32: J. D. Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares
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Hello, this is Eric with some thoughts before we get to this week's main conversation. What I want to talk about initially this week is the real raison d'etre for long-form podcasting as I see it. I would like to think that all listeners to this podcast understand the very real danger that cranks and crackpots pose to our society when they are not recognized as such. The idea of visiting a witch doctor, faith healer, or tarot card reader to treat your infection with the coronavirus hopefully sounds insane to you.

If it doesn't, this likely isn't the podcast for you as I'm just going to assume here that such actions are a priori crazy. You are probably fairly able to spot many such charlatans easily from their bizarre behavior patterns which do not bear a moment's scrutiny. But what about people who have more complex presentations? Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked multiple times every day what I think about Stephen Wolfram's supposed announcement of a theory of everything two weeks ago on April 14th.

I thought perhaps I would take this opportunity to clarify what I do think. The short answer is that I don't think that this is what happened.

I think he announced a program in line with previous investigations of his into the properties of cellular automata where simple computational rules result in output of unexpected intricacy, richness, and beauty. If you have ever toured the famous Mandelbrot set, played the late John Conway's Game of Life, studied Go, or even played Cat's Cradle with yarn, you are familiar with this phenomenon of explosions of unexpected structure from minimal assumptions.

My interpretation of Wolfram's announcement is that he believes he has a research program that will one day show that the richness of our world can be found to result from a specific computational rule that his team will be able to locate using tools of modern computing. I'm happy to be wrong if this is not what he announced, but that's what I gleaned after a short look at some of the video and materials that he released. It looks to me like a program to search for a final theory rather than something close to a final theory.

The next two questions, however, are often where things become complicated. Question two can be phrased as something like, why do you suppose he doesn't simply write a paper and submit it for peer review? And question three would be, do you think he's a crank?

The short answer to question two is, I think, like many other experts, he lost a good deal of faith in the ability and willingness of the community of theoretical physicists to fairly judge in good faith new idiosyncratic work via an anonymous and unaccountable system which is always ripe for abuse. As for question three, the simple answer to whether or not he's a crank has been,

I'm not going to dignify your ugly question with an answer. Theoretical physics, you see, at its absolute highest levels, has been in some strange state of advanced crankiness for decades.

But what does it really mean to say that the mainstream and leadership of a field are cranky? Can the mainstream truly be fringe? Wrong, perhaps, but fringe in some sense means both distant from the center and wacky. There is no concept in English of which I am aware for a group of experts promoting a prima facie insane perspective from the highest positions of trust, expertise, and leadership.

Stephen Wolfram, in my opinion, is far less nutty than the arrival of new high-energy physics preprints that are posted daily on the so-called archive server used by all leading theorists. A quick review on any given day chosen at random reveals that these papers are generally not in any way tied to particles, forces, dimensions, or symmetries that have ever been seen in any experiment.

They are not actually high-energy physics theories at all, because they are not tied to any energy scale, they aren't attempting to understand the physical world, and they aren't even theories so far as I can tell. As far as high-energy physical theory, that would be zero for three and beyond pathetic. What they really represent are the mathematical explorations of fragments of long-ago exhausted dreams for unification, now 20 to 50 years past their due date. This is why we need a new concept, which I have called the KNARC.

Aside from being Swedish slang for hard recreational drugs, it is also the word crank spelled backwards. You can think of the two meanings as being related by virtue of the fact that our central institutions are almost all growth-dependent structures, now increasingly dominated in our low-growth world by leaders addicted to desperate measures to cover for their lack of competence, progress, and honesty. Quite simply, the mainstream may still be tautologically at the center, but it is often no less wacky than the fringe that it denigrates. Think about it.

President Donald Trump is a good example of a knark, freestyling about getting disinfectant inside the body to kill COVID from the presidential lectern and then lying about it, claiming it was sarcasm when he was caught.

The Surgeon General, the CDC, and the WHO are all knark organizations for giving deadly, faulty, and transparently self-inconsistent recommendations on the use of face masks to say nothing of our friends in the People's Republic of China, who are blatantly lying about all aspects of the COVID epidemic, so far as I can tell.

Joe Biden, Trump's likely opponent for perhaps the world's most demanding job, is a knark for running when he should be retiring, given embarrassing signs of mental decline and his constant inability to remember what he's talking about from moment to moment with alarming frequency for a mere septuagenarian.

Once you have a concept of a dependably crazy bipartisan center, ignoring reality to quickly extract as much as possible from the accumulated wealth and credit of civil society before the bills all come due and are sent to the next generation for payment, you realize that if there are any reliable experts left, you would expect them to be straddling the worlds between the central knarks and the cranks of the fringe. And this gets to the difficult problem we now face, but which we cannot face up to.

the coming total collapse of authoritative sources. You will notice that Wikipedia's history of surprisingly high quality comes from an insistence on using reliable published sources of information as primary material. But don't take it from me. In Wikipedia's own words, if no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it. Close quote.

in short when reliable sources cannot be found communal sense-making breaks down and comes to an end in my lifetime i have seen the universities the scientific journals the papers of record all succumb to the political economy of perverse incentives in a low-growth world

Said differently, we now run the risk that if previously reliable published sources which prided themselves on a goal of objectivity become captured by political incentives, secondary structures like Wikipedia will begin to degrade and unravel as a result. Thus, we can formally at least understand the logic of the CEO of YouTube when she tells us that she must remove videos that contradict authoritative sources to protect the public health during a pandemic.

But when she tells us that the World Health Organization is such an unquestionable source, we must, by the same logic of public health, actually consider whether YouTube should be nationalized given that the WHO appears to be enthralled to mainland China and unable to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan's efforts to control the virus while they continue to spout nonsense about the transmission of the virus and PPE.

A free and advanced society must question the now unreliable WHO and do so vigorously and ferociously whether or not YouTube and its parent company have continuing business interests involving East Asia. Of course, the idea of nationalizing YouTube because its CEO is chilling a conversation that needs to take place in the middle of a geopolitical health crisis is a confusing issue.

Yet who can deny that she is blatantly exercising the privileges of a publisher while retaining the legal protections of a platform?

One senses immediately that it is a conversation that cannot take place within a framework of thoroughly nutty yet central institutions that share a common interest in being spared difficult questions, particularly as regards communist China. On the other hand, figuring out how to make it impossible for Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other publishers to exercise editorial control while posing as platforms is an essential conversation that must not be handed off to cranks, trolls, and crackpots.

The lacuna that has opened up between the cranks of 4chan and the comparably nutty knarks of the great boardrooms lying and colluding to protect their empires from oversight, clawbacks, and regulation is therefore of utmost importance, and this is where we find long-form podcasting.

By getting to know an individual host with all of his or her strengths and weaknesses, we have some hope for a new form of semi-reliable media. This sector may not yet fact-check as regularly as the New York Times, but it is less likely to credulously quote the ridiculous China COVID statistics, Epstein autopsy report, or WHO mask recommendations.

It is also more willing to take on the perverse incentives destroying the credibility of the platforms, elected representatives, scientists, universities, hospitals, and other previously trusted institutions. I wish I could say that this was because of something intrinsic to the medium, but really it is because of this. Long-form podcasting is something new. There is still room for growth, and it is still difficult to control.

As long as those two features hold true, the sweet spot for sensemaking is likely to be found in long-form podcasting, which lies in a no-man's land between the cranks and the knarks. It's not perfect, but it's the best we have at a very difficult moment. I'll be back with some words to introduce today's guest after these words from our sponsors. ♪

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I don't think at the time I knew anything about him setting out to write a book, let alone such an outstanding and important one. Oddly, J.D.'s family and mine tangentially connect through the Appalachian experience. Once upon a time, the American political left was very focused on the economic plight of both American Southern blacks and the Appalachian poor. It is not hard to see why, in that both were subjected to different levels of enslavement and government-supported terror from those who exploited and controlled every aspect of their lives and labor.

in large measure the left was thus drawn to both for two main reasons in the first place the brazen enormity of the exploitation made a powerful case that the left was truly interested in defeating the evils of legalized human exploitation and control of the economically downtrodden this also provided a large voting base within the wider category of organized labor

but in another vein entirely these groups metabolized that injustice and somehow produced from it much of the rich and interesting american folklore and ethnomusicology that in part define us and bind us as a nation these are after all what folklorists think of as the two most generative american sub-communities

where southern blacks had tales that made harriet tubman into moses the appalachian hillbilly had fashioned the irish-born mary g harris into american labor's iconic mother jones the woman who mothered her era's workers into a fearsome force to be reckoned with in the deadly skirmishes with company armies of detectives that in fact defined the period as such in my family far removed in los angeles

We grew up listening to the plight of both groups. With respect to Appalachia, in songs like "16 Tons" or "Which Side Are You On" or "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore," incredibly specific details like name checking or county-by-county level descriptions were dispensed in song of an Appalachian world far removed from my family.

And, as strategy, this had the effect of getting lots of people far removed from Kentucky or West Virginia to feel as if we knew the place intimately and wanting to learn all we could about the Battle of Blair Mountain or the evil J.H. Blair of Harlan County. But most of the left then moved on from this odd attachment. And they did so without the ability to get rid of all of the evidence of the historically critical connection.

The publication Mother Jones, for example, continued on, but now without a particular passion for the highly religious heteronormative family-focused culture of miners, steelworkers, and their descendants, which had been the object of Mother Jones' original interests. The people of Appalachia increasingly felt that they were being abandoned by the American left, and thus they leaned to the right as they sensed that they were now being treated as antiquated relics from the era of organized labor.

It's hard to get the modern left to properly sing, which side are you on, when it taunts, will you be a man? Or celebrates our ecologically disastrous reliance on coal in general and coal mining in particular. Yet there are some of us on the left which still think that the minute that the Democratic Party truly abandons southern Ohio or eastern Kentucky because they can't see their connection to these people of the region, well, then it ceases to be the left, or even very American for that matter.

In that sense, J.D.'s obvious love and feel for this region during the largely post-Cole era in some sense feels like a great opportunity for a spiritual renewal of the left and a reconnection as well with the national interests of the American family under stress.

I know, of course, that this opportunity is very unlikely to be taken up by the leadership of the current Democratic Party. But, of course, it would be if the left actually wanted to win and furthermore make winning matter in the best tradition of the thinking left. It would also be therapeutic, in my opinion, for us all to reacquaint ourselves with just how much actual genius there is within our most downtrodden people.

So, sit back, relax, and I hope that after a few words from our sponsors, you'll enjoy my unbroken conversation with J.D. Vance, the author of the incredibly moving Hillbilly Elegy. Returning sponsor, Lamps Plus, is the nation's largest lighting retailer, and they want to get you thinking about great lighting for your home, so they let me tell you about offbeat chandeliers and things. Today's is about the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Oman, which has the largest recognized chandelier in the world, weighs apparently 8.5 tons. Check it out on YouTube.

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Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I get to sit down today with my friend, JD Vance. JD, you're the author of Hillbilly Elegy, but before that, you were working with friends of ours inside of

uh, the sort of Peter Thiel universe. Welcome to the portal. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Uh, it's a great honor. So, um, this is kind of one of these funny stories where I knew you in one capacity and the next thing I know you've written the book that the entire country is talking about. Did you see that coming? No, definitely not. In fact, I remember, I don't know if you remember this, but I ran into you and I think it was Kevin in the dining hall at the Kevin Harrington at the, uh,

at the Presidio and the book had, I think, just come out or was just about to come out. And it was sort of this throwaway thing. Like it was the side projects that I was working on. You know, I always worked full time and I just thought the book would come out. I would be proud of it, happy about what I had wrote, but that would be pretty much it.

