealthy people.
There's a difference between being wealthy and being like that guy.
And what's the difference?
It's that there's literally nothing you can't have.
And your time gets taken care of.
You know, you don't do things like you don't fly first clash.
You've got an airplane and it's on call and it goes when you want to go.
And if you want to go, I'm going to go to the top of Mount Everest next Wednesday and have a picnic.
Done.
There's a helicopter.
We'll go do it.
And I think that also causes some of this resentment.
There aren't that many of those people, but their lives are so alien and they get so insulated from people.
It's the Gwyneth Paltrow syndrome of her drinking some smoothie in the morning that costs $800 to make or something.
And you should try this too.
Right.
It's really nice.
And I saw Jim Carrey.
It was a Jim Carrey.
No, it was what Robin Williams, because I thought, who else could get away with this but Robin Williams?
He was on television and he was promoting something.
And he said, you know, I come to New York once in a while.
And he said, he's on the Today Show.
And he said, you guys, you know, you invited me to come out.
So I came out and I come here.
And he said, you always hear talk about homelessness.
I just got, I just left the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
There are rooms.
There's huge buildings.
The whole park is surrounded.
Why aren't these people just, you know, staying in the Mandarin Hotel?
Obviously joking, but there are some people who are really like that.
Yeah.
They don't understand it at all anymore.
I played a prank on my dad with that.
He was going to take a cruise that was leaving out of New York.
He'd never been there before.
And he wanted me to recommend a hotel for him.
He's very cheap.
And I said, well, there's a place actually over close to where the cruise ships leave.
It's called the Mandarin Oriental.
You should call him up.
I think they quoted him $3,500 for amused.
He stayed out in a La Quinta album.
Yeah, right.
By LaGuardia.
But yeah, and their lives really are very, very different.
I think that's kind of an interesting story, and it's an interesting break in that, you know, Cornelius Vanderbilt wasn't as alienated from the mainstream of American life as the top executive at Google or Facebook or someplace like that is.
And we have a better life than Vanderbilt did in his age.
I mean, Calvin Coolidge's son died of a scrape, too.
He was president of the United States of America.
He had access to the best health care you get in the world.
I have a letter from Booker T. Washington.
He's writing one of his speeches.
And so it's a whole bunch of his notes that he's trying to put together.
And one of the lines in it that I just thought was astounding, he said, even the poorest among us that were slaves, we have a better education than the son of the president of the United States when we were slaves.
I mean, this is about 1910.
He wrote that.
Yeah.
You know, 50 years, 50 years later, he has a better education, better living conditions than the son of the president.
Yeah.
But it is funny how that world changes.
There's a guy I know, who's a very wealthy guy, finance guy, and he lives in a very fancy place.
And a guy knocks on his door apparently a couple of months ago.
Said, I want to buy your house.
And the guy says, my house isn't for sale.
Guy says, I'll give you $100 million.
This is a real story.
Real story.
Yeah.
That's something that only happens now at this point in history.
You know, people don't just go knocking on strangers' doors.
No, I think we might be living in the Great Gatsby times.
I think some of these big houses and things.
I think we're far more gilded than the Gilded Age was.
I think we, yeah, but I think it goes farther down the ladder.
How so?
You had maybe, what, six people that were in the Vanderbilt category at that time, and they would build these houses.
I mean, you look at the Vanderbilts mansion.
There's nothing like the Vanderbilts mansion.
You know what I mean?
You go down to, what is it, North Carolina?
I can't remember the name of the house down there, that huge, sprawling mansion.
There's nothing like that anywhere around it.
You know what I mean?
I once visited the Liberace house in Las Vegas.
Well, he was at one point the highest paid entertainer in the United States of America.
Was he really?
Yeah.
And just, I mean, we live differently now.
And his house is kind of gross.
I mean, partly it's because he's Liberace, you know.
Yeah, it's a dump.
Yeah, Fraceline is a dumpy.
It's a dump.
Kind of low ceilings and stuff.
Right.
You walk into that house and you're really underwhelmed.
At least I was.
And it wasn't that different from like the shag carpeting.
It was like the shag carpeting that I had growing up in my house when I was little.
When I was gold, what color was yours?
Green, olive green.
Ooh, olive green.
Not avocado green.
No, no, avocado green.
Yeah.
Okay.
Avocado green.
That's a good shag.
But yeah, that's good shag.
But Elvis had it in his.
I mean, it wasn't, there was that time period where it still was like that.
But the Gilded Age, they were, you couldn't relate to even a phone, you know what I mean?
Or, you know, you couldn't relate to the way they lived because it took a hundred people to make it work.
Now, I mean, I knew I felt like I really had, was really living a posh life when I could have an assistant that just did whatever I needed.
You know, when she came to me one day, because you weren't wrong about that, Glenn.
I know, I know.
But you know what?
Now, Alexa.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, now, now the average person can have an assistant.
You can have somebody running to go for, you know, go for groceries.
Okay.
Alexa, I need this, Send it to the house.
Done.
Yeah.
No, that stuff is amazing.
And yeah, you don't have a chauffeur.
You have Uber and you don't have, you know, full-time staff.
You've got these other things.
And I think that's good and helping really has radically improved how people live.
It's a funny thing.
We were in France right after we got married on our honeymoon, and my wife likes this particular French tea.
And so we went looking for it at stores and we couldn't find it anywhere in France where we were.
And so she ended up ordering it from Amazon from some company in Portugal that gets it to Texas while we're on the highway driving.
Alexa as Your Assistant00:06:56
Just think of that.
Think of that.
When we were going to Australia, my son and I went and he's 15.
And I'm like, Australia.
