June 29, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, here we go, guys. | ||
| I got a Peterson, I got a Shapiro, I got a Weinstein, I got a Rubin. | ||
| I feel I should go to you first, because... Three Jews and a Canadian. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| I saw that movie, it was pretty good. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| All right, you're on Real Time tonight, and I thought it's an interesting little piece of all of this, because we're sort of all out of the mainstream, but we kind of dance in there every now and again. | ||
| You probably dance in there a little more than the rest of us. | ||
| You gonna smack around Mar tonight, or what? | ||
| You know, I think that it'll probably be pretty cordial. | ||
| I mean, I think that Mar is secretly one of us. | ||
| Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I think that Mar is tired of the... I mean, his show was called Politically Incorrect. | ||
| I mean, I think that he is tired of the identity politics. | ||
| I think he's tired of the intersectional nonsense. | ||
| I think that he wants to have some open conversations. | ||
| I just think that he's tied politically to the left. | ||
| So, I'll be interested to see how much of that he goes after. | ||
| How much Trump talk there is, which I find utterly uninteresting, is the truth. | ||
| And how much of it will be about kind of broader issues of freedom of speech and civility and having decent conversations. | ||
| Because I think that he's on the right side of those issues. | ||
| I mean, I've played him on my show, right? | ||
| And I disagree with him on everything politically. | ||
| But I played clips of him on my show, specifically on those issues, and him cracking the whip on people on the identity politics nonsense. | ||
| And I think we're on the same page there. | ||
| Well, if he wants to be an effective advocate for the left, He should lead the march in dissociating the moderate left from the radical, unreasonable left. | ||
| Someone's got to do it, because the strategy that they're abiding by right now is pretty damn self-destructive. | ||
| And he's in a good position to do that, and I think he's motivated to do it, because he is a free speech guy, being a comedian and everything. | ||
| It's risky. | ||
| I think you take your life in your hands if you're the leftist who says that right now. | ||
| If you're the person on the left who does this, I mean, you did it and survived. | ||
| I'm retired from the left now. | ||
| He's trying. | ||
| You found a bunch of new friends, right? | ||
| I mean, that's really what people have to understand is that when you take these positions, Yes, there are gonna be a lot of people who decide that you are Satan, but there's gonna be a whole lot of people who are your new friends, who are ready to have these conversations, which is why, you know, again, this sort of IDW term that Eric coined is so fascinating because everyone disagrees with everyone about nearly everything in this group. | ||
| But because we don't want to shut down the conversation, it's created this whole audience for every one of us. | ||
| Like each one of us, our audience has increased tremendously just by being part of conversations with one another. | ||
| So that's it to me. | ||
| What is it you guys think about us? | ||
| And this wider group. | ||
| Just the awesomeness and the amazingness and all that. | ||
| But like-minded people. | ||
| We just happen to be the examples that are sitting here. | ||
| For all the differences that we've talked about on gay marriage and abortion and death penalty and all of these things that I know we all have various disagreements on, why are we all okay with that and so many people outside of this seem to not be okay? | ||
| Well, I think it has to do with the fact that most of us are confident. | ||
| There's a sort of a principle of faith in rationality that I'm not that worried about a lot of the things that the far left is very concerned about. | ||
| Because I have an idea that more or less, if you do the reasoning correctly, everything is going to work out. | ||
| pretty much OK. | ||
| And I think that we have the dexterity in changing our minds, admitting that when we're | ||
| wrong, when we've changed our perspective, stealing each other's ideas and giving credit, | ||
| so that I have a sense that if I'm—you know, Ben and I have not gone toe-to-toe on abortion, | ||
| for example, and I have an idea of the outlines of his position. | ||
| He probably has some idea of mine. | ||
| But my guess is, is that he's not going to go bananas on spermicide, and I'm not | ||
| going to be advocating for the right to abort a child a day before its due date. | ||
| Except for extraordinary circumstances. | ||
| And even then I'm not sure. | ||
| But I think what it is is a certain kind of confidence that you can allow the other person in a discussion to actually have a genuine position and that you can contend with it. | ||
| And what we need to do is to push out more of the cognitive Lego that gives us that confidence To more people so that they can say, I don't need to fear the pro-choice and pro-life are both really limited positions, in my opinion. | ||
| And it's just an example of one of many things that we have gained the confidence with each other that it's not going to devolve into name-calling if everybody plays in an honest fashion and uses the full capacity. | ||
| That's where it is. | ||
| I mean, the honest fashion thing is, I think, what counts. | ||
| I asked Sam about this earlier. | ||
| So I was just doing a podcast with Sam, right? | ||
| We all hang out together. | ||
| It's pathetic. | ||
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unidentified
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Apparently lunch with his mother was more important than us. | |
| I asked Sam about this and what Sam said is that he thinks that what has changed is that there's a bunch of us who are not interested in the stupidest version of the argument. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If I want to hear a pro-choice argument, I want to hear the most sophisticated version of the pro-choice argument and then see if I make an argument against that. | ||
| I don't want the simplistic version of the pro-choice argument just so I can knock down the simplistic version of the pro-choice argument. | ||
| Yes, it makes for a great Ben Shapiro destroys video, but it's more fun for me. | ||
| Like personally, I really much more enjoy engaging with the best ideas that somebody else has to offer than engaging with the worst ideas that you can pick out of a hat on Twitter. | ||
| Well, so, I mean, one of the things that was useful for me, for example, in this protracted discussion with Sam, is that my arguments are better now than they were. | ||
| And you might say, well, why do you care if your arguments are better? | ||
| And the reason I care about whether my arguments are better is because I know that my arguments are part of the toolkit that I use to operate effectively in the world. | ||
| Arguments aren't just some abstraction that you hold that's disconnected from your actions in the world. | ||
| And if my arguments are more fine-tuned and sharper, and if I'm able to account for a wider range of phenomena because someone has put forward facts that were hard for me to incorporate, then my toolbox is much more efficient and I can operate more effectively in the world. | ||
| So I find that Well, it's a variant of your position. | ||
| It's like, I want to hear the best versions of the arguments that run counter to mine, because I'd like to figure out where I'm wrong, and I'd like to make what I'm doing better. | ||
| And that's more important to me. | ||
| It is literally more important to me than making sure that what I already know is right. | ||
| Like, I'm confident in what I know, but I also know that I could do a better job of expressing it, that it could be The system could be more dynamic, it could take more things into account. | ||
| Like, I've got plenty to learn. | ||
| And a real discussion with someone who objects to you, that's where you learn. | ||
| So, more power to that. | ||
| I think that temperamentally, I would say that, I think there's a pretty easy test, which is, when someone catches you out on a part of the argument that you've made, that you know was flawed, and someone catches you out, do you smile or do you get angry? | ||