And of course it really took off. And, you know, if I was going to quantify the expectations versus the reality, you know, the initial print run on the book was 10,000 copies. The publisher thought that would be more than enough that it wouldn't sell that many. And we sold out after a couple of weeks and it was just off to the races from there. It was pretty crazy. And am I, so the book is hillbilly elegy, but you are just coming fresh off.

today from having seen a movie being made out of your book. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So Ron Howard at Imagine is making, you know, making Hillbilly Elegy into a movie and has been working on it for a couple of years. And I've been, you know,

various stages of involved at various stages of the process. And I saw the first cut of it before I came in here. So if I seem like I'm on drugs, it's because I'm still sort of floating through Los Angeles, unsure what exactly happened and what to make of it and how to process it. But as weird as I expected it to be to see my life story put into a movie, it was even weirder. Weirder still. So, so you family members played by anyone famous?

Glenn Close is playing my grandma. And yeah, and I think in big ways is sort of the hero of my own life and of the book. Amy Adams is playing my mom. Frida Pinto is playing my wife.

The actor who's playing me is Gabriel Basso, is playing the older version of JD. And really got to know these guys, really enjoyed it. I actually started to appreciate that filmmaking is sort of an art form if you do it the right way, which was not how I went into the process expecting to feel about it. But it looks pretty good. You know, knock on wood, I think it's going to actually come out pretty well. You know, I watched it with my wife.

And the thing that I told her beforehand is I just want to feel like they didn't screw it up. I recognize this is a first cut. It's a rough draft. It's not, not the final movie, but I just want to walk out of there feeling like they didn't screw it up. And I really felt like that. So I'm pretty happy. Well, this is fantastic. I couldn't be happier for your success. Now, thank you. One of the,

So a couple of odd features, you're coming from Southern Ohio with family in Kentucky. Sure. Um, and of course, Southern Ohio, um, has more to do with Kentucky than it does to do with, let's say Cleveland or something like that. So it's culturally, um, closer to Appalachian. Now it happens, and you may not know this, that I was a folklore minor in college. Um,

And hillbilly culture and black culture are sort of the two great wellsprings of American folklore. And so I was always of the opinion that this was like one of the great artistic regions of our country. And one of the things that that meant was, is that we were left with a lot of folk song, which describes a world that I feel has been almost forgotten by

coastal America in particular, and this is quite funny, left of center, coastal America. And one of the things that I'm dying to talk about is coal and its legacy as we sort of distance ourself from this sort of dirty form of energy that we, we, because we're so awake and climate aware, we sort of are embarrassed because of the environmental degradation. But this was really the wellspring of,

of both culture and in some sense, the soul of the American left and something absolutely bizarre has happened. And I wondered if we could, because the book has been out for some time, so we're not going to get really fresh questions about the book. Sure. But I thought what we might do is sort of examine the legacy of Appalachia with respect to politics, where the country is going and what you were trying to do with the book when you wrote it. So can you say a

What it was that you were intending to do when you wrote Hillbilly Elegy? Yeah, so what I was intending to do, I think, is write a reflection on this idea of the American dream. And...

It's something that we become so jaded that it almost feels sort of trite or cheesy to even talk about it. But when I was like a kid growing up in the late 80s, the early 90s, I really had this sense that America was a place where you could be anything, where you could do anything. And of course, over the course of my life, I sort of realized that that that

notion is a little bit more complicated than I had expected that it would be. I realized it was a little bit more challenging. I realized when I got to Yale Law School, which was sort of the culmination of, you know, my sort of educational and work career up to that point, that the American dream was in a very real sense in crisis. And yet I still sort of held on to it. It was still sort of a really important part of my identity. And

And I wanted people to sort of understand that, to understand how you could simultaneously accept that America was imperfect, but still love it, that you could still believe that this was the land of opportunity, even though you recognize that most people around you weren't necessarily able to achieve the full measure of that opportunity. And that kind of tension, that really complicated relationship that I had with the American dream was sort of the message that I wanted to deliver there.

And, you know, my ultimate hope is that somebody would pick up Hillbilly Elegy, would kind of understand the people that I came from, the people that I grew up around, why they thought the way that they did, why they, you know, sort of thought about their country the way that they did, and ultimately why those people are struggling in very real ways from, you know, the opioid epidemic to a host of other sort of sociological and economic factors.

And that's why I wrote it. I don't think I had any sort of super groundbreaking insights in the book. The one truly original thought that I thought that I had was that there's...

There were really high rates of religious identification in the part of the country that I came from, but religious participation had sort of fallen off a cliff. So you had this weird juxtaposition of people who are devoutly religious but not connected to a real church. And I thought that had all these sort of interesting implications. And then I think Robert Putnam came out with a book like a year before mine that sort of just said everything I wanted to say on that front, but much more interestingly. So it sort of progressively evolved into –

more and more of a story about my own life and my family's history so that people would sort of understand these things and understand where a lot of people were coming from. So I love picking up the thread of the American dream because I'm a total believer in the American dream. And I more or less want to just fight anyone who wants to get in its way. Right.

And so as an unreconstructed believer, it's kind of interesting to hear somebody talk about it. Now, am I right? You did not grow up particularly well off. You weren't, you know, because right now we're living through a very bizarre moment in time in which white skin is assumed to be connected to a trust fund by many people. Yep. Yeah. You know, I sort of grew up.

I'd say from the time I was born until when I was 13 or 14, kind of oscillating between working class, lower middle class, and sort of right on the edge of what you would call poor. And then by the time I was in high school, I was living with my grandma full time. My grandfather had died, and we were genuinely poor. I think I never really felt hungry. There's sort of ways in which the social safety net definitely worked for us, but we were very, very poor.

you know, marginal. Yeah. We were very marginal resources were very tight. And,

And the idea that, you know, you could afford things that seemed necessary, like a college education to get ahead in America just seemed totally out of reach. It's one of the reasons that I joined the military, not the only reason. I was very patriotic family of my, my grandma's six grandchildren, three of them joined enlisted in the Marine Corps. It was right after September 11th. I think that I enlisted like three weeks after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003. So it wasn't just sort of that it was my pathway to a better life.

Uh, but, but definitely we grew up in, in a pretty rough environment in a lot of ways. And the fact that I made it is on the one hand, I think evidence of the American dream, but on the other, you know, I don't think you can read too much into one person's story because there is a lot of evidence that, that people are struggling in a way that they weren't. I mean, I think that's true, but I don't, I don't want to discount your particular story because each link in your story,

or each step on your ladder is like a different version of the American dream. Not only do you enlist in our military, but you enlist in a branch that at least in my family and in my world still carries a lot of prestige, the Marine Corps. So you do four years in the Marine Corps, and then you're off to a college education at Ohio State.

Yeah. So I go to Ohio state. I, I remember feeling this intense sense of being very old there, you know? So I got to Ohio state in September of 2007, I was 23 years old and,

And we would talk in like introductory political science classes about what was going on in Iraq. And, you know, I had friends who were like still there and I had just come back, you know, a year earlier. So you were wizened from a direct experience. Yeah. And I, and I think that I just felt, you know, everything from the dating scene to,

Most of my friends from high school if they had gone to college they had already graduated I was just desperate to sort of get out so I graduated very quickly and it placed like Ohio State that was possible you could take as many credit hours as you wanted and as soon as you got the degree requirements met you were you were out of there so I actually spent less than two years at Ohio State and then went to Yale Law School right after that. Arguably the country's top law school from a theory perspective though

Yeah, definitely. Definitely, definitely, definitely the highest in sort of the objective rankings. But I do think there's an interesting question about what it means to be the top educational institution in a world where things are as corrupt as they are right now. Though, I mean, to your point, at that time, I wasn't thinking that. To me, Yale Law School was, that was my ticket, right? As soon as I got the call, because they call people when they let them in, they don't send letters. Small classes, right?

And I will never forget. I was at a friend's house. I got a phone call on my cell phone. It was a two Oh three number, which I knew from sort of law school admissions message boards. That was a new Haven area code. And I just knew I was like, okay, I'm never going to have to worry about money. My life is going to be set. Things have worked out for me. That was sort of my instant reaction to that. It was, it was a, yeah, it was a really transformational moment. So it's interesting. So neither you nor I did very well in high school. Um,

We both have ended up in somewhat similar worlds a little bit. But when I, you know, when I got a PhD from Harvard, I had none of that feeling that things were going to be okay because it wasn't a professional degree. It was an academic degree. And I think people discount.

Just how weird it is to both have a sense of being economically marginal and economically secure and the message not being entirely clear one way or the other. I've met very rich people who can, because of the way in which they grew up, never get a sense of comfort that things are going to be okay. Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I do think there's a way in which I've realized that that sense of scarcity is always going to be with me.

But it's just not the same as like really being in scarcity. I always have, you know, I think my wife has told me that

there's always this way in which I'm terrified that things are going to go radically wrong very quickly. You know, that some investment that we made, even though it's in, you know, a super safe public equity is just going to go to zero. Right. Uh, the taxes are going to go up so high on our, on our house that we're going to have to move out of our house. Your wife grew up where? She grew up in San Diego. So we're very middle class, uh, daughter of Indian immigrants. Um, I think herself very much a believer in, in the American dream. The reason I bring it up is that both of us have, um,

uh, have married people from the subcontinent. Sure. And my belief is, is that partition, uh, casts a Paul over people who come from India, uh,

whose families went through that. I don't know whether that's part of your story. It's certainly part of my wife's story where they were Hindus living in Karachi. And so whether you interact with the Holocaust or partition or the Armenian genocide or anything like that, there are these weird, um, intergenerational sort of traumas that get passed. Yep.

Yeah, so they grew up in South India, in Chennai. And to the best of my knowledge, no family members were implicated in the partition. Though I'm actually ashamed to say that I don't think I've actually asked her parents that question. Well, if they were Tamils, that's probably not... Yeah. Yeah. They weren't. Oh, they weren't? They were not. They were Hindu. They're non... Well, Tamil... Chennai was Madras, which would be in Tamil Nadu. But... So, yeah. There might have been some other ethnic group. Well, they...

They spoke Telugu at home. Okay. Does that shed any light on what their likely ethnicity was? I think so. But Dravidian languages are not my... I'm ashamed to say that I don't know more about my wife's family. Well, let's get back to Ohio then. So one of the things that really moved me is that you've invited me to gatherings where people who are very worried about

inequality in the United States and the health of working families and the number of people who are marginal and the disappearing middle class and the swelling ranks of the poor are talking about these issues. And I can find myself as the only Democrat invited to the table and I can listen for hours upon hours to Republicans pouring their heart out, trying to figure out how to help

the working poor, the people affected by the opioid epidemic and trying to figure out what the hell's going wrong with our country. And I have to say that when I come back to my coastal friends who are left of center, I feel like a lot of this has just fallen off the radar. Like people, they weirdly look down on this region in ways that make me incredibly uncomfortable.