It's on the other side of the planet.
My wife said, as we were leaving, hey, make sure you call me when you get there.
She also said, text me when you're in the plane.
And I thought, this used to be like going to Australia.
I may not see you again.
You know what I mean?
Don't cry, kids.
Daddy will be home in two years.
One of those Civil War letters.
Dear Cordelia.
Yeah, right.
We have landed and stuff.
Right.
And now you're just like 15 hours and you're there.
A mere 15 hours.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
No, that's true.
Because when I first started college, no one had ever sent an email, really.
I mean, some people had, but it wasn't a normal thing.
And there wasn't web browsers and things like that, which really makes me feel like an old dinosaur saying that stuff.
Are you ready for this?
I was on the air late in my radio career saying that's dot com, not D-O-T, but period C-O-M.
Right, yeah.
So these things really have changed the way we live.
And I think that, yeah, that weird alienation of the upper, upper, upper, upper class has had an outsized cultural effect.
There aren't that many of those people, but the fact that they exist is sort of like if you suddenly discovered that there really were dinosaurs living on an island off the coast of Costa Rica, it'd just be a different conception of what the world is and what it's like.
And they just have, I think, very strange lives.
But we don't appreciate the material progress that everyone else has gotten because we're just used to it.
We're just like, well, of course life gets better at this dizzying pace every year, year after year.
But that's not really the case.
And it doesn't happen by accident.
I mean, it's now kind of set in stone to where we're not going to be able by 2030, you won't be able to keep up with the amazing news.
You just won't be able to keep up.
And we're already seeing it.
Every week, there's something you're like, I mean, there's something that's crazy.
You're like, we did what?
But there's other things that you're like, wait, China landed on the dark side of the moon?
What did that?
I didn't even know that.
I mean, there's crazy stuff that is happening that is remarkable.
And the closer we get to the singularity in 2030, you're going to hear cancer's gone, you know, cerebral palsy cured.
You can, you know.
We'll be telling our grandkids, there are poor children in China who only get to land on the dark side of the moon.
You know, it's going to be crazy.
You know, there's a story that people who came to adulthood before the automobile became very common, a lot of them learned to drive, but they never really learned to drive well.
They never really got used to it.
And it was always an effort for them.
They just weren't native to it.
And every now and then, now I walk around and see someone who's 19 typing with their thumbs at 600 miles an hour.
We're not members of the same species because my thumbs can't do that.
And so yeah, these things are going to get stranger and stranger, I think.
In shorter periods of time, we'll become more significant, I think.
So people who were born 10 years after me just really never knew a world without the internet.
That was just part of their world.
People born 20 years after me, certainly, they are digital natives in a way that will never be.
So it's interesting to think of what will happen to people who were born 20 years after them.
And some people will be a year or two.
They're going to be just radical changes in the world.
Well, we just need Elon Musk to give us all the uplink and then we can all understand it and understand it in any language that we want to because we're all part of the Borg.
I like him because he's embraced it.
He's like, yeah, I'm a bond villain.
I'm going with it.
Is he not like the billionaire that you'd like to be?
He's living the life of.
Yeah, he's living the life that I would want.
You know, if you had that kind of money, you'd be like, yeah.
And you know what?
We're going to Mars.
You know, he just does it and he embraces it and he doesn't care.
He's smart enough, too.
Yeah, and that's the reason to have those sorts of resources, right?
Because you can buy 600 Ferraris, sure.
But I mean, what's the point?
What's the return after the sixth or seventh?
I mean, I got 11 at home myself, but 12 would seem like a lot.
But no, I mean, the great thing about that kind of Silicon Valley ethos is that, yeah, there's a lot of money to be made and they like being rich.
These guys like being rich.
But it's also this, let's do something cool.
Let's do something no one's done before.
And I think that is just enormously valuable and admirable.
I think I don't like what Bill Gates does with all of his money, but he changed the world.
He made my life a lot better.
I think Steve Jobs was an absolute jerk.
He tried to get me fired at Fox.
Fine.
Did he, right?
Yeah.
But I love Apple products.
I love what they've done.
I wrote an obituary for him when he died, and people gave him grief for not giving away a lot of money to charity.
He changed the world.
Yeah, that's what I pointed out at the time.
If you want to look at his good works and what he gave to the world, it's right there.
He just happened to make money doing it, so losing money doing it.
Right.
I think capitalism, when it's done right, is the greatest charity of all.
Because if it's done right, you're sitting at home going, what is it that I could make that would make people's life, what do they need?
Hayek explained it in exactly that language.
The genius of the market is that what it really does is allow us to discover the most valuable ways to serve other people.
Yes.
And we often, when we talk about capitalism, we emphasize the competitive nature of it because that's Americans and we're like, you know, it's doggy dog and all that sort of stuff.
But what's really remarkable about it is the cooperative aspect of it, where we now have this thing where we've got just worldwide economic material cooperation among people who don't speak the same languages, whose countries don't like each other very much, who don't have the same economic incentives, but they do these remarkable things together.
And, you know, if you went back and tried to explain to some, you know, medieval British king who was getting ready to invest half of his kingdom's assets in ships to keep the lines of trade open, well, our problem in our country is that all the people from all the world bring us all their best stuff at their own expense and they lay it down at our feet and they don't charge us enough money for it.
And we're really upset by this.
We need to think of a way to make the stuff we buy from other people from all over the world more expensive because we're victimized by low prices and lots of selection.
Try explaining that to Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Henry II.
Cheap Imports Upset Us00:00:26
Yeah, which is not going to happen.
Or, worse yet, your grandchildren.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The name of the book is The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.
Kevin Williamson.
Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered Discovered by other