31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes 02:27:30

Hello, this is Eric with a few initial thoughts before this week's episode. First, I want to briefly discuss a pair of mistakes and omissions on my part. To begin with, we released a Portal special episode recently about a speculative theory of physics called geometric unity, which was partially recorded on April 1st. We did this so as to make use of the opportunity to attempt to repurpose the tired and increasingly irritating April Fool's tradition of which many of us have grown bored.

I had intended to single out and call particular attention to a man who is very important to the geometric unity theory, as well as the portal project itself. This is a man I think of as my uncle and who means the world to my family, Michael W. Brown, former farmer and commercial fisherman who became the CFO of Microsoft and then the head of the NASDAQ. Years ago, during the financial crisis, Mike invited me and my family to take over his two small islands in the Puget Sound archipelago and lead a renegade research-oriented science camp.

We did this every summer there for many years, and these islands, now under new ownership, are in fact the origin of the so-called double island rules that we discussed from time to time, and which allowed us to get past issues of ego and miscommunication between intellectual and domain-specific silos.

In any event, we, that is I, rushed to get the episode out for April 1st, and in my haste I forgot to include the segment of special thanks due to Mike for a level of generosity, wisdom, selflessness, risk-taking, leadership, and brilliance that honestly I'd previously only seen in movies. I will try to have Mike on the portal at some point, but I wanted to say that his unwavering support of scientists attempting to work outside of and around traditional channels in physics, biology, economics, and other subjects is

has been nothing short of inspirational to me. So Mike, if you're listening out there, please come through the portal. These are dark times indeed, and we still need great leaders like you to remind us all of how it's done.

Additionally, as someone who probably does not listen to a broad enough smattering of podcasts, I think I inferred from listening to Sam Harris's episodes that it is typical to begin a podcast with a section entitled housekeeping. I now realize that that may be an iconic aspect of Sam's podcast, just like Dave Rubin's direct message is iconic to the Rubin Report. If so, I apologize and will call this first segment something else. Color me chagrined for engaging in the sincerest form of flattery here without knowing any better.

As for what is on my mind this week, it is this, the virus and its curious relationship to the future. For the last month, I've spent nearly all of my time at home with my family, and many of the better thoughts I've been exploring during this time are due to my collaborator and wife, Pia Malani. Pia is the economist who currently runs SIGS, the Silicon Valley Center for Innovation, Growth, and Society, which she co-founded with INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Very early on, I was fumbling to try to understand the most likely effects of the virus, and she said something clarifying, which I wish I had repeated to you all when it was fresh. She said, I think in a way, the virus can be thought of as representing the future. I don't know. Maybe I'm dense, but I didn't catch it the first time, so I asked her to clarify. She was surprised that this wasn't obvious to me, so she spelled her position out.

think about it this way take all of the seemingly varied issues we discuss constantly over the dinner table and at conferences all of them i replied with a slightly teasing voice as i assumed she was speaking with hyperbole why yes pretty much all of them she said brightly and without an ounce of self-doubt in a voice that i have learned to fear over many years of collaboration she continued

Let's start with surveillance, monopolies, automation, telecommuting, next generation warfare, UBI, future of work, the retail apocalypse, online dating, anti-vaxxers, the student debt crisis, supply chain vulnerability, green tech and climate change, urban homelessness, college equivalency certificates, biohacking, the retreat from globalization, collapse of mainstream journalism, Chinese ascendance, social engineering, Saudi modernization and the move away from fossil fuels in the kingdom.

inclusive stakeholding, political realignment, and the problem of gerontocracy and the end of naive capitalism underpinned by UChicago-style economics. In fact, pretty much all the things we've used the center to explore. Okay, I said nervously. Well, she continued, you know that tired tech expression, the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed? Well, this virus is accelerating that unifying future that was already headed our way across the board.

And recapitulating that moment where Agent Kuyon drops the Kobayashi coffee mug in the usual suspects film, a forest spontaneously emerged for me from the confusion of the trees I had seen previously. All of these seemingly disparate phenomena were suddenly revealed as closely related. Americans were actually calling for their own surveillance, only they were calling it contact tracing. The retail apocalypse, which had been building slowly, suddenly became a matter of a government decree creating an ever more imposing monopoly for the world's now richest human.

He in turn owns and controls the only paper to take down a U.S. president consolidating control over a sense-making apparatus. Most supposedly essential face-to-face office work was revealed to be illusory as easily monitored and recorded telecommuting replaced the high-carbon commute. The demand for fossil fuels in turn evaporated, pushing oil futures into radical states of contango. Social distancing solved the problem of unwanted Me Too toxic male touch as sexless Zoom dating put the hurt on Netflix and chilling.

Indeed, nearly UBI-like payments were going out to newly unemployed former workers who were expected to sit at home on couches as universities effectively all but confessed that they could deliver the same value through distance learning by not rebating extortionary tuition.

China, through an emasculated World Health Organization, seemingly began inducing our own U.S. institutions, like the CDC and Surgeon General's office, to impart deadly magical thinking to Americans about the ineffectiveness of masks for healthy people. This all came as if some kind of twisted revenge for the Boxer Rebellion, where Chinese believed swords and martial arts made them invulnerable to Western high-tech warfare.

Spontaneous protests broke out in cities across the country as masked protesters fought mysterious rules that communicated that one may not peaceably assemble in contradiction to the First Amendment.

We were also not allowed to contradict public health authorities who were clearly covering for a level of baby boomer and silent generation incompetence to keep the manufacture and storage of essential goods and services within national boundaries and out of the hands of strategic rivals who think nothing of blatantly lying to us in matters of life, death, and statistics. I reasoned, however, that there were clearly too many different things happening in such a situation for the sudden arrival of the future to lack a single ideology.

And so it occurred to me, and to Peter Thiel as well, who I called immediately, that the two older generations of Americans who were to duke it out in the race for the presidency shared a single purpose. Their common goal was to stop the future from arriving at essentially any cost to future generations so that they could live out the remaining days in as close to the style to which they'd become accustomed in childhood and young adulthood as was actually possible. And what did they use to accomplish this? Well, it was a combination of three ingredients.

First of all, it required political control.

Second of all, it also needed a seemingly inexplicable indifference to the world of trouble that they would finally leave to their descendants after their demise. Lastly, it partially hinged on a reliance on 75 years of astonishingly good luck, which can partially be explained as a rational universal fear of the future after two world wars, totalitarian atrocities, the 1918 pandemic, and the Great Depression. This is related to Francis Fukuyama's theory of the end of history. To this way of thinking, what was happening was simple.

The magic trick of holding back nearly all aspects of our true future required all three elements to be in place simultaneously. Now, nothing had changed with respect to the first two. In fact, all that had occurred was that their luck had finally run out with the COVID virus.

To my generation and the ones that followed, that past version of the post-war American dream was like a mesmerizing rumor and tale that the older generations had repeatedly and vividly wielded to cast a spell. This intimidated many of us from demanding answers and a say in our own future.

If you can't get a second home in your 30s from a paper route, a low-cost education, or a life in public service, then perhaps you should wait your turn and let the elders who made it work lead for a little while longer until the younger generations can prove that they are ready to assume adult responsibilities.

This was a magical spell indeed, which blinded those of us who were forced to repeat "Okay, Boomer" to explain our seeming relative inability to earn and lead in the presence of elders who could out-earn us in their prime. And this was even under the weight of multiple divorce settlements or three martini lunches, and without the extensive training and apprenticeships that we seemed to require. Well, that spell is now broken for me, watching our supposed leaders contend with the true pandemic.

the silent and boomer generations lacking any kind of precedent now look like incompetent dolts i suppose it is theoretically possible that the rest of us former gritty latchkey kids and digital natives would not fare better but we could scarcely do worse

In fact, our elders are revealed not as go-getters or can-do leaders, but as creatures of the system who simply held back confronting the inevitable future for decades because its shape and form are indeed terrifying. And it wasn't really the virus that was accelerating the terrifying future across the board. Any worldwide crisis of sufficient depth would have done it.

The world has always been caught up in escalating plagues, wars, depressions, and conflicts, and the coronavirus was ushering in the future simply because it was the first piece of early 20th century scale bad luck to fall into our new millennium, characterized as it is by fragility. After a few words from our sponsors, I'll be back to introduce today's guest, author Ryan Holiday.

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In this episode, I get to sit down with author and social analyst Ryan Holiday. I wouldn't say that I know Ryan enough to consider him a close friend, but I have enjoyed every conversation I have had with him for the unique metacognitive perspective that he brings to all things on which he thinks, speaks, or writes. There are two things in particular that Ryan does that make him one of the most incisive analysts and best conversationalists in the public eye working today.

In many ways, the overarching lens that I feel is missing from today's hyper-partisan world is that of expecting conflicting truths to lie in superpositions. After all, why would anyone imagine that the simplified childlike positions of activists would be appropriate for those who eschew hyper-partisanship in favor of nuance?

While I can't pretend to answer that question, I can say that Ryan's ability to fully consider the validity of two or more evident truths that are at least nominally in conflict is all too rare in today's world of public intellectuals. While that itself is reason enough for me to tune into Ryan's perspective, there's something deeper that draws me towards his voice and way of thinking.

all too often in my experience the minority of social analysts who in the internet era can still properly entertain a dialectic in public without bending to the activist mob tend to stop there prematurely at a point of detachment

They frequently appear to be disinterested in reframing natural tensions for others so as to facilitate progress through synthesis and reconciliation. Instead, they often prefer the entertainment value of a continuing battle to a satisfying conclusion without victor or vanquished. In particular, I have increasingly noticed a move towards studied indifference and the projection of personal apathy on the part of several metacognitive pundits in what seems to be a mechanism of self-protection.

I find that Ryan, by contrast, is fairly open in sharing that he cares about the future deeply, but always in a thoughtful and measured way, informed in an interesting fashion by his relationship to Stoicism. That combination of caring without sanctimony makes him one of my favorite conversationalists in private, and I am glad that we got a chance to try to translate this into a public forum. Two words on the setting of this conversation.

To begin with, it took place in 2020 before the stay-at-home orders were in place, so it feels in some sense like a message in a bottle from another earlier world, and it oddly filled me with a sense of what feels like a genuine longing for our recent past upon listening to it. With so much rapid change, it feels like full-on early 2020 nostalgia is actually now a thing, even though it is only April. Secondly, we discuss Ryan's book on Gawker and Peter Thiel.

This is one of the first places that I have ever shared my thoughts about the episode, and it may surprise people to hear my inner conflicts about Gawker, journalism, and Nick Denton. To this end, I will just point out that I was later to find out about this story from Peter than many may have imagined, and that Peter actually encouraged me always to act as an independent voice of moral concern as you may discern from the conversation.