| I think it really is almost that easy, because the truth is that there is something fun about the idea of having to rethink your position, and something adventurous about the idea that you haven't thought everything through, that there are these new vistas of thought that maybe you haven't considered before, and it does hone you, it makes you better at it, and it also allows you to... Listen, life is funny, and it's funny that we're flawed human beings and that our logic is flawed, so there's a certain humor to the idea that somebody is exposing A rift in your thinking that you now have to deal with. | ||
| It makes life fun. | ||
| If you were just a stone all the time, it would be really boring. | ||
| We kind of got there, because when we did the abortion discussion, my position basically, I think, is similar to yours, which is that at 20 weeks where they've shown that the fetus can feel pain, that to me is the cutoff. | ||
| I describe myself as begrudgingly pro-choice, but you said to me, well, if you're acknowledging that it's a life at 20, well then it's obviously a life at 18. | ||
| To be completely cogent in my argument, I have to concede that point to you. | ||
| It didn't move me to tell you that I'm going to now agree with you on what the policy should be. | ||
| But we can do that, and we didn't punch each other after, and it's all right. | ||
| And then what if somebody comes in and says, well, you know, life or not life is a Boolean, and the problem in computer science is one of casting, which is, if you make it a float, and you're talking about the degree of life, or the meaning of the life, or the quality of the life, does that change things? | ||
| And so, you know, this idea about, may I break your frame? | ||
| Well, I'd prefer if we stayed in it for a little while, but then let's explore that in a second. | ||
| And so there's sort of a generosity of spirit argument, and I think that Quite frankly, one of the strangest things about this group of people is that I find it spectacularly non-egoic in terms of when we have a dinner. | ||
| I don't have a sense that anybody needs to lead. | ||
| I mean, it's as close as I've seen, like, a roundtable, where the sheer pleasure of talking to people in a time—this is a McCarthy-like time. | ||
| And we have—I feel so happy to be at a table in which I can talk about things that are troubling me or bring out something I worry that says something negative about myself, that I'm having these thoughts. | ||
| that nobody wants to be booted out of the group by virtue of grandstanding. | ||
| And I think that that kind of... | ||
| It's really interesting watching people who would be thought of as being highly egoic | ||
| behaving in a non-egoic fashion. | ||
| I think that part of that too is one of the things Dave and I have talked about | ||
| and the technology is enabling this, is that... | ||
| Because I've looked at this group and thought, well, why in the world did it ever get categorized as a group? | ||
| Because it's a strange group. | ||
| And there's some reasons. | ||
| Pretty much everybody who's in it is entrepreneurial in the fundamental sense, in that everybody's created their own little domain. | ||
| And it's kind of hard to knock them over, because they're in their domain. | ||
| So we're not reliant, in some important sense, on external funding, let's say, to enable us to continue. | ||
| So that gives us a certain amount of freedom. | ||
| But another part of it is that, as far as I can tell, everybody who's participated believes that their audience is intelligent. | ||
| And I think that that's also a reflection of that. | ||
| It's not lack of intellectual self-confidence. | ||
| It is lack of commitment to your set of ideas, like, as if they're axiomatically true, but that spills over to the attitude towards the audience. | ||
| Like, I don't feel that I'm there to tell my audience a bunch of things that they need to know that I already know. | ||
| When I'm conducting my tour, it's like, well, here's a bunch of ideas that I'm confused about still, and I'm going to use this as an opportunity to explore them, and I'm going to explore them with you, and you guys are going to come along for the ride, and that's going to be good for everyone. | ||
| I really saw that with Harris in Vancouver, because we had a Well, as high level of an intellectual discussion as we could manage. | ||
| And I would say it was approximately at the same level as a good PhD defense when the defense is going well. | ||
| And the audience was with us the whole way. | ||
| And they're participating in this discourse process. | ||
| Far more important to participate in the process of discourse than to specify the outcome. | ||
| And the audience had made that decision and abided by it while we were doing the discussion. | ||
| I think that's the difference between... I think that's why Like Joe Rogan, for example, is so popular. | ||
| When I listen to Joe, I know he's going on an intellectual journey that's going to take three hours. | ||
| I don't know where the destination is going to be, but I know that the journey is going to be a lot of fun. | ||
| And I think that that's what makes for success in this field. | ||
| And so much of our politics, so much of our intellectual life has become what you're talking about, standing on a stage and people yelling at you what you ought to think. | ||
| If you're a good person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's what it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's no fun. | ||
| I mean, it's a lot more fun. | ||
| So Joe does the same thing that great authors do. | ||
| It's like a distinction between Dostoevsky and Ayn Rand. | ||
| It's like, you know where Rand is going to end, right from the beginning. | ||
| Whereas if you read a Dostoevsky novel, you have no damn idea where that's going to come out, and neither did he. | ||
| So he was exploring the ideas and formulating them as he went along, and that's true art, and that is what Rogan does, is that you know, and he's very good at that, because he's a smart guy who isn't afraid of the fact that there's a whole bunch of things he doesn't know. | ||
| And so he can lead people on that journey, and the journey is more important than, to use a terrible cliché, the journey is more important than the destination. | ||
| I think eagerness is a tiny time we have to get on to other points, but the one thing I would add, which is a dangerous idea, is that I think there is a concept of good diversity and bad diversity, which is not understood in the general population. | ||
| Good diversity is when you have a collection of people with different ideas and they're somehow complimenting each other and checking each other and people are backing down and seeing things that they wouldn't have seen because you're walking around the elephant from all the different sides and seeing all the different components. | ||
| Bad diversity is something like two people grow up in different countries, one drives on the left side of the road, one drives on the right side of the road, And the idea is that you decide that everybody should be | ||
| able to drive on the same side of the road that they grew up on. | ||
| And so instead of everybody getting to a really interesting panel, you get a lot of auto accidents | ||
| and nothing really interesting happens. | ||
| And so I think it's very important to be honest that there is a lack of diversity about what | ||
| constitutes conversation. | ||
| And I think that that's a very troubling thing because there's no precedent for discussing | ||
| bad diversity at the moment. | ||
| I would much rather listen to two theologians talking and building up some high structure and two atheist astrophysicists talking about the same thing than having two conversations of an atheist and an astrophysicist where each of them keeps tearing down each other's starting assumptions and you come back eight hours later and nothing has been achieved. | ||
| But does that kind of explain your success in a way? | ||
| Because probably four years ago when conservatives were basically only talking to conservatives, the way the left seems to only be talking to itself these days, you started doing a little of this. | ||
| And I would venture to guess that you probably, in a way, feel more comfortable with this crew who you disagree with on a gajillion things than probably when you're hanging out with just a bunch of conservatives that you're like, yeah, we all agree on this stuff. | ||
