Dan Carlin: What happens when a nation’s truth splinters into 1,000 versions | Kmele Foster

0:00 In the old days when you used to say around the water cooler

0:03 that the New York Times says blank The New York Times might have been lying

0:06 to us that that might have been propaganda But was it better to have

0:10 a shared view of truth even if it was false than to have 50 truths?

0:15 And you can't even have a conversation now.

0:18 Right.

0:18 This is like having 10,000 reality choices where we are now.

0:24 It's like pick your reality.

0:27 [MUSIC] I'm Kmele Foster with Big Think and I'm delighted to be

0:35 here in conversation with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame, common sense.

0:39 I think of you as a historian, Dan, but also a kind of public intellectual.

0:44 I'm not sure which of those terms you more prefer or perhaps

0:48 you have some other way of describing what it is that you do.

0:53 They both sound wrong.

0:55 And historians absolutely wrong.

0:57 Public intellectuals amorphous enough so we can have fun with it.

1:01 But just your local neighborhood friendly podcaster with the Spider-Man guy say?

1:06 At the present moment,

1:08 the sensibility that a lot of people have is that something is a skew.

1:14 There is intense political division.

1:16 There is high even at the moment despite the fact that most Americans,

1:22 it seems, are beginning to identify as independents.

1:25 It still feels like there's just a sharp political divide within the country.

1:30 We've had a number of contentious elections recently.

1:33 We've had the results of those elections questioned

1:37 persistently on perhaps both sides of the political spectrum.

1:42 But I think most prominently after the 2020 race,

1:46 we still have lingering questions related to that in some people's minds.

1:52 And at the moment, the notion of guardrails,

1:57 constitutional protections and safeguards,

1:59 norms even, all of those things seem to be in jeopardy and important respects.

2:06 We have various cases that are testing the authority of the courts.

2:11 We have many people who are interested

2:14 in reforms that would forever, not forever,

2:17 but would certainly meaningfully change the composition

2:20 of the courts and their roles.

2:22 Is that what we're talking about when we say here that all

2:26 of these things feel almost not so much up for grabs,

2:30 but at least much more fluid than they have at any other point in my lifetime?

2:35 I think where we get into trouble with some of these things is

2:39 we're looking for, and I think it's the way we divide history books too,

2:42 where you have chapters.

2:43 So something happens and we realize we've entered into a new

2:46 era where I feel like there's much more of a continuum.

2:50 I'll go listen to some of the punk albums I used to listen to when

2:54 I was 14 years old and you'll listen to the dead Kennedys and the lead singer,

2:57 Jellaby, offers talking about the stuff we're

2:59 doing in Central America and all these things.

3:01 And stuff that this is all pre-internet, pre-digital, all this kind of stuff,

3:05 but he's talking about things that morphed into the now.

3:09 And that's when you realize how long some of these trends have been germinating.

3:13 That's maybe a good way to put it.

3:16 I would suggest that what we have now is the logical end result,

3:19 but being a continuum, we're not at the end.

3:22 We're getting farther down the road.

3:25 This is all stuff that to me, we were talking about,

3:28 and this gets to what you were saying earlier, in an amorphous sense.

3:31 That we're on our way to something.

3:33 I'm not going to talk about what to do once we get there,

3:36 because I don't know what it's going to look like when we get there.

3:38 But I feel like we've been on this path for a long

3:41 time and I could suggest that if we zoom out even farther,

3:44 when we know the story 10 years from now, 20 years from now,

3:47 I think we're going to be able to trace back

3:50 the roots of now to 30, 40, 50 years ago.

3:54 And that's always the problem, I think,

3:56 when we as human beings living in the story,

3:58 try to figure out what's going on, is that so

4:01 much of what's going on started before we got here.

4:03 It's like the old Marx line that you don't get to make history the way you want.

4:07 You inherit a world that was created by other people

4:10 and that has constraints that those other people were dealing with.

4:12 And then we add new elements, right?

4:14 It's their world from 1960 plus the internet

4:17 plus this plus that has changing moral values plus,

4:20 you know, and add a bunch of different things.

4:22 So, I mean, I feel like we're just in a more

4:25 intense version of where we were when I was 14 years old.

4:29 But those intense elements that have been added, the internet, social media,

4:33 all these kinds of things, they keep dialing up the amplitude.

4:37 So everything we were dealing with, for example, politically,

4:39 or what they used to talk about the 1980s and the 1990s is

4:42 trying to figure out a soft landing from the US post-war dominance, right?

4:46 The hegemony that because we were the one power that wasn't devastated,

4:49 that we were feeding, I mean, there was a sugar high,

4:53 a historical sugar high that we had after 1945 that inevitably was

4:57 going to come down as the rest of the world caught up.

4:59 But what was that going to look like

5:00 for the average American right on the street?

5:02 So I remember in the 1980s when we were dealing

5:05 with Japan starting to make cars that were getting into it.

5:07 I mean, this was all a very big deal,

5:09 but you don't see that as part of the larger picture,

5:12 which is the coming off of the sugar high, the rest of the world catching up.

5:16 And then you throw in these elements that have never existed before.

5:19 I keep bringing up the internet because to me,

5:22 that's the big, um, the big X in our equation, right?

5:25 The part that didn't exist previously, because otherwise as a history nut,

5:28 I'm going to attach this to similar circumstances in the past.

5:32 But that's the element that didn't exist before,

5:34 and that to me is the wild card.

5:36 And when we watch our kids starting to attach themselves to a computer

5:40 at the hip at 10 or 11 or 12 years old,

5:43 I think it's reasonable to ask what are they going to do?

5:45 And then collectively, what does it do to society?

5:48 And how does that change the dead Kennedys talking

5:50 about what they were talking about when I was 14?

5:52 You know, I mean, I feel like we're on the continuum trying to make sense of it.

5:56 And to me, it's easier for us to look back 10 or 20 years and now look and say,

6:00 okay, I can see what I was talking about

6:03 in the 90s and how that's playing out now.

6:05 It's so difficult for me to do a common sense show now because we

6:08 like to focus on solutions and clear thinking and all those kinds of things.

6:12 And I feel like from where we're looking at things in the mix,

6:15 I don't know how you do that.

6:16 I don't know how you do that, honestly.

6:18 Yeah, Martin Gurri had a book that I thought was pretty great.

6:22 And for me, it was incredibly clarifying with respect to just how

6:25 to think about where we find ourselves now called the Revolt of the Public.

6:29 And it's similarly focused on the, I think,

6:32 what it called the information tsunami.

6:34 And specifically, it's the Internet, of course,

6:37 but mass media more broadly and the Internet

6:39 making all of that so widely available.

6:42 So many voices being able to kind of communicate all at once,

6:45 the elites essentially losing the ability to kind

6:48 of have this monopoly on narrative shaping.

6:50 But the gatekeepers.

6:52 Yeah.

6:52 Yeah.

6:53 So that certainly feels like a kind

6:55 of fundamental element of what's happened in our politics.

6:58 I think that we have a tendency to think about the ways

7:00 in which say Barack Obama and Donald Trump are very different from one another.

7:04 But when you look at how similar they are to one

7:08 another in terms of their kind of ascendancies into politics,

7:11 Barack Obama was a political outsider who really wasn't his turn at the time

7:15 that he found himself with a democratic

7:18 nomination and then ultimately winning the presidency.

7:20 And Donald Trump, similarly, a political outsider,

7:22 essentially not so much a grassroots guy because he's very much a celebrity,

7:28 even before he made his ascent in politics.

7:31 But it was certainly not his time.

7:33 The party was incredibly resistant during his first winning presidential run.

7:40 And even in his second victory,

7:43 it seems that he was a very kind of surprising force to many people,

7:49 I think, even in his own party.

7:51 The expectation after 2020 was that Donald Trump was over.

7:53 He probably weren't going to see him again.

7:55 And plenty of people were surprised by the fact that again,

7:57 he was able to leverage a lot of the same

8:00 tools communicating directly with the public leveraging social media,

8:04 essentially establishing his own social media company.

8:07 And I think it's hard to understate just how essential all

8:11 of that is to the context that we find ourselves in, the fact

8:15 that it feels like it's hard to even find agreement about what

8:20 the actual facts are about circumstances that are going on right now.

8:25 But relatedly with respect to circumstances that have transpired in the past,

8:31 what is in fact true is something that's really

8:33 hard to make sense out of at a time when

8:36 we've never had more access to information and never had

8:39 more outlets that are at least looking into these things,

8:42 however well resourced or they are or not.

8:45 I always think of the Steve Bannon line flooding the zone with crap, right?

8:49 That that was going to be a little less pleasant than that.

8:53 Yeah, but the whole idea was how do

8:56 we conceal the important things amongst a ton

8:59 of unimportant things so that by the time you

9:03 figure out what is important versus what's not important,

9:06 it's already a done deal.

9:08 The fact that somebody has enough input into the public informational sphere

9:13 so that they can do that is a change from the old days.

9:17 You mentioned gatekeepers,

9:18 gatekeepers is the way we used to think about them, right?

9:20 And we would slam the fact that the gatekeepers, I mean,

9:22 I always tell this story because it's so indicative and young people always,

9:25 their eyes always get so big when I tell them.

9:27 But I remember as a kid in the 70s,

9:29 we used to come out of the supermarket and you

9:31 would see every car in the parking lot had been flired.

9:34 Somebody gone in Xeroxed, their messages,

9:36 they'd put it under every windshield wiper.

9:39 And I joke all the time to my kids

9:41 that that was the old version of social media, right?

9:43 If you wanted to get your word out, that was how you used to do it.

9:46 And you know, it would always be some cult or some weird thing that was,

9:49 you know, that you'd never put it.

9:51 The gatekeepers would keep from getting in the regular media,

9:54 but that was how it used to be.

9:56 You couldn't flooding the zone with crap was

9:57 a lot harder to do in the old days, right?

10:00 And I've had a lot of conversations with people is about shared facts.

10:04 This question about,

10:05 can you have a society where debate and stuff like that is important

10:11 if you don't have a sort of a touchstone where you can say,

10:15 okay, that's true because so-and-so said it was true.

10:18 And in the conversation, we all agreed that in the old days,

10:21 when you used to say around the water cooler,

10:23 that the New York Times says blank,

10:25 and that used to be enough to settle whether it was a fact or not,

10:28 that the New York Times might have been lying to us,

10:30 that that might have been propaganda.