I'll let the conversation speak for itself, however. I do hope you will enjoy our uninterrupted conversation with author Ryan Holiday when we return after some brief messages from our sponsors. Okay, so tell me if this is familiar. You're hunkered down, you're trying to get some exercise, and in fact, you're feeling some stress and some aches and pains from this crazy situation. But maybe you have a regular massage therapist and you can't go visit that person.

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Hello, you've found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I am here today with Ryan Holiday, author of Conspiracy.com.

and other books, and a great all-around thinker and voice analyzing what's going on in our society. Ryan, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, very curious about your thoughts as to whether the time that we're in right now has any particular feel and why it's hard to associate what has been going on in terms of a zeitgeist with any kind of...

intellectual wrapping that helps us better understand what the forces are that are most changing our lives at the moment. - I've actually been thinking about that a little bit. You probably, oh, you live in LA, so maybe. You ever watch the show The Hills? - No. - Okay, so The Hills is this sort of fake reality show that,

came out and was about originally it started in Laguna Beach it was a reality show and then they all moved to LA but it's this sort of like mid early aughts like reality show about young people moving to LA and it created all these sort of big brands and and sort of

personalities that dominated the tabloids for a real long time. And then this year they came out with like the 10 year anniversary of like the show had ended. They all went on. Some of them were successful. Some of them were not successful. This was a show about them in their early twenties. And now they're in their early thirties and they like revisited it.

And my wife and I were watching it and I loved it. You would not think I would like it, but I loved it. What I found over and over again, and this is what I think the zeitgeist is, is these characters who basically are fake people, but sometimes have real emotions. The word they kept talking about over and over again was how anxious they were and how tired they were. And

And these are obviously all sort of tail end millennials, right? Wouldn't that be peak millennials? Sorry, peak millennials, yes. And it struck me that there was probably something illustrative there about the sort of millennial mind of, for the millennials, their 20s was, from their teens to the end of their 20s was like the Warner Act, the financial crisis, right?

an economic recovery that they didn't really benefit from, and then walking in now to becoming a parent, you know, becoming an adult. Maybe. Maybe, but starting to get serious about life, but without...

the comfort or security that would soothe some of those anxieties. So I thought it was, to me, one of the feelings of the age is kind of an anxiety or an unease about things. Together with exhaustion. With exhaustion, yes. Because we're, you know, we're on our phones all the time. We're consuming more information than ever.

We have more information about what other people are doing. I think that the exhaustion is from social media in the sense of like, it's keeping up with the Joneses times like a thousand, you know, because. I don't even want to call it. We are, we are on our phones. We have merged with our phones. And so if I think about the phone as a portal, the idea is that I turn this slab towards me and then I suddenly go into some

Like right now, I don't know whether you and I are being attacked on social media. Sure. We probably are. We probably are. It's just what percentage of it is attack and what percentage of it is complimentary. Right. But the point is that there is this parallel world taking place at all times and that we have now merged with it so that there isn't a we that is on our phones. Yeah. Or the idea that it's a separate world is like,

Right now, there are people simultaneously watching thousands of hours of video or audio that both of us have produced. So we're having this conversation, which is obviously not live, but other people are watching a very different conversation with us at this moment. That's right. And that is strange if you think about it. And yeah, some of those people are hating that conversation. Some of that people are loving that conversation. It's a...

One of the weird things I get all the time, we were talking about Tim Ferriss a second ago, like people go, oh, I just, they're like, I loved you on the Tim Ferriss podcast or whatever. I was like, I did that interview in 2014, but to them it's new. So like that, the portal, different people are entering the portal at different times. And whereas I think something is old, it's,

If you've never seen it before, it's brand new. I was trying to talk to my son who's 14 about the old days, like what was it like? And I had to explain to him how important the clock was when you didn't have cell phones in everyone's pocket, that you had to be very precise and careful where you were going to meet someone on like what street corner at exactly what time. And that these things that were broadcast live

Like the news, synchronized behavior. We were willing to be synced because we didn't have an ability to be independent. And that now we've gotten this ability to do everything on demand. We're surprised that no one carries our information set.

I was actually just like my, I have a three-year-old. So I was thinking like, what's the, what's the, like when I was, you know, when I was a kid, like, what's the, what's the technology story that I will tell them that will like blow their mind. And I was thinking about this last night. Cause I got in my friend's truck. It was an older truck and we had an older version of that when I was growing up, but we had this Toyota pickup truck when I was a kid and it didn't have a clock in it.

because it was a cheap old truck. And I remember that whenever, like on the way to school to see if we were late or what time it was, we would have to turn it to like KFBK. I grew up in Northern California. Turn it to KFBK because every 15 minutes they said, you're listening to KFBK. It's 945 and traffic. So we'd have to turn on the radio and hope we were close to

but would know that in a minimum of 14 minutes and 32 seconds, we would be getting the time. And so it's weird because yes, things were more synchronized, but also you could exist in a bubble detached from time also because not everyone was trying. You were genuinely unreachable to

It was glorious. Yeah, it's strange. And not that long. I mean, this story I'm telling you is probably like 95 or 6. So I'm interested in sort of these old stories, but I'm also just... Am I right that probably we will find that our brain structure was altered by our phone use? I mean, I would think so. There's that Louis C.K. bit about...

You used to have to sit with awkwardness or unpleasantness, but now you can instantly relieve yourself of like, let's say I got here early and there's no one here and I was waiting. Because the host was late. No, no. I'm just saying, let's say you get to something early. Yeah. You would have had to wait with your own thoughts. Right. And now you can go into the portal and not have to have thoughts.

And so that idea of reflection or downtime, it's like one of the things I compare writing a book to is sometimes if you have your laptop and you...

shut it and it should go into sleep mode but you come back and something had happened and it's been on for 11 hours and it's like almost like hot to the touch it doesn't happen anymore but i remember that happening on my older macbooks to me that's like what writing a book is like your brain is not shutting off and i think social media actually creates the phone creates some version of that where the you're never getting the downtime between moments right always always the moment

In what ways am I diminished? What parts of my capacity have I forgotten? For that? Well, what I'm really trying to get at ultimately is that

a lot of transformations have taken place that have not been well documented that divorce us increasingly from what might be termed our super ancestors. People like there are no 400 hitters in baseball. Yeah. We've accepted that that was a different era and somehow that can't be. Sure. But it seems like we could accomplish all sorts of things recently that we can't now. And, and,

It's very interesting the extent to which we've lost capacities and we haven't documented what it was that took them from us. Like I can't figure out why I can't read a book. Well, so related to that one, I think it was Daniel Boorstin. Have you read him at all? He wrote this book, The Image, about sort of the invention of modern media. He's basically talking about what sort of television and radio does. Fascinating. I think he was like the librarian of Congress or something. But he was like...

The Lincoln-Douglas debates, it was like Lincoln talked for three hours, Douglas talked for three hours, then everyone took a break and went home and came back, and then they each argued for another three hours. Now the Democratic debates are like an hour and 20 minutes, and there's eight candidates. Huge.

human beings used to be able to consume incredibly long form complex, like these were farmers and blacksmiths and people sitting here watching one of the smartest people who ever lived

one of the most eloquent speakers of all time, talk for three hours without break, you know, unamplified. Have you seen certain losses of capability? I mean, I think the ability to consume very long form content, whether it's, you know, a Robert Caro book, or it's a, you know, a thousand, you know, line poem. I think those are one of the, one of the

Only bright spots for me is podcasts. Like, people listen to a three-hour Joe Rogan interview. Long-form podcasting and long-form television. Yes. Yes. Although I find long-form television to be very manipulative and not a sign of progress. Oh, same way. This is great. So, I think... Okay, so, like, when I watch, I don't know, Bloodlines, what I got the sense of is that... Like, let's say I watched the first three seasons, which I thought were good, and then I realized...

I just watched 22 hours of television and eight minutes of things have happened. What they did is they... Instead of having to create beats inside the show to get you to go from commercial break to commercial break, they just know that if they...

If they keep you going, if at the end you're vaguely interested, you will let it autoplay to the next thing. So it's taking what...

what could be a compressed, really interesting couple hours of television. And, and it's like how the YouTube algorithm, uh, uh, rewards watch time. Right. So people just make shit longer than it genuinely needs to be. Um, like as a writer, one of the favorite rules, one of the favorite exercises I heard, um,

Raymond Chandler would write on basically index cards and his typewriter, and his rule was like something has to happen on every index card. So if you read a Raymond Chandler thing, it's like beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. Now you read some novel that wins the National Book Award, and it's like, weirdly, it is 2,000 pages or 1,000 pages, but nothing happens. The characters learn nothing. No lessons are taught. So like...

It's even some of the long form stuff that we consume. It's mostly just a testament to our ability to veg out or consume it in the background as we're doing another thing rather than be very engaged with. Well, then maybe what I want to do is to break out. Is there some long form television that you think

isn't empty calories yeah yeah i mean i'm sure i'm sure there is like i found that the sopranos was incredibly drawn out and in general didn't waste a lot so you liked it i did and and look i would say that the hbo model is different than the netflix model the hbo model is like this has to be so good you will wait one week

and hold on to the threat and come back to it. The Netflix model is, can I steal Tuesday from you? - I see. - You know, like, where you call in sick from work and watch episodes of Genghis Khan or Narcos or whatever. - Okay, well then what's going on with Joe Rogan? Like, this is a singular phenomenon. - Yes, it is fascinating.

Someone was telling me that there's a whole generation of people that don't even know you can listen to Joe Rogan. They just watch it on... I mean, it makes no sense to me that someone could watch a three-hour YouTube video. I just don't understand where you would be able to do that. Well, in part, they're lightly watching it often. I think so. But I think it's a generational...

also a lifestyle thing that is somewhat new. Um, but I was just listening to his Malcolm Gladwell interview and it's like three and a half hours. And I was like literally entertained for every second of it. He's like, he's a, I think he's a master of it. And I think what he's really good at is, is, is,

Being the everyman in the sense of, like, he's asking the questions that a normal person would ask Malcolm Gladwell. Like, what a person who has the opportunity to talk to one of their favorite authors would talk about, as opposed to whatever the...

subtle political agenda or, you know, whatever somebody in the media would try to use the opportunity of talking to Malcolm Gladwell to accomplish. Right. Except that

The funny part is that he's so far away from being every man. Sure, of course. But the persona and the rapper exactly communicates every man. Like his vibe is what you say. Yes. And then if you talk to him or hang out with him outside of his show, you're just aware of what an incredible storehouse of information this particularly singular human being is. He has an enormous personality.

body of knowledge so that you're always close to something that he wants to talk about yeah that's true one of the interesting things i was noticing about that interview is there was like nothing that malcolm gladwell mentioned that rogan wasn't vaguely familiar with there was no events in the news there was no you know he's mentioning this video like this police shooting and this and and he was like he knew all of it um

I think what defines Rogan to me and good podcasts and why they've so exploded is like actually an earnest interest. Yeah. As opposed to a vague, like you've been profiled by media outlets, right? Very little. But what happens is- Actually, very, very little. Interesting. But you get the sense that this person is very nice to you and very friendly, but they're

when you read the article, it is clear that their intention was to let the reader know that they were above up here, um, rendering judgment on the quality of why sometimes they don't cooperate with. Yes. Right. Yeah. I mean, in fact, this, this sort of ties together two different threads. Is the success of Joe Rogan above all, all others, um,

telling us more about what is going on with traditional and legacy media in that he is offering somehow the best antidote to this kind of seamless, endless, interoperable wall of institutional, corporate, and legacy sense-making. Yeah. So...