| Well, I think I'm certainly more interested. | ||
| I mean, I think that the idea that The fun conversations are the ones where you're surprised. | ||
| And I think we have yet to have a group conversation, or even a conversation one-on-one, because we all talk, you know, one-on-one to each other, too, where something surprising doesn't get said. | ||
| And that makes everything a lot more interesting and fun. | ||
| And right now, I gotta say, everything is so boring. | ||
| Like, for all the chaos, everything is so boring, because it just, it breaks down into Trump's- Boring and chaotic. | ||
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unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| I mean, it really is just, Everybody feels like everything is spun out of control, but everybody's hunkered down in their own bunker. | ||
| And so everything comes down to Trump is always right or Trump is always wrong, and we're all supposed to revolve around this black hole that is Trump, or this sun that is Trump, and he's the center of gravity. | ||
| I don't think most people live their lives thinking about these problems. | ||
| Well, the whole Trump attack and Trump defense thing is really dull. | ||
| I mean, when I went on Mar's show, there was the YouTube part afterwards, and the panelists, with the exception of me, were tearing Trump apart. | ||
| And I was sort of watching that from the outside in some sense, partly because I'm a Canadian, and I thought, well, first of all, it's just not that interesting that you can list Trump's faults. | ||
| It's like you and my crazy neighbor. | ||
| You're not bringing anything to the table doing that. | ||
| It's too easy. | ||
| And then, of course, the other problem is, well, by going after Trump, you're going after his supporters, hypothetically speaking. | ||
| And, of course, that's 50% of your population, which turns out to be a very big strategic problem for you, you know, now and in the future. | ||
| So it is dull. | ||
| And I don't think people are... People would rather have a more interesting conversation. That's what we can offer to | ||
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unidentified
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you know. | |
| So that's what I want where I wanted to take this. How do we I mean we hit on | ||
| this a little bit in the first two hours but how do we do that now? How do we lay | ||
| out I think we're already laying out a more interesting conversation but how do | ||
| we also lay out something that doesn't make everyone feel horrible because that | ||
| is a lot of what's going on here. | ||
| All these people that are showing up to your events, they're going, wow, what a reprieve from the madness, the antidote to chaos. | ||
| Well, I mean, I haven't been able to do that politically, I wouldn't say. | ||
| I mean, what I've been suggesting to people is that as intolerable as they find their lives for reasons that are arbitrary and self-inflicted, there are things that they could do at the individual level that will make a radical improvement. | ||
| They're difficult things. | ||
| They're things that require the adoption of responsibility and vision and the willingness to speak your partial and imperfect truth. | ||
| But if you put that into practice, there is an up. | ||
| Now, one of the things that needs to be done in the political sphere is to delineate what that up might look like politically. | ||
| You know, to give people something that's positive to strive for it. | ||
| Well, I mentioned earlier that I see that to some degree in the burgeoning literature that's suggesting that many things around the world are improving very rapidly. | ||
| You know, and your counter position was, well, that doesn't mean our situation isn't fragile, which I also agree with. | ||
| But there is reason, I think there is genuine reason to be optimistic about the future at a sociological and political level. | ||
| And I think that that's something that we could be having a more serious discussion | ||
| about. | ||
| I also think that, you know, the reason that you've been so successful is because while you are speaking in kind of terms about society, everyone reads it as self-help. | ||
| Everybody reads it as self-help. | ||
| And I think that pretty much all of us, what we are saying is being read as self-help, and I think that that's empowering. | ||
| Because basically what we're saying to people is, For the most part, it's a free country. | ||
| Like, shut up and get on with your lives. | ||
| There's a bumper sticker that was going around, you know, like the Shapiro 2020 or Shapiro 2024 bumper stickers with something I said on the show, which was, solve your own problems. | ||
| Because we're all looking for other people to solve our problems. | ||
| Better than that. | ||
| It isn't solve your own problems. | ||
| It's three things. | ||
| Solve your own problems. | ||
| You can solve your own problems, and you'll find the deepest meaning in your life if you decide that you're going to solve your own problems. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, that's a nice combination. | ||
| And I think that message is true for the vast majority. | ||
| Even when you're talking about societal problems, the very emphasis on reason is a suggestion that you can solve a lot of the problems in your life if you change how you're thinking. | ||
| I think we are engaged in a collective form of cognitive behavioral therapy. | ||
| I think that everybody is depressed, and we don't know why we're depressed, and we're upset, and we don't really know why we're upset. | ||
| I was saying to my wife the other day, a couple of things. | ||
| So I was saying to my wife the other day, if you were in 1930, and someone just dropped you in 2018, you would think, my God, this is heaven. | ||
| My kids aren't dying in youth. | ||
| My wife isn't going to die in childbirth. | ||
| I'm not going to really have to experience dire poverty. | ||
| I can get anything I want from the comfort of my own home. | ||
| I don't have to go anywhere. | ||
| Everybody has several cars. | ||
| I have entertainment that never ends. | ||
| All of this stuff is just fantastic. | ||
| And then, yesterday I was having lunch with a prominent Hollywood figure whose name I won't mention, so he doesn't lose work, and we were doing it at a restaurant in Brentwood. | ||
| And we were talking about Trump and politics, and I was looking around this room, and everybody's drinking $200 bottles of Chardonnay, and they're bubbly water, and they've got their kale salad and the whole thing. | ||
| And it occurred to me that 98% of the people in this room think we are living in danger of incipient fascism. | ||
| If you'd pull the room and say, are we living in crisis mode? | ||
| 98% of people in that room go, yes, we're living in crisis while they sip their Chardonnay. | ||
| And I thought, well, then either you're not active enough or you're just lying to yourselves because you don't actually think that we're in crisis. | ||
| Now, that's not to say that we aren't at crisis point because there's so many people willing to break the system. | ||
| But I think that one of the things that's coming true right now is that so many people think that the system is irrevocably broken, that they are willing to break the system that is not irrevocably broken. | ||
| Well, that was what Mars said, essentially. | ||
| Bring on the recession, because that'll rid us of Trump. | ||
| It's like, well, you want the disease so that you can have the cure. | ||
| It's like, it's just not helpful. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, boy, I should sit this one out. | |
| No, no, go for it. | ||
| This is the fun part. | ||
| So I sort of radically disagree. | ||
| I think that a lot of the people who are at the very top understand why these games are fragile. | ||
| And so the games are still serviceable, but if you actually understand how the games are played, you understand just how quickly this thing could turn. | ||
| So I think, first of all, it is precisely the people with enough success But that shouldn't mean they would be willing to turn it. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| That's where I don't get the distinction. | ||
| The number of people with nine and ten figures worth of wealth who talk to me about the rich and the powerful as if they are some different group is very high. | ||