10:32 But was it better to have a shared view of truth,

10:36 even if it was false, than to have 50 truths?

10:40 And you can't even have a conversation now.

10:42 So I've had a bunch of arguments with people about,

10:45 you know, the nature of truth.

10:47 Can you have conversations over things where we have different worldviews?

10:50 And I mean, that's the problem I have as a person

10:53 who likes to have a good conversation argument or debate today,

10:55 is we never get past the, you know, who are your sources or what are your facts?

10:59 We never get into what we would have called

11:01 in the old days the meat of the discussion, because we never get to, I mean,

11:04 we differ over the reality we see if that makes sense.

11:08 And the question then that I would have is,

11:11 can you have a situation where we're all

11:14 occupying our own little information or reality niches?

11:17 I mean, is that even a thing?

11:20 And I'm not sure, I keep looking for historical

11:23 analogies where we've been in other periods like that.

11:26 And I know they existed, but the difference might be you can find

11:30 areas where there may be an alternate reality.

11:32 So you have reality A that most people believe and then alternate reality B.

11:37 This is like having 10,000 reality choices where we are now.

11:41 It's like pick your reality.

11:42 And I can't decide if this is

11:45 an integral phase where we're like ironing things out.

11:49 So in 20 or 30 years, we'll go, wow,

11:51 that was a weird, you know, inner-regnum that we were living in.

11:54 Or whether this is the new reality.

11:55 And that gets back to what we were saying about,

11:58 how do you do a common sense show or anything to talk about

12:01 these things when we're still trying to figure out what it is we're even seeing,

12:05 if that makes sense.

12:06 I suspect it isn't quite binary,

12:08 but it almost feels like I could describe two possible futures here.

12:13 One where things get meaningfully worse,

12:16 where there is exceptional levels of distrust of all

12:20 of the important institutions where people are kind of finding their narrative.

12:24 Wherever they want to splintering all the way down.

12:27 I kind of call that now.

12:28 That's what I'm talking about.

12:30 But say it gets worse.

12:31 Say that gets more difficult to navigate.

12:33 And then there's another possibility,

12:35 which interestingly for me could be brought on by much the same forces.

12:39 There's this sense that there's nothing I can really trust that we develop,

12:43 but we potentially develop some cultural antibodies where we're better able

12:47 to make decisions about what is true and what isn't true,

12:51 where we don't become cynical about everything,

12:54 but become kind of usefully, functionally skeptical of a great many things.

13:00 And when I look around the information ecosystem,

13:03 I see the ascent of all this AI generated content, for example.

13:07 I know for myself, when I'm consuming stuff

13:10 on social media or encounter some news story,

13:13 I'm always asking the question out, is this real or is it fake?

13:16 And I'm not just looking for someone to fact check it for me.

13:20 I just have this understanding that not only could I be duped by this, but a lot

13:24 of elite talent who is supposed to know better could be duped by this as well.

13:29 And if we find ourselves developing those muscles

13:33 and new publications and new institutions start to spring up,

13:37 that can actually help us sort out and a fact from fiction.

13:40 It feels like that's kind of another very

13:43 real possibility and that there is perhaps some

13:46 reason for optimism at this point that we

13:49 might actually find ourselves in a world like that.

13:51 I mean, is that optimistic story something

13:53 that you think might be credible here?

13:56 I love your term antibodies.

13:57 I love your term because I think that's a good way to put it

14:00 because I always say there's a fork in the road always ahead of us, right?

14:04 Things can get better, things can get worse.

14:06 The better thing, because every time I bring something like that up,

14:10 somebody writes me and says, "Well,

14:11 it's funny you mentioned that I was going to get in touch with you." We

14:13 started a new company where we're creating a news app that will help you filter.

14:17 In other words, there are people who see

14:19 the need and are trying to figure out if

14:22 this is a problem that's been exacerbated by technology

14:25 can technology get us out of the problem.

14:27 The answer could be possibly.

14:29 The reason I'm doing a podcast now is I started

14:32 a tech company with some buddies back in the late 1990s.

14:35 One of the things we were working on is

14:38 something I called news based on your views.

14:40 It was going to be sort of like if you

14:42 think about a webpage with a slider at the top.

14:45 The slider allowed you to move the politics of the page you were looking.

14:49 If you imagine the simplest way to look at it,

14:52 think about left, right, and center.

14:54 You go to the webpage, it's a news site like the Dredge report or anything else,

14:58 and in the center is the default.

15:00 If you turn it to the left or the right, the stories all change.

15:03 It's a combination of stories that the left might

15:05 not have covered that you see on the right,

15:07 or it's the same story, the same headline,

15:10 but from a right-wing outlet or a right-wing viewpoint.

15:13 The goal wasn't to isolate you from the other side's viewpoint.

15:18 The goal was to educate you on just what you were saying.

15:22 How does the news media take an event like today's story?

15:25 The president has a near assassination attempt.

15:28 Oh my gosh, how do the different outlets cover that?

15:31 If you could literally shift on the same outlet and watch the story change,

15:36 watch the writer change to a more

15:39 conservative writer or a less conservative writer.

15:41 See how the headlines, see how the photos,

15:43 I thought it was an improvement on media literacy.

15:47 But you mentioned antibodies,

15:48 which is another way to look at it in more of a pendulum sense, right?

15:52 Because we have this need,

15:54 my stepfather used to say that the greatness of America

15:56 was this, we build a better mouse trap idea.

15:58 Well, that's the antibody idea, right?

16:00 The pendulum swings and we have this obvious need.

16:02 People can't figure out, fact from fiction.

16:06 We're drowning in misinformation.

16:07 Is there a need then that the better mouse trap can fulfill?

16:11 I don't know the answer to the question.

16:13 I just know that I think,

16:15 I could think of professors back in history class that would say that everything

16:20 that we're experiencing now is a version

16:22 of what we used to experience only worse.

16:25 I mean, when you think about the impact that things like

16:28 Gutenberg's Bible and moveable print and all that sort of things have,

16:32 I mean, it's a similar vibe, if you will.

16:35 A similar destabilization of the way things were,

16:37 and a lot of people wondering about what this means for us.

16:41 This is obviously, you know, amplitude-wise far above anything we've ever had.

16:45 But it's interesting if you use it as sort of a connection to those earlier

16:50 destabilization platforms and ask yourself how

16:52 we got ourselves out of those problems.

16:54 I think we have two different kinds of situations, though.

16:58 You have a situation in a non-free country where the people really have no input

17:03 and it doesn't matter what facts they believe

17:06 because they're not impacting the leadership decisions anyway.

17:08 You think like a Putin's Russia, or you think about our situation, or Europe,

17:13 or countries that are supposed to be democracies

17:15 or republics where the information and informative level

17:19 of the population is absolutely crucial to the system

17:22 working out the way it's supposed to.

17:24 And then you ask yourself,

17:26 have we created something that breaks our system if you keep

17:29 people from knowing what's going on by flooding the zone with crap?

17:33 And the answer to that question is unknown,

17:34 which is why I'm not doing a common sense show about it.

17:37 I feel like an observer more than an advocate.

17:40 I used to know where things were going.

17:42 I could talk about that intelligently.

17:43 I feel like I'm just along for the ride now,

17:46 like all of us are, you know, if that makes sense.

17:48 Sure, sure.

17:49 So we've zeroed in on the kind of cultural dynamics,

17:53 the rise of particular technologies,

17:55 this really robust information ecosystem that we

17:59 find ourselves in, which pretty fractured.

18:01 Robust is a nice way to put it.

18:04 But I want to talk about some of the other institutions,

18:08 and particularly our political institutions.

18:10 I'm very curious about something I've heard

18:13 you talk about in the past, executive power,

18:16 which is something that has expanded pretty reliably over the course of many,

18:21 many administrations,

18:22 and the current administration is certainly no exception to that.

18:26 They've made a lot of kind of unprecedented changes with respect

18:30 to attempting to do things via executive order and pronouncement.

18:34 I suspect we all know, but I'll say that Congress doesn't really

18:38 legislate in the way that it has historically.

18:41 In fact, it's largely kind of separated

18:44 itself from that responsibility and obligation.

18:46 They barely even pass budgets anymore,

18:48 which has forced the courts to do a great deal more.

18:52 So I offer all that as context for what I'm going to say next,

18:56 because one, the institutions were designed,

18:58 and there was an expectation that they would work together,

19:01 or at least be these kind of counterbalancing for the rest of the world.

19:05 But when the legislature isn't doing nearly as much

19:08 as it used to or was expected to, the executive branch

19:10 is doing a heck of a lot more than perhaps

19:13 it ought to, and certainly than it was expected to.

19:17 And the courts are, it seems, still playing their traditional role,

19:21 trying to adjudicate these disputes over what can

19:24 and can't be done under the law by the legislature,

19:27 what the proper restrictions on the executive branch ought to be.

19:31 But there is a lot of concern about whether or not

19:34 the courts will continue to be able to play that role.

19:36 And I'm curious about your thoughts

19:38 on that, given what you've seen historically,

19:40 if we've perhaps gone through periods like this before,

19:43 and you think things are about kind of normal where the courts are concerned.

19:46 And then I want to talk about executive power in particular.

19:49 And if you think that we've seen, again,

19:52 just kind of, you talked about this steady progression that we

19:56 can kind of look at history as something that, wow,

19:59 this unprecedented thing is happening.

20:01 Versus, yeah, we've kind of been on this trajectory for a while.

20:04 And certainly with executive power,

20:05 it feels like we've been on this trajectory for a while,

20:08 but it also feels unsustainable.

20:10 Well, the thing to remember about executive power is it is tempting,

20:16 and not just for the executive,

20:17 but for everyone who wants the same things the executive is trying to do.

20:21 And this is something where, I mean,

20:23 people get angry with me and they accuse me of being,

20:26 they'll say, you're both sides are, right?

20:28 Because every time, and I'm a devil's advocate, I absolutely am.

20:31 So anytime I go too far on one side, I always even up on the other side.

20:34 But what I try to tell people is

20:37 that it's okay to say that one party's been worse

20:40 in one respect or another at this time

20:42 or at that time on the question of executive power.

20:45 But when you've got a trend that takes decades and decades,

20:48 some would say going back to Andrew Jackson,

20:50 I mean, you can date it whenever you want,

20:52 but that's going to be a bipartisan thing.