I think it's also just genuinely, like, most people are fans of stuff, right? And Joe Rogan is a fan of stuff. And when you read a New Yorker profile or a New York Times profile or an Atlantic piece or even some of the, you know, like recaps of television shows by outlets that, you know, everyone does this now.

There's this weird sense that everything sucks, people that make it suck, the world is falling apart, and that the job of the media is to tell us what's wrong with things. And why would anyone consume that information? What is the utility of you telling me that things suck? When I talk to authors, it'll...

Like, the old media model was like, you could write a book about an idea. Like, just general, like, hey, this is complicated. And people are like, I don't have time for this. Like, tell me if it's, tell me, is it good? You know? Or tell me that this is bad. But there's this weird sort of thing in the media where it's just like, it's just kind of, this is, it's like there's an ambiguity to it. And like, it's almost like a film on top of it. There's this culture. I mean...

you know, this word, the commentariat, like who the hell elected these people? And why do they have a culture? And what is it about their jobs that produces this kind of incestuous? Well, she said, she did this think piece about this. And then I came back at that and so-and-so digested the two. And you're just thinking like,

Nobody cares. Well, and ostensibly that should be the role of the editor. The editor should like, I almost get that there's a commentary to sort of young opinionated writers who are writing things, but there should be the editor on top who's saying, who's asking tough questions about the hot take or the opinion. Is it that the economic, is it that the system of selective pressures that is choosing these people to sit in those chairs is now imparting such a spin that

that the world is kind of tuning it out increasingly because, you know, for example, there is a piece I've never heard described like a general platonic abstraction, which I call envy porn. Yeah. Where the piece talks about fabulously rich people leading shitty decadent lives. And you are supposed to be exactly filled with one part envy and one part pity.

Yeah, or some version of that piece is like, I'm going to write about this person whose life seems very glamorous, but I'm subtly going to show how they're actually a vapid idiot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and...

I think what it is, is like, okay, so economically and as far as opportunities go, it's literally never been easier to reach a mass audience, to monetize your work, to control your own destiny as a creative person, right? So like, imagine looking at the vast opportunity of podcasts out there, the opportunity to write books or to create YouTube videos or to do any of these things and go,

I don't want to do that. What I would like to do is make $42,000 a year without health benefits and have a full-time job at Business Insider. You know what I mean? Like you are either you're insane or you're fundamentally lacking the talent to cut it in the real world, eat what you kill, like

sell stuff directly to the audience. - So it's a variance reduction model that you know that you're gonna have a job if you do your job, but you don't actually have to test yourself based on whether or not people are dying for your content. - Yeah, it's like, okay, if you live in some small town, you might think, oh, this person is a certified financial advisor, they know more about money than me, which might be true, but like, they would not be, if they were really good at managing money, they would not be

running a Charles Schwab office in Toledo or something, right? And so it's like, you just, oh, the people who are writing for this outlet or that outlet are in less, I mean, there's obviously exceptions. Malcolm Gladwell writes for The New Yorker, but is also an entrepreneurial writer

in other ways. But, you know, you just realize, oh, you're... It's sort of like the survivorship bias. Like all the good people have been... All the fundamentally talented people have been siphoned off and worked for themselves. I don't know that I really...

I don't know that I hold exactly that take on it. I understand that there's a selection bias. I think that there's an aspect of people merging with these venerable structures. There is power from an institutional perspective that hasn't been completely lost and frittered. I'm not quite sure whether the millennials still pay attention. Well, that came from Harper's, that came from the Atlantic, that came from the New Yorker. However...

What I'm very curious about is at what point do the super vital people

going back into the institutional structures. Like I will see things happen on the Joe Rogan program. And unless there's an angle to take somebody down, it doesn't filter back into what I, this thing I call the gated institutional narrative, because it's mostly an idea that certain organs only talk to each other and themselves. And that, the power of that conversation to stay focused on

It could be completely irrelevant and wrong things or misleading things or terrible things.

but it still has a measure of coherence that the Wild West lacks. And I'm questioning what happens when the interesting stuff is incoherent and the other stuff has a coherence, even if it's meaningless. Yeah. George Trow wrote this book called Within the Context of No Context. And he's sort of talking about, he was a New Yorker writer. He wrote this like 30 years ago, but sort of talking about exactly what we're talking about is that like sort of

the job of these old institutions was to provide context to an imprimatur, a stamp of approval. But now there's these new media outlets, this new wild west where that's gone. Yeah, it is interesting. It's like the Elon Musk episode of Rogan is newsworthy, but the other episodes which reach still millions more people than, you know, an episode of Lena Dunham's Girls, one is covered and the other isn't. Right. But these empty shells are, are,

are really, he calls them empty shells, that these outlets are empty shells, that there is this significance and meaning and equity in them that was built over hundreds of years in some cases. The Atlantic dates before the Civil War, so even if the business model has changed and the credibility might have been reduced, it still means something to people because it's been around for so long. A great example of this is Forbes.

is the economic, the business model is the exact same outlet as the Huffington Post, right? Like it's run by contributors, most of whom are not paid, most of whom are not edited. And yet you see something written by, like you see an article from Forbes.com. It feels like it's from the media brand Forbes, which dates to the early 1900s, right?

but it's actually written by some random person who may be, you know, conflicted or not qualified or whatever. So these empty shells matter a great deal. And we, because so much advertising has been put behind them and exposure, one of the examples I like to use is like,

Okay, you're driving through LA, you see a billboard for, you know, a new movie. It'll have the laurel leaves, you know, around the award that it's won. Well, you know, there used to be like a handful of film festivals and now there's a million film festivals. And so you're driving and you see the laurel leaves and you go, oh, this is an award winning movie. But that might have been, you know, uh...

the Sacramento Film Festival or a non-existent film festival. You know, you've already got the Charles Schwab office of Toledo, Ohio really angry. Now Sacramento is never going to give us... I'm from Sacramento. Okay, all right. I feel like that's what I need to know. We're just plugging a second. There's no such thing as bad press. Yeah, but you know what I mean? So like our mind is looking for these symbols that tell us like this is the important narrative, this has been vetted, and in fact, most of that has fallen away. Yeah.

And so I think we have trouble integrating what's even real and not real. - So if all of our minds are now really the product of random, not randomly, but eclectically chosen inputs, and we can't count on a canon so that there is a less shared context, what would be the art that would be appropriate to this time

that we could look back and say, hey, do you remember how we shared that? Like what is the art we're creating now that matters? Are we unreachable by art effectively because we're too atomized? That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, is there a painting that could come out that would generate,

genuinely pierce the cultural consciousness. Well, remember when Gangnam Style came down? Yeah. That was so weird. Yeah. It was so unseen. Yeah. Everyone was dancing at weddings and- But we also, like the first thing was just your jaw was dropping. What am I watching? It doesn't even make sense. It's like some sort of hypnagogic state. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that was able to, it grabbed the mic and

and said, "Now hear this." - Well, what's interesting is that was like the first video to do a billion views, right? - Okay. - And now there are videos that have done a billion views that you and I have never heard of.

You know, like, which is very strange to think about. I remember the other day, someone had recommended this book. The book is A Man Called Ove, which is this interesting little novel. It was actually really good. But he's like, hey, you should check out this book. And it had recently come out, and I pulled it up, and it had 18,000 reviews on Amazon.

And I'd never heard of it. So not like I hadn't read it, but like I'd never heard of it. I'd never seen it written about anywhere. It had won no awards. It had not been made into a movie. And so you realize, yeah, things can be flat out cultural phenomenons, but have no cultural impact whatsoever because they are filtered out of whatever that dominant phenomenon

media narrative is. Yeah. I mean, I even see this with my own books, right? My books have sold millions of copies, have been reviewed like twice in newspapers. Really? And they were almost all from the Teal book because that was a media-centric book. So my book that's got the most media...

connections got the most attention but actually sold the fewest amount of copies. And

For the rest of it, you don't really fully exist? Yeah, basically it exists to the people who surface it in the... Who get it surfaced to them in the Amazon algorithm and sell like crazy. But as far as... Yeah, what's also weird is like, yeah, to sell millions of books in you, I could walk into a good chunk of indie bookstore. I think people... It's not just the media culture, but I could walk into a large...

number of indie bookstores. And not that they wouldn't have my books, they would not have heard of my books. Even though their business is literally, should be finding books that are selling copies and putting them in front of people. So there is this weird sort of...

There's this weird, it's almost, the New York Times list, I'm fascinated with the New York Times bestseller list. So two things about it. Why? Because to the public, the New York Times list is a reflection of what books are selling best. Right. And to anyone in the industry, you know this is emphatically not the case. It's heavily edited.

The New York Times list, for instance, discounts Amazon and weighs independent retail as a, their algorithm says independent retail matters more than Amazon, even though Amazon is responsible for roughly 80% of all book sales.

Um, only until like 2000, it was only in like 2012, 2013 that they started counting eBooks. Yeah. Audible was, uh, in some cases not included. If you look at the fine print on the New York times bestseller list, it says explicitly not included are, uh,

perennial sellers, which means that like the Great Gatsby should be on the bestseller list most weeks. But the New York Times says, oh, that's old. Let's put How to Be Anti-Racist on the list, even though actually that book is selling a fraction of

seven habits. Well, this is okay. So this is this complex supporting our human malware and our malware runs between our ears. So it's client side. So I have a program that says, if I want to know what's hot, I should check the New York Times bestseller list. And the idea is why am I maintaining the malware client side to participate in this

crazy drama? Is it only because other people are using the same list? And so it's a QWERTY phenomena where it's a terrible arrangement of keys on the keyboard that was originally there to get keys not to stick to slow down typists? Or, I mean, how do I get rid of my legacy architecture? Well, it's probably a little bit that, right? It's the cultural inertia and legacy of like, this thing is existing. And so it's a shorthand.