Like we talked, I gave you my idea for birthright Ohio that like birthright Israel, we should tour people from the coast and show them, you know, what kind of standard of living they could have if they moved to the interior and brought some of their technical knowhow and got over their bigotry. Yup. Yeah. There, there definitely is that sense of bigotry. And you know, the way that I would illustrate this is when I was in law school, I was a third year student in a seminar and,

And, you know, in these seminars are 12 or 13 people. I made some point and the point kind of implied that I was in the military and this sort of, you know, very nice student turned to me and said, Oh, you were, you were in the military. And I said, yeah, I was in the, I was in the Marine Corps. And she said, Oh my God, that's so surprising. You just seem so nice. And, and,

You know, it's, yeah, somebody made the comment to me later, years later when I told that story that if I sort of lived in hyper woke, you know, if that had happened in 2017 or 2018 instead of 2013, I would have called it a microaggression. Yeah. And it sort of hit me that that was like my brief flirtation with a microaggression. But there is this weird way in which whether it's the reaction to the Trump phenomenon or

or just general lifestyle, voting habits, cultural attitudes, whatever the case may be. There's this way in which I think left of center elites especially

are not comfortable with the idea that there is a population in the middle of the country, primarily they're not exclusively white, that's just doing very poorly. And they have specific class political interests that are not really being given good expression in current American political and cultural discourse. And sort of the way that I think about this most strongly is like in response to Trump's election,

You know, where there were all of these sort of absurd think pieces and academic research papers that back them up in the social scientists. Like, you know, let's try to quantify just how racist the average Trump voter is. And some of these studies, they wouldn't even control for age. Some of these studies, they wouldn't even control for income. There were these weird ways in which like basic, you know, basic research practices weren't being followed.

But then if you really looked at the questions that they were asking to sort of tease out whether people were racist and you realize that they're basically just penalizing people who don't have rights.

college educated attitudes about race, that what they're really sort of when they, when they say that a person has a high degree of racial animus in a lot of these studies, it's, did you go to an elite university and learn to talk about race like a person who graduated from an elite university? It's an amazing point. And it's, you know, that, that, that has blinded a lot of people, I think, to just, you know, how much frustration, how much hurt there is. And it is made left of center politics in this country, uh,

a really, really perverse. I don't think all leftist politics, but I mean, there are these weird pockets of leftist politics in the country that still sort of get it. Yeah. But most, most don't, especially at the elite level. So this is actually personally really, I don't get a chance to talk about this often. I have the sense that people who've worked on the same factory floor for

of different races and have actually come to understand each other, maybe have each other over to each other's homes, but maintain a certain sense of like we can be close, but we're also separate and we have to joke about our differences. And sometimes it erupts into a fight and sometimes you bury the hatchet and sometimes it's kind of the spice of life. Um, that richness of actually,

different races dealing with each other at a work environment, like sharing a life together, like sharing a life together. But like maybe you're, you belong to different neighborhoods, you know, because the, the neighborhoods segregate and you sort of, I mean, I think you know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to talk about it in terms that are actually weirdly, I mean, it's the inverse of what you're saying. I come from the group that is now, I mean, this is like, this is so complicated. Um,

three out of my four grandparents never got a college degree, you know? And in the two generations since then, I'm supposed to pretend that I've always come from this exalted group of educated people. Like, well, of course in all stratus, you know, strata, this isn't an issue, but like, to me, this is just like the last four minutes we've been college, college educated and somewhat for you. Now I want to go back and I want to try to talk about,

The way in which races actually interact and men and women actually interact. And I can't use the college-educated language of elite universities to talk about this. There's this weird way in which you're separate, but you're also actually intertwined. Yes. Yeah. And I actually think it's very bad for like real race relations in the country, right? This sort of fake...

We're not going to talk about 70% of the issues that you might talk about in a normal conversation because we're terrified that we're going to offend each other. I think that's a really terrible way to actually, again, share a life and a conversation with somebody. You know, I think about, you know, my real experience to this, having never worked on a factory floor, I guess I maybe worked at a factory for like three months out of my life.

um was in the in the military right still still still one of like the genuinely um multi-racial multi-racial multi-ethnic multi-class institutions in american life and so many of the conversations that i had with like my 19 year old you know friends that i was in boot camp with

would absolutely offend and scandalize the average sort of college student. But it was the basis of intimacy, right? Yeah, absolutely, right? Like you're going to joke around with things, right? The most offensive things in order to show, hey, if we can get through that...

Maybe I can, maybe I can actually deal with you in a firefight and trust you. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you know, some people like make fun of each other. That's a natural thing to happen among people who are genuinely friends. I think especially like young people, they're kind of ribbing each other. They're testing the boundaries a little bit. And there, there's a way in which that kind of real conversation is no longer welcome in elite circles. Um,

And, you know, I think sort of the pro spin on it is that, you know, maybe an environment that's multiracial where jokes are flying everywhere. Maybe people are sort of secretly offended. But in a hyper cleansed environment and the average elite university, people aren't as offended. But I don't buy that. I don't want to pretend that.

joking is just awesome because there's a lot of people have that simplistic attitude. You know, there's a lot of harm that can be done by bad and unskilled jokes. But in my experience, you make too much of an unskilled joke. You learn very quickly not to do it again. Yes. And people get better over time. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So, so I think there were maybe imperfections and, and certainly, you know, people said things to, to,

Others that went too far in some in some way, I'm sure. But being I think probably our society, especially in elite circles, college educated circles, is too much in the direction of.

terror over offending somebody's sensibilities. And it's really hard to build a real relationship with somebody when that's, when that's where you're going. I mean, I think you and I have had this conversation maybe, maybe in private or maybe I've had it with somebody else, but you know, I have, I have a couple of, of friends who are practicing devout Muslims and,

And there's a way in which people who are serious about their faith, Muslims, talk about terrorism in a way, Islamic terrorism. Yeah. In a way that 99% of public intellectuals and commentators would be terrified to talk about it.

Um, but again, when you like really know somebody and you're talking about real issues and the intimacy of somebody's home and you're not worried that everybody is who's saying something is saying it in bad faith, you can actually have a lot of really interesting discussions. You know, I'll be honest. I learned, I started off saying, you know, we can't talk about Islam as having a connection to terror. And it was my Muslim friends who said, what is your problem?

What are you doing? Have you touched a pod? Have you gone mad? Did you blow a neuron out? You know, of course there's a problem. That's what we talk about. And honestly, Eric, you sound like an idiot, you know, and it was a very powerful argument. Now, if you ask how we joke,

you know, probably we, I occasionally make a joke with very close Muslim friends about terror or oil and they make a joke about how I control all of the newspapers and the movie studios. And those kinds of jokes have this role in building intimacy.

And of course they're dangerous, but that's why they work to build intimacy. Right. And what concerns me is that nobody's ever going to get intimate if everybody's terrified of being real. Yep. And you can't just also say, well, the comedians are right. Everything offensive is awesome. And we should just celebrate the first amendment every time somebody says something hurtful because, you know, there really is something about learning to be decent, but we're not going to learn how to be decent by being terrified of each other. Right. Right.

Yeah. You know, one of my, my best friends from law school is this guy, Jamil Javani. I think you've interacted with Jamil at least a little bit, very smart guy lives in Toronto, wrote a book called why young men about sort of the connection between young men and attraction to sort of violent, violent movements, be they Islamic or white supremacist or whatever. And I was, one of my favorite moments from law school was Jamil and I

And a bunch of our classmates, we went to like this late night chicken restaurant. We were, you know, gorging after a night of drinking and,

And afterwards, like all of our classmates had just left this terrible mess. And Jamil and I sort of stayed back to kind of clean up so that the people who worked there didn't have to clean up the entire mess. And we sort of had this real moment of connection that we're probably the only two people here who've actually had to clean up somebody else's mess before. And that, that sort of sense of, you know, clearly different nationalities, different races, um,

He's a black guy from Toronto. I'm a white guy from Southern Ohio. But that sense of commonality led to so many fruitful conversations about race, about class, about Canada, about America. And there's a way in which sanitized rhetoric actually prevents those types of relationships from developing. And I don't know what to do. I mean, again, I'm not super cynical about this.

I think that it comes from a good place, a genuine desire, at least in some cases, not all cases to prevent offense, but it can be just destructive to. Well, I also think it's really friendship. It's really important to understand what racism is and is not, which you can't do if you, if you're not willing to sort of investigate and interrogate it in yourself. Sure. And in general, I find that,

Everyone has programming. I mean, our friend David Eagleman has made this point that if you put a bracelet on a rubberized hand that says, you know, Jew, Christian, atheist, Hindu, and then you stab the rubberized hands with a fork, people react to the one that is labeled with their group differently. It's just very funny that we sort of have to deny that.

uh, that we have any kind of evolutionary programming towards tribe or group now. Okay. Once you, once you actually have sort of wrestled with this in yourself, um, you know, then you're open to actually solving richer problems. And I don't know how we get back to that because, uh, you know, what I see is that, um, there's a very thin layer of people who have found their way to,

high leverage positions, particularly within media, within universities, within HR departments, who are hell bent on making sure that speech is policed in a very counterproductive way to actually making progress on, on these issues. And I guess, you know, the weird thing that, that I have to say is, is that I associate this much more with the left. And so one thing I would love to talk to you about is the way in which the left moved bizarrely by using the

our shared interest in Appalachia. Sure. Sure. Yes. You, you mentioned, you mentioned coal earlier. And of course, one of the hotbeds of the American labor movement was, I mean, it's genuinely violent union reactions against what was going on in coal country. And let's say what it, what it was, which is, I've almost never heard this word used in a modern context. It's a form of slavery in the 20th century. Yep.

And the people enslaved were often whites. I mean, there was black slavery through coal as well. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. West Virginia had a lot of black coal miners. Other places did as well. Right. But yeah, no, it was, I mean, the entire economy was sort of different and segregated, right? They didn't pay people in dollars that they could use. They paid them in sort of company script. Script.

They lived in houses that were typically owned by the company where very often the wages that they earned just covered the home and the food that they ate, which very often was sort of at starvation levels. There was this weird way. And they had to shop in the company store. Exactly. Like the company script. The script kind of covered up for the fact that it gave people a sense of agency where there really wasn't any. Well, let's go further.

these coal barons had private armies in the form of things like the detective agency. And these were effectively private armies. Yes. And the unions had private armies themselves. Yeah. So you had like, you ever hear of this group? I think it was the dirty 11. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay. Well here's, let's get into this because I think that what, one of the funny things is that the, the culture, right.

seeped in to us culture in a way that the current lefties do not understand. And I think of myself as left of center, but I'm, I don't think of myself as a, what are these guys now call themselves as progressives because it doesn't seem progressive in any way, shape or form. So for example, our friend Christina Hoff Summers, uh, who is a feminist who associates with second wave feminism. Yup.

Um, you know, it was notable for saying that she doesn't think that the wage gap is what it is frequently quoted as being, which is a 25% discount for women doing the same work as men. Now she was protested, um, at, uh, a university in Oregon by a bunch of kids who are singing a rewritten song and it went like this.