| Rich is richer than me. | ||
| That's what I figured out. | ||
| There's a difference between people who have their senators on speed dial and people who don't. | ||
| The rich is not a monolith, and that's one of the huge problems in this story. | ||
| If you're engaged in some kind of business like armament or extraction where you need to have a very close relationship with government, you see the world very differently than if you're very good at picking investment opportunities and you just want to be unfettered in your ability to go make more. | ||
| I think that one of the things that really resonates about your message, and I feel a little bit less close to Ben on, is that somehow the message that you should improve your own life got Conflated with, if your own life isn't awesome, it's because you failed to make it so. | ||
| And I think that was sort of more true in a period of uniform high growth as between 1945 and 1970, when, you know, if you had beta to the system, if you just had exposure, hard work usually paid off. | ||
| I think that depending upon what sector you're in, what your skill set is, where you are in your life, it's very hard for some people to turn things around. | ||
| And the idea of, look, you may not be able to solve the problems you confront, but you can solve the portion of the problems that you can solve yourself, and that you should at least do that That is a very different message, because it says, even if I'm not living in luxury at the end of it, it's not because I failed. | ||
| And I think that decoupling... That's a fair distinction, and I would probably, you know, given that criticism, I'd probably agree to the curbing of my own kind of solution, right? | ||
| Like, I think that's right. | ||
| Clearly there are people... We are all created equal in our rights, but we're not all created equal in our abilities, or in our capacity to rise or fall in a society. | ||
| Or in our sectors, or in terms of our... | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| And I would do the other half of that thing, which is I would climb down from asking, you know, if more people were willing to admit that, I would say, okay, it's very important that people at least make a co-payment of trying to solve the problems in their own life before demanding that the outside world... And that's the part that I focus on more simply because I think that The government is so big. | ||
| I mean, this is where politics and philosophy meet, right? | ||
| So I think the government is so big and so intrusive and so involved in so many areas of our life that the tendency right now in America is to blame other people for the problems that you have. | ||
| And that's true on virtually every side of the aisle. | ||
| I think that when, you and I have disagreements about trade theory, but I think when President Trump goes to a Rust Belt town in Ohio and he says, I'm gonna bring back all your jobs because the Mexicans and the Chinese screwed you. | ||
| I think that that's a lie. | ||
| I don't think he's bringing back those jobs. | ||
| Well, you and I aren't disagreeing about that. | ||
| Yeah, and so I think that my solution to that is there's not necessarily a solution. | ||
| I think one of the lies is that there's always a solution to every problem that can be had if you just have enough communal power behind it. | ||
| And I don't think that's right. | ||
| I think that the solution for most problems in life, not all, because I don't think all problems in life ever get solved, but at least the majority of the major mistakes people make in their life that create obstacles that they can never overcome the rest of their life are self-inflicted. | ||
| I think that the unbarring serious health problems or mental disability, I think that the number of problems that make it impossible for you to overcome sheer dire poverty in the United States, virtually all of those problems are problems that people put in front of themselves. | ||
| And so if you can make those basic decisions, then you can turn your life around in a pretty significant way. | ||
| Or even if they're not problems that people create for themselves, they're problems that They're subject to that are also very intractable to communal level solutions. | ||
| Like mental illness is a good example of that and its contribution to homelessness. | ||
| It's like, well, it's terrible to be mentally ill and to end up on the streets. | ||
| It definitely is terrible. | ||
| But it isn't like we actually know how to solve that. | ||
| So even if that can't be put at the feet of the individuals who are suffering, it's like, okay, well, we'd like to sort that out communally. | ||
| It's hard to sort that out without making it worse. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| Do you guys think we can only make it a little better or a little worse? | ||
| Like, of course, all hell could break loose on one side of it, but that within the margins, like, it's pretty good and we can maybe make it a little better, but that the capacity for humans to make a system much better than this, that will allow the most people to flourish. | ||
| We can make it not much worse. | ||
| Like, that's what I'm hoping. | ||
| We can aim for incremental improvement, which compounds, by the way, so that's very powerful, incremental improvement, but we could aim for incremental improvement while deciding that we're going to stave off chaotic and unnecessary descents into the abyss, which is what I see the danger in this polarization process is generating. | ||
| It's like a catastrophe that we actually don't need. | ||
| What do you make of the amount of people that seem to want that right now? | ||
| I mean, I always say every week on this show, it's like, Twitter is not real life. | ||
| But the amount of people that I'm seeing constantly talking about tear it down and now the new attack on civility, where even if you say be civil, be respectful, that that is now thought of as a tool of the patriarchy or a tool of the oppressed or all of that stuff. | ||
| What do you make of that assault? | ||
| I mean, I think, first of all, the fundamental hatred of the system by a lot of people is I'm not going to justify it given the fact that the system that we have is the best that has ever, you know, happened to any human beings in the history of the world. | ||
| I mean, this is a pretty great place to live. | ||
| Compared to all other places. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm not saying compared to utopia, compared to heaven. | ||
| I'm not saying it can't get any better. | ||
| I think that one of the great dangers always is utopianism, and I think you're seeing it from both sides. | ||
| I mean, right now, when you saw Alessandro Ocasio-Sanchez win in New York, Yeah. | ||
| And she's promising universal health care, universal college tuition, universal housing. | ||
| All of this stuff is going to magically happen. | ||
| And she's asked on MSNBC, are you going to pay for any of this? | ||
| And she just basically says, well, just how FDR did. | ||
| FDR didn't. | ||
| OK, that was one of the big problems. | ||
| And also, there was a giant world war happening at the time. | ||
|
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So it's the itch to come to a solution. | |
| And something has to grow to provide that. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| You really want to make a state that has enough power to grant all those wishes. | ||
| It's like, careful what kind of genie you generate, because it's going to have a demand on you. | ||
| I don't think the free markets are inherently utopia, and I don't think that a vast government is inherently utopia, but I think free markets at least have a certain respect for human labor, dignity, and individuality, and collectivist utopias certainly do not. | ||
| quality. It's not like there's a central administration making the decisions. | ||
| So even if the decisions are bad, which sometimes they are, they tend to be self-correcting and mostly they operate | ||
| locally. | ||
| So there's something to be said for that. | ||
| So what do you say to all the people that are gonna listen to this? | ||
| That I think you're a little more sympathetic to the rest of us that are going, but we need help or | ||
| this sounds cold or too individual. | ||
| What I have to say is going to be colder than this. | ||