There's probably a Girardian argument that we want what other people are wanting. And there's also... But you're telling me they're not even wanting that.

- Right, but we think that's what people are wanting. - I know, but if I wanna have a real Girardian moment, I wanna actually want what you're wanting, not what somebody else is telling me that you're wanting. - That's true, yes. So it's Girardian virtue signaling then. - Oh, this is good. - And then I think a lot of it is the paradox of choice, right? There's so much choice that we need

we gravitate towards anything. So we go to the most red list on the side of the New York times. We go to the top of Amazon. Like we, we, we, we just, it's like, please reduce choice for me. I think that's what we're saying. What? Or I mean, or, and please allow me to, to plug into a large memetic complex so that my time isn't wasted with references and

Like, for example, I drove here and I have this Discord server of people who talk about the show and the culture. And I wanted to announce myself as coming in. So I said, you know, this line from the HMS Pinafore, my gallant crew, good morning.

And I was hoping somebody would echo back, sir, good morning. Right. You want them to get the reference. I want them to get the reference. And nobody has the reference. Right. Because why is anyone maintaining HMS Pinafore from the 1800s in 2020 on a Discord server? Well, that is when it's... I mostly write about ancient philosophy. So I sort of, you know...

reading these books. What I love is when you're reading Montaigne or Seneca, they'll quote lines from, you know, the Odyssey or Virgil, they're quoting poetry and plays and things, and it never occurs to them to attribute

It's always in the footnote from the translator, this is a lost line from a Euripides play or whatever, right? But in the ancient world, it was assumed that you would not only have seen said play, but you would have seen said play so many times that you would recognize it.

And, you know, I think the problem is there was just so much less stuff, right? Well, there's that, but there's also this weird discomfort we have

of teaching a canon for the purpose of keeping interoperable referencing. Well, canon is racist, Eric. That's why we can't have a canon. That's why we promote it on the portal. No, of course. Well, we stopped teaching the canon. We certainly, like, yeah, people used to, people used to,

learn Seneca when they were being taught Latin, but now they don't learn Latin, so they're definitely not going to learn Seneca's epigrams. So I think there's an element of that to it. But also, it's like, look, there was only a handful of playwrights in Athens. Now we have all those playwrights, and we have Shakespeare, and we have 100 years of movies. Yeah.

- Well, the movie canon is the one thing that I really see going in the opposite direction is that we remember these scenes. Like if I said to you-- - If you had said, "You can't handle the truth," everyone would know what you're talking about. - Right, but if I said to you, "Put that coffee down," would that be resonant with you? Your name's Levine? - Glenn Ross? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Okay. - Yeah. - Like, so-- - Yes. - The fact that-- - Coffee is for closers. Yeah, those are the things-- - The fact that we can do that to some extent

Well, one of the, so what I do, because I do this email every morning, I write an email called Daily Stoic and it's one sort of Stoic inspired meditation every day. Instead of quoting plays, because no one gets those, I use song lyrics a lot. And I find song lyrics are also something that people have a

have a lot of familiarity with. Really depends on what era. It does. When I found out that my millennial co-workers had never heard Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon and Garfunkel, I had a real moment. But I bet if you, let's say you'd written an email and the title was like, we need a bridge over troubled water, there would be a vague cultural, like not nostalgia, but connection to that. Even if they don't get it, there's a vague familiarity, I bet.

O-M-G-L-O-L-R-O-F-L. Really? I don't think, I mean, I've been shocked how little transmission there is to a lot of my millennia. And again, this isn't a knock on them. It's just things that were incredibly important and salient just dropped by the wayside. And then there will be references. Like a lot of them will know Led Zeppelin. Yeah. And I'll say, wow, why is it that you all know this, but you don't know that? Yeah, it's like classic rock.

Versus folk rock.

I did hear this one thing to tie back to media. It's like, if you look at like, you know, media headlines over the last hundred years, there's lots of, yeah, Shakespearean references and like literary references, like that headlines might be a pun on that. And they were like, the person was saying like, in the future, the headlines will be Simpsons references. Like, because that's what's replaced the thing. That was very sneaky of you. A friend of mine said that the Simpsons was the only thing

the only pleasure she got where she could actually use her very expensive BA in English literature. Because the people writing it are so, are like, are a Harvard. Exactly. So the point is, is that they're sneaking. Sure. Yeah. But, but yeah, they're, I would argue that one of the reasons like the Marvel movies are so big, now obviously there's a hero's journey sort of archetypes or whatever, but, but,

If you're going to make a $200 million movie or a billion dollar movie, you have to have a large cultural familiarity. Like there has to be an... The audience has to already be familiar with the characters. So the reason we get lots of sequels, we get remakes... Because you've already invested in building up... There's already a latent audience who are at least potentially interested in the idea. Whereas if you think about a movie like Interstellar or...

Inception, what an incredible gamble that is from a studio standpoint to make a movie that's that expensive, but that has no cultural headstart.

In that people already love. Although, let's just take one of those. So Interstellar has this character who never really got his chance. And he's now a father. And so he's got this problem, which is that he's finally getting called up to the majors to do something real. And he's Matthew McConaughey, who people know. Yes. Okay, well, this character, in some sense, is playing off

not a specific archetype, but something that is very, you know, the past over who has to choose between family and a dream. Yes. But, but just, I think the point is it's, if you're doing Spider-Man eight,

Everyone knows who Spider-Man is. Well, I took your point. Yeah. Another question I had about the Marvel Universe. Although how many people in Interstellar recognize the, you know, don't go quietly into the Dark Knight? You know, like that movie is built around poetry. Dylan Thomas. Yeah, Dylan Thomas. Yeah. Did people get it? Did they not? I don't know. But that's also a weird exception in that sense. Well, and also, you know, all the work of like...

It was a Kip Thorne who was consulting to this to get the physics right. You know, very often a film is over engineered, which I think is a beautiful thing that Hollywood still chooses to do on occasion with respect to the Marvel universe. How much of that is really, it's an ensemble idea, but it's,

Like with the Avengers, how much of that is really based around one or two of these characters that are much more important than all of the others? I mean, I'm sure that's a big part. I've literally never seen an Avenger or Marvel movie. But I'm interested. I think like what are in 10 years or 15 years, what will be big enough to have the cultural nostalgia to be a sure bet for a blockbuster movie?

what do we all share enough that, you know what I mean? Are they going to be Kardashian movies? Like what, what, what could you be making movies about that reached everyone to a degree that I, I'm not sure what that answer is. So here's the thing. I, I, I'm always fascinated when I'm positive about something and I can't get it to land generally. You and I have never explored this, but I'm convinced that we're in a revolution and it's a weird revolution so that it doesn't immediately change.

rhyme close enough with any revolution we've been through before. And you see this with unrest all over the world and everybody's incapable of figuring out why things are going in unexpected directions. The last time we were in such a situation arguably would have been the late 1960s. And the music we had clearly made sense for the revolution that was going on. Yeah, sure. I'm positive that the music I'm listening to does not belong to this time. It's like it's unwanted music

Even the best of it. You mean like the Taylor Swift of the world or? Even the hip hop. Okay. The hip hop is, everybody will point to the hip hop and say, no, no, no, the hip hop is actually that. That's what's now. That's what you're just not getting. I listened to it. I'm still not convinced that that's the music of now. Okay. That somehow our inability to say where we are in common and to build up that kind of, somebody will call it the inner subjective or what have you. Yeah. Yeah.

means that my music, even if it's great music, sucks because it's not the music of this time. Sure, it's not rooted in anything human. Well, if I heard, let's imagine that I wake up and I get in an Uber and the guy's playing the radio or whatever and a song comes on and I just think like,

Oh my God, that is the song of now. This is a sound I haven't heard. Suddenly I'm grounded again. And then there's an explosion in this fantasy where everybody's saying, what is that? And then people start talking about it and start building it up. So for example, the comedy we had was not the comedy of now up until I think very recently. I was talking to Joe Rogan about this at the, at the comedy store and,

The comedy store on the Sunset Strip now appears to be, and maybe the comedy cellar in New York, a small number of places, the reincarnation of CBGBs for punk. These are the subversive voices, the politically incorrect voices. No, no, no. It's a group of people who are talking to each other backstage, trading ideas and creating, like there is a school happening that I don't know if it's named or

Interesting. Where they couldn't figure out how to tell the jokes a few years ago. And they've now cracked the code. Yeah. And the jokes are now the jokes of our time where the jokes didn't feel like they were the jokes of our time. Okay. Right. Like in other words, for example, you don't want to be politically incorrect for the sake of just being a dick. Yeah. On the other hand, you don't want to denature yourself.

To the point that your comedy is completely uninteresting. Yeah. Before nobody could figure out how to do an edgy bit that meant something that still had some heart and left you feeling uplifted that somebody had figured out how to say what you've been feeling. Yeah. Well, there's some puzzle like that in music that hasn't been solved.

So two things. So one to go to our point about the dominant cultural medium or conversation, and then like what people are liking. I've, did you see that Jesse Singer piece about like the, the Chappelle ratio, whereas like on, uh, Netflix or whatever, like Chappelle's, uh,

special had like a 98% rating. And then the rotten tomatoes rating was like 30%. Yeah. And so it like the people who are supposed to be helping us surface these things and contextualizing them and popularizing them and reflecting back to us what they mean have failed completely to get what people need. Or we have failed our betters in Brooklyn.

Yes, right. Actually, they know what's good and we plebs are like garbage. We plebs just don't get it, right. We just don't get it. Right, sure, sure. And that's certainly what they think, right? That they're telling us why we're all... They're beginning to understand that they look ridiculous. I think they are. But there's also an argument that we're the deplorables who are not getting how offensive...

uh do you really i don't i don't believe that look i i didn't think chapelle's thing was that great to be on i think it was amazing but and i did think it was offensive in sometimes uncompensated ways yeah

But that wasn't what was so exciting about it. The exciting part was the breaking of the joke that broke the fourth wall where he said, I'm going to do two impressions. Yeah. And the second impression is you fuck the audience. Yeah. My audience sucks. You know, you suck. And I am going to point out that you suck to get you to stop sucking quite as hard as you are. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. The other argument though is like, okay, when we look back and we go, okay, the songs of the sixties and seventies, um,

I wonder if you, if you, okay, give me, if you're like, give me the 10 sort of Vietnam songs, you know, it's like all along the watchtower. It's,

you know, whatever the song. Why was all along the watchtower of Vietnam? I don't know. I'm just saying like, what are the Vietnam era? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I meant. But I mean, like, do we think what those songs are? It's because we've watched so many movies about them. They've been, you know, it's like, what's the soundtrack from Forrest Gump? What's the soundtrack from Full Metal Jackal? Take the one you pulled up.