20:55 And to me, the biggest issue,

20:57 and I have this discussion with people all the time,

21:00 not enough people pay attention to the fact

21:02 that the Constitution's number one goal is not efficient legislating.

21:06 It is tyranny prevention.

21:08 And we pay a huge price in this country for the inefficiencies

21:13 in our constitutional design because it's trying to keep those powers separate,

21:18 because it's trying to keep too much power

21:21 from ending up in any of the single branches.

21:23 Now, the truth of the matter is,

21:24 is if you want to make progress on any number of issues,

21:28 we'd be better off throwing that out the window.

21:30 That tyranny prevention stuff causes us all kinds of headaches.

21:34 But you see how much it matters when we come close to really needing it.

21:38 And I think that's a perfect case.

21:40 All those things that you bring up can be explained as attempts to try

21:45 to do a better job at passing what

21:48 people who are currently in the Trump situation, they'd like to pass it.

21:52 And they'd like to pass an agenda that people like the Heritage

21:54 Foundation have in one form or another been pushing for 40 years.

21:58 So the last thing that they want to hear is that Congress needs to interfere

22:02 more and slow things down and re-establish

22:05 guardrails and all these kinds of things,

22:06 which is the same thing that liberals would have felt like during

22:08 FDR's administration when he's trying to pull people out of the depression,

22:11 but doing so in ways that increase the tyranny potential, right?

22:15 So this is the, in my view, the problem we have as a country is

22:21 our inability to understand that we have a two-party system

22:24 that has developed in a country that has nothing

22:27 in the founding documents that design that at all.

22:29 There's nothing in there about Democrats.

22:31 There's nothing in there about Republicans.

22:32 There's nothing in there about Wigs.

22:34 There's nothing in there about Federalists.

22:36 The founder is disliked factions, as they called them,

22:38 which would have been their word for parties.

22:41 That's probably unrealistic,

22:42 but it's important to realize that what we have now and what

22:47 has developed organically over 250 years is not part of the design.

22:50 You know, when we talk about, and I've talked about this for years, you know,

22:54 when you get on the radio and you start

22:57 talking about wanting third-party members or independence to run more,

23:00 boy, do you get a lesson in how hard that is?

23:04 Because over 250 years,

23:05 the two parties have managed to give themselves, let's call it,

23:09 it's like an automatic tournament berth in like

23:12 a basketball tournament or something like that.

23:14 The Democrat Republican automatically get in, somebody else has to really,

23:18 really be extraordinary to make it in there, and that's wrong.

23:21 And what it does is it, my stepdad would say it's a competition question.

23:25 We can't get better anymore because if

23:27 you don't like the Donald Trump administration,

23:29 then you get to be pushing the Chuck Schumer side of things.

23:33 And there was a great book.

23:36 This is actually on point,

23:38 but there was a book by a Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig.

23:41 He's made it free.

23:41 It's on the internet now, if you want it.

23:44 It's called Republic Lost.

23:45 And I love the way he designed the book because it's

23:48 supposed to show you the problems that have developed in our system.

23:51 And he understands that because the problems are bipartisan,

23:54 that the arguments need to be bipartisan also.

23:56 So every page is sort of set up so that you

23:59 have the left-wing argument for what he's saying on one

24:01 side of the page and the right-wing argument for what

24:04 he's saying on another because unless you're a corrupt person yourself,

24:07 or unless you don't think you can ever get what you want done past,

24:11 because most people don't want it,

24:12 then you don't benefit from a corrupt system either.

24:15 And what Lessig was trying to point out is that both

24:18 of our parties have over time become

24:21 embedded in this system, where, for example,

24:23 he says, what is it that gets you promoted from the local mayor,

24:27 who's a Democrat or Republican, to move up through the party?

24:31 And he eventually, you know, spoiler alert, he points out that it's fundraising,

24:35 that what you've proven to be good at throughout your rise in the party

24:39 power structure is you're good at bringing

24:41 people together who will then give money,

24:43 who will then help the party, who will...

24:44 You know, it all makes sense when it's explained that way,

24:47 but the bottom line is these people that get up to the top positions of power,

24:50 Donald Trump accepted because he's not part of that system,

24:53 but these are people who didn't demonstrate fantastic leadership skills.

24:56 They didn't demonstrate the ability to work across the aisle.

24:59 They didn't demonstrate the ability to come up

25:01 with really unique and groundbreaking and interesting legislation.

25:03 They were fundraisers.

25:04 And so I feel like when you look at the leadership now and you say,

25:10 well, why aren't they pushing harder against the executive branch, for example?

25:13 Most of them, and I say most of them because it's hundreds of people, right?

25:16 There's a whole bunch of different...

25:18 But most of them aren't those kind of people.

25:20 They weren't picked for those reasons.

25:22 Those are not their strong points.

25:23 They don't really want that most of them.

25:25 I mean, they may want to get done what they want to get done, but that's not...

25:30 These aren't ideologues, most of them.

25:31 And you can see it because they often give up the opportunities

25:35 to really push what they say they believe in for other things.

25:39 And this is why, for example,

25:41 if these people really cared about the institution of Congress,

25:44 or they cared about the guardrails, or they cared about the Constitution,

25:47 then you would never see the President able

25:50 to go to war without Congress screaming and yelling.

25:52 The fact that they don't is a sign that they don't want to, right?

25:57 And they don't want to because they've

25:59 worked out that there's no advantage for them.

26:01 If I make the President get my declaration of war,

26:05 if I'm a Congressman or a Senator, how does that help me?

26:08 It helps the institution, helps the country, does what it's supposed to do,

26:12 but me personally, that just gets me in potential trouble.

26:15 Right, you're on the hook for the decision.

26:17 Yeah, the war goes sideways, I'm in on it, right?

26:19 On the other hand, I can do something like just say,

26:22 I'll give an authorization to this and that.

26:24 And then if it goes sideways, I can claim,

26:26 well, that's not what I signed up for.

26:28 If it's good, I can say I was in the whole way.

26:30 In other words, the Founders believed

26:32 that the various ambitions of all the people, men mostly in their day, right,

26:37 in these different branches of government would counterbalance one another.

26:40 My pride would counterbalance your pride, my sense of, you know,

26:44 and it does work that way sometimes for a while, but somewhere down the road,

26:49 people figured out that I can have all

26:51 of the perks that matter to me in this job

26:53 without any of the things that are a pain in the rear for me in this job.

26:58 And when that happens, I think you start getting different people.

27:01 I can remember several different eras in legislative history

27:04 where you would see a great leaving of competent,

27:08 experienced people who just said,

27:10 I can't operate in this environment anymore, or Congress has become too divided,

27:14 or fundraising's too much a part of my job.

27:16 And I remember several eras where you would see it just as sort

27:20 of an influx of people just leaving because this isn't what they signed up for.

27:25 Well, then my question is,

27:26 is it those people signed up for the reasons we want them

27:28 to sign up for and left because they can't do that anymore?

27:32 What are the people who take their place doing, right?

27:35 And over a period of time, then,

27:37 do you end up replacing people who at least mentally are trying to do

27:41 what we think they're supposed to do in that job with people who don't care,

27:45 who aren't leaving because it doesn't bother

27:47 them as much as it bothered their predecessor?

27:49 Well, what do you end up with?

27:50 There's a great line from the movie, The Untouchables,

27:53 the remake with Sean Connery and Kevin Costner and stuff,

27:56 and they're trying to deal with a corruption issue in Chicago

27:59 in a courtroom because the Al Capone types had bought the jury.

28:04 And the real famous moment in the movie is when,

28:07 because the jury's been bought, they can't get Capone and whatever,

28:11 and they come in and they bring

28:13 in all the jury replacement members that aren't corrupt,

28:16 and then that changes everything, right?

28:18 It's essentially like replacing your corrupt

28:19 government with a non-corrupt government overnight.

28:21 And I remember thinking, that's kind of what we need.

28:25 I mean, there's an old line William F.

28:27 Buckley said, we do better if you just simply went down

28:29 the phone book and randomly picked a name and made that person,

28:33 your Senator or Congress person.

28:34 Well, that might have been hyperbole once upon a time, and it still may be,

28:38 I don't know, but eventually, if things go the way they're going now,

28:41 you're going to look and you go, Joe Smith from, you know,

28:44 Wisconsin might be a better choice than some of these people.

28:47 That we've got right now.

28:49 And at that point, when random is better than the selection process we have now,

28:54 I'd say that that's an interesting point we've come to in our history too.

28:57 Sure.

28:57 No, I think that makes a lot of sense.

28:59 I want to retreat back to something you said,

29:01 right at the beginning of your response about kind of both sides.

29:05 It seems to me that when someone is alleging both sides,

29:08 they probably ought to be trying to make some determination as to whether

29:11 or not you're offering some useful context

29:13 for trying to better understand the circumstance,

29:16 or whether you're trying to kind of obfuscate

29:20 the situation and help someone escape culpability by saying,

29:24 but what about what they're doing?

29:25 And they do that online all the time, by the way.

29:28 Of course.

29:28 I think we see that we see that latter thing all the time.

29:31 I think we really don't see quite enough of people trying

29:34 to excavate some additional context related to something else or find this trend

29:41 line that may run through both parties because that's a heck

29:44 of a lot less satisfying for someone who is in fact a partisan.

29:48 I don't want to believe that I am somehow even

29:51 partly responsible for the way that things are right now.

29:54 And I think that the point

29:56 that you made about Congress is exceedingly important.

29:58 I mean, the President has enjoyed,

30:01 and we've seen this a few times recently, actually, having, you know,

30:05 pretty much control of Congress and the White House

30:08 and a fairly compliant Supreme Court in the sense

30:11 that it's conservative and still decides to try to go

30:14 it alone in a bunch of instances because one, it's easier, but two,

30:18 it does kind of offer some cover for Congress

30:21 persons who may not be excited about all of this.

30:24 It's been very interesting to see Republicans become less remarket oriented,

30:29 more populist and more enthusiastic about things like tariffs.

30:33 And I say enthusiastic.

30:35 The enthusiasm seems to come from the White House.

30:37 Congress for the most part is just kind of mum on the issue for the most part.

30:43 And seems to comply with his desire without raising too much of a fuss.

30:47 And it feels like a lot of our politics kind of functions in that way.