| You guys are like warming my heart with your stories about individuals pulling themselves up with their bootstraps. | ||
| I mean, there was a phase change in the economy around 1970 that I cannot get people to focus on. | ||
| And if you look at GDP, which is a very flawed measure, and median male income, which Tyler Cohen, I think, was the one who pointed out that this is the best version of the argument. | ||
| One of these things, they're both going up together until like 1970, and then one of them flatlines and the other keeps going. | ||
| And the idea that this is not a structural change that is in every school textbook, and that we don't understand that we've built up two plus generations of experts lying about What do you think happened? | ||
| Because I've read criticisms of the decoupling theory. | ||
| Nobody likes my version of it, but I'll give it to you. | ||
| I'd like to know, because I don't understand it. | ||
| Everyone who cares about this stuff should read a guy named Derek DeSola Price, who was active in the late 50s and started talking about there will be a singularity in science. | ||
| Price's Law? | ||
| Yeah, number of PhDs, number of journals, amount of funding. | ||
| Everything was going up exponentially, and things that go up exponentially cannot. | ||
| Continue. | ||
| And so he predicted this is going to end because there will be too many PhDs per child. | ||
| And sure enough, that system sort of came apart. | ||
| So if you look at the period from between 1945 to 1970, you have this growth regime. | ||
| And everything that got built during that time has what I call an ego, an embedded growth obligation. | ||
| If it doesn't grow at this rate, it's going to turn pathological. | ||
| And so we built a ton of infrastructure around this beautiful period of high, broadly distributed, fairly even and stable, technologically-led | ||
| growth. | ||
| And that ended. | ||
| And then began this crazy period of excuse-making, where we found every gimmick known to man. | ||
| And if you want to read an article about this, I think I wrote one called, Anthropic Capitalism | ||
| and the New Gimmick Economy. | ||
| And so part of the problem is, is that the concept of jobs as how we feed ourselves, | ||
| rather than creative enterprises or something else, jobs are probably tied to a period of | ||
| time that Isn't going to go on forever, and it's probably weakening as a means of feeding us. | ||
| So the market was unbelievably brilliant, and then there was a structural change, and now the question is, how do we account for these egos that make embedded growth obligations, that make liars of all of the experts who service the institutions? | ||
| So the big problem that we're having, the reason we can't wake up from this madness, is that you've had since about 1970 people having to lie to keep the institutions afloat. | ||
| What's a lie? | ||
| Well, take a law firm. | ||
| The idea is you have some number of partners. | ||
| The partners have associates. | ||
| All the associates want to become partners. | ||
| So you have to tell them a story about if you work hard, you will become partners. | ||
| But when you hit steady state, like the professors, the professor wants to have 20 students. | ||
| The 20 students want to become professors to have 20 students. | ||
| None of this stuff works anymore. | ||
| So it's a hidden, what do you call that game? | ||
| It's a hidden pyramid scheme, Ponzi scheme. | ||
| But the income ability levels since 1980 have been relatively stable in the United States. | ||
| Well, we've been a very rich family trying to figure out ways to live out our days in the style to which we've become accustomed. | ||
| And we found every kind of gimmick known to man, whether it's offshoring, or mergers and acquisitions, or self-regulation of markets. | ||
| All of these things that we learned how to do... Is the big problem just the transfer over to the service economy, as opposed to the intellectual economy, as opposed to manufacturing? | ||
| Well, the thing is, is that a lot of this was led by something like, you know, science, in the form of, let's say, just semiconductors coming out of physics. | ||
| You know, how much of our current growth has been scientifically led? | ||
| And now, you know, with Moore's Law, the reason everybody talks about it is it's one of these growth laws that can't go on forever. | ||
| In other words, it's been doing pretty well. | ||
| I mean, part of it, I know, things that are impossible can't continue forever. | ||
| That's the rule. | ||
| And the doubling seems to be one of those things. | ||
| And the idea is that we've been pretty good staving off disaster for a very long time. | ||
| It seems to me, though, that there is, and this is perhaps part of the contradiction that people are wrestling with, is like, and you're pointing to structural deception, let's say, something like that, and the delusions that go along with it, but it also does seem to me, and this is where the measurement issues become so complicated, is that Even though wages among men have been flat since the 1970s, I think you could make a pretty cogent case that we are actually, in many ways, much richer than we were. | ||
| First of all, the world's much richer. | ||
| There's much less poverty worldwide, and in an absolute sense as well. | ||
| And so, even if the average American isn't richer, let's say, although we could dispute that, the world that surrounds him is much richer, and that actually constitutes a form of accrued wealth. | ||
| Because you're actually safer when a quarter of the Chinese aren't starving, and a quarter of the Indians aren't starving. | ||
| Okay, but then I would also say, although there's been local stagnation in the West, arguably, there's been massive global improvements. | ||
| But then the other question is, is the idea of local stagnation actually accurate? | ||
| Because there are lots of ways that we are clearly way richer than we were. | ||
| Now, we're certainly richer in terms of our access to high quality information at a very, | ||
| very low cost. | ||
| And so the technological revolution seems to be real. | ||
| And we can purchase a lot more of this high quality technology for less money than we | ||
| could. | ||
| So I'm not entirely convinced of the wage stagnation argument. | ||
| There's a tremendous amount to be done about the metrics, about how we measure these things. | ||
| There's also a total flaw that is suffused throughout economics. | ||
| I just came back from four days in Venice and the first day in Venice I thought this place is unreal. | ||
| It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my entire life. | ||
| Every 52 years didn't prepare me. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Four days later, I was like, wow, there's so many tourists, and okay, you can go over this bridge. | ||
| It took almost no time to remove that level of magic because I got used to it that quickly, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's a problem. | ||
|
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We get used to things that are going well extraordinarily quickly. | |
| Hedonic numbing is a real issue. | ||
| The other thing is that what were the Gini coefficients measuring the inequality during the period that was going up? | ||
| You know, we're now in a period of such inequality that humans are very focused on things like status. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes, yes. | ||
| And so it's not clear to me that people wouldn't be actually happier in a totally different regime. | ||
| I mean, we have enough plastic stuff from China. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| Now, in all of that, my claim. | ||
| Okay, so that's an interesting issue because one of the things we could say, perhaps, | ||
| is that between 1945 and 1972, what was provided for people wasn't so much | ||
| a standard of living that's higher than we have now, but a trajectory of development | ||
| that appeared more stable and believable. | ||
| And low variance. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then the question is, well, what actually do you want? | ||
| Do you want a high standard of living? | ||
| Or do you want to believe that if you put in incremental effort, your life can improve? | ||
|
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And it could easily be that people will rather have that than... What if I have the ability to make a 30-year plan? | |