Bob Dylan is quoting two separate parts of the Bible, one of which is Isaiah, right? And you know, this whole concept of Christ on the Mount being crucified between these two other figures and this incredible conversation sketched in thumbnail, uh,

between these two figures evoking the crucifixion. The other case, you know, you're talking about, you know, the loss of a great city and waiting to hear the news that I guess Babylon has fallen or something, you know,

And then Hendrix comes out of nowhere combining rhythm guitar and lead guitar in an otherworldly piece that even Dylan has to realize, holy shit, I didn't get my own song. There was so much drama in that, those three chords, you know, that I know why that song

worked for that time. But what I just mean, like if you ask someone today, what are the songs? And let's say you got 10 songs. Right. And then you compare, then you look side by side with the charts of that era. Are they the same? Or is our sense of it

a thing that happens slowly over time as we get more removed from it. So the argument that what we're listening to today is not the songs of our time actually is, do those songs get created afterwards as we reflect, like as we reflect on it, as we filter the good from the bad slowly over time. So maybe you, maybe you didn't actually hear, maybe you wouldn't have heard all along the watchtower in a taxi in New York city in 19,

whatever, just as you wouldn't hear it getting into an Uber downstairs today. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I do.

The Great Gatsby is the book of the jazz age, but it was a failure in its own time. Well, there's lots of- You know, but so it emerges after we sift through it over time and then we get the reflection. It was being written in that time. It just wasn't, we just didn't appreciate it enough then. I love that. I think that's true for some amount of it. What I think, what I'm talking about is an effect so large that we don't even really want to contemplate

I mean, there's an aspect to which Ariana Grande or Billie Eilish is speaking to her audience in the time and going through their problems, and they are making a connection. I don't mean to say that. What I mean to say is that this moment...

for young, old is wildly incoherent. If you have a civil war, let's say in Beirut, everybody's going through the same civil war. It's not like the old man, your civil war is different. No, those checkpoints are real. Whatever is blowing us apart in terms of whatever assumed interstitial relationship

Inter subjective is breaking down everywhere. We're all going through it and nothing is reflecting it. And we're not even thinking about like what I try to do is to give you a concrete realization. I believe that the comedy that's going on in the lab is now the comedy of our time. Yeah.

I don't think that's yet true for music. And people have an automated answer, which is, no, man, it's hip hop. Hip hop is what's now. And even that's not right. Like, you will see something take over the planet when somebody actually hits the formula that says, oh, my God, this is the ephemeral of this moment made archival. Have you watched the Taylor Swift documentary? No. You should watch it. Okay. Because it's interesting because you're watching the most...

artists of our time essentially create a propaganda documentary about themselves. Right. But there is this interesting moment in it where she's decided she wants to speak out about the Senate race in Tennessee that's going on at that time. This is like filmed in 2017 or something like that.

And you watch her. So I think two things. The first one is there's a scene in the documentary where she has to go to her advisors and her parents, and she's like literally weeping, begging them to try to let her say what she thinks politically. Right. Which you would never have. Bob Dylan did not have that conversation. Jimi Hendrix did not have that conversation either.

There was a, I think it was both a courage, but also the stakes were lower. And so didn't Bob Dylan have that conversation by singing Maggie's farm gone electric at Newport? I mean, wasn't that the import is like, I'm tired of you guys telling me that I'm breaking free. Screw you.

Maybe, maybe that's a good point. I don't know, but it's a very, I thought it was a revealing cultural moment that like the person with all the power, I don't think Bob Dylan was then as big as Taylor Swift is now.

He didn't have 100 million Instagram followers. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It's a weird thought, isn't it? Yeah, it's crazy. But you think that there... I think it's a courage thing, but it's also... Her brand is specifically about her being apolitical, not controversial, not saying what she actually thinks. It's about the mask. And here she's trying to break that mask or take that mask off and be...

genuine and so i thought that was interesting the other weird sense i got from the documentary is primarily because it is propaganda she makes this herself it's not like some you know 2020 documentary about something she her pride i felt the primary mood was that you she wanted you to see her as kind of a victim like as weak and as struggling and um

being buffeted by forces and adversity and difficulty. I can't imagine 30 years ago, Madonna at the peak of her career, wanting you to feel sorry for her. That would not be the brand. So there's a weird millennial moment in that for me. Well, but sometimes that's just bringing your context. Like Madonna effectively was metabolizing shame and

you know, in something like, like a virgin where the idea is, is that if I can assume that you understand the shame, then my cavorting in this particular way shows you that I'm rising above it. So maybe the idea is, is that,

a Taylor Swift, like you have to be buffeted by forces and pushed down and victimized so that you can rise up and say, no fucks left to give and all of these-- - No, no, no, it's actually closer to something you've talked about where Madonna's narrative is fundamentally of empowerment and of her agency and the prevailing mood of this and I think of our time to go back to your original, original question

It was that she's a low agency person.

Do you know what I mean? That like, you think she's X, but actually she's just like everyone else, which is that we are not in control of our destiny and that we are victims and that this is hard and we're helpless. You know what I mean? Like, I think that is a weird force of our time that like, even though we actually have more opportunities, more resources, more freedom than literally ever before, everyone wants you to know how powerless they are. And

and how much of a victim they are of systemic. - Certainly how Taylor Swift came to our consciousness is that she was the good-hearted girl next door when you were focused on the hot chick leading the cheerleader squad. - And then right as she was winning her award, Kanye West came up and bullied her out of it. That's like the narrative of the film. It's really interesting. - What do you think the biggest distortions that we're wrestling with

in our minds are where there is a resolution that immediately catapults us to a different metacognitive level of understanding of our environment. In other words, what is it that you see is most off in people's understanding where there is a fix and you can say, what now that I see that I understand why I'm behaving this way, why I don't feel right about my family relations. I'm not comfortable with the media.

or our political process? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I get a sense from a lot of my peers that there's this kind of feeling of unrootedness and being untethered.

And it's like they're looking for it everywhere. They're looking for peace and meaning in psychedelics and polyamorous relationships and traveling and influence. It's the exact same list that I would have come up with. Okay, interesting. And to me, the solution of 90% of the problems. Wait, don't tell me. Okay, yeah. Let's both fix it in our minds. Okay.

I won't change mine, you won't change yours. Give me yours. - I think for most people, I think this would be the solution to the elite angst and anxiety as well as the alt-right anger and fear. It's like get married, have kids, live within your means, find work that's purposeful and fulfilling to you. - So this just happened, I went to, I think it was

I think it was Joe Green was opening this treehouse. It was one of these intentional communities. Everybody's talking about we have a loss of spirituality. We have a need for community like never before. Our lives have to be meaningful. And then all this stuff about nutrition. I always pick on Tulum because people are always going to Tulum. Yeah, they are. Psychedelics.

all of these kind of intentional getaways. Yeah. And I raised my hand. I said, how many of you have children? And like one hand goes up in a very crowded row. Right. And I said, have you ever considered that what it is that you're looking for is family? Yes. And maybe even belonging to your local mosque, church or synagogue, whether or not you believe. Right. And, and,

I don't think it even occurs to them that this is, they've got a family-sized hole in their souls. Yeah, that's a weird thing, Silicon Valley. It's Silicon Valley, but I mean more like the larger system of sort of media and questions. It's like they've kicked out the legs of all the stools, all the legs of the stool, like families kicked out.

showing up in an office is kicked out. Even if you show up in an office, having your own space inside the office is kicked. Like all the things that used to make us feel normal and comfortable and safe and rooted and

- It's not normal to go to WeWork and bring your stuff to a large community table every day. You should have a desk with pictures of your kids on it. - Well, I don't wanna say normatively, but the thing that I'm just fascinated by is the idea isn't occurring to these people. Once you have a kid in a school and you're worried about how the kid is doing and other parents have the same concerns about the same teachers and you're having these conversations,

you start to think, oh, well, this is what my body is programmed for, is to take this incredible interest in a tiny number of people. Now, I don't mean to say, and I'm positive that you won't mean to say, that every single person needs to go have a child. Right. It's just most people. Most people. Yeah. On average. Yeah.

And I'm not even talking about having a great family. Like have a challenged, difficult family like everybody else. Yeah. It could be a gay family. It could be a transgender family. It doesn't really matter. It could be a dysfunctional family. It could be a family with a lot of pain. Right. No, you need that. I do think you need that. Also, I think it has all these weird unintended benefits, even just like, oh, it puts you –

on a schedule because the kids go to wake up at a certain time and go to bed at a certain time. They need a bath at a certain time. And like, they go to a same place most days of the week, you know, like it roots you in life in a way that when you have unlimited options and unlimited choice, you, you are paralyzed.

I mean, I don't know whether you've found this. Your oldest is three? - Three and a half and then I have a seven month old. So I'm in deep in the shit. - All right, well this is great. By the way, three was definitely the, I heard about the terrible twos, we had terrible threes. - They call it threenager. - A threenager, that's very good. I hadn't heard that. It was also the most delicious time. But anyway, the thing that I found was is that my feelings about death changed.

because this is the human program for immortality. So you can worry, like once your child starts to carry your memes and your thought processes and knows your references, there's a weird way in which you can accept your own death and say, okay, well, I'm continuing in some form. Yeah, I had this weird feeling. I don't feel it a lot, but sometime after my son was born, because my career's been successful, I've done interesting things, and I had a kid and I was like, oh, I'm...

I could be done. Like, like, like I'd done it all. Like, obviously you want to be around, you want to have more, you want to do more, but you're just like, Oh, like I've, there, there was this weird evolutionary sense of having ticked all the, all the boxes. Did you ever feel that? I, I, so our, our oldest, um,

skipped her last year of high school and went to college. And we had this sense of like, wait a minute, we succeeded? Yeah, right, right. I'm not even positive that I think college is a good idea, but it was just the sense of like... You got them from beginning to... The plane has... The wheels have left the ground. The wheels have left the ground. Yeah. And that was one of these feelings where you do have that sense that somehow...

You've contributed. One of the things I find very strange is that children are about the most interesting thing to have, but they, they're terrible for talking about them, particularly to people who don't have them. Yeah. It's inevitable. It's inevitable. There's an inevitable quality. And, um,

What was I going to try to get at? Something here. And it also gives you a weird relation to your own body and feelings in that, like, if you could step back from it, you know it's hard and exhausting and difficult. And somehow your body and mind is telling yourself that it's worth it and amazing. Like, you get a sense of like, oh, my body is...

Like that my wife would like to have another kid. I'm like, you saw what this did to you. Like it was horrible. I mean, let's be honest. Yeah. This was a life and death activity. Still is occasionally, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're still not sleeping from the first two. Right. Not gotten any of the stuff you wanted to get back back yet. But your mind is able to.