No platform for fascists, no platform at all. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Now that song comes from 1931, I think, from a woman named, it's credited on Wikipedia, I think to Pete Seeger, but it's Florence Reese, who was the wife of Sam Reese, who was a union organizer who was being hunted by the army of,

union boss and they shot up her house. I believe she's even, you mentioned 20th century. I mean, this was like going into...

sort of mid to late 20th century. There's a brilliant documentary. It goes up to the 70s. Right. It is a brilliant documentary called Harlan County, USA, which I believe that she's featured in this documentary. She's much older at that point, of course, but she's singing the song in the documentary. And your point about private arms, this incredibly violent attempt to suppress people from demanding... Is this actual tyranny? This is actual tyranny. It's like corporate tyranny.

and people fought back against it, and of course sort of extracted some measure of wage protections, health protections, and so forth. With guns and explosives. No, let's celebrate this, because one of the things is it's very weird to hear people, I don't know if you've ever seen this cartoon where there's like a giant chalkboard, and it's got like a bunch of hash marks on it, and on one side it says like number of people

uh, school killings, numbers of people killed in schools. And on the other side it says number of times guns have been used to fight off tyranny, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And there's no, there's no hash mark. Right. And I think you guys just don't know anything. Right. You're just ignorant. Yeah. And, um,

the, and I'm not a gun nut, like I'll talk gun control, but I'm not going to tell my friends who enjoy firearms and the fact that it may be a hedge against tyranny that they have no point. Well, and if you think about the cultural legacy that leaves for the women who grew up in that part of the country, right? So my, my grandmother was born into deep poverty and Appalachia. She was born in 1933. She left, um, in sort of the mid forties, but kept on coming back.

And this is Glenn Close. Yeah, this is now being played by Glenn Close. But my my mammal, when she died, she owned 19 handguns. Yeah. And many of which were loaded. And we would find them sort of stocked when she died. We would find them stocked all over the house, you know, in a cupboard, you

in a wardrobe and sort of a coat pocket because she couldn't get around very well. And she wanted to make sure that no matter where she was, if somebody came in, she was within arms, arms reach of a gun. And, you know, for mamaw, like, I don't think she was ever a member of the NRA, but guns were part of her sense of her cultural identity. And women shot, man, they had to, these women were so tough. Like Florence Reese, how tough was she? And do you know, do you know,

I don't know if I exactly have my folkloric tradition, right? There was another song called Lay the Lily Low, which I think she borrowed the tune from. Okay. Which was a song about a woman who cross dresses to join the army to take care of her man. I don't know this one. Okay. So this is like the issue. Right. I'm so fucking fed up with the left because like, if you actually look at the traditions that you're spitting on, it's highly feministic.

it's violent in the face of oppression. It speaks to labor and inequality and redressing inequality in a very forward fashion. Yep. And now there's like this, um, we're too good for this. So my claim is, is that the word deplorable, most of my left of center friends don't understand this the way I do. I view it as the word for democratic apostates, people who left the democratic party, uh,

when I don't know if you remember Hillary Clinton went to Bombay and she said, well, the parts of the country that are productive voted for me. And I thought, okay, so you go to foreign soil to complain about those of us who are shit out of luck at the moment. And I showed you before we started. So yeah,

you mentioned the movie by Harlan County USA, or, you know, people can look up Harlan, bloody Harlan. There's a lyric in which side are you on, which goes, they say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or thug for J.H. Blair. Harlan, because it showed up in the song, I thought it'd be interesting to look at its voting pattern. And it was more or less blue throughout the 20th century up until 1980. Yep. And suddenly it,

the blue starts plummeting. And by the time you get to Trump, it's like 8% blue. And it's just, otherwise it's just Trump country. Right. And why did you lose these people? Because they started detecting, in my opinion, you correct me if I'm wrong, that they're not wanted, that they're, they're, they're backward. They're pitiful. They're violent. They're benighted. You know, the kind of people who might say nuclear rather than nuclear. And we can't have that. Right.

WTF man. Well, you know, of course they're they're all just racist reacting to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 It just it just took them nearly two decades to actually react to it, right? That's that's one of the things that's always falls apart about the white working class is just racist narrative is that they stuck with the Democrats Most of them well after the passage of the nineteen rights act maybe I'm ignorant. I

I think a lot of racists voted for Obama. Yeah, I'm sure that there were. I mean, I don't think racism is what people think it is. No, I agree. So your point about Harlan County, your point about the voting patterns, the deplorables comment, there's sort of so many reactions that I have to that. So let me try to organize my thoughts into sort of three separate categories, and I'll say what I'm going to say, and you can riff on it. Yeah, but we should have had alcohol here because I really want to hear your thoughts. I know, I know, I know.

Okay. So the first is...

a comment about the connection that's always existed between a sort of social and cultural conservatism and a concern for working class Americans. I don't like to use the term progressive because it's been so perverted, but a broad belief that we should be using various apparatuses of power to actually make it easier for working and middle-class people to have a good life, right? Call it economic leftism, call it whatever you want. That

That's always been deeply connected to social conservatives. So we're going to talk about Reese. One of the facts that I often bring up about her that nobody knows is that she had 10 children.

right? And she was a deeply committed family woman in addition to a union organizer. And the coal miners who were striking, whether it was in the early 20th century, the mid 20th century, they understood their occupation. And you talk to coal miners today and you still hear this. There's this sense that they're doing something that actually powers the rest of the country. Like Mamaw, my grandma would talk about the way in which

Coal miners won World War two they defeated Nazism They defeated fascism because what was powering all those ships what was making it easy for the American economy to catch up to Nazi Germany? Super quickly it was coal powered industrialization the United States there was this sense that their work was connected to their love of country in a way that I think most

left of center people are deeply uncomfortable with. I'm surprised by how uncomfortable people

who are left of center, who are under 40 years old are at talking about their country as if it's a lovable place that people could have pride in. There's a real discomfort with patriotism among the under 40 crowd that's left of center. Let's call this out because this is one of the reasons I think that

I'm allowed to hang out with you guys is that patriotism is connected to nationalism. Nationalism is connected to ultra nationalism. Ultra nationalism is connected to like national socialism and Nazism. So somehow it's like, you've got an American flag. You must be a Nazi. It's like, Jesus, did you realize what you did there? Yeah, no. So it's, it's, it's totally insane. Um,

But I think it's a significant part to me of what is driving the left of center disconnection with the white working class that used to be a real important part of the base of the Democratic Party. So that's sort of one category of responses I have to what you said. The second is that there is a way in which the narrative that Clinton tells about the

Left Coast or blue America being more productive than red America that it actually just is kind of true and

And it's also kind of false, and that's sort of my third point. But there is a way in which Los Angeles is a more economically vibrant part of the country than where I grew up. It just is. People make more money, they fly to more places, they have more economic activity. There is a real sense in which my party, I'm a Republican, I've sort of been involved in conservative politics since I was able to be involved.

where we still very often act like we represent the people who are in the most productive parts of the country and not in a lot of the parts of the country that have been, and it's an overused phrase, but it's true, have been left behind. And there is this disconnect. I mean, you know, I know, you know, you're sort of a guy on the left who likes to beat up on the left and I'm a guy on the right. I don't like to beat up on the left. I have to beat up on the left because I

Well, I'll say that. I'm a guy on the right who feels like I have to beat up on the right. You have to beat up on the right. I think the adoption of like a hyper neoliberal economics on the right has been absolutely devastating for the people who actually vote for Republican candidates to say nothing of their like moral claim to having a good life separate from what they do in politics. And I do think that this point about representing people who are not doing as well economically, it's sort of,

Out of fashion people don't like to be the party that has the parts of the country that sort of aren't doing as well economically and and I just really hate that I think that one of the the the shibboleth that needs to die in the Republican Party is that we represent as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan said in 2012.

the good noble entrepreneur who built their own business. And yeah, those people are great. And obviously we know a lot of them and I admire a lot of them, but they're not everything. And there is some dignity worse than that. There is some dignity just in having a job. Yeah. Whether it's in coal mining or manufacturing or,

you know, legal support where you do something that you're reasonably proud of. You put food on the table and you go home at the end of the day and you feel like you can look your kid in the eye and said, say, I did something. I'm proud of what I did. And I have enough material comfort that I can actually spend time quality time with my family. Uh, they're, they're, they're, they're just, in other words, I think there's a way in which, uh,

aren't comfortable on the right with the fact that workers are much more likely to be voting for Republicans these days than business owners. And that has changed from 40 years ago. And they haven't quite caught up to that. Let's talk about our mutual disease on both left and right in recent times. So to me, I have a theory which doesn't win me a lot of friends at fancy dinner parties, which is that

the idealism of an age is usually the cover story of how some small group of people has learned how to make money. So what we are living with in large measure is Davos idealism. You know, we are the world is a story about breaking your tie to your fellow countrymen. It's about learning to hate your country. Yes. Because I, why should I be shackled to some guy who,

you know, in, in Perry County, Kentucky, I guess we were talking earlier about Gene Ritchie. We'll get back to that, but yeah,

Like why is that important when there's somebody in Laos who can be lifted out of poverty and aren't all people. And like, I just don't have any of these feelings at all. There's this whole thing about like the Rawlsian veil. And my feeling is, yeah, that person in Laos may be just as maybe a much better person, the person in Kentucky, but the person in Kentucky is my responsibility. The person in Laos is not.

Right. And I have more responsibility for my family than I do for my city than I do for my, for another state. Yes. But there is a way in which like just the, the rings of responsibility, the way which we freed up this ability to make money recently was let's tell a story that divorces us from each other at a national level. And then talk about how we're going to uplift people in Africa and Asia so that we can ignore the people that we're hurting at home.

Yeah. So, and I think that's a left and right bipartisan effort to screw over our own countrymen. So I, I agree. And this sort of goes to something else I was going to say in response to the point about, you know, the, the labor movement and Appalachia coal and how it got divorced from the left. And I, and I think a big part of what happened is,

is that the economic trends that we both worry a lot about had a geographic expression that we weren't fully cognizant of when it was happening. And now I think it's just hit us in the face and it makes all these problems even worse, right? Say more. So if you live in Los Angeles, you're more likely to travel to Beijing, China or to Paris, France than you are to Morgantown, West Virginia, even though Morgantown's a university town or-

you know, Mingo County, West Virginia, which is a much more rural and sort of economically depressed part of West Virginia. There's a way in which the logic of a hyper globalized economy has made it harder for people to actually spend real physical time with their fellow citizens, right? So one of the reasons the military always worked super well is because it has this sort of forcing function of making people who came from all across the country

share a room together, share a mission together. And that was like a very powerful creator of national solidarity and cohesion. Not surprising, I think, that the Congress that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act was almost 90% veteran, primarily from World War II, but of course some folks from Korea too.

You basically had a generation that had fought together, bled together, died together, felt invested in something, and then they were able to sort of accomplish like one of, I think, the great legislative things in American history. You don't have that sense of solidarity because these people don't live with each other anymore.