| We want the ability. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If what I value is the ability to make a 30-year plan... | ||
| And I want to have some idea of how I'm going to get to my retirement and put kids through school and do all of this. | ||
| And then it's this plan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the idea is... The predictability is gone, no question. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That's why I said jobs are not going to be the means of redistribution of the wealth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I do wonder if, you know, on the individual level, I think that's... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| There's an enormous amount of chaos and volatility in the system. | ||
| But I think that the only thing that you can say to that is the same thing that's been true for most of human history. | ||
| The time when people could actually stably predict that in 30 years I will be significantly better off than I am now and I can make a retirement plan, that's about 50 years of human history. | ||
| Before that, it was basically you have two kids, one of them dies, and then your wife dials in childbirth with the second. | ||
| You don't have two? | ||
| You have eight, right? | ||
| And you have eight and six of them die. | ||
| Three are miscarriages and fine. | ||
| And so this dream that we had from 1940 to 1970, even if I accept the premises, I'm not sure that that's a realistic dream about what human beings... That was my point. | ||
| That was the anthropic capitalism. | ||
| You just described it. | ||
|
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Okay, good. | |
| So now I don't have to read your article. | ||
| There's a little bit more in there. | ||
| No, I'm sure there is. | ||
| I'm just joking. | ||
| But the only point I'm going to make, the only point I'm making is that I think that what really has been lost, and this is the part that I'm really focusing on a lot lately, is we can't control the situation around us, but we can control our reactions to the situation. | ||
| And what I mean by that is these massive systemic changes that we're talking about, we, number one, don't agree on what those systemic changes should be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or even what they are. | ||
| Right, what they are or what they would do, right? | ||
| Nobody knows what the hell they would do. | ||
| And with all of that said, the one thing that you can control is the amount of virtue that you yourself pour into your life. | ||
| And it seems to me, in a non-virtuous position, that because somebody else is earning more than you, you are therefore worse off. | ||
| And so, what we really have lost, I think, and this may be an outgrowth, I mean, there's an argument to be made, I know Jonah Goldberg makes this argument, for example, that sort of late-stage capitalism or advanced capitalism tends to tends to lead to this rat race where we are looking at what | ||
| the guy next door to us has. | ||
| But the lack of just basic virtue in the position that I am worse off because my neighbor is better | ||
| off even though I have more stuff than I did five years ago, the lack of inculcation of any sense | ||
| of what I would call basic morality is having a significant impact. | ||
| One of the things that's happening clearly in the tour that I'm doing and the people that I'm talking to is I'm actually making a variant of that case. | ||
| I said that and it's probably in keeping with your vision as well. | ||
| So let's imagine that A rising tide does lift all boats and that's actually happening, but we're purchasing that at the price of a certain degree of predictability and stability into the future. | ||
| That seems quite clear. | ||
| And that's exaggerated by this incredibly rapid rate of technological change. | ||
| It's like, okay, so how do we tolerate all that uncertainty? | ||
| Given that we're also deriving substantial benefit from it, we don't want to mess it up. | ||
| And what I've been suggesting to my audiences is get your act together as much as you possibly can, because the way that you deal with uncertainty is by being prepared for anything and everything that's going to come your way. | ||
| And so you want to put yourself together so that when the difficult decisions come along, even though we can't predict what they are, you're going to be in the best possible solution. | ||
| There's a new message here. | ||
| The new message is that whatever I want to tell somebody. | ||
| Very often I hear parents like, we have two children and one of them is living at home. | ||
| And I say, OK, let me explain in part why your child may be living at home when you're disappointed that that's happening. | ||
| And so I go through the economics argument. | ||
| The person feels better. | ||
| Oh, wow! | ||
| Or I explain, here's why you're not able to catch up to your parents. | ||
| It's not all about your personal failure. | ||
| And so the idea is that that personal responsibility is something that we need and we also can't have. | ||
| It's too dangerous. | ||
| You have to do this tailored message. | ||
| And I think you've been intuiting this. | ||
| Here's the portion of your life that you're responsible for. | ||
| We're going to delineate it. | ||
| And if your room isn't cleaned up, it's not because of the government, right? | ||
| That was your point. | ||
| Saying, and this is, you know, again, you and I are going to have to do this at some point, this is a great country and, well, if you put your mind to making money, Then it may be the case that stick-to-itiveness and passing the marshmallow test and being inventive and creative works. | ||
| But there are a lot of people who are given a very different message. | ||
| And they grow up being told, you know, be a good person and work hard. | ||
| And a lot of this stuff doesn't work the way it used to. | ||
| It just doesn't. | ||
| And lying about it offends me. | ||
| So I want to say, look, if Making money is very important, and we need to be able to talk about the role of money. | ||
| Money is fungible. | ||
| Everything else is not. | ||
| So if you make money, then you have lots and lots of options. | ||
| And we need to give people the idea that that's a good thing to pursue if they have any hope and dream. | ||
| But it's also the case that, fundamentally, what your message is, is you have to make the co-pay. | ||
| And the co-pay is the part of your life that you absolutely control. | ||
| And if that's out of control, don't expect anyone else to take any sympathy. | ||
| Well, then you can also make, if that part of your life is in order, you can also make a more credible argument for the existence of unreasonable systemic impediments, because you can say to yourself, look, I put everything into this, and then you can make a credible case. | ||
| This is why this is the attractive version of the personal responsibility thing. | ||
| So we have another problem here with our discussion about dispossession, because one of the things that's bothered me about the left and the right is the right tends to think Well, if you just got your act together and worked hard, you can make it. | ||
| And the left tends to think, well, everybody's the same, and if you remove systemic impediments, then everybody could do whatever they needed to do. | ||
| Well, the left is wrong, because there's a real diversity of ability. | ||
| But the right is wrong, because there's a real diversity of ability. | ||
| And so, for example, there is a distribution of IQ, which is real. | ||
| And if you're... the psychometric data basically indicate that if you have an IQ of less than 90, which is about 15-20% of the population, you actually can't read well enough to follow instructions. | ||
| And you might say, well, that can be rectified, say, through educational means and so forth, and the evidence for that is pretty damn thin. | ||
| And so the problem with a society that's meritocratic, Fundamentally, even if it's meritocratic based on character, is that there's still going to be individual differences that seem to be innate that are going to produce radically unequal outcomes, many of which are painful. | ||
| The thing that you will have a hard time convincing me of, having gone through the PhD system in the sciences, is that some of the world's most brilliant people hold PhDs in the sciences. | ||