It's like the equivalent, so normally you're flying the plane and you're convinced you're the pilot and then every once in a while autopilot kicks in and you realize that it's overriding you and you don't have nearly as much of a say in it as you think you have had. I think kids sort of give you a weird glimpse into how biologically driven you are.

you are and your life is. - So I'm very concerned about the idea that a lot of the people that I really love and take seriously

don't have a particular concern about the world beyond their own lifespan and that's very hard to convince them of why they should care a lot of these people increasingly have an idea of i don't really need to have kids i enjoy my life but it's very somatic it's very much about

the purpose of life is to be happy. And if there's one thing I'm reasonably convinced of, the purpose of life is not to be happy. - I think we would be happier if that's what we were bred for or paid for. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Well, happiness is approximate to guide you to doing certain things that are actually about something related. I mean, it's not orthogonal to happiness, but some kind of fulfillment. - There's a Greek saying where it's like,

Society is great when old men plant trees. Trees in whose shade they will never sit. Yeah. I just was trying to make this point to people, and they act as if they've never heard it. Well, not only is it weird, most people have never heard it. If you look at, it's the exact opposite of how demographics work.

voting patterns seem to go. The older you get, the more conservative you are, the more selfish you tend to get. It's strange that we are looking at a political system in which

young people are most concerned about, and look, there's obviously, these are nuanced issues, so I'm not meaning to, but it's young people who are most concerned with climate change. It's young people who are most concerned with the solvency of sort of various institutions or, you know. Well, look, we've got a psychotic generation and I don't know why because you can't have everybody being a psychopath. Yeah. But the boomer generation is,

There is something bizarrely wrong with these people as an aggregate, not as individuals, but as an aggregate, their concern for their own children is so diminished from what I would expect. Yes. And they're concerned with their lifestyle is so exaggerated. And again, everything has to be filtered through on average. Sure. Sure. So please, before you attack all the standard disclaimers,

What the F? It's strange. It's very strange. What's the term for it now is dream hoarding. Wait, I haven't heard this. Yeah. So it's like, who are the NIMBYs? Who are the people who are most in favor of legacy admissions to colleges? You go down the list. It's...

wealthy people who are primarily concerned with themselves. And in some case, if we're lucky, they're one to two children. It's not a sense of like when we say our kids, I forget who said it, but it was really brilliant. I think about all the time.

He said, you know, a generation or two ago, if you said like, we're going to build a park for our kids, or we're going to put in a swimming pool for our kids, you meant a community swimming pool in your neighborhood. Now you mean we're putting in a swimming pool in the backyard. Right. We're going to put a large fence around so the neighborhood kids don't come in it. Well, my version of this is why am I more concerned about your children than you're concerned about your children? Yeah. Like I'm a Gen Xer. My,

My audience is largely millennials. I rag on the millennials to an extent. Sure. But honestly, it's this avuncular concern like, hey, how do I help you guys figure out why you're feeling blocked with work? Because let me tell you, I believe all standard career paths don't make sense, which is a terrible thing to be growing up with. Yeah.

not all of you need to have children, but a lot of you are pretending you don't need to have children so that you don't feel bad if it doesn't work out. How do I, how do I say something to help you couple in court and, and, and, and realize these dreams. And then when I listen to the boomers, they have this attitude of like, yeah, I just figure everybody will find their bliss and, you know, make their own way. We know we did. And I just think,

Do you have any idea, for example, how crushing college is as an experience relative to when you went through it? Me? No, no, no. You boomers. Right, because they remember paying $55 for tuition to go to UCLA and it's now $55,000.

But why does nothing get through? It's very strange. I remember a tweet I saw from you many years ago that I think about often is you looked at the average age of professions as boomers have gotten older, and it's

precisely the age of what the boomers are so like a college president in 1970 was 30 because that's how old boomers were and the now boomers are 70 the average age of a college president is like 70 you know like they've hoarded all the stuff and they won't they won't retire and give it up 51 during the 80s yeah and it's now climbed into the 60s right but my

I mean, I just want to take it away from them. I literally, and I think this is just important. I want to say you're done. Timmy needs, Timmy needs the tricycle now and you've been on it and having a 69 year old person on a tricycle is unseemly. Right. Get the hell off the trike. Yeah. It's time. It's time for, it's almost, it's like nepotism would be refreshing, right?

Like that you're retiring as CEO and putting your son in charge or your daughter in charge would be refreshing, better than you just never letting go. - The thing that, the one that really breaks my heart is how many weekend getaways do you people need? And I said this thing about you're gonna have hard drives filled with photos that nobody cares about and you're never gonna hold a grandchild in your own arms.

What is even going through your mind? Like dowry is a concept that we consign to the developing world. Wealth redistribution. Just give your kids your money while their ovaries are still fresh. No, it's funny. So my parents, I think, are sort of typical. My parents were slightly late, or like the last generation of boomers.

the last sort of tail end of boomers but like when my we grew up in california and then when my sister and i graduated from college or went to college my parents moved to hawaii so they moved so the opposite of like uh let's be near the kids my parents moved literally as far as you can move away and stay in the united states and then i can tell it makes them sad that they don't have as close a relationship with their grandchildren as some of their friends and it's like

You know, it's because you live in an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right? They can't put it together. I'm not going to. And they go, oh, come visit us. It's the beach. It's like, do you know how hard it is to put two toddlers on an eight-hour flight with a three-hour time difference? That's insane. Just get a paper route. What? Just get a paper route. Right, right. No, no, it's not at the expense. It's just like, I'm just not going to do that. No, no, I understand. It's a complete disconnect. Yeah.

The story I've been telling recently was going to my father's 85th birthday party and

one of their friends, this is the silent generation who doesn't take enough shit in my opinion for this, because I think they really, your father is the silent. My father's silent. That's born right before world war two or born before 46. Okay. Got it. So he's born in the mid thirties. Got it. Okay. You know, and this is like McCain and well, interestingly, no person born in the thirties ever becomes president of the United States. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, um, this is Korea. Yeah.

Yeah. Dead fight in Korea? No. Okay. But. Right. Right. Sure. So one of his friends says to me, you know, everything's changed so much. There used to be 14 boys who all played in the street where we live and we've been in that house, you know, for decades. And I said, well, how many boys play in the street now? He says, none.

I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, no families can afford this street." I said, "Does that strike you that you were able to afford this street when you started and now you have an idea of course no families can afford?" I mean, is there any part of this that lands? None of it. - What's also, it's like you should move into a two bedroom condo and then people, you should have moved to Florida and then people could have your house. It's not only that it can't afford it,

It's that you're still in the house. Yes, but I would say it differently. But I just mean in California, it's like, it's also because boomers aren't selling their houses because they don't want to take the tax hit. Here's the disconnect for me. Do you understand that you caught a wave? Do you imagine that the rest of us just aren't as smart as you? Nobody's hardworking because that's one of the memes. It's like, well,

And I believe that it's exactly the reverse, that the millennials watch the Xers. This is a friend of mine, Zed Zayi, said, we watched you give everything to try to make these careers work and fail. And so we're not going to fall for that. So we're going to Tulum. Interesting. Sure.

- Yeah, or it's like if you know retirement's a lie and it's not gonna happen, you should go to Tulum now. - You should go to Tulum and front load your life because quite frankly, we don't have a plan. There's no retirement plan. - Yeah, no, no, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah, there's also, I think, let's say you're a millennial, it's like, I remember freshman year of high school, I watched 9/11 live on television. Then I watched the war in Iraq. Then I watched the financial crisis.

I was lucky in that I dropped out of college. I didn't take any debt. I caught some waves that other millennials didn't get to catch. But like, I mean...

That's a dark 10 year period right there, you know, like of shit happening and being lied to. And you, we, you watched, I think the antagonism between millennials and boomers is not just the straight generational conflict, but it's, it's,

It's like the boomer conflict between their parents. It's like, sure, there are problems, but like there was a heroism to the greatest generation and a sacrifice there. It's like we just watch like sort of rank moral hypocrisy and selfishness from the boomer generation without much in the way of redeeming.

qualities. Do you know what I mean? Well, see, I don't think, let me just get my spin on this. There's nothing magical about the generations. The key question is what was your developmental environment and you're an economic environment growing up. Yeah. So I thought I just had a problem with authority. Turned out when I started working for somebody younger than myself as an Xer, somehow the Xers don't figure into the millennial story, which is very, the Xers think it's, it's hysterically funny. Um,

I found that I was easily able to take direction from somebody like Peter Thiel, not because I had a hierarchy or authority issue, but because really the problem was silence and boomers have beliefs that I don't share. Sure. They just don't understand what they do makes no sense to me. None. I cannot process it. And it's not like I haven't studied it or tried to understand it. It's just certain things that are obvious realities to me.

It's like speaking at a high frequency that their ears can't hear. Yeah. The division to me is you had silence and boomers and then there's a line and then Xers millennial Gen Z are all saying, well, we're not part of whatever story is going on above that line.

And maybe to tie back to the art discussion, I think one of the big problems is that we don't have any story whatsoever. There's no mediums, music, television, radio.

especially literature, which is, you know, from my focus that it's telling any kind of redeeming, inspiring, meaningful story. What's inspiring you? Come on. I don't even believe this. What is, you've taken tremendous inspiration, for example, from stoicism, right? Yeah.

you've profiled like, you know, this is an incredibly weird heroic story of Peter against Gawker, unless it's the reverse, in which case it's the, you know, the rich baron laying low the free press. Yeah. Either way that you tell that story.

It's an effing amazing story. Yeah, it's the story of good and evil. Either way you assign it. Yes, right. And that's what I was fascinated with. Who is the good guy, bad guy? Both characters have. But if you were telling the story in television today or something...

The only way you would tell that story is Peter is irredeemably the bad guy. I think what is the cultural, what's the primary theme of most of the culture that we're consuming today? I think it's nihilism. I think that everything is meaningless. Everything sucks. Everyone's a moral hypocrite. There is no good or bad culture.

shouldn't judge other people's lifestyles. So I think we don't lack, we lack any kind of store, like what we've, we've looked back at history and gone, Abraham Lincoln's actually a racist. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson are total hypocrites. Founding of America was based on fraud. Like we've looked back at, we've, we've, we've,

emptied all these things of meaning and replaced them with nothing. And then we wonder why everyone is content to burn down the system. All right. But you, sir, are not afflicted with this. Right. But I'm a throwback. No, no, no, no, no, no. You're of this moment. You're part of the same...