Um, you are invested in the global economy. Almost by definition, you're invested in geographies. You're more likely to see that poor person in Laos because you own the factory or more likely you manage the factory. I don't think you lost me there. Everything else I was with you. Okay. I really think that this has to do with a giant memetic complex that got pushed out. You can never have gone to Laos. You're not really, I took your point about,

Shanghai, you know, Hong Kong, that's closer. Maybe Laos is too far. Okay. But look, there is some way in which if you're on this archipelago of bustling cities, you're closer in some metric to,

uh, between LA and Shanghai than you are LA to Bakersfield. Yes. Yeah. Well, even in just in G like the amount of time that it takes you to get to certain parts of the country, it takes you much less time to go to certain parts of Europe. And I think that's that, that I think that does have a really powerful psychological effect when you spend more time with one group of people and less time with another. Well, you know, I was talking to my contractor, uh, I was working on my house today or, uh,

maybe it was yesterday. And I was saying, he found out that I had this podcast because people that he works with listened to it. I said, you know, I have a huge following in construction and my take on it is, is that people in construction,

are constantly improvising it's it's a fundamentally creative activity yep you you're given some problem some somebody else screwed something up you have you have detective work to figure out what what was there before then you have a question about will this work will that work then there's the engineering problem so i view a lot of that stuff is much more um intellectual than a lot of the paper pushing because a lot of the paper pushing is just you you know you have to

to be aware of certain rules. I mean, if you're doing truly creative accounting, you might get go to jail, but maybe that's really creative. But a lot of what I see is that people who listen to this program are spread out all over the economic spectrum, but they tend to be grouped by art. The question of, are they thinking for themselves? Are they forced to think for themselves? Sure. And what I see there is that we're very uncomfortable with the

how the sort of new intellectualism shakes out. And because that's my audience, um,

Like when I went to visit you in Ohio, the person who shuttled me to you was a huge fan of the show. I didn't know. And working some very regular job, but super highly intellectual. And this is what he was doing with his mind. Right. I think we're nuts. I think we've gone crazy. I think we just absolutely can't bring ourselves to realize that farmers are wrestling with genetics and

that people who are working with their hands are very often solving puzzles at an incredible rate. That's really interesting. And we've come up with a, an explanation, which is that everybody should learn how to sign pieces of paper to make money, which is not how it works. Well, if you think about globalization, this is a very fascinating point. And if you think about the, the effects of globalization on, on what I broadly call the professional or managerial class is that it's taken a

People who, you know, by the objective measures that we have, SAT scores, LSAT scores, whatever, are sort of at the top of the cognitive pyramid. And it's fundamentally turned them into people who are more...

who spend more of their time finding labor and tax arbitrage than actually creating something new, right? So this is like my hyper bullish, sorry, my hyper bearish version of globalization is not just that it, you know, there's all of the, okay, so we lost 7 million jobs to China from 1999 to 2006. Like, oh my God, that's catastrophic, especially in the region of the country that I came from. I think you can see sort of a whole host of things that happened in the wake of that, the opioid epidemic, right?

rise in family breakdown, family trauma and so forth. That is all very, very bad. But an effect that we don't talk enough about is that, you know, you know this stuff better than I do, right?

Labor is a substitute for capital and vice versa. And if you're investing in just taking some function that already exists and paying a guy in China a third what you paid a guy in Ohio to do, they're not invested in creating new things. And so the tech slowdown thesis that I know you and I are both very much on board with, I think is partially, though not entirely...

It really is a globalization story because it's turned our creative class into paper pushers and the way that you see this anecdotally of course is you know I talk about sort of feeling like once I got to Yale my ticket was punched like there was this sense of relief that I would never face real economic scarcity of the of the kind that I had experienced when I was a kid and the weird thing is then you get to Yale Law School and

And everybody talks about how much they hate their jobs, right? Like investment bankers are the people who sort of won the meritocratic game. People who are working at the best 50 law firms in America, they're sort of the people who won the game. And yet they all hate their job.

And there's something very bizarre about that, about winning every single competition that you were supposed to win. And the prize at the end of the rainbow is a hyper non-creative and miserable position. So I think this is really something that I've been talking with Peter about for years. Sure. Same. And more or less the claim that I make is that every named occupation is over.

If you can name something, if you can name something that's a track, by the time you win that game, and maybe not the ultimate huge winner, but if you've more or less ticked all the boxes on your way through that track, that track is now so pressurized that...

you are weirdly precarious in one way or another, either you're working yourself to a crisp to maintain your position. And so maybe there's money rolling in, but in fact, you're actually not doing healthy things to your body, to your family. You're putting everything at risk all the time, or it's more, more precarious than you would imagine. So for example, you may feel that Yale law prepared you to have that, that secure position.

But what if you had gone to Juilliard as a cellist? Do you really believe that there's always going to be an orchestra? Like what if you mangle your hand? You know, I don't think, I think that there's this very weird thing. I started to hear about the precarious people. Yeah. I have never felt other than precarious. You and I both didn't do so well in high school. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, I, I trained for a position in mathematics and I just went through my applications for my first postdoc in 1991. And it's, I got rejected from all sorts of tiny schools, which said we have no jobs this year. I don't think people who say, well, you know, of course we'll be fine. I worry about the rest of the country. I think very often those people have no real talent.

honest connection that they feel much more precarious there's almost no thing that is low variance am I wrong or can you think of a named occupation which you'd feel great if your kid uh made all the hurdles no not not at all and I think the precarious point is interesting though I think it's it's it's related but it is separate from the fact that these jobs even if they weren't precarious are still kind of miserable

they're just not creative they're not interesting but the something you said is is it gets to sort of my my theory about a couple of the democratic presidential candidates and so there's this friend of mine his name is julius crime i don't know if you know julius but he wrote this article recently called the real class war of american affairs and one of one of the arguments is sort of interesting is if you think about you know there's this weird question

If you view it from 30,000 feet, why is Elizabeth Warren the most favored candidate of Silicon Valley in terms of donations? Google employees are donating more to her candidacy than anybody else. She's saying she's going to break up the company where a lot of their wealth and income is tied up. How does this make sense?

And in one way of viewing it is that it's a class war. Elizabeth Warren is the candidate of the precariat and their class war against the super rich. So if you think of her big proposals,

student debt relief and free college that doesn't benefit my family. Well, most of my family doesn't benefit. It really benefits the person who went to Harvard undergrad and then Yale Law School and Columbia Business School and has $300,000 worth of debt. There's this really interesting argument that Medicare for all, though I'm a fan of universal health care and sort of the abstract,

The question of how to do it is really difficult. There's this really good argument that in a society where the bureaucracy is as corrupt as ours is, that Medicare for all is basically just a massive wealth transfer to the hospital physician industrial complex. Right? So the question is like, does...

Medicare for all, you know, what what industry in America is the government effectively the sole buyer of goods and services? And has that had this massive monopsonistic deflationary effect on cost? And the answer is, of course, not the only example is a defense industry.

And so you can maybe imagine a scenario where Medicare for all is just a pretty big giveaway to physician networks and hospitals in the same way that our defense industrial complex is a massive giveaway to Boeing, Raytheon and so forth. And if you sort of tick off through the list of her proposals, they're not benefiting the top 1%.

but not really benefiting the bottom 50% either. They're really targeted towards the precariat. And I, and I do think that this sort of this dynamic in American politics is, is very important. So might this be like upper five figures to low seven figure families? That's sort of how I'm thinking of it. Of course, it depends on cost of living, right? You know, mid six figures in, in, in Google and, uh,

The Bay Area means something much different than it does in Pittsburgh, right? But yeah, that's basically how I'm thinking of it. You're not a person who can sort of make a living off of capital income. You still have to work for a living. You feel, to your point about being precarious, it's not just that you could sort of lose your job and lose your good life, but it's all of these sort of what we think of as creature comforts, but are really just...

things that help you establish some sense of social prestige in a world where social prestige is very scarce, right? So the best schools for your kids, you have the dynamic of, you know, the wives of iBankers waiting in line for two days outside of the nicest preschool in lower Manhattan because, you know, they

they just, that's like the only school that will both give their kids a good education, but make them sort of feel proud about what their kids are doing when they're talking about it at their dinner parties. And there is just this weird way in which the precarious

like the most unexplored political grouping in the country right now. Of course, most of them are Democrats. And it's very mysterious. Like, I don't know whether I've ever told you this crazy story, but when I moved to New York, we needed, um, preschools and I didn't understand that New York had gone insane. Um, and so there was a one preschool on the Upper East side of Manhattan that, um,

You had to call to get an application. And we then learned that you were supposed to get your entire family to call at the same exact moment. But it turned out that we were all calling the public number and that the people who were really supposed to go to the preschool were given a second private number. Like the whole thing. Screwed up as that.

It did have the effect of making me not want to go there under any circumstances. Yeah. But. Notchable there, but. But the, look, I think we're destroying ourselves. I mean, I think that, you know, if I look at my relationship to Harvard, Harvard is two separate things. One, it's a feather in the cap for people I don't give a shit about. And maybe they pay some extra money or whatever, but.

they and their douchey children, you know, can go inhabit the power structure and do whatever the fuck they want. I'm sorry. I'm hearing passion come out of my voice. And then the real Harvard, in my opinion, is not this power mad group. Yeah. It's like the actual smart people. And that's a resource. And maybe that's somewhat prestigious, but that's not the thing that makes Harvard, uh,

you know, makes you associated with sticking your, your pinky out when you, when you take tea to your lips. You know, there's the question about the actual geeks who push forward mathematics, physics, biology, and that's a different kind of glamor. You know, that's a, that's a very different world. I am furious that these two things are fused the way they are, because my feeling is, is that one of those things, which is this prestige game is putting the other one at risk.

Like these, this is where, you know, even what you said before about the creative class, I don't know who the creative class is or the smart class. I have better conversations with people who've left the educational system and gone and done something technical and unforgiving than I do with the people who study, you know, how to arbitrage tax regimes in different countries. Yep. So,

I guess I share your concern that the bad Harvard is affecting the good Harvard. Though I don't...

I mean, I lived it where the bad Harvard wanted to raise everyone's taxes and slash their benefits by messing with the CPI in the same year that the good Harvard was trying to say, Hey, there's an entirely different framework for calculating CPI that none of you know, that solves a lot of your longstanding problems. And I watched the bad Harvard hold the good Harvard's head under the toilet and

water, you know, until it asphyxiated. I said, okay, now I understand how the game is played. We have a problem right now where we're fighting for the soul of our institution. So I agree with you in that the thing that really weirds me out about the universities, especially the elite universities and

You've talked about, I think on this program, but certainly in, you know, in conversation with me about this sort of embedded growth expectations of a lot of these institutions, right? So law firms kind of make sense when, you know, 10% of people making partner, 10% of people are getting hired, 20% of people are sort of cycling out and you're sort of replacing the various people in the cogs in the wheel, you know,

You know, the same is true of investment banks, of financial firms, of companies, these sort of things. So many of them work in constitutional government, right? It works when the pie is growing and there are taxes to distribute to the priorities of left and right.

What is weird to me about universities is that they've become sociopathic even though they're still growing. Now, maybe the growth is like fake and everybody knows that it's going to unwind eventually. But like Harvard has an unlimited amount of resources basically. Yeah.

Relative to its unlimited is overstating it. They have a lot of resources, right? Harvard is not a law firm where the partners are sticking around and they can't hire new partners because they don't have any revenues coming in. Harvard's endowment grows every single year, probably more than they're paying their salaried professionals. And yet...

it's still so jacked up, right? In other words, like so many of these institutions that we talk about as being screwed up, I can tell a story about them not growing as driving a lot of why they're not, why they're, why they're not healthy. Well, but I think a lot of what this has to do with, why is Harvard so screwed up basically is the question I'm asking. Okay. Well, I refuse to answer that on principle because I do love Harvard, but I will answer why is Harvard, why is Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale,

uh, so screwed up and why, why are we left with only a tiny number of institutions, maybe Caltech in Chicago that aren't completely succumbing to this disease? Yeah. Um, I think it has to do with the idea that the generations, first of all, let me say something controversial. I think that the baby boom takes a lot of heat for the silent generation.

A lot of these problems began with the generation before the baby boomers. They tried to figure out how to save the world from stagnation and low growth. And when they couldn't do it, they started realizing, okay, well,

These fake growth stimulus techniques are sufficient to grow certain slices of the pie at the expense of others, if not the entire pie. And the baby boomers just sort of signed on to that and made everything completely insane. The weird thing about the universities is that there was a cultural thing. All of these people go back and forth between different universities with different levels of endowments, right? So here's the weird thing.

choose any one of the great research universities without knowing which one you chose. It is almost certainly headed by a baby boomer. Whereas in the 1970s and early eighties, it would have probably a 50% chance of being headed by a Gen X or, or a millennial. So they changed the retirement age.