| And I came up at a time when, in the early 90s, these people were told that the world was their oyster and that we were desperately in need of scientists. | ||
| And I remember a friend of mine being told that he had a $14,000 a year job offer post-PhD from MIT with a pregnant wife. | ||
| And the person who offered it was like, this is great, we can get people for pennies. | ||
| And why was that? It was because of something that came out of the National Academy of Sciences and the National | ||
| Science Foundation to slam American workers in the sector. | ||
| This is very, very important. It had predicted that people would be paid six figures for PhDs, which was, you know, | ||
| low. | ||
| Larger than they had been paid for a long time. | ||
| And it was the meddling with the market. | ||
| The thing that I don't like about the personal responsibility issue is that individuals should not be solving the problems of, let's say, tech groups getting together and saying, we will not poach each other's employees. | ||
| The market has to work for people, not just institutions. | ||
| And if you're in a sector in which you can make the market work for you, You have this feeling of anybody can do this and in fact what you need to do is you need to migrate to these sectors because there are other sectors where you have let's say government intervention which says we are going to interfere with the free working of the market or we are not going to take into account that some people produce public goods. | ||
| And so it's very important to me to understand that some people are coming out of very different circumstances in which it's very unlikely that they will be able to make their world grow and blossom. | ||
| And that other people of extraordinary ability and high IQ and work ethic find themselves not fighting forces that they don't even understand. | ||
| Well, this is the sort of criticism that's often levied at me because people say, well, you don't take the systemic problems sufficiently into account. | ||
| And so that's a nice outline of the systemic problems. | ||
| You know, when the banks decided that they should be self-regulating with respect, you know, to their gearing ratios or the risk, There was one guy who wrote in to this SEC hearing to allow these investment banks to, you know, do the last little bit before 2008 blew up everything. | ||
| This guy, Len Boley, who was a computer consultant to banks. | ||
| It's like one guy in the entire country saw a disaster. | ||
| coming and got involved in this internal game that was a By banks for banks and so what's very important to me is to | ||
| understand when you have bad behavior by institutions It is pathological to put that responsibility on individual | ||
| shoulders Well, the only quote I would make to that, and I think that's a fair comment, is that what I'm hoping and what I'm trying to convince people of is that their ethical responsibility, which is partly to further their own development to the degree that they can, does extend to the community, is that you want to make ethical citizens so that they don't make mistakes that corrupt the | ||
| The systems affect more people. | ||
| of the system at a systemic level. | ||
| The best way to do that, in my estimation, over the long run, is to concentrate on the | ||
| ethical behavior of the sovereign citizen. | ||
|
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Now that doesn't address the systemic problems that are already in place. | |
| Systems affect more people. | ||
| That means that when people make vague accusations about systems that are dysfunctional, then | ||
| it's not helpful. | ||
| What I see is not, you're making very specific criticisms of very specific institutions in | ||
| very specific ways. | ||
| And that's useful, because then we can actually have a discussion about where those systems go wrong. | ||
| You're not criticizing the patriarchy! | ||
| No, I'm trying to crowd that out. | ||
| And part of the point is that almost nobody in the regular commentariat wants to talk to me about What went wrong with our immigration policy? | ||
| How did we get into trouble with mortgage-backed securities? | ||
| What's going on with CPI adjustment? | ||
| Well, fortunately we've got something better going on here, so let's not worry about that. | ||
| But you know, we only have about 10 minutes left because you've got a hard-out, so I thought we'd do a little self-therapy while we're here. | ||
| So I want to ask you each one thing, I'll even answer it myself, and then we can all sort of comment. | ||
| I'll start there. | ||
| If you had one blind spot? | ||
| What do you think it might be? | ||
| I've asked you guys some version of all of this before, but, you know, a lot changes over the time that we keep doing this. | ||
| But if there was something that you thought was your personal blind spot, what would it be? | ||
| Well, I would say, I don't know if I can identify a specific blind spot, but I could say in general, you know, I know perfectly well that I don't know enough about a lot of the things that I need to know about to make the sorts of arguments that I'm making. | ||
| Like, I'm painfully aware, and increasingly aware, I would say, of just how much I don't know, how much more I need to be reading and concentrating on to flesh out what I have to say. | ||
| Like, I don't know, I don't know... | ||
| Enough about economics. | ||
| Barely anything. | ||
| I don't know a lot about history. | ||
| Barely anything. | ||
| And so I'm more and more aware of how much I don't know. | ||
| And now, I don't know if that's the kind of blind spot that you were thinking of, but... | ||
| But it's terrifying to comprehend that and still try to move forward in this sort of space. | ||
| It makes it tough to be a public person these days, right? | ||
| Because everyone wants you to know everything about everything all the time. | ||
| Well, you end up with the problem that Eric was just describing, which is, you know, the reason that people won't contend with you is because You force them to move from their low-resolution ideological certainties into domains where specific knowledge is necessary. | ||
| You instantly expose everyone's ignorance. | ||
| It's like, that's hard on the people that you're having the discussion with, but the devil is in the details. | ||
| Up until the last sentence, I would say that I would love you to shorten that and put it on a bumper sticker for me. | ||
| It was a brilliant summary. | ||
| Blind spot, Shapiro? | ||
| I mean, I find it hard to argue with any of that. | ||
| I mean, I think that, you know, if you're intellectually curious, then that means that you know that you don't know anything. | ||
| So I agree with everything you just said. | ||
| I mean, as far as other intellectual blind spots, I mean, or other blind spots generally, I would say that for me the constant struggle is I find myself more stressed out now than I was two years ago when no one gave a crap what I thought, right? | ||
| So the fact is that it's, you know, living a less stressful life in the middle of believing that people actually care what you think. | ||
| It means you have to take your stuff much more seriously. | ||
| That's not really a blind spot as much as a concern. | ||
| And I think that that means that You know, just the commitment to hearing more about things is deeply necessary. | ||
| But it also means that it just means your life in many ways is more miserable the more people know about you. | ||
| And it's not a poor me thing. | ||
| I love what I do. | ||
| I love the fact that people care what I think. | ||
| Like, that's what I live for, is that people care what I think. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| I mean, it's pretty sweet. | ||
| You've got a lot of good stuff going on. | ||
| Oh, no, I've got a ton of great stuff going on. | ||
| But the fact is that I spend— The risk is higher. | ||
| The risk is higher. | ||
| In some ways, that makes you a better person. | ||
| It's almost like the old kind of religious slogan that if you feel God is watching you all the time, then you're more likely to be a better person. | ||
| And there is that feeling like, OK, if I make a mistake, I want to be the first person to notice that I made the mistake and correct that mistake. | ||
| But that also means that you live with a lot more self-doubt and a lot more second-guessing of yourself than you did when nobody cared. | ||