I was very curious when you said your colleagues or your peers. Who are they? What's your firmament? What's your cohort? I mean, I feel like I spend most of my time communicating with people that are dead. You talk to the dead and so do I. So Zeno is the founder of Stoicism. He goes to the Oracle of Delphi. He's a young man. He's a merchant family. He's incredibly wealthy. He trades Tyrian purple, which is the purple dye that makes the emperor's cloak.

And he stops at the Oracle of Delphi and he says, what should I do with my life? Basically, the timeless question. And they say, you will become your best self when you begin having conversations with the dead. And he shortly thereafter suffers a shipwreck, washes up in Athens, loses everything. And he walks into a bookstore and the bookseller is reading

a dialogue of Socrates and

He realizes, oh, this is the conversation with the dead. Socrates is dead a few decades by the time this happens. And he realizes, oh, I'm talking to Socrates. And this creates the school of philosophy that I now believe in. But I think what we have lost, this is the closing of the American mind? Is it Bloom? Bloom.

We've lost, we've destroyed the canon, replaced it with nothing. You know, we destroyed the myths of the founding of America, replaced it with nothing. We questioned patriotism, replaced it with nothing. You know, we tore down marriage, replaced it with nothing. You know, we tore down the office, the community, the small town square, all of the things, we tore them down and we've replaced them with nothing. I feel like I'm...

I'm rooted in those, I'm rooted in that more ancient tradition. That's to me where I find meaning. But you're rebuilding it. I hope so. Okay, so when you bathe your three-year-old, how's your nihilism doing?

Oh, it's not. That's my point. And when I'm reading him Aesop's fables or we go for a walk on our farm in the morning or, you know, I drop him off for school in this small town in Texas that we live in. Right. I walk down Main Street and my office is a hundred-year-old building and I'm surrounded by ideas and...

And I think even podcasts, the idea of dial, like this, like this is what most of Socrates' work is, is the recreation of dialogues between smart people. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like that is, that's our salvation. I've gone back to, I think, 1609 to find a drinking song for my class.

I don't want to call them a cult, but the people who are coalescing around this podcast, they're probably now 10 different performances of this song on a Google drive. Oh, you know, one like an EDM and another was a, is a swing version. You know, somebody else has done like three part religious harmony. People want meaning. And the whole point that we can't get at is these open communities where everybody can comment on YouTube and say, Hey,

You suck. You don't even get it. You're so far out. You got pawned. That thing just needs to shut the fuck up and we need to exclude it because

I think we've wildly overestimated diversity and inclusion. We need interoperability to allow for the diversity and exclusion. There's certain voices that we now need to just turn the volume all the way to zero. They can have their free speech, but it's very important that those voices not- I'm a big fan of shadow banning.

I'm not a big fan of shadow banning by corporate interests who are doing it for the wrong reasons. Yeah. I'm a big fan of excluding people and heads on pikes when you actually have the conviction of why that person needs to be excluded from the community. Yes. Like, for instance, I don't, I think like Twitter, instead of,

banning people, Twitter should tweak the algorithm to de-emphasize politics, let's say, and re-emphasize photos of pizza or whatever. Like, I think what we've allowed is toxic conversations or styles of conversations to dominate the town squares in a way that's made them almost unlistenable or, you know, made them worthless.

Well, to your earlier point about public parks. Yeah. When a public park becomes a dangerous Hobbesian place,

square. When you let homeless people turn it into a camp. Well, but I'm not even talking about necessarily homeless people. You know, if you have like a solid drug taking community where people who have perfectly reasonable homes. Yeah, you let high school kids drink in it or whatever it is, you lose that original intent. So exclusion is

is trading at a discount at the moment because we have a fear that if anybody points out that inclusion as writ large is, you can't just stop at an idea that simple. - Yeah, like what I love on Twitter is the mute button. I don't block people, I just mute the people that I don't wanna hear from. And they don't know that they've been muted as far as-- - Well there's that, but part of the problem is is that people who are using these attacks

on the lower brain. So for example, if you have followers who start to say, wow, Ryan really is at an interesting point. I really like what he's developing. Then you start getting these weird accounts that are remoras on your shark. And they're like, that blowhard has been mining the same passage from Seneca. Tell me something new. Did you read a new book today, Ryan? Okay, so now you mute that. You don't realize that that person

It's changing the experience for everyone else. Subreddits are a great example of this. There's almost like a law that a subreddit is formed by people who are fans of a thing, and then it becomes dominated by people who actually hate that thing. This process, it's like if you leave a dead body out, and then you put a time-lapse camera on it,

You'll see this weird process by which the body is reclaimed. Yeah. Okay. Sure. That seems to be a feature of our time that I wish we were talking about, that anything hopeful and decent and meaningful left out in this environment will be eroded and memefied and cheapened and degraded simply by virtue of the fact that it was out there.

There is an aspect of saying there's a reason that we don't leave the original constitution in an open air park. It's protected under bulletproof glass and humidifier. And the key point is, can you touch? I don't understand. Why can't we touch it? We're the people. The people's like, no, you can't touch it. You just can't. Right. Yeah. It's a sort of protection and enforcing of boundaries and norms. And well, this is the thing. This is what has to start.

I mean, I literally watched the moderators of one of these groups dedicated to this show and they were in pains. I don't want to exclude anybody. I just said heads on pikes. Take the first real troll and make a public example of this person and their shittiness. And let that, you know, put that at the gates of the city wall so that everybody understands exactly how you'll be asked to leave the community. Right.

No, that's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah, it's weird. I feel like everyone should have experience with

moderating an internet forum like i because i did that as a certain internet nerd growing up and so i i you yeah you're like look you gotta you gotta ban people or you gotta get rid of people or you have to insist on the rule like if there are rules and you don't insist on people following that rule it descends into anarchy immediately i also think you need an injustice budget

Like, in other words, you can't move through the world. You know, like the Janes in India, they don't want to do any harm. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, no, you have to, you have to be allowed to do some injustice as you move through planet earth. Got it. Sure. And so the fact that so many people have an idea that they have to only have type one error and never have type two error is paralytic.

Well, so I wrote a piece a couple months ago about hunting and... Are you a hunter? Yeah. I live on a little farm in Texas. Mostly boars because they're an enormous invasive species. Okay. But what I love... Two things about it I love. One, if I took a picture of my breakfast this morning, people go, oh, that's a delightful photo. Right. If I took a picture of a boar I shot, I'm a murderer. Right. Even though actually one is much less violent and...

cruel than the other right bacon from a factory farm you know sausage from a i encourage everyone to read uh the walrus and the carpenter poem of lewis carroll i haven't read this i will you you know the time has come uh the walrus said to talk of many things of shoes and chips and sealing wax of cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings you ever heard no

It's a dialogue between these two characters who trick a bunch of oysters into being their lunch. And one of them is very sad about the fact that they've done such a nasty thing. And the other one's like, come on, we did it, whatever. And I really detest, the question is, who do you detest more? And I always detested the one with this sort of mock attitude.

and sanctimony and pity. Whereas other people have the idea, well, at least that's a nub of something to begin an empathic conversation. - Well, that was my point in the article. It's not that everyone should hunt, but I feel like everyone should do it once because you realize, oh, this is a complicated thing.

which brings up complicated emotions. You learn that food comes from life and death, and you learn that there is violence in the world. And that sometimes, like your point about injustice, like it is in one respect unjust to kill this animal. On the other hand, this is where food comes from. On the other hand,

somebody else killed all the mountain lions and the wolves and so now there's not a predator to kill these wild boar which shouldn't be here and so there's an unlimited population of them and they are destroying the environment that you say that you care about well it's interesting also that people tend to think about the top and bottom of a food chain yeah and that um

when you kill something in the middle of a food chain, you're killing a killer. And, you know, in some sense you've preserved more life or, you know, then there are all these ways in which you can argue that a vegetarian diet takes life in ways that you didn't expect. So you have to make contact with the fact that there is no way out. That's exactly right. And I think, for instance, this might seem like a stretch, but so you go out, you hunt wild boar, you do it once, you get the experience that it's,

There's a certain amount of injustice, but this injustice prevents a greater injustice, blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, like Austin is like San Francisco and like Los Angeles that's struggling with a housing crisis and homelessness, right?

So Austin has had this, where I live has had this long standing belief that if we don't build infrastructure, people won't come here. If we prevent density, our place will not become dense and we will preserve the bubble of our wonderful city. Well, me being outside this, I have a place in town and a place outside. So the, the, on the one hand, it's great for me that there's restrictive zoning laws because it means my house in town is steadily gone up in value faster than anything else.

On the other hand, because they can't build a 30-story apartment complex in my neighborhood, what they are doing is raising large forests and beautiful tracts of land that were formerly farms right outside city limits and turning them into mobile home parks. So these people who think, well, it would be unjust to push these

lower middle class, lower income people out of their neighborhood. So richer people could move into nice apartments. They think by restricting zoning, by not passing laws, they are preventing an injustice, but actually a greater environmental injustice and a number of other injustices are happening just right on the other side of town, but because they don't see it, they don't have to feel it. And so,

And so the homeless crisis, and then they cannot see, this is a boomer thing, they cannot see their insistence on protecting the single family home is directly responsible for that homeless crisis. Do you see your own hypocrisy clearly?

what, like what, in what I just said or in my life. No, just you're talking about benefiting from things, things that are also having negative consequences. What is your relationship? I, I, I'm treating you as an advanced life form where some, some other person would say, I'm not a hypocrite. Yeah. I,

I, of course, am a hypocrite. I would imagine that you would recognize that you were one as well. Yeah, no, in that example, it's like, look, I'm benefiting from it. It's like, look, I'm not a Trump supporter, but the Trump tax plan has been great for me, right? And I think we have to be honest with ourselves about those things. To the extent that we can be. Yeah, and we should look for them and try to understand them because I'm really concerned

One of my favorite quotes from Upton Sinclair is that it's really hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. And so when you don't understand where you benefit from things, what your incentives are, you can drift towards a kind of a moral superiority, which is actually based on kind of ignorance. But I'm sure I'm a hypocrite on a lot of things I don't know about, but I do try to be aware where I am

Good on both sides or whatever. I mean, I guess when I have all these trade-offs in my life, I have to say that

the idea of budgeting for badness, like this is my, we talked about an injustice budget. I have a hypocrisy budget and I'm trying to live within my means. It doesn't mean that hypocrisy means nothing to me. It just means I've watched every other person make the accusation to someone else of hypocrisy. And I always think I have so much metacognitive access. I'm watching my own hypocrisy constantly. And it's,

It's legendary. I mean, it's really large. Yeah, I think it's like, let's try not to be a raging hypocrite rather than try to be utterly unhypocritical. I mean, I think that that's the right posture. And I think that I don't, in an online world, signing yourself up for being for truth, for goodness, for consistency, you're just dooming yourself to fail. There's no possible way that you're going to leave a trail that isn't going to contradict itself many times over.