30:50 Certainly, the most recent conflict in Iran

30:53 seems to function in that way as well,

30:56 where there might be some concern expressed about it,

30:58 but there isn't really an interest in Congress flexing its muscles,

31:02 asserting its authority, its proper authority in that instance,

31:06 and trying to direct the course of things.

31:08 I don't know if you had an additional response on that or you

31:11 kind of were cool moving along to a different topic,

31:13 but I would love your feedback.

31:15 What the president is doing now is

31:18 he's not breaking down walls that didn't exist.

31:22 He's breaking down walls.

31:23 We pretended existed, but didn't.

31:26 And this is what we were screaming about for years

31:30 on the Common Sense show is that if you don't use these powers,

31:35 for example, Congress's authority to declare war, at what point do they go away?

31:41 There are actually some legal theories out there about the US Constitution

31:45 that would suggest that if a power is not used long enough,

31:48 and if you're comfortable and you do it a certain way for decades,

31:52 it's almost a little like how some

31:54 states assume if you're living with somebody else,

31:55 if you're living with somebody for seven years, it's community property, right?

31:58 If you don't declare war for 40 or 50 years,

32:01 it's kind of like, backed into the Constitution in an unwritten way.

32:05 But everybody sort of, like I remember

32:08 seeing it during the second Bush administration,

32:11 where they went to Congress for an authorization for the war in Iraq,

32:16 but made, it was almost like their little

32:18 signing statement out that they used to do too,

32:21 where they would say, "We're coming to you for this authorization,

32:24 but we are saying explicitly that we don't think we

32:27 have to come to you for this authorization." In other words,

32:29 we're not saying that we require this, but we're going to be...

32:32 And Congress was cool with that, too.

32:34 In other words, we're all cool with pretending we still need to do this.

32:38 But that's a fig leaf.

32:40 Now, when the president currently says,

32:42 "I'm not even going to play that fake game," and everybody's in an uproar,

32:46 what we're doing here is defending the fig leaf of protocol.

32:49 And I was having a conversation with the buddy asking whether or not there's

32:53 a refreshingness to simply throwing it out

32:56 and saying it was never there to begin with.

32:58 That was not really a guardrail.

32:59 We were making ourselves feel better at the end of the day,

33:01 pretending it was a guardrail,

33:03 better to know it's not and deal with it, versus, "Hey,

33:06 even the fig leaf of protocol acknowledges

33:09 that there was a protocol and that that's better

33:12 than no fig leaf of protocol at all." I don't know the answer to that question,

33:16 but I think that that's what this president has done.

33:19 He's just said, "None of this ever mattered in the last 20, 30, 40 years anyway.

33:23 I'm not going to pretend it matters.

33:24 Screw you, Congress." And Congress has kind of gone,

33:28 "You can't do that." And here's the problem,

33:31 and this is where you'll see it on the Internet, too.

33:33 I get so upset with that both sides-arism

33:35 approach on the Internet because someone will say, "Well,

33:38 you didn't say something when Barack Obama killed

33:41 Anwar Al-Al-Liki with a drone." Which, by the way,

33:44 I did say something when that happened, but the point is that if you don't see

33:49 how that at least gives the other side an argument,

33:52 which is what they're using now, right?

33:54 Where were you?

33:54 Nobody ever sits on the Internet and says, "Well,

33:57 you know what sure Obama did that, too,

33:59 but let's talk about the policy." That never happens.

34:02 Again, when we were talking earlier about how you never can have a good

34:05 discussion anymore because we just get hung up over truth and fact and sources,

34:08 this is this way, too.

34:10 We never talk about whether it was good to drone an American citizen like that.

34:13 We just say, "Well, Obama did it, too.

34:15 So how could you have a leg to stand on?" Okay,

34:17 can we have the discussion about whether any of them should have done it?

34:21 And that's the problem I have with the partisan lines here,

34:24 is that you can't have that cross-party discussion.

34:26 And you mentioned something earlier that made me think about the word,

34:30 "I like to use a lot in this situation." It's empathy.

34:33 Try to put yourself in the other guy's shoes.

34:36 And what I say is, if you are cutting your own person some slack,

34:41 that you would not cut this person from the other side,

34:44 then you're a political hypocrite.

34:45 And that is what all of these people online, by the way, when they say,

34:49 "Where were you when someone so was

34:50 doing it?" That's what they're implying, right?

34:52 You're a political hypocrite.

34:53 The question is, is how do we break out?

34:55 There's an old line, I don't know if Gandhi really said it,

34:58 but it said it in the movie, right, where he said,

35:01 "I know a way out of hell." What is the way

35:04 out of hell in this problem that we have for us,

35:08 this political hypocrisy, this inability to say,

35:10 "Hey, let's not criticize Trump for doing this because Obama did it, too,

35:14 and I didn't yell when he did it." But that's why I

35:17 get to both sides of your tag when I point out that, "Listen,

35:20 we got here, and I can say it up for it.

35:22 I think the Republicans are worse than the Democrats over

35:24 the last 30 or 40 years." But that doesn't change anything.

35:27 If I elected Democrats the whole time,

35:29 I don't think we're that far from where we are now anyway, right?

35:32 Once we have this fig leaf of protocol problem,

35:34 unless you mentioned the two forks in the road,

35:37 right, getting better, getting worse,

35:38 unless you're going to have somebody that says,

35:40 "elect me and I'm going to put the guardrails back up,

35:43 I don't know how we fix that, and no one's going to want

35:46 the guardrails back up when there's guys in power because it's counterintuitive.

35:49 If you say, "elect me and I'm going to give up some

35:53 presidential power back to Congress," which may be run by the opposite party,

35:56 by the way, "Who's going to elect me?" So that's where we get down this road,

36:00 "Can we make things better or aren't things going to get worse?

36:03 We're required to do some pretty counterintuitive

36:06 things as an electorate to make things better.

36:08 Are we capable of doing that?" I don't know.

36:11 Mark Cuban said two days ago something about he's had it with both parties.

36:15 Yay!

36:16 What can we do about that?

36:17 And I don't want to pretend that multi-party

36:20 systems are an answer to the question.

36:22 I think the reasons Netanyahu and Israel are so extreme right

36:25 now is because he's got minor parties dragging him into these.

36:29 So there's no panacea when it comes to multiple parties,

36:33 but our duopoly in this country right now is messing with the part

36:36 that I was always told was part of the genius of America by my stepdad.

36:40 He said, "What makes us geniuses, we get better through competition.

36:43 We've got Hertz and Avis here,

36:45 and there's no incentive for anyone to be any better than 1% better than

36:50 the next guy." And I think that maybe

36:53 helps explain our political decline as a system.

36:56 Yeah, so much there.

36:57 I mean, one thought that I had that was triggered by something

37:00 you said a moment ago is just about the sense of existential peril,

37:04 like persistent existential peril that our politics has been.

37:07 It feels like just kind of overwhelmed by both sides

37:14 of our political divide here are insisting routinely that if they win,

37:20 that's kind of it for us.

37:23 And I can appreciate why someone might make those arguments.

37:27 I can give some credibility to both sides.

37:30 Here I am.

37:32 Give some credibility to both sides and say, "Okay, maybe you're right.

37:35 Maybe you're right." But it also feels

37:37 like if we're going to have a conversation

37:39 or we're going to think about politics through

37:41 that empathy lens that you mentioned a moment ago,

37:43 or we really try to put ourselves

37:45 and the other person's shoes in a meaningful way,

37:47 it's much harder to do that when we imagine

37:50 that what we're facing is kind of an existential crisis,

37:54 a set of policy proposals that will forever change the country

37:59 in a way that we simply can't come back from.

38:02 It may be the case that it's appropriate to talk in that sort of way.

38:08 It often, however, to me feels like we are engaging in a sort of hyperbole,

38:14 and that it's probably better to embrace this Adam

38:18 Smith dictum that there is much ruin in a nation.

38:22 And however bad we might imagine things to be,

38:24 the reality is that the country's pretty resilient.

38:27 We tend to come out on the other side of these things.

38:30 There's an ability to recalibrate,

38:31 and we at least embrace that sort of perspective.

38:35 It feels like maybe there's an opportunity

38:37 to have a more constructive sort of conversation about

38:40 our politics and about where things stand and how

38:43 we might make navigate our way through things.

38:46 Because as you mentioned,

38:47 I don't know that multiplying the number of parties is necessarily going to fix

38:52 this, and I don't have an expectation that they

38:55 will kind of correct themselves on their own.

38:58 But if the electorate is much more engaged than these conversations

39:03 and can do it in a way that is perhaps a little less,

39:07 a little more dispassionate is perhaps the right way to say

39:10 that there might be an opportunity for more fruitful political engagement.

39:14 Oh, God, there's like five things I want to say about this.

39:17 I'm never going to remember all of them

39:19 because they're all on five different paths.

39:22 The first thing is, and remind me about this, but we're not

39:26 incentivized to keep the level of heat in our political culture down.

39:29 The incentivization all runs the other direction.

39:31 Sure.

39:31 But let me, I want to play off something I

39:34 just said because I'm going to talk about political empathy,

39:36 and I can hear a friend of mine saying,

39:38 you're asking me to empathize with people who

39:40 don't think I should even be allowed to exist.

39:42 And I wanted to address that for a minute because that's a very logical point.

39:46 So take for example something that I got wrong,

39:49 and I talked about this quite a bit because

39:52 I saw things like the racism of my youth,

39:55 and I grew up during the busing era and all in the family,

39:59 all that stuff where society is trying

40:01 to iron out a whole bunch of long-term problems.

40:03 It's been dealing with it, and iron it out publicly, right?

40:06 And I, like many of my generation,

40:08 thought that we were looking at a generational problem,

40:11 that these were people from another time period that were slowly aging out,

40:15 and that as they aged out, we would have a different reality when it came

40:19 to things like race and all those kinds of things.

40:22 And of course, obviously, completely wrong on all of those fronts,

40:26 but I'm interested in why I was completely wrong on all those fronts.

40:29 And one of the things I think deserves a tie in here is if you

40:33 look at the people who think that race

40:35 is really important on a white person level,

40:37 a lot of those people like the Trump administration.

40:40 Well, why are they voting for that?

40:42 And why are, as the racism risen up,

40:45 I told a story to you when we talked earlier about

40:49 an interview I did with a Croatian during the Yugoslavian Civil War,

40:54 and I had known the history of the region and how there's

40:57 these ancient hatreds between some of the people who are in the world.