And you couldn't discriminate on the basis of age. So now almost all of these institutions are headed by baby boomers. Without knowing anything further, I can also say that almost all of them have had the number of administrators on payroll skyrocket above the number of new enrollments. Their tuitions have climbed above medical inflation. The number of old professors getting grants increased.

has climbed relative to the number of new professors getting grants. In other words, there's one overarching story, which is a story of intergenerational warfare. And the funniest part about it was that

If you were part of the generation that had declared intergenerational warfare on the Gen Xers and Millennials, and then now the Gen Z crowd, if anyone mentioned what you were doing, you would accuse them of intergenerational warfare. So my claim is, is that Harvard could afford to buck this trend. They could lead, you know, oddly, I think Ohio state,

where you were decided to lead against the protesters who showed up in the office, you know, and said something to the effect of, we understand that you feel very strongly about your views and we're going to give you the right to go to jail for them. And you'll notice that there's no administrators, there's no office staff here because they've all gone home because this is no longer a safe space for them.

And by reading them the riot act, Ohio led the way and Chicago led the way saying, this is not a safe space. This is an educational institution. There are a tiny number of schools that are bucking this trend. Harvard could have been one of them, but Harvard doesn't believe enough in itself. And this is the thing that really makes me angry, which is there is a pride in believing in the United States. You know, what I love about your story is how many American dreams have you lived, sir?

There's one about the Marine Corps. Sure. There's one about going to college. There's another one about going to Yale Law. There's another one about working in finance and venture capital. And then there's another one about becoming a best-selling author. Okay. The reason that you're so out of... And a father. That's, you know... In an interracial relationship with, you know, the melting pot in your house. Yeah. Okay. You are the American dream on steroids, J.D.,

And the reason that you have this backwards right of center perspective is, is that it's worked for you over and over again. Like you have a weird ability to throw off the learned helplessness that the country is in. And I don't think that it's any longer impossible. I mean, it's still possible to do what you're doing, but the amount of will to buck that thing,

has gotten hard this is no longer within reach of the median individual the american dream is still alive yep but our problem is is that we've got to put it in reach of the median human being who is not going to do something this agentic and it's ridiculous i'm sorry it's offensive it makes me sick when we start talking about well you can always become an entrepreneur well

Well, okay. Well, what if I'm, I'm supposed to be a mathematician. I wanted to do math, man. That's a job, right? Okay. So maybe I can push pieces of paper. Maybe I can have a podcast. That's a crazy thing to train somebody in mathematics and say, Oh boo hoo. You don't get to do what you trained. No, that's ridiculous. If you train in this kind of a specialized way, because your government tells you that there's a shortage, just what you said before, right?

the coal miners, the steel workers thought they were part of a something. This idea that we are going to try to turn this into a pin factory in the market gives you your full worth by telling you what your paycheck is. Fuck that shit. I mean that, that is a destruction of narrative at the, at the hands of a crowd who have disconnected us from each other.

Yeah, so let's play this out in the context of Harvard or Yale or sort of whichever elite university we're going to pick on. Because I buy the argument that sort of the boomers, the Gen Xers have sort of screwed this up. And I'm consistently frustrated by when some campus protest happens and some administrator or somebody else sort of folds. But there's also the question of why those protests are even happening in the first place.

And it occurs to me that if Harvard did exactly what we wanted it to do and the president of Harvard in the face of some ridiculous sit-in in his office just said, you guys are children, get out of my office or you're going to prison. Maybe that fixes some of the problem, but it still seems like a lot of the problem with the institution is the kids who are there, right? Look to Chicago.

Yeah, I don't, you know, I know Chicago the least of all the elite places. Okay. University of Chicago, they are, they've become more and more and more important as time goes on.

because how much of that is selection bias that they've, they've planted the flag and said, we're going to be the place that isn't screwed up. And so they're just getting the non screwed up. I think it has something to do. There's some of that, but it didn't happen by accident. It was founded by the Rockefellers in the late 1800s. So it's a very recent entry. Like I think Stanford is kind of comparably recent. This isn't from the 1600s or the 1700s. This is,

This is yesterday. I think Chicago had black and women graduates and PhDs from the beginning. So they don't have a lot of guilt. And this is one of the reasons I think people ask me, Eric, why do you not go in for all of this hand-wringing about whiteness and reparations? And I think it has to do with the fact that my family's been giving at the office since the 19-teens and 20s.

so we've always been good on this stuff so i don't i i'm really not interested in in guilt and hanging my head and i'm not embarrassed does not chicago isn't embarrassed they've been meritocratic and they actually believe that women and blacks can survive in a meritocracy without putting your finger on the scales because they've proven it yeah right now that that kind of bad attitude

means that they can buck a trend that the rest of the country can't. Harvard, you know, has had uncomfortable relationships with Jews. It's had uncomfortable relationships with women. Sure. So of course it's guilty. Now with Asians. With Asians, right. Can't do anything. Right. Right. Okay. That's a big problem. And I think that that has something to do with the idea that if you're really meritocratic, you just don't have the same kind of weird guilt. Right.

Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that, though I still don't think it sort of solves the problem for why so many of the kids who are going to other institutions. I mean, I guess I'm getting at a slightly separate question, which is even if we assume that Chicago, for all the reasons that you said, has managed to avoid the most sociopathic tendencies in American life right now.

It'd be interesting to actually see what's happening in the hard sciences in Chicago. Like, you know, we should revisit the question in 10 years. What's happened to sort of their commercialization efforts in the hard sciences? It'd be sort of an interesting way to gauge how healthy a university is. And by the way, Chicago isn't healthy in standard terms when your unofficial slogan is where fun goes to die.

The point is you're selecting for kids who are just pathologically serious and not necessarily well-rounded. Sure. Like I don't understand why we keep asking for well-rounded applicants. Why do we want you to have started a fake NGO as an 11th grader to show us

you know, and why, why do we care about your Nordic skiing abilities? None of that makes sense. Cause we're, yeah. I mean, I, my answer to that question is that we're selecting and I don't like this, but I think the, the, the institutional answer to this question is we're selecting for managers. So I don't know if you're familiar with James Burnham or his book on the managerial elite,

But it was his sort of argument is that the whole Marx class war dynamic sort of misses that there are all of these like managers who are hyper technocratic, who in a lot of ways are sort of the most important. You might call them the precariat. I think that, you know, Burnham's managerial lead is very similar to your, your precariat. And, uh,

what what that sort of what's required for that skill set like think about this if you're going to be a mid-level bureaucrat at the epa yeah then well-rounded is actually pretty useful because you have to you have to be kind of a chameleon you can't be too deep on any one thing you can't be too interesting on anything but that would be

I'll take polymaths, but polymaths aren't the same thing as well-rounded. Exactly. Well-rounded almost sort of assumes a certain level of shallowness, right? Well, polymaths can be somewhat shallow. Certainly what you do is that you try to figure out what's the 80% that I need from that subject for 20% of the effort, right? Like it's a very much a Pareto aware approach.

thought process. But the key thing is what happens to the freaks, the mutants, the disagreeables, the people that we've used to power our society historically, when they can't get access to their own institutions. And this is where I get very revolutionary. My feeling is it's not your Harvard. It's our Harvard. Let's just, let's just break open the doors and let the freaks and the mutants play and get the douchebags out. Right.

Chicago is much more about that. And, you know, we have to appreciate that it's really important that MIT not focus on well-rounded people. Well-rounded is for the second string. That's for the betas. Give us the freaks, the mutants, the poorly adjusted yearning to breathe free. That's what we need, man. Oh, that's a slogan that can go on the statue of Liberty. I mean,

The thing is, I mean, I think that I agree with everything you said. I am certainly terrified of the quality of the research that's coming out. You know, I do like a lot of life sciences stuff.

And there's this way where I'm like super optimistic on life sciences because it seems like we figured a lot of things out that we have to figure out to sort of make next level innovations. While at the same time, the people who are getting an NIH grants like often aren't the most exciting young scientists. It's, you know, people who aren't that exciting and aren't that young. Well, look at the difference between NIH and Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes has historically been,

had more risk taking because it's not under the same administrative structure. Okay. So now start thinking about how do we fund a skunk works, right? For really crazy stuff. More DARPA, more. Yes. Like turn that stuff. Right. Take Jeff Epstein and all the sort of weird stuff he was doing and get rid of the creeps and do it as a government project. Right. We, we, we've got to realize that like, here's a great test in the life sciences. We should have a test.

Which looks at all of the disgusting things that nature actually does and if you look at biology Biology is absolutely abhorrent vile. It's vile Okay, it should be a test to enter any biological program that you can get the the analysis of these things right without a whiff of political correctness entering your analysis these aren't even human systems and

Well, yeah, I mean, but things are so broken, right? So I'm very good friends with a guy who I won't use his name because I wouldn't want him to get in trouble. You know, Democrat, certainly voted for Hillary Clinton.

Brilliant, brilliant guy, like a credible Nobel Prize winner in neuroscience and neuropsychiatry. They don't give it for neuropsychiatry, but that's sort of his field, right? What do brain circuits do? How do they change? And what does that mean for sort of various neuropsych conditions that we're still not very good at treating? And he's a brilliant, brilliant scientist at one of our 10 best research institutions. Yeah.

Now, I came across an article a few years ago in The Atlantic, and the basic gist of it was a very well-credentialed neuroscientist had said effectively that there are no structural differences between the male and female brain. And she said this at the Aspen Ideas Institute.

i forget the name of the neuroscientist but sort of a pretty easy article to google based just on that description got it and like i've invested enough and looked enough at neuroscience companies like i know that there are sort of some important structural differences in the amygdala for example i know that different hormones testosterone and estrogen have different effects on sort of different structures within the brain

And so I just emailed my buddy and I said, you know, this article like jumps out at me is kind of absurd. And he immediately wrote back. He's like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If we had a healthy academic culture, like this person would not be able to get away with saying these things. Like there would be professional repercussions for being an expert in a field, but being so wrong about that. Right.

But there aren't. And not even that. But she was at one of our most elite gatherings saying this. And he is saying...

This is both absurd, but you can't tell anybody that I'm telling you this. Because while every single neuroscientist who works at my university would agree with this email that I'm sending you, we would be terrified to actually say it. Well, this is what I can't. This is why. That brokenness. Like, I think you and I agree that that is there's something. It's threatening our entire literature. That's like threatening our civilization. That's like threatening our civilization.

But why is it happening like that is the question that I still just haven't figured out. Because, of course, if you want to solve it, you've got to get to the why. Well, let's get to it. Let's have the dangerous. I don't know if I'm going to be helpful here because I think about this all the time and I haven't figured it out. Well, let's imagine that you just look among biological females, right? And you just look at the ratio of the second and fourth digits as some indication of why.

you know what hormone somebody was exposed to in utero. And then you start to find some differences in brain structure. That's okay. Yes. As soon as it goes male, female, look, here's the big problem. Are men better at anything than women? No, don't answer. Okay. We know that we're allowed to say that we were better at peeing standing up, but that's it, man. Okay. Right. That would be very weird to have an entire gender that has effectively no function.