| So that's not as much of a blind spot as a concern. | ||
| The problem with trying to identify your own blind spots is that they're in your blind spot. | ||
| That's why I asked the question, I wanted to make you think a little bit. | ||
| It's funny because just the other day, it was yesterday actually, I did the Adam Carolla podcast, which he's, you know, it's comedy and he's doing more of a radio show thing, so you speak a little more freely, and I was about to say something very politically incorrect, and I obviously don't have a problem doing that generally, especially when I'm doing comedy, and just for a moment I had you sort of ring in my head about, be careful about your words, and I was like, ah! | ||
| I just don't feel like offering up one extra comment. | ||
| Right, life is less fun that way, right? | ||
| Because it's like the stuff that you felt like you could say a year ago, now you realize not only maybe you shouldn't have said it a year ago, but also you feel like if I, am I, you're constantly saying, am I curbing myself because I'm afraid, or am I curbing myself because it's the right thing to do to curb myself here? | ||
| And that's an interesting sort of calculus you have to do all the time. | ||
| I think if you're concerned that it's because of fear, then you might want to take the risk of saying it. | ||
| I've tried to wrestle with that problem. | ||
| Am I avoiding this because I think it's bad or because I don't want to take on the responsibility? | ||
| If you have suspicions about that, then you should do it. | ||
| I think you should arm yourself against your weaknesses and take that risk. | ||
| I think it's better developmentally to do that. | ||
| All right, I'll answer it for myself, which is a cue off something your brother said to me once, which is that perhaps I have a little PTSD from the left. | ||
| So my focus on these completely bananas ideas has been so singularly stuck in my mind that maybe it lets some other things slide every now and again. | ||
| I'm trying to be very aware of that and trying to figure out how to go forward on that. | ||
| So does that mean you're a little bit more on the attack than you'd like to be? | ||
| Because... I think I want to ease up on a little bit of the attack on that. | ||
| I think I've spent the last couple years really... It was first me identifying it for myself. | ||
| Really, I was interviewing all of these people and figuring out that they were often going through the same thing I was, but then it morphed into going on the attack about it. | ||
| And now I feel like because And again, I say the word winning with, you know, a little tongue-in-cheek, but because I do sense something has turned here, that maybe I can get my foot off the gas a little bit on that and focus on the big ideas that I really care about. | ||
| I thought about that in relationship to this whole group. | ||
| It might be nice But I think we should really be careful to use minimum necessary force. | ||
| There's idiocy on the left and on the extreme right that needs to be pointed out. | ||
| But it might be better if we did the minimum necessary amount of that. | ||
| Because it also starts to become something you can parody quite easily at some point. | ||
| And more and more of delineating what the alternative might be if there was a positive alternative. | ||
| It will be interesting to see what happens with the IDW as it moves beyond the critique. | ||
| Because what's really unified us, I think, has been a lot the critique, right? | ||
| The critique of intersectionality and the identity of politics. | ||
| And once we move into the space where we're actually trying to maybe build something together | ||
| or come to some sort of ideological consonance, then some of these, I hope the, what I hope is that | ||
| if we're going to recapitulate the arguments, I hope that we recapitulate the arguments in a more reasonable, | ||
| cogent, and intelligent way, you know, in terms of the actual political arguments. | ||
| But I'm not sure that those—I think that none of us, I hope, are dreaming that there will actually be an ideological continence among the lot of us, because clearly that is something that is not going to happen. | ||
| I mean, we all have significant disagreements among ourselves on all of these issues. | ||
| But how beautiful that is, that we're all kind of working through it in our own way, and we're all not going to get to the exact same ending, but we'll kind of go with each other the whole time. | ||
| Blind spot! | ||
| Weinstein! | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| It's more or less infinite. | ||
| I think that I do a terrible job of, when somebody's making a bad analytic argument, but is intuited their way to the right conclusion, I tend to discount them. | ||
| As if the analytic argument was how they should be thinking. | ||
| So different kinds of minds who have their variables. | ||
| You know, if you think nothing of Myers-Briggs, it should at least tell you that there are kinds of minds that aren't working at all like yours. | ||
| Big Five might be a little bit better. | ||
| So that's been a huge blind spot. | ||
| I think that I am very focused on provable Institutional betrayal, which I can point at and no one else seems to want to talk about, and that because no one wants to talk about really specific problems with the institutions, it leads me sometimes to not seeing the generic case. | ||
| I think that I am very much a prisoner of my learning disabilities. | ||
| I had to sort of construct my own operating system to get around them otherwise. | ||
| If you ever want to see something funny, ask Brett Weinstein to read aloud. | ||
| Because you just see that he's having to impressionistically figure out what's on the page because he's not tracking it exactly. | ||
| So I think that fight to say I'm not stupid probably distorted me a great deal, having to build my own architecture. | ||
| I think we can safely say you're not stupid. | ||
| One last thing, and I think that one of the things that I'm most worried about is that fighting the supposedly empathic army of people trying to destroy conversation itself has had a very negative impact on my empathy for exactly the people that they want me to have empathy for. | ||
| And I think that it's very important for all of us to say, okay, what's the steel manning of that position and to make an extra effort when people are making absolutely non-empathic arguments trying to destroy you and fry you to think about the empathy that you want to have for whatever went wrong in their lives. | ||
| You know, it might be fun at some point to conjure up a panel where some of the people that are in this group take the leftist position and defend it. | ||
| In every possible way, right from the postmodern conclusions, which I think are worthy of substantial skepticism, to the notion of the reality of the dispossessed and the presence of systemic oppression and all of that, and to make the cases as brutally as we possibly can. | ||
| I think that would be useful. | ||
| I will not steel man those tactics. | ||
| No, not the tactics, but the content. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| Because it doesn't seem like we've been able to have the debate with anybody who can carry the debate. | ||
| So it might be really useful to... | ||
| Well, I think Brett and I have been trying, but it's hard because we're spending most of our energy... | ||
| Fending off the ads, yeah. | ||
| Fending off the tactics. | ||
| The tactics, that's exactly the point. | ||
| It's not the conclusions. | ||
| All right, we gotta move on. | ||
| Jordan and I are going to Long Beach tonight. | ||
| You're going to San Francisco. | ||
| You're going back to Daily Wire. | ||
| You guys are doing something for July 4th, right? | ||
| Yeah, July 4th. | ||
| So July 2nd, we're gonna be doing a special episode of Daily Wire backstage. | ||
| That's me, that's God King Jeremy Boring, who runs the place. | ||
| It is the ex-Gribble Michael Knowles and Andrew Clavin and Jordan Peterson. | ||
| We're all gonna be celebrating 4th of July with everyone's favorite Canadian. | ||
| So Jordan's gonna stop by at 4 p.m. | ||
| Pacific, 7 p.m. | ||
| Eastern, so check out dailywire.com for all that. | ||
| You can check it out on YouTube and Facebook as well. |
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