41:00 And I brought it up to the guy and he just stopped me dead.

41:02 And he said, "All of that was going in the other direction.

41:05 All of that was trending.

41:06 We were having movies made about Serbian

41:08 girls falling in love with Croatian boys.

41:10 You know, it was going their version of the all

41:12 in the family Archie Bunker route, right?" He said,

41:15 "But then the economy turned." He said,

41:17 "And demagogues found that they could get power by playing with the old hatreds,

41:21 blame your economic situation on the ancient people

41:24 we've never liked." And he said it was

41:26 like pouring gasoline on a bunch of glowing

41:29 coals that you thought were burned out already.

41:31 And it just flared right up because

41:33 it's an ancient tool that demagogues can use.

41:35 I think you can play in the ancient hatreds.

41:38 But the ancient hatreds come up because other reasons arise,

41:41 economic in the former Yugoslavian he was suggesting.

41:44 Well, you could make a kind of a tie

41:47 in here that the party that's benefiting from, let's call them,

41:51 disaffected, disenfranchised whites in the American Rust Belt,

41:53 voting for the Trump administration.

41:55 What if we could have helped those people

41:57 four or five administrations ago in the Rust Belt, not end up in the Rust Belt?

42:02 Are those people in a different place that you had mentioned earlier about

42:05 the importance of each of these elections

42:07 and how we've heard now for a generation?

42:09 This is the most important election in our lifetime.

42:12 What if that's always been true?

42:14 What if that's been true for 40 or 50 years, right?

42:17 In other words, when we were screaming and yelling

42:20 and listening to the dead Kennedy's scream about the Reagan administration,

42:24 I thought the Reagan administration was particularly nasty.

42:26 Now, in the context of things,

42:28 it looks positively glorious compared to where we are now,

42:32 but that's the continuum, right?

42:33 But had something changed early on?

42:35 Have we gone in a different direction in 1964?

42:38 Oh, that would have been gold water.

42:41 But you know what I'm saying?

42:43 In other words, from before I was even born,

42:46 we could have been on a different path

42:47 now that would have set us on something different,

42:49 but once you don't solve problems

42:52 and once people become more and more desperate,

42:55 that's when extremism arises, right?

42:57 So if you solve the problem of what are people going to do for meaningful work,

43:02 you know, in the parts of the country that are feeling,

43:04 you know, watching their towns disappear and their children leave,

43:08 and if you don't solve that problem,

43:11 it's going to find a way to make you feel its pain.

43:14 We did a show once called "The Revenge

43:16 of the Gangrenous Finger" on common sense.

43:18 And the entire part was how you could decide this finger doesn't matter at all,

43:22 just a little finger who the hell cares about this.

43:25 But if it gets gangrene because you ignored it, it'll poison all of you.

43:29 And that's how I feel about the body politic, too,

43:32 is you can only go so far in destroying people's lives,

43:35 or if you're not actively destroying them,

43:37 they're not doing what you should be doing to maintain them,

43:41 they will make you feel their pain.

43:43 And there's an argument to be made that that's what we're going through now.

43:48 And if we don't solve the problem this time around,

43:51 it will be ever more amplified the next time we come around.

43:55 You know, there's somebody who described history as not a circle,

43:59 but like, almost like a mobius strip,

44:02 where you do come around to the same point,

44:04 but it's on a different level, right?

44:06 And I feel like we've had to deal

44:09 with this, what are Americans going to do to make

44:12 a living and raise their family and have

44:14 a higher standard of living than their elders had,

44:17 which was always, you know, our benchmark.

44:19 I feel like we've been having this discussion

44:20 since at least the 1980s, maybe the 1970s.

44:23 How long can you not solve that problem before it's going to turn

44:28 a system that should be functioning

44:30 like a spinning top and perfectly equilibrium?

44:32 At what point does that top become unbalanced?

44:35 And once it does, how do you restore its equilibrium?

44:39 And that gets us back to what we were talking about earlier.

44:41 I don't know what to say in a common sense show now,

44:44 because the whole show was about how the top was going to get out of balance.

44:46 I don't know how to get it back in balance.

44:48 That's so interesting.

44:49 And now I'm in the position you were in just a moment ago.

44:53 There's so much there that I'd like to respond to.

44:55 I love these conversations, though, because you had them enough.

44:57 We end up getting stuck on, well, where did you hear that?

45:00 And who did you get in your source?

45:02 This is much more fruitful, isn't it?

45:04 I think so.

45:05 You mentioned just in terms of race and identity and the really,

45:10 I suppose I could say increasing salience

45:14 of race as an issue in American politics.

45:17 Again.

45:17 Yeah, it's so odd.

45:19 And the Mobius strip analogy is phenomenal because I

45:23 think that actually is a really great representation for what,

45:27 at least I've seen happen here where in the 1960s and 70s,

45:31 when you talk about race,

45:32 there's a very particular sensibility about kind of institutionalized,

45:37 formerly institutionalized races.

45:38 Jim Crow, everything that came with the law.

45:40 Which has to be addressed.

45:42 Yeah.

45:42 And it kind of made sense.

45:44 But as someone born in the 80s, lived through the 80s and the 90s,

45:48 my sensibility about race and identity was forged in that particular context.

45:54 And in that context,

45:55 what was clear to me was probably embodied in that Michael Jackson song.

45:59 It doesn't matter if you're black or white.

46:02 There was a sense that we were

46:04 moving away from a particular sort of sensibility.

46:06 You were just as wrong as I was.

46:08 That's just it.

46:09 I was.

46:10 I was.

46:10 And what actually seemed to happen from my standpoint was

46:15 this issue became increasingly salient

46:17 in these ways around particular narratives,

46:20 whether or not the narratives were completely

46:23 completely consistent with available facts and data.

46:26 So, you know, police involved shootings

46:28 became a massive issue around the country.

46:30 And it's something that I've worked on directly and have covered

46:34 and even even done a bit of activism with respect to.

46:37 And it's something that's been a concern for me,

46:39 but I've always been concerned that that issue

46:41 was kind of miscast as a racial justice issue.

46:44 Because the data did not bear out the kind of assertions

46:48 that were being made about

46:50 the disproportionate risk faced by particular communities.

46:52 It seemed to me that the appropriate access

46:56 upon which to have conversations about that was, okay, so what if, in fact,

47:01 too many people are being killed by law

47:04 enforcement and they're unarmed in certain circumstances,

47:06 how can we have better transparency, more accountability,

47:09 better training to ensure that not too many people

47:12 are being killed by police in circumstances like that.

47:15 To take the kind of hierarchy of concern and to place at the very top of it,

47:22 the racial designations of the persons involved in those shootings,

47:25 it seemed to me was always a huge mistake because it would presuppose

47:31 a certain set of things that we ought to be taken into consideration

47:36 with respect to the solutions that might be workable in those contexts

47:39 and also make us think about the problem just in too narrow or way.

47:44 At a time when I was seeing plenty of examples

47:47 of persons of all backgrounds kind of facing those kinds of circumstances.

47:51 And I think that that is pretty indicative of a lot of what's

47:55 happened with conversations around race and identity

47:58 and kind of imagined harms and peril.

48:00 And it seems like a lot of the resistance early on to some of the things

48:06 that we saw say in 2020 with Black Lives Matter was less people who were saying,

48:11 well, hey, what about white people and more people who are saying,

48:14 I'm sorry, why are we talking about race?

48:18 Don't we have the same concerns?

48:20 The kind of all Lives Matter response to Black Lives Matter was never about,

48:25 and at least so far as I could tell,

48:28 asserting that your concerns don't matter, it's that all of us ought to matter.

48:33 It was about being broadly inclusive.

48:35 And it was interpreted as something that was perhaps aggressively bigoted.

48:41 And I think that that almost inspired a kind of backlash.

48:45 I think it gave strength.

48:47 No, you've absolutely hit the nail on the head.

48:49 And it's so human.

48:50 It's that all you have to do is go too far in one direction.

48:54 And there's a backlash.

48:55 I think we operate on the Newtonian laws here, right?

48:58 For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

49:00 And as soon as you go too far in one direction, there's going to be a reaction.

49:04 I'll tell you this is a personal story.

49:06 But I think this dovetails into something we were saying earlier

49:08 when we talked about the role that the increasing amount of digitalization,

49:11 you know, we talked about the Internet,

49:13 but there's an angle to this that we don't think about.

49:16 Which is the fact we have a camera with us at all times now.

49:19 So I'll tell you a story.

49:20 I was on the assignment desk at KABC in Los Angeles and Eyewitness News.

49:24 And I used to work the late shift a lot of the time.

49:27 And the late shift, as soon as our last crews were in for the day,

49:30 you start getting stringers who would bring you the footage.

49:33 And the stringer folks is somebody who they're like a freelancer.

49:36 And they would go out with a police scanner

49:38 in their car and they'd hear about something like a traffic accident.

49:40 And they go and they shoot their own video.

49:42 And then they go to the TV stations and try to market the video.

49:46 So I'm on the assignment desk and some guy calls up and says,

49:49 "I've got video of somebody being badly beaten by the LAPD.

49:53 Do you want to buy it?" So I had

49:54 to call the boss and the whole thing because there's

49:56 different rules about if you wanted exclusive or if you

49:58 just want to be able to use a different prices, we ended up passing on it.

50:01 And it ended up going to KTLA channel five.

50:04 It was the Rodney King beating video.

50:06 Which of course we turned down at KABC.

50:08 And then had to put KTLA and the little chiron

50:11 in the bottom right-hand corner every time we showed it.

50:13 But the bottom line was the reason that was such

50:16 an important video to so many people in Los Angeles was,

50:18 I used to take calls at the assignment desk all

50:20 the time for people who lived in say Compton, right?

50:23 And they call up and they'd say,

50:25 "My son just got beaten up by the police." And I'd say,

50:28 "Okay." And we'd start the conversation about what

50:30 do you want us to do about it.

50:31 And they'd say, "Well, we have photos." And they'd say,

50:33 "Well, what are the photos of?

50:34 Well, we've got a photo of his black eye." And I'd say, "Well,

50:37 I don't know the circumstances that that black

50:39 eye happened." And I said, "If you had video,

50:41 if you had something that would show the circumstances,

50:44 then maybe we could do something." And of course,

50:46 nobody had a video camera with them when they needed it.