Comparatively. Yeah. Help it stand out for selection. What? That would help it stand out for selection. Well, if we're. So then you look at something like chess. Sure. Chess does not know male from female. And you can paint the pieces black or pink or you can put fur trim on them. You can do anything that you want. Yep.

You could pour money into it. I don't know, but I have this terrible statistic. I don't like the IQ and race or IQ and gender stuff. Sure. Neither do I, but I can't stop people from playing chess. Sure. And the chess statistics are horrible. Sure. I don't want to over-focus on them, but people ask this question. Okay. Well, what if it's a 99 to one of the top hundred chess players are male?

Now do I think that none of that is structural oppression? No, I think some of that is structural oppression. I'm no doubt that there's a path dependent thing where we've traditionally had boys playing chess more than girls, blah, blah, blah. Do I think that you would get to 50 50 in chess ability if boys and girls were started on a completely equal playing field? I do not. Do I think it's because girls are not as good intellectually at that? Not necessarily.

I think it's a very weird kind of solipsistic activity where you, you know, you can play against the computer and find it satisfying. Okay. Whatever that is, I've got too much information about a difference between men and women and a skill that doesn't appear to know gender, you know, from Adam. Now I have to retreat from the amount of information I have. I need something that is so strong that it can undo because 99 to one is just, it's too much. Now it's,

No one will be happier if 50 years from now this podcast is unearthed It's like can you imagine this guy didn't realize it was all structural pressure, right? And I just want to say, you know, congratulations to my future Critics, but I think that the problem here is we don't want to confront the fact that biology carries implications Yeah

Um, we have too much information about ourselves and it's in conflict with some of what I think of our best traits. I love the idea of all men are created equal. I know from marathon running that Ethiopians and Kenyans are not quite created equal either that, or they're very, very lucky or maybe they've just got more heart than the rest of us. Right. But you know, my brother's point is, or maybe they radiate heat really efficiently. Is that true? That's what his belief is. Oh,

well you know certainly if you look at a variable like height you know pygmies are not the same average height there's no reason that any continuous variable will have a mean value that's the same in any widely separated population okay forget forget iq you know weight height yeah it would be very weird and eskimos and inuit we're right we're exactly the same sure so we know this and we know

that this is going to get us into trouble if it starts to conflict with our founding fictions. And I love our founding fictions, but they're fictions. I know they're fictions. Every smart person's supposed to know that our founding fictions are fictions. You know, I always bring up the fact that Elizabeth Taylor apparently had a mutation so that she had two rows of eyelashes, which was pretty flattering. Right? So is it, is it surprising that somebody with two rows of eyelashes is pretty hot? I don't know. Yeah. I mean,

I, so obviously like I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of biological differences, you know, men are, well, so I recognize that it is socially disfavored, but I also just as a basic rational matter, understand that men are better at some things and women are better at some things. I have that part of my brain too. Sure. And then I've got, I'm raising a girl and a boy. Yeah. And I've got another part of my brain that's not at all comfortable with this.

I've got an inner conflict. And rather than saying like, I'm fine with this. And anybody who isn't is a pussy. I'd much rather say, look, this is a struggle, man. And the idea that you're just going to socially execute anyone who is struggling with these conflicts,

Like, you know, take multiculturalism. You and I are both benefiting from multiculturalism. I know that cultures are based on exclusion and multiculturalism is based on inclusion. So it's a conflict between the inclusion of exclusive groups. Now there's no question that like is tolerance of intolerance tolerance or is it intolerance? They're all of these puzzles that come with adulthood. Right.

And the terrible thing is being told by this kind of robotic army that if you struggle with these things, you're the bad person. No, it means you're a leader. It means you're possibly going to drag us out of our madness. Maybe you're going to upgrade the ideas that are behind the founding of, of our nation on around an enlightenment document. What do you think? Well, I, this is a lot of thoughts there. I mean, one, I, I do think that the, you're, you're right that,

there's a way in which, you know, if you're just focusing on gender, there are like obvious biological differences that you're still sort of allowed to acknowledge, like differences between average height, differences between average weight. There are sort of less obvious ones that I think that even 30 years ago were not controversial to acknowledge. So for example, I think the data is very clear that the,

average woman is much more unhappy right now. Sorry, the average mother of young children is much more unhappy right now with the time that she's able to spend with her family as opposed to at work than the average, you know, father of young children. And it's not to say fathers aren't unhappy with sort of the work-life balance issue, but if you look at the data, it's just very clear that women express a stronger, um,

dissatisfaction with their current waiting between the time spent at work time spent with kids now i'm sort of comfortable saying that because that's rooted in the data though i sort of acknowledge that there are people who even think that as you know structural or cultural that's sort of evidence some part of it's some part of it probably is that though i just don't think that there's any argument that all of it is structural well that's that's the point that you're constantly looking at things where

Some amount of it is probably structural and the people who don't want to acknowledge... Go ahead. Yeah. So there are two separate issues here, right? There's sort of the tension between acknowledging that there are cultural drivers for some of these problems and there are biological drivers. I wouldn't say problems. I don't think difference is necessarily a problem. Cultural drivers for some of these differences. There are biological drivers for some of these differences and so forth. But there's also...

That tension, I guess, has probably existed in every reasonable or rational person. But something about the way in which those tensions are resolved publicly in institutions that are in some ways designed to resolve them is really, really warped right now. And the fact, for example, that when Elizabeth Warren came out with her sort of big family proposal,

And one of the things was universal daycare, right? Like a lot of women in my family, a lot of women I know with young children are sort of saying, well, why are we subsidizing professional class? They're not putting in these terms.

why are we subsidizing professional class preferences when it comes to child raising? Because the idea of putting your kids in daycare and getting back to work as quickly as possible is something that's like very unique to our time and to the well-educated. Again, if you look at preferences, a lot more women would prefer to spend a little bit more time at home. Like why isn't that a reasonable policy intervention to our current moment? Make it easier for, I don't, I'm not even comfortable with well-educated. I want to say, um,

University well credentialed. Well, well credentialed. There you go. But why is it not a reasonable thing to say we should as a policy as a pro family policy, right? Make it easier for parents,

Parents of small children who want to spend more time at home to do it Why that seems to be a thing that's reasonable and to acknowledge that if you do that Probably more women than men are gonna take advantage of the option to spend a little bit more time at home as opposed to a little bit less time at work or of course you probably know this but one of the takeaways of Family leave policies in Europe, especially northern Europe is

Is that the more generous the family leave policies are, the more that women over time tend to withdraw from the workforce. And one of the theories for why is, you know, they actually enjoy spending time with children. And if it's economically feasible, a lot of people choose to spend time with their kids instead of at work. That is a reasonable thing for people to choose to do. And there are actual critics of

especially on the right, by the way, but I think you see it, you're starting to see on the left as well. There are critics on the left who say about those policies that they're

their anti feminist and pro patriarchy because their long-run effect is to enable Women to make preferences that they apparently actually have Now in here's another here's another version of this that I'm like really that really really bothers me So my friend Orrin Cass you've spent some time with I think he's a brilliant brilliant sort of right of center policy thinker He's made an argument

that one of the goals of American economic policy should be not just higher consumption, meaning more money in people's pockets to buy things, but a well-functioning labor market. This is one of the things that Warren is really into. And his argument is that a well-functioning labor market, especially for men, is a major driver of whether families are intact and stable. In other words,

For whatever reason, whether it's biology or culture, when men lose their jobs, divorce rates go up, addiction goes up, family trauma goes up. I'm seeing this in my friend group where so many men lose their footing in this treacherous labor market. Yes. And the home goes haywire. And we can't talk about it because in part, let's swim all the way upstream on this one, J.D.,

But, but anyway, so let's, let's do that. Just to bracket that for a second. The point I wanted to make is that the tension between how much of these choices is driven by culture versus structure. And I agree with you that it's both and in different areas, the waiting is different, but that is an issue that I think people of goodwill are sort of meant to sit down and try to figure out. But you can't even have these conversations in certain circles, right?

You cannot talk about family policy on the left right now in a way that acknowledges that the way that mother's preferences change is different from the way that father's preferences change. Well,

So first of all, you have, so you have to start adjusting, which is like my basic take is I want to talk about households that raise babies with two people in the household. Sure. Okay. They don't have to be male and female. They don't even have to be non, but there's like a breadwinner breadwinner and a caretaker because, and I'm going to just going to hopefully lose the percentage of my listenership that can't take this, but societies are about babies. Right.

Yes. And it's a society that is not about babies is not a long-term society. It's a dying society. It's a dying society. So all I know is, is that there's no way we could build, have built what we saw out of our window. And it was still light in one generation. Rome wasn't built by a single collection of adults. Yes. Okay. When you can't talk about babies and the fulfilling nature of babies and

Having had two of my own, it is very hard to construct work to compete with kin work because babies are frigging satisfying. They're maddening. I think we overdo it. We don't, we don't give women respite when they stay home with kids. Sure. And that's also true for gay couples where one dad is staying home or if they're two mommies, doesn't matter. Babies are fulfilling and yes,

If we can't say that. So one of my theories about universities is that we withhold tenure for reasons that we don't talk about. It's that a certain number of women will have children and find it more satisfying than the incredibly productive career. They used to be very engaged with. Okay. Now the idea is you want to make sure that they're essentially aging out of fertility before you give them a permanent offer. Yep.

So when you take your ovaries to work and the fact that you have, you, you're bequeathed a legacy of certain maternity and uncertain paternity, that's part of the human endowment. So mothers have always known it was their child. Fathers have never been exactly certain until the present. Okay. So now we have this situation in which females are built to invest in

in the continuation of our species differently than males because sperm is cheap and eggs are dear and paternity is uncertain. I feel entirely comfortable saying that just from the biology and anybody who doesn't want to agree to that is just incompetent and they need to leave the conversation. I'm not even going to bother having it with them. With that said, we now have a new set of issues, which is that let's assume as I do that mean intelligence is

for females is the same as for males by fishery and equivalents of some kind. Okay. What are we going to do with all these super well-educated females who now have this trade off? I think we need to start doing is to talk about the trade off.

Do you want to engage in kin work? Do you realize that there is a high probability that you will find this very satisfying? And I keep saying, should we pay women more than men because of the unincorporated burden of kin work, which they are asymmetrically shouldering. So I think what you see is that there are these sort of two constellations. There's the constellation that says, you know, we should base ourselves around adjustments to a traditional family structure because that was honed by evolution.

And there's another constellation that says we now know that we can using birth control, using paternity tests, get much closer to gender equality. We should start from something that thinks of us as a worker before thinking of us as a breeding engine and start from there. So whether the office or the Savannah office,

in essence is your basic idea of the point to expand around. I know that the solution is going to be more office than the Savannah would say, and it's going to be more Savannah than the office will admit. It's somewhere in, it's somewhere between these things. Yeah. And to your point about how fulfilling children can be, I just don't think that we can,

or I should say, it's very hard to overstate the cost to mothers and fathers of not spending an appropriate amount of time with your kids. And while there are real advantages to having...

you know, it's sort of a classic division of labor argument that you want people doing the thing that they're most inclined to do, that they're going to be most productive in doing that, that, that logic have taken to too much of an extreme. It doesn't just lead to a world and where, you know, where mothers and fathers aren't spending any time with their kids. It sort of leads to a world where you have, you know, the, the, the people who are of a certain social class are,

making and caring for all the kids, while all the other people in a different social class are the ones doing productive labor, which, by the way, is a world that we're getting much closer to than I'm comfortable with. So I share your view that you don't want to sort of cut people out of the labor force. My wife is a working mother. We have somebody who helps us take care of our kids. She loves her job. She's very good at it. I think it would be bad for the productive economy for her to be sort of taken out of it.