50:48 So never...

50:49 So when the Rodney King beating happened,

50:51 it was seen as so important because this was representative

50:55 of something that we had been told happened a lot.

50:58 But that we couldn't cover, we couldn't tell the rest of the population how

51:02 often this happened because we didn't have enough context, right?

51:05 So that was why Rodney King was so

51:07 much more important than anyone else is because,

51:10 "Okay, even though you don't see what happened five minutes,

51:12 it was so much more context." And it was

51:14 enough context that you could look at it and say,

51:17 "I'm not really sure I care what this guy did." Right?

51:19 It doesn't matter what he did.

51:21 He didn't deserve this.

51:22 And so to me, that's a perfect example of what you're talking about too,

51:25 which is you can have something like that and go, "Well, holy cow,

51:29 something like that should never happen

51:31 in a society like ours." And then what ends

51:33 up happening though is then when we turn it into the white and black thing,

51:37 then people on the other side say, "Well,

51:39 I never heard a black person in my life and I'm a white person.

51:42 Why?" In other words, you get that Newtonian reaction again.

51:45 And what's so sad about that is it

51:47 stops us from noticing something that is unabashedly happening,

51:51 which is Rodney King is getting the hell beaten out

51:54 of him in a way that unless he shot a police officer,

51:57 he shouldn't be having happened to him, right?

51:59 And so that's the larger conversation,

52:00 which should have said that if Rodney King were white, what happens then?

52:04 In other words, I think that this whole, you know,

52:07 there was a scene, and I remember seeing it on television and thinking,

52:11 "This is going to work against this cause so badly."

52:13 But it was one of the Black Lives Matter protests,

52:16 and it was some white young people sort of kneeling or asking

52:19 for forgiveness or something from some black students at the protest.

52:23 And I just remember thinking, "This is not going to help anybody.

52:26 This is going to be on Fox News tonight.

52:28 This is going to prompt the counter, really." In other words,

52:32 there's that empathy thing we talked about

52:35 earlier at Play Here Too to understand,

52:37 and you know, I had this problem, I'm jumping around, I apologize,

52:41 but I had this problem when I was a protester in my protesting days.

52:44 There were always two groups of protesters,

52:46 the ones who were desperate about being effective,

52:49 and the ones who were more concerned, and this has come from me,

52:51 and I'm not going to be a protest.

52:52 I'm not going to be a protest, but I'm going to be a protest,

52:53 and this is coming from one of the effectiveness crowds,

52:54 so I may be biased, but we used to think that we're performative people.

52:58 They wanted to be seen in the right place, doing the right,

53:01 but part of that was the way that I used to argue,

53:04 "Let's cut our hair, let's dress in suits,

53:05 let's go down there, and, you know, oh,

53:07 we're not going to, that's not who we are." Yes,

53:09 but what if it's what we need to be to be effective?

53:12 Right, and so I felt the same way about when I

53:14 saw that protest with the white kids kneeling and asking for forgiveness.

53:17 Okay, maybe you have a reason for doing that, maybe that serves to purpose,

53:21 but I guarantee you that's going to work

53:23 against whatever you're trying to do here,

53:25 and yet that's, if I had said that as a protester,

53:28 there would have been pushback.

53:29 In other words, some people thought,

53:31 "So this is what I mean about that Newtonian thing

53:34 and having empathy." If we could somehow merge those, a combination

53:37 of having the empathy and realizing that you have

53:39 the empathy so that you can see the Newtonian thing happening,

53:43 then maybe we stand a chance to nip

53:45 the next Newtonian counter-reaction in the bud,

53:48 but you know what's going to happen,

53:50 and you don't have to be a genius to figure this out.

53:53 But I mean, what's going to happen, let's just say the Trump administration goes

53:57 by the wayside and we have the post-Trump era.

53:59 What are we thinks going to happen in the post-Trump era?

54:03 Don't you think there's going to be prosecutions?

54:05 Don't you think there's going to be investigations?

54:07 Don't you think that like the Nixon administration,

54:09 there's going to be people going to jail?

54:11 Listen, first of all, I should say that that has to happen.

54:14 This is why we're in a conundrum.

54:16 If you don't do that, then you don't punish people who violate the Constitution.

54:19 But when you do do it,

54:21 how are the people who support the president now going to view that?

54:24 They're going to view that as lawfare.

54:26 They're going to view that as the pendulum swing.

54:28 They're going to view that that the lesson they

54:30 learn is the next time that they get power,

54:32 they've got to be even more nefarious.

54:34 Aggressive.

54:35 Yes.

54:35 And this, by the way, ladies and gentlemen,

54:37 for those of you who already know, I apologize,

54:39 but this is the Roman Republic tit-for-tat retribution

54:42 cycle that led to the death spiral there.

54:45 Over several generations,

54:46 the Marius and Sulla things that you see playing out at the end of the empire,

54:50 that it leads to Caesar that gets more murderous

54:52 every time power then goes to the other side.

54:56 That's where we are.

54:57 So being able to look ahead and say, can we somehow put a monkey wrench

55:02 in this dynamic we're living in the middle of, play

55:05 as right into the point you brought up

55:07 earlier about the two roads we can go down.

55:09 One road is we repair and we get

55:11 better and we have a second American Renaissance.

55:14 The other road is we're Marius and sulling this thing down to the Caesar day.

55:19 And then the, I mean, you know, so I feel like that's where we are.

55:24 I don't know which part of the Roman cycle

55:27 we're in, but it's the Mobius strip thing again.

55:30 It's not exactly like ancient Rome,

55:32 but it's enough like ancient Rome so we should recognize it.

55:34 Yeah.

55:35 I mean, that's just so,

55:36 it's so consistent with what I've been seeing in the news cycle just this week.

55:40 In Virginia, you just had the redistricting.

55:42 Another thing that's a true party, Jewo-oppole thing.

55:45 Yeah.

55:46 Both parties absolutely doing it,

55:48 but there's a kind of a vigorousness with which the democratic

55:52 response is taking place now that is happening at the same time.

55:56 It's karma baby, it's karma.

55:58 A lot more, a lot more.

56:00 I just saw a commentary piece, I think, in the bulwark that was,

56:04 you know, stridently in favor of court packing, for example.

56:07 And from their standpoint, the description, and I think this is almost verbatim,

56:11 you know, it's time to take the gloves off.

56:13 We've got to do whatever it takes.

56:15 Anything that's appropriate,

56:16 anything is appropriate in service of ensuring that tyranny doesn't win.

56:21 We have to do everything possible to seize control and to bend

56:26 the rules in our favor so that they don't do it.

56:29 There's just probably a way that people respond to that from the other side,

56:34 and it's with a similar sort of reckless abandon,

56:37 insisting that they need to bend the rules in their favor.

56:40 And yeah, that feels unsustainable,

56:42 and that might be the most kind of dispiriting

56:46 thing to come out of this conversation so far.

56:49 On partisan crazies, what we've done.

56:52 Yeah.

56:52 And that would be the only thing that would

56:55 be the advantage for me of multiple parties,

56:58 is it would be harder to fall into one of these two camps.

57:02 You mentioned earlier about a rise in the number

57:04 of people who called themselves political independence,

57:06 and I do believe that this is the highest

57:09 number of political independence we've ever had in this country.

57:12 At least registered.

57:13 But we have no power.

57:15 I mean, there is no political independent party,

57:18 and we're not united on anything.

57:19 I mean, that's the other problem is that political independence

57:22 is like what punk rock used to be in 1979.

57:25 There's no special section in the record store.

57:27 It's just everything else, right?

57:29 So in other words, whereas Democrats may argue amongst themselves,

57:33 there's enough agreement so that they're in the same party,

57:37 same for Republicans.

57:38 Independence span the spectrum from libertarians to greens to, I mean,

57:43 so there is no, we're inherently, we're inherently divided from the get-go.

57:49 So we decide elections now, which I find fascinating, but we have no candidates.

57:55 Do you see how crazy that is?

57:58 So what does a Trump or whoever's going

58:01 to run for the Democratic, what do they do?

58:03 Do they appeal to their base, which they have to do, right?

58:07 What did Nixon say?

58:08 You run to the right for the primaries,

58:09 and then you run back to the center for the generals.

58:12 The Democrats run left for the primaries, then run to the center.

58:15 But why are they running to the center at all?

58:18 Well, they're running to the center to get people like me, right?

58:21 But as we talked about earlier,

58:24 the radicalness of the times should reflect the level of the problems.

58:29 I always use a termite example.

58:30 If you have somebody come and inspect your house and say you have termites,

58:34 but you just got them.

58:36 You have a lot of different things.

58:38 It can cost you a few bucks.

58:40 You can freeze them.

58:41 So if you catch it early, the solutions are minor.

58:44 If however, you find out you've had them for 40

58:46 years and they've screwed up the structure of your house,

58:49 well, then if you want to solve your termite problem,

58:52 the solution has to be radical, right?

58:55 It's not a small solution, or you'll still have termites.

58:58 By kicking the can down the road for generations like we have,

59:01 whether we're talking about race or economics or constitutional guardrails

59:05 or any of the things that came up in our discussion today,

59:08 you're ignoring the termite problem.

59:09 So the solution that fixes the termite problem is going to have

59:12 to be more and more structural as we go down the road.

59:16 If we wanted to solve this problem back in the post-Nixon era,

59:19 it would have been an easier solve.

59:21 And so I think where you get to where we

59:24 are now is where you get to the brittle stage,

59:27 where solving the problem could be so radical that it

59:31 could break and destroy the system we're trying to solve.

59:33 And I think you see that with some

59:34 of the things the Heritage Foundation suggests we do.

59:36 And then all of that stuff is turn us back to like the 1940s or 1950s, well,

59:40 you're going to break the system if you do that for all sorts of reasons,

59:44 including the fact that you can't go back to everything the way it was.

59:47 I mean, you're going to go back to segregation and separate but equal,

59:50 or just leave that out and go back

59:52 to the other things you liked about the 40s and fit.

59:55 You see what I'm saying is that that idea to return

59:58 to a glorious past that never existed in the first place,

1:00:01 which the Romans also believed in, sets you

1:00:03 up for a different kind of failure than those of us who are trying to fix

1:00:07 a system but can't decide what that even means.