At the same time, I think it's bad for both of us to spend not enough time with our kid. And I think it's terrible for the kid as well. And we've got another one on the way. And I think that, thank you. And I think that we've gotten to a point in our society where we're simultaneously having a lot of our citizens engaged in work that actually isn't that meaningful or fruitful or productive on the one hand.

And on the other hand, we're having people spend more and more time on that and less and less time on things that are a little bit more fulfilling and sort of ultimately necessary for the sustainment of civilization. And one of the weirdest things about the American economy of the past 20 or 30 years is that for, I think as long as we've had good data on this fact,

Working class people tended to spend more time at work than upper class people. That's like completely inverted now. So you have this weird situation where, again, the managers, call them the precariat, whatever you're going to call them, are spending much, much more time at work than

And then they have it sort of any generation in the past. And consequently, they're spending less time with their kids. They're having fewer children. And I think that just makes the entire world of professional America kind of sociopathic and icky. And you go to the neighborhoods and Los Angeles is like one of my favorite cities. I really like it here, actually.

But you go to DC, I think DC has the lowest fertility rate of any major American city. Los Angeles probably isn't far behind. I think San Francisco maybe second lowest. Yeah.

It's bizarre. It's like a wasteland with no children. And there's a way in which it's very short-term productive because you have all these, you know, knowledge economy, quote unquote, workers in San Francisco who don't have to go home and take care of kids. Or maybe they have one kid that they can pay somebody else to take care of. But they're losing something about like what makes life worth living.

And I tend to think that that over the long term has really negative effects on society. So like there's this really interesting study that came out at maybe it came out a year or so ago, but it sort of tracked economic dynamism against fertility rates in different locations. And one of the things that consistently finds is that places that have more kids are more technologically innovative.

there's a good argument to be made that the most advanced Western economy in terms of technological innovation right now is also the one with the, it's the only one with above replacement fertility rate. That's Israel. That hasn't been teased out enough. The short-term trade-off between productivity and spending time with kids has made our society pretty wicked. Well, and I'll go further. I look at these millennials who are having trouble forming families, and a lot of them are about to go

you know over the border of 30 and and we're lied to by the way about how fertility changed sorry no no no no no go keep i'm just i'm emotionally reacting in real time go ahead well i've seen this with a lot of people in my friend circle my wife's friends and so forth i had no idea

how much harder. And my wife and I have been pretty lucky on this front. We haven't had to do any sort of significant therapeutic interventions on the fertility front, but it is just much easier to have a baby when you're 22 than it is when you're 32. And it's easier when you're 32 than it is when you're 38. I keep talking and I feel like nobody told. Well, and we need financial products to get young people money earlier in their lives. And I'm going to say, let's just,

maybe I'll burn all of my listenership. A lot of the money that P that baby boomers are spending on weekend getaways and new toys and third homes and second homes and all this stuff is actually money that you were supposed to be putting towards your children's security so that they can enjoy it while they're young to raise families so that you get grandchildren. Yes.

And this idea of we don't want to push anybody to have grandchildren. We don't want to push anyone to get married. We don't want to do it. I mean, I,

at some level, this is what, so this is what a self extinguishing strategy sounds like on its way out. It's so pure. It's so loving. It's so giving. It's so forward thinking that it doesn't make any sense. Yes. Right. Like in essence, you either care about things that go past your lifespan and just maybe there's a place to close it out and invite you back. I was thinking about, um,

how weird it is that the American left doesn't relate very strongly to the concept of the American family. It's something weirds it out just the way it's weirded out by the flag and an excessive patriotism. It's also weirded out currently by traditional families, which make up the majority of families. Okay. Yeah.

who was mother Jones? Like, why is there a magazine named mother Jones? Why those two words? Because there was an actual woman named mother Jones. And if I memory serves correctly, she lost a mess of sons. And so she had nowhere to mother. And so she decided that she was going to mother these dangerous bad boys of coal and steel and

and their fight for masculinity and dignity and teach them to fight like hell. And you know, I was thinking about this thing that you were saying about Glenn Close portraying your grandmother. This is another thing that makes me crazy.

We are supposed to hold up older women. Postmenopausal females are very rare in the natural world. In general, almost no species has them. Grandmothers and great grandmothers are super special. Yes. To say nothing of grandfathers and great grandfathers. The idea that you're honoring your own grandmother by getting Glenn Close to play her in a Ron Howard picture is,

There's a version of that in every family where we hold up our old women for all the service they've done at home. They're the celebrities of a house. And one of the benefits about doing your stuff, doing your work inside of a home and inside of a family structure is that you get celebrated as a super important person by a collection of people who've tracked your entire life history. Yeah.

And that really concerns me. That's the other side of babies. If you're not taking care of your grandmothers and you're not taking care of your babies, what are you? Yes. Well, you're worker bees and you're sort of living in like a Marxist conspiracy dystopia. I mean, this is- Even worker bees. Right, even worker bees. Even worker bees are taking care of the queen's

offspring who are more closely related to them than they would be to their own well there definitely is a way in which you know i'm obviously not a marxist but where i think that there's like a marxist conspiracy version of the modern american work environment that we all became sort of

hyper liberated and we could sort of, you know, buy and sell our labor on the free market. And we're in some ways sort of less encumbered in our jobs and more able to switch than we have been in sort of any recent period. And yet the end result is that it's made us much more willing to sacrifice ourselves to the interests of a corporation than for our own families. And I think that's really, really a key.

And I do want people with real choices as to whether or not to invest in work or

or in 100 professional work because like if somebody's on the on the trail of a vaccine you know i don't want to tell them no no you need to have two babies in order to make it happen 100 like i think it's super important that we one not idealize especially the 1950s version of an american housewife because my grandma told me it was very lonely yep it was not the multi-generational world that she you know her mother and her grandmother had grown up in it was very often not chosen even a little

And I do try to emphasize the point about choice, you know, whether it's structurally driven, culturally driven, individually driven. You want it to be informed choice. That was your 100%. But there is this weird way in which, you know, there's this curve of fertility rate versus preferred fertility rate. How many children are women having versus how many children do they want to have?

and for like the first time the past 10 years that curve is inverted so women are now saying they want more children than they are having and that was like not true for any period in american history that's pretty disturbing right we finally reached a point at which family preferences have become inverted against are you open to paying women more money than men

In order to renew our society, if that's what it takes. If it would work, yes. Well, I mean, there's a good argument that one of the real screwed up incentives that's built into our tax code is that we don't treat...

unpaid domestically. We don't treat homework as work, can work, for tax purposes. And that creates these sort of massive incentives to join the paid labor market as opposed to do the things that you might want. Well, and also with our divorce structure, you know, that it's much harder to...

Yeah, 100%. So there's the marriage penalties, all these weird ways in which a traditional family life is in some ways disfavored by our public policy. But you said something that really is important to me. One of the great things that I admire about Appalachian culture is that there is a prevalence of multi-generational families.

In a way that most, at least most sort of American subcultures, I haven't seen the same thing. Like it was super common for three or four generations of family members to live under the same roof. By the way, that was sort of something that public policy for certain parts of our country's period tried to actively fight against, tried to turn these multi-generational families into the classic nuclear family. This is your point about the Marxism, which is that...

You can be very far left of center and progressive and still hate Marxism, you know, which is where my family is. And the point there is when you start hearing the market fundamentalists say, well, why should you be allowed to die near where you grew up?

I hear something else than that, which is like, wow, you really want the market to replace the family. Because if you can, if you can bike to your, to your uncle's place, you've got a very strong fabric that can be an insurance policy when the, you know, somebody in the economy isn't fired, you know, you can do your work at home. Like there is, there is this issue that the family as an economic unit,

has to be reexamined because of the atomistic pressure in the previous era to disconnect ourselves from each other. And I just, you know, this is, this is sort of where it cashes out for me. We're being induced to see ourselves through the lens of capital versus labor, the market, our wages are worth, and this is, this is ending. I can tell. Yeah. So,

So one, I mean, strongly in the multigenerational point is especially important. You know, my I love my wife's family, you know, grew up in India, immigrated to the country about a year before my wife was born, just devoted to my wife, to their grandchild, to future grandchildren, just like very great people.

And you can sort of see the effect it has on him to be around them. Like they spoil him. There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren, but it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents. I don't know. And the evidence on this, by the way, is like super clear. That's the whole purpose of the post-monopausal female in theory. But let me ask you a question, not knowing the answer. When your child was born, did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up

in some huge way. She lived with us for a year. Right. So, you know, I didn't know the answer to that. No, that's weird. Unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman. It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the, the, the, the hyper neoliberal approach to work and family is that when we sort of got to the point of wanting a family, uh,

And we both just said, you know, my wife had a clerkship starting with the chief justice of the Supreme court. Right. And it was, it was about a year down the road and we sort of started doing the math. Like, all right, if we start now and we get pregnant early, like you're going to have not a very long maternity leave before you have to do this super demanding, super important job. And, uh,

Was kind of like and you know in hindsight, maybe it was like a little stupid But we had this conversation where he said whatever like let's just do it and we'll deal with it, right? There wasn't this moment, you know 70,000 years ago where the cavemen would say like I we've got a mayor We're gonna move into a better cave right or I've got I gotta get a better job hunting woolly mammoths before we can have this baby you just make family life work and

And it was sort of easy for us because my wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California.

Just took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year. Okay. So it was just one of these things where it's like this, this is what you do. The biology professor PhD. Yes. Drops what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah.

To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant. Painfully economically inefficient. Can I just propose a really- Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do. We got kicked out of our bedroom because my in-laws just moved in.

And it's like, okay, you need to learn how to do this. You need the relief. You need the help. You want to honor these two women by name at the close of this podcast? Yeah. So, uh, Usha Chilikori, now Usha Vance is my wife and Lakshmi Chilikori is her mom. And I love them both very much. And, uh, you know, life wouldn't be worth living with without them. Okay. And so in my case, my wife is Pia Malani, which some of my listeners will know, but, um,

Esther Silliman, who became Esther Malani is my wife's mother. And she's the one who moved in and showed us how it's done. And I just think that in part, one of the things that we need to do is to recognize that these are really celebrated roles. And that if you get any notoriety behind you, you should be able to say thank you and to put that out there. And I hope that this...

Glenn Close role in your own family. I mean, what a great honor for your grandma, too. Well, I appreciate that. And certainly it looks like Glenn, having watched the movie for the first time, really knocked it out of the park. So I'm very, very excited about that. But I'll say, you know, one of the things, just to sort of bring this full circle to where we started, is that the economic logic of

of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is, is to me, it's actually a consequence of,

a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. I think it's, yeah, it's the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market-oriented way of thinking about

What's good and what's desirable if people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. And if it doesn't, it's bad. I think that that entire sort of.

To me, that's sort of the root of our political problem. Families are maddening things, but we've had families for a lot longer than we've had offices. Yes, we have. JD, you're welcome back anytime. It's an absolute thrill for you to come and visit. His book is Hillbilly Elegy, soon to be a major motion picture. Fingers crossed. You've been through the portal with JD Vance. Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcasts.

And after you're done, head over to YouTube and both subscribe and click the bell icon to make sure that you're notified when our next episode drops. And thanks, everybody. Be well.