1:00:10 So your idea about there being two roads ahead is

1:00:14 fascinating because I feel like we're staring at both of them,

1:00:17 at the fork, unable to figure out what the hell we do.

1:00:20 And I think that's where we see the dearth in leadership

1:00:23 here because we don't have people running for office promising a solution.

1:00:27 Right?

1:00:28 And I think that's quite true.

1:00:29 They're promising to keep you from the other guy to do something about that.

1:00:34 Or to simply undo the last five years or, I mean,

1:00:37 when you've got a multi-decade problem,

1:00:39 and this is at least give the Heritage Foundation credit for one thing,

1:00:43 at least the solutions that they're putting forward

1:00:45 are commiserate with the level of the problem.

1:00:48 They're as scary as heck, but they're big and the problem is big.

1:00:52 So if somebody is going to say, "Okay,

1:00:54 I'm going to run for the Democratic nomination and I think

1:00:56 we should give a child tax credit for this." And I think,

1:00:59 I mean, these are little tinkering, tweaking things when we have a system where

1:01:02 we're drowning and we've gone down two times already,

1:01:05 that's not going to fix your termite problem, right?

1:01:08 And yet if you talk about the kind of legislative fixes for our termite problem,

1:01:12 you're going to look like an AOC or you're going to look like,

1:01:16 you know, in other words,

1:01:18 it's the most radical people in both parties that are actually

1:01:21 proposing things large enough for the scale of the problem we face.

1:01:24 But it scares the heck out of us for obvious reasons,

1:01:26 but these tweakers and tinkerers aren't going to solve the problem.

1:01:29 So that's why we're stuck where we are.

1:01:32 I want to turn in a slightly different

1:01:33 direction here because we've talked about the institutions,

1:01:35 we've talked about how to think about history,

1:01:38 and there's something else that I think

1:01:41 you're kind of uniquely well positioned to speak

1:01:44 to, and that's the state of the polity

1:01:47 broadly with respect to our attention spans,

1:01:50 our interest in thinking in sophisticated way about complicated issues.

1:01:55 I'm sure a little frustrated and vexed here.

1:01:58 I'm sorry.

1:01:59 I didn't interrupt you, Kmele.

1:02:01 No, it's fine.

1:02:02 But we've got the tic-tockification of everything.

1:02:06 I've read a number of surveys that suggest that that is

1:02:09 where young people are getting their news and YouTube shorts on X,

1:02:13 on these other platforms where you're succinctly delivering your message,

1:02:17 and that's the sickness.

1:02:18 And there's an algorithm involved, by the way.

1:02:20 Yeah.

1:02:21 And this is, the sickness comes at the expense of something.

1:02:25 There is a nuance.

1:02:27 A couple more characters, maybe a few paragraphs,

1:02:32 perhaps even something book length.

1:02:34 And you really have been producing a product

1:02:37 for a long time now and kind of bucks that trend,

1:02:42 and that tends to still work in certain contexts.

1:02:45 So I hear that we're shifting towards this more kind of oral tradition of sorts,

1:02:51 but it's almost like a guttural oral tradition versus

1:02:54 what I would expect when I think about Oratian.

1:02:57 I think about Emerson giving a lecture.

1:03:00 Chris Hitchens.

1:03:00 I mean, Chris, you're hitting it.

1:03:02 Sure.

1:03:03 Absolutely.

1:03:03 Yeah.

1:03:04 And it feels like what we're getting though

1:03:07 is something a little less robust than that.

1:03:10 And certainly not the case that people seem

1:03:13 to be interested in kind of these like lengthier,

1:03:16 written prose on a variety of topics, you know,

1:03:19 book sales aren't what they used to be.

1:03:21 But if we are moving to this oral tradition,

1:03:24 it doesn't necessarily feel like we're moving towards one

1:03:26 that is actually going to be particularly healthy for us.

1:03:29 It's kind of a fast food,

1:03:31 the fast food equivalent of whatever it was Emerson was offering.

1:03:35 And that doesn't seem like a great outcome for us.

1:03:38 So I'm just curious about how you're

1:03:42 thinking about the cultural trends around information,

1:03:46 dissemination and consumption.

1:03:48 And if you are at all optimistic about the appetites

1:03:53 that people are demonstrating for these kind of shorter versus longer form,

1:03:58 the kind of nuanced versus particularly simplistic,

1:04:01 perhaps even self-serving narratives that you can go out and find for yourself.

1:04:05 Well, I mean, look, the first thing that I thought of when

1:04:07 you brought this up and I was able to see kind of where

1:04:10 you wanted to go with this is I read a story today

1:04:13 where young people are giving themselves digital breaks and trying to, you know,

1:04:17 touch grass a little bit more in the old line of things.

1:04:20 In other words, you know, we think about, I'm older than you are.

1:04:22 I think about a world that I grew up in.

1:04:25 I grew up in an analog world.

1:04:27 And an analog world that was actually closer to the world

1:04:30 of the Middle Ages or the ancient world than someone who grows up now.

1:04:35 That's what's crazy to think about.

1:04:37 But my era was the one where we went from the analog world to this one.

1:04:40 There was a time period.

1:04:41 Everybody my age had to say, "Holy cow,

1:04:43 I'm going to have to learn to use a computer." Because when we grew up,

1:04:47 that was one of the things.

1:04:49 But that created a different world and it detached us from that old world.

1:04:52 And so seeing the kids kind of thinking, well, maybe there's something really,

1:04:56 we can feel the unhealthiness without knowing

1:04:58 exactly because we've never had anything else.

1:05:00 But we know this isn't how it's always been.

1:05:03 This isn't what the human experience has always been.

1:05:06 So we crave it, we want it.

1:05:07 Maybe if we put the devices on the side for a month, we'll get a taste of it.

1:05:11 That's that Newtonian counter reaction thing again, right?

1:05:14 In other words, what you mentioned,

1:05:16 there's almost a human need for some of this stuff.

1:05:18 And I'm going to break it down to personality types.

1:05:20 Because I think, you know, I have a buddy who's a computer genius,

1:05:24 but he's really a math whiz is what he is.

1:05:27 And he sees the world in numbers.

1:05:29 And we'll have conversations with each other.

1:05:30 We almost have to have a translation device because

1:05:32 I see the world in terms of a linear development.

1:05:35 This happened that, you know, mine's a historical context and his is math.

1:05:39 But it's the same thing, right?

1:05:40 He finds a way to organize and make sense of the world

1:05:42 in his way as math and my way as context.

1:05:45 But these are personality types that seek

1:05:47 to even want to make sense of the world.

1:05:51 This is not something everybody feels a need to do, right?

1:05:55 That's for some people, that's an important thing for them.

1:05:58 Other people couldn't care less.

1:05:59 They're living their lives.

1:06:00 And I got another friend who's a musician.

1:06:02 That's what he cares about.

1:06:04 This other stuff is all interference.

1:06:07 It's noise to him.

1:06:08 His work.

1:06:09 But so I think the people that would

1:06:11 like the long form content that you type about,

1:06:14 to talk about are the kind of people who need that, right?

1:06:17 They're people who crave context.

1:06:19 There's people who say, you know, who the longer the conversation goes,

1:06:23 the deeper it is, the more satisfying it is for them.

1:06:26 Now, that's not normal.

1:06:28 That's not everybody.

1:06:29 But the reason I said earlier that when you said,

1:06:31 how do these shows that we do evolve to be these long things?

1:06:34 And I said it was an evolution that the listeners played a role in.

1:06:37 They're the one, it's a famous story.

1:06:38 I tell them all the time and I'm sorry, but I mean, I apologize.

1:06:41 The first time we ever did a show over an hour long,

1:06:44 I included an apology in the show.

1:06:46 I said it is just not right to assume that I

1:06:49 should take an hour of your time to talk about the Apaches.

1:06:53 You didn't ask for this.

1:06:54 And I got about 10 people writing the exact same phrase.

1:06:59 We have pause buttons.

1:07:00 And the minute, I mean, it was like a light bulb because I was an idiot.

1:07:04 Of course, they have pause buttons,

1:07:05 but it never occurred to me that there would be

1:07:07 a bunch of people in the audience who would say,

1:07:09 60 minutes, we're hoping for an hour and 20, right?

1:07:12 So in other words, these were people telling me that they wanted more.

1:07:15 It wasn't me creating a market for it.

1:07:17 It was me discovering that there was one and the market told me there was one.

1:07:22 And I think that's a personality type.

1:07:23 I don't think that would appeal.

1:07:25 My wife doesn't listen to my shows.

1:07:27 It's not her thing, right?

1:07:28 But somebody does.

1:07:29 So I think there's a personality type that appreciates context

1:07:34 that can deal with opinions maybe like when we're doing common sense,

1:07:38 a lot of people listen to common sense don't agree with me,

1:07:41 but they like that they're getting something from it depth wise,

1:07:44 complexity wise that they don't get elsewhere.

1:07:46 And I appreciate that.

1:07:47 And those are exactly the kind of people

1:07:49 that do what you and I were talking about earlier,

1:07:51 the ones who were able to take themselves out of their own partisan views,

1:07:54 able to have empathy, able to try to see somebody else's viewpoint,

1:07:57 if only to make better arguments for their own side, right?

1:08:00 That was my stepdad used to say, you want to sell somebody something,

1:08:03 you better understand their point of view, right?

1:08:05 And I feel the same way about politics.

1:08:07 You want to sell somebody something, understand what matters to them.

1:08:10 And I think that a lot of people out there who don't get context are craving it.

1:08:16 It's a personality type.

1:08:17 I don't have 10 bazillion listeners,

1:08:19 but the ones who like what we have to offer, they're out there.

1:08:23 And I think that's an interesting demographic to try to target,

1:08:25 to be honest, maybe for other things too.

1:08:28 I use a lot of AI tools, but engaging with these tools, one can very quickly,

1:08:35 not just expand on particular things or try to answer questions.

1:08:39 And I think answering questions with the LMS

1:08:41 is perhaps less valuable than what I use them

1:08:45 for, which is trying to synthesize the perspective

1:08:48 that I'm entertaining to pressure test that point of view.

1:08:53 And then in certain cases,

1:08:55 to just kind of summarize other points of view in really efficient ways.

1:08:59 And if with essentially the same kind of corpus of information,

1:09:03 I can give you the short form, the long form,

1:09:06 the kind of multi-part form of a piece,

1:09:09 one that is kind of shaded to the left or the right,

1:09:13 as you talked about earlier with the project that you were working on.

1:09:17 I think that there's something pretty powerful in that.

1:09:20 I mean, perhaps I'm just making a case

1:09:21 for you to go back and try that thing again.

1:09:24 Could you see something like that doing being a long term answer?

1:09:28 Obviously not the version you're working with now,

1:09:30 but the evolution of this in five, eight, 10 years,

1:09:33 could you see something like this playing the role

1:09:35 in solving some of the stuff we were talking about,

1:09:38 the flooding zone with crap problem?

1:09:39 Or is this likely to be the tool of the people who

1:09:42 want to flood the zone with crap who figure out who figure out,

1:09:45 you know what, we're going to now just

1:09:48 make the large language models push the crap.

1:09:50 We don't even have to flood the zone.

1:09:51 We'll have an a laser beam of crap.

1:09:53 Yeah.

1:09:54 I don't know.

1:09:55 I do think that there are a couple of things that make me optimistic.

1:10:00 I mean, first is that the large language models,

1:10:03 while they are expensive to build and operate,

1:10:05 it's actually been surprising how cheap they can cheaply.

1:10:08 They can be built.

1:10:09 They'll get cheaper.

1:10:10 They'll get cheaper.

1:10:11 That's like everything else we've ever done.

1:10:12 Yeah.

1:10:13 And how cheaply they can be run.

1:10:14 I mean, you can buy a Mac mini and install something local

1:10:17 on your machine that doesn't even have kind of access to the internet.

1:10:21 And it can still give you pretty robust support in any number of important ways.

1:10:26 So the competitive landscape in that space, I think,

1:10:30 will make it hard for someone to offer up a product

1:10:33 that is just kind of biased in one direction or the other.

1:10:37 And in recent history,

1:10:38 whether it's open AI or Gemini or anthropics, Claude or Elon's Grok,

1:10:45 all of those tools have kind of gotten

1:10:48 to a place where they've become less partisan

1:10:51 in rather obvious ways and more kind of general

1:10:54 and curious and offering you on the one hand,

1:10:57 on the other hand, perspectives on a number of topics

1:11:01 that before there were all kinds of issues that seemed to be

1:11:04 a function of people kind of pushing these tools in a left

1:11:08 or right direction to try to achieve some specific kind of outcome.

1:11:12 And yeah, maybe those tools can be a mechanism for encouraging

1:11:16 us to think in more complicated and nuanced ways about important issues.

1:11:20 But the real issue, I think, does come down to individuals.

1:11:24 Whether or not we're invested enough and perhaps brave

1:11:28 enough to embrace positions that are a little less certain,

1:11:32 that it'd be more intellectual humility on our parts

1:11:35 and for us to be more invested in, more invested in trying not to be wrong

1:11:40 about things as opposed to trying to be right.

1:11:43 You've tweaked my devil's advocate though now.

1:11:44 Now all I think of is, "Palantir plus AI plus nuclear weapons plus the fourth

1:11:49 amendment and we're screwed." Have you read the book,

1:11:57 "If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Does?" Yeah, I haven't read it,

1:12:01 but I am exceedingly familiar with the arguments there.

1:12:03 It's one of those things, look, all tech works this way, right?

1:12:06 When you're a nuclear weapon,

1:12:07 I mean anything when you look at the big tech and just go, "Wow,

1:12:09 there's an existential potential harm here."

1:12:11 But as my wife and I'll talk about it, it could cure cancer.

1:12:15 Yes, but it could create the authoritarian police state you're worried about.

1:12:19 I mean, we live in interesting times, don't we, Kale?

1:12:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:12:25 I mean, I do think the most pessimistic view on AI is one that it seems,

1:12:31 to the extent it's true, it's just true and here we are.

1:12:34 It's over and we should enjoy the next couple of years and there we go.

1:12:38 Judgment day is coming.

1:12:39 But I do think that I'm much more

1:12:42 inclined towards the more optimistic vision of things,

1:12:45 which is that we see some kind of important incremental changes over time

1:12:49 that we get much better at doing the things that we already did as opposed

1:12:53 to kind of creating a job's apocalypse

1:12:55 and that the real meaningful competition that we're

1:12:58 seeing amongst the people who are building

1:13:00 these tools and the diversity of the tools,

1:13:03 they're specialized in specific industries in many instances.

1:13:07 I can kind of customize them to my liking.

1:13:09 Might be good to support my own means.

1:13:11 I just support my own means.

1:13:12 I'm a little too.

1:13:13 Yeah, I think that there's a lot of value in that.

1:13:15 And I think ultimately, the challenge here is the open AI's and the anthropics

1:13:24 and even palantiers of the world who are

1:13:26 these big incumbents who are spending a lot of money

1:13:28 to kind of get out ahead of these tools.

1:13:30 As you mentioned, you're going to get cheaper.

1:13:32 They're going to get better.

1:13:34 To the extent there are huge challenges on the horizon,

1:13:36 a lot of those challenges are going to be have

1:13:39 these major companies are going to have to face them down first.

1:13:43 And it's not going to be easy or cheap.

1:13:46 And a lot of them could kind of crash on the rocks in the process.

1:13:50 And the beneficiaries of all of that might be all of us.

1:13:54 And the second generation of companies that come after

1:13:56 them and can kind of build on the wreckage

1:13:59 of those old firms and acquire some of their pieces

1:14:01 and utilize the data centers that they all built.

1:14:06 And the extra energy capacity that we're going to need to build

1:14:10 if we're actually going to have these tools in the future.

1:14:13 So I'm optimistic, but that's mostly because

1:14:16 the pessimistic view of things is so pessimistic.

1:14:19 It's almost like the heat death of the universe.

1:14:21 It's almost not worth worrying about.

1:14:23 No, it's been different.

1:14:23 Well, I mean, in the '50s,

1:14:24 go look at all the literature when everybody thought they weren't going

1:14:26 to wake up the next morning because of nuclear weapons and stuff.

1:14:29 I mean, for me, I just look at AI completely differently.

1:14:32 And that's just the military history, Guy Ami.

1:14:34 But it's a weapon system.

1:14:36 And the reason you have to think about a weapon system

1:14:39 is that too many people think about it like a consumer product.

1:14:42 And a consumer product is going to follow a completely

1:14:46 different line of development than something that is a military product.

1:14:49 Because the military product is going to blow past all sorts

1:14:53 of restrictions we might be able to make on consumer products.

1:14:56 So you might say something like, oh, well, we don't want to do this with AI.

1:14:59 That would not be a good move.

1:15:00 Yeah, but if somebody else will just say China

1:15:03 can be our bad boy du jour in this conversation.

1:15:06 But if the Chinese are working on it in the military sense,

1:15:09 it acquires the same dynamic that nuclear weapons, in other words,

1:15:12 we can't fall behind because it's an existential threat, as opposed to, oh,

1:15:18 yeah, it might affect our ability to deliver products onto it.

1:15:21 It creates a different dynamic.

1:15:23 The survival mode is triggered.

1:15:25 And all of a sudden, that opens up doors to rampant development.

1:15:29 We might not otherwise think was wise if it wasn't so important a thing.

1:15:34 And the only reason I bring that up is we've

1:15:37 now had a couple of generations to live with nuclear weapons,

1:15:40 which follows a similar dynamic.

1:15:42 And I feel like people,

1:15:44 it's normal in an American society where everything is sort of, we look

1:15:49 at the capitalistic side of this, how we can make money off of it.

1:15:54 But when you put it in a more military sort of context,

1:15:58 I think that's when you're going to see how AI is

1:16:02 going to function in terms of our ability to control it,

1:16:05 our ability to let it go beyond a line where we would let it go.

1:16:10 If this was just a consumer question,

1:16:11 I think that's probably going to be a more accurate way to watch the development

1:16:14 of AI is to think about it with like the next nuclear bomb type thing.

1:16:19 And I bet it follows that path.

1:16:21 You know, we used to call nuclear weapons

1:16:23 and nuclear power a dual use technology, right?

1:16:26 Because you can use it for both AI is a dual use technology.

1:16:30 But we forget that one of the uses is military and existential.

1:16:34 Yeah.

1:16:34 And then some of the limitations on your ability

1:16:37 to utilize it are built into the tech as well.

1:16:39 I mean, the nuclear fallout, if you're too close, you can't use it.

1:16:43 That's where the problem is very terrible.

1:16:44 When the EMC pulse happens and blows your AI out of the water, then what, right?

1:16:47 Yeah.

1:16:48 Yeah.

1:16:48 And I think AI is somewhat similar in that at the moment, you know,

1:16:52 we talk in the consumer context hallucinations,

1:16:54 but that actually exists in the military context as well.

1:16:58 And it's part of the reason why

1:17:00 you can't have completely autonomous murder machines.

1:17:02 Go watch a movie like fail safe.

1:17:04 The whole movie fail safe is about sort of a computer glitch, right?

1:17:07 Well, what if that computer glitch were done on purpose?

1:17:10 I mean, there's a, well, war games, the more updated version,

1:17:13 I guess a fail safe is another one.

1:17:15 Imagine the movie war games from the early 80s with AI.

1:17:18 I mean, the whole thing is fascinating.

1:17:20 And I always say, you know, if we fascinating and terrified,

1:17:24 it's the stakes that actually make it interesting, though, right?

1:17:28 In other words, if it wasn't so damn serious, it might not be so intriguing.

1:17:32 If I always say that this would be such

1:17:35 an interesting period to study from 500 years from now,

1:17:37 you know, we were doing a history show on it.

1:17:39 It just is a whole different thing to live through, isn't it?

1:17:42 Yeah, yeah, it sure is.

1:17:44 Now, I suppose 500 years from now, AI,

1:17:47 Dan Carlin, AI Kmele, maybe continue to have this conversation.

1:17:52 That's right.

1:17:52 And whenever we want it, things.

1:17:55 Dan, this has been really, really wonderful.

1:17:57 I am so grateful to you for just taking some time to chat with me.

1:18:01 This is not gone at all as I expected,

1:18:04 which is in some respects precisely what I expected.

1:18:06 I hope you get what you want out of it, but it was very enjoyable.

1:18:09 Thank you so much, Dan.

1:18:11 That means a tremendous amount.

1:18:14 Dan Carlin, thank you, sir.

1:18:16 Thank you for having me.

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