Yeah. And one of the stoic ideas is sort of be strict with yourself and tolerant of others. We have it the exact opposite in our sort of media culture, especially. Like, I always laugh at the sky is falling alarm of media people about the collapse of norms in politics. These are the same people who wake up every day and

and have been part of a generational collapsing of norms inside journalism.

Right? And so we can be, norm enforcement is not something you insist on other people do. It's something you follow. I think religious people get this wrong too. The 10 commandments are not for you to enforce on other people. The 10 commandments are 10 rules to govern your behavior because that's all. That's what's under your control. Yes. Yeah. Where do you think we are with our press? Um,

Like, if you just look at, for example, the Andrew Yang coverage in the last election, which everyone saw as being very clearly distorted. Yeah. Am I wrong? Do you agree that it's distorted? Yeah, like I read that New York Times piece a couple days ago where it was like, what was it like to work for Andrew Yang? Enforced karaoke. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Exactly.

Like enforced monogamy of Dr. Jordan Peterson. I just thought it was a great example of the kind of profiles we were talking earlier. That person, it's actually not

an ideological bias. I think people get it wrong. That person was not trying to destroy Andrew Yang because of a political disagreement. That person's job is to take people down, right? That person's job is to find hypocrisy or contradiction. Everyone's happy with the story. We're not doing our job. Yes. And so...

That person was probably very friendly to Andrew Yang. Probably every interview in the course of that story made them sound like an eminently reasonable person. And then... The knife is stuck in and twisted. Yes. And something that I also took from you, I think that story is rife with is, what was it? The Russell... Russell conjugation. That's exactly... So how you decide to spin those things...

the difference between him looking like a ruthless businessman, a fool, or a

Savvy. Savvy. Savvy and ruthless might be Russell conjugates of each other. But fool is the preferred way of destroying people in our culture. And I actually think what, like, maybe I have this theory that like the media just wants, if there's a sort of bent towards nihilism or absurdity, it's like, how do we just undermine the credibility of everyone? Everyone and everything. Constantly. By sort of pointing out weird flaws, contradictions, showing, portraying their worst moments, blowing up

you know, bad comments, that's the analogy is that's, oh, you don't feel good, here's some antibiotics. Oh, you don't feel good, here's some antibiotics. And then Trump and some other figures, I think it doesn't just have to be political, are the super bugs that are resistant to antibiotics. And then

We don't have another play. Like we don't have anything we can do. Are you fascinated by the Trump phenomenon? Was originally very horrified and I've come back down to more of a bemused fascination. That's so dangerous. I mean, I've always found him fascinating. Yeah. And I think a lot of what he does is just trolling, but he's trolling as the...

commander in chief. He, he, he has the world's most dangerous machine at his fingertips. Right. And he's like the cat in the hat having a field day. Yes. And I feel like the fish. And the other thing that I can't stand is, is the,

way in which the left insists on being played by him at every possible opportunity. - No, I think-- - Like no learning seems to take place. - Well, it's impossible to get someone to understand what's in their financial interest to not understand. Ideologically, they could not dislike Trump more. Commercially, he could not be better. So the idea that they would learn this

and kill the golden goose is just not going to happen like when that stat that oh we gave trump you know the media gave trump two billion dollars in free publicity the media business turns around and sells that free publicity at a multiple you know like so you really think i mean it's not that i don't understand the economic proposition that you put yeah you really think i mean i don't even think that that media war against trump is working that well in

No, no, I don't think it's working. I think they are on the same team. Okay. This is the professional wrestling show. People tune in for as much professional wrestling as they can stand. Yes. So that means we have no press because of what we... There is no... Like if you take UFC versus WWE... Yeah.

You're talking about a world where, what, there's no UFC or UFC is just the rebels who live on farms and do long-form podcasts? I think it's like Trump every day wakes up and does their job for them and that he gives them...

polarizing, divisive, controversial, outrageous. - So they want him to win, they're gonna be voting for Trump to keep their pick? - They're not gonna be voting 'cause they don't like him ideologically. - Okay, but then that gives the lie to what you're saying. In other words, if what you were telling me is that he's the best thing that ever happened to them

them. There's a less Moonves quote, who's also a shitty person, right? A serial sexual harasser. But he said, you know, Trump is bad for America, but very good for CBS. So let's hope it keeps going. So I think at the very top, there's some sense of that. But I think it's like, if you're

If you're a social justice warrior reporter, it's never been a better time to be that because there is an unlimited amount of material. I'll be honest. I don't fully believe you. Okay. In other words, if that were true, then you would vote for Trump and you won't. Me? Oh, you mean that reporter? That reporter. That SJW reporter. I don't think these people, I think they are benefiting from it and implicitly and subconsciously they're doing things to further this ridiculous conflict. I'm not arguing. Yeah, yeah.

I don't think they really want Trump to continue in office. Yeah, right. But so I think there is the, but that's the Upton Sinclair thing is that you don't understand why you're not understanding it because your biases are blinding you to what's happening. You know, I saw this before. I try to use the same examples so people learn them. The word nuclear is,

was not understood by the educated because they would always correct it to nuclear. And then they would always lose because they would say, okay, you win the idiotic point and you lose the fact that you just look like a jerk. Okay. Okay. So it was like an easy way to always win an argument with somebody with a college education. Yeah. You could always win against the educated. They didn't ever get it. They didn't understand that the person saying nuclear understood it was nuclear.

And they were doing it to bother them. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a win. Yeah. Sure. If I say Democrat Party and I emphasize rat at the end rather than Democratic Party, you know, it's like I get the hack. Yeah. But the other side somehow is. Right. Is weirdly confused. Well. You know how when you see somebody being trolled, like have you ever been trolled and not realized that you were being trolled? Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's happened to me. Yeah. Most of us.

it shows that you're not in on your joke or like somebody slips a reference in that you didn't get. Yeah. I think that that kind of thing is constantly happening to the left where they just don't grasp. They're so convinced that they're on top of the game that they don't realize they're losing. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that's right. But I remember you talked about this on your episode with Tyler where he

It's obvious what a terrorist is doing. It's obviously what a school shooter is doing. It's obviously what a mass murderer is doing. It's to get the attention. Right. But the media is not able to...

to break out of the pattern that the bad actor is maliciously exploiting. And my media manipulation book was sort of all about this. It's like, look, if you create a website, Jezebel, which is designed to express feminist outrage, it becomes very easy for a marketer or a troll or a person who wants to get attention to go, okay,

The market here is for things that will outrage feminists. So I will do X and I will get Y. And I think Trump, as an intuitive understander of the attention economy, realizes what they want, like realizes what the media wants and he gives it to them and they don't always realize that they're playing into it exactly. But

It's why they're getting raises and why they're gaining Twitter followers. - Why don't we do something more hopeful? Why don't we start a movement inside the Democratic Party called Under New Management where we kick the Clintons, the DNC, and all the people who presided over the economy

from 1992 into the present, the hell out of this party and say, okay, giant mistake, cosmic screw up, they're gone. Why am I dealing with these people year after year? Why are they still in the story? I mean, so many things have happened in human history that have not involved Hillary Clinton. Why am I still dealing with Hillary Clinton? Nobody really wants her.

No, nobody really likes Nancy Pelosi either. Or any of those people. Nancy Pelosi, in her role as Starker, they may not like Nancy Pelosi, but they know that she's a Starker. She's a tough piece of muscle. Sure. And if she's your Starker, then okay, she's your bad guy to go up against their bad guy. I don't think we have exactly the same feeling about Pelosi at the moment. Sure. Yeah, it is weird. You're sort of hostage to people who have...

who've gotten uh i mean the very one-sided the verdict is in yeah you know it's it's not a it's not about her being a woman it's not about they just don't like her specific they just don't like her in specific yeah sure yeah sure yeah i don't know uh but like why aren't we even trying to take over this party

I think what's interesting is that there's the argument that Republicans control the levers of power, Democrats control the levers of culture, right? Storytelling, like Hollywood's overwhelmingly liberal. Is it? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean if you've been in these terrible definition I don't even know what liberal means if Holly what I'm just I'm just saying is like many of the greatest Storytellers of our time would identify as liberal and vote Democratic and yet why are the Liberals so bad at storytelling? narrative branding me like why is Trump actually the one that is

Is dominating the news cycle that knows like when you watch the Democratic candidates speak or when you watch Taylor's campaign, are they actually so abysmal at saying anything compelling, having any kind of political vision? Because we're lying. In what sense? Let's imagine I wanted to tell a heartwarming story about immigration. Yeah.

If I just have a story about a guy who comes with a dream and founds a company and puts all sorts of people to work and becomes an American hero,

That's not a great story at the moment. If I were instead to tell the story about a guy who comes over on an H1B visa, who's being cynically exploited by importers of labor who are trying to destroy the American worker. And then he realizes what's going on. And then he founds a business, despite the fact that he's been used as a pawn in this terrible game.

And, you know, he starts speaking out on behalf of, you know, do you think that they hate immigrants? They don't hate immigrants. What they really hate is your exploitation. You American. Like,

Oh my God, what a story that would be. Because then I would say, wow, you've just resolved these two things. One, I've always loved immigrants. And two, I can't stand immigration. And the reason is because it's being exploited. That's a story with an emotional core, which would allow people to say, I've never heard anyone sing my song before.

I work in an environment where I love the immigrants and I can't stand my American bosses because of what they're using the immigrants to do against me. We can't tell that story. Like the weird thing is, is that the left is not in any way, shape or form the left. It's not liberal. It's not pro worker. Okay. It's metastasized into some unrecognizable thing that has no authenticity and calling it the left.

Like when you had protest songs that were witty, that were smart, that, you know, that nailed people where they lived. Sure. That worked. Sure. You know, this thing with Greta.

when Trump went after Greta and he didn't go after Greta directly, he went after the exploitation of Greta. He knew that there was a layer, which is disgusting. And there, but then I start to feel negative things about Greta. Why should I feel any negative thing about Greta? The person I have to maintain layers and layers. And,

And it's the layers of manipulation and malware that are making all of us deranged. Am I wrong? Yeah. I went to this thing in LA. A bunch of big screenwriters have sort of created a consultancy for Democratic candidates. They're like, we're getting beaten in storytelling. So why don't we take the sort of best storytellers and we'll consult for sort of ascendant Democratic candidates of all kinds of political offices to help them tell a compelling narrative. Greg. What?

I'm wondering if I know the same group. - I'm forgetting who it was. Billy Ray is one of them. I love the idea. I sort of wanted to be a part of it. And I went and I won't say who the politician was 'cause I'm actually forgetting the name. But the point was that one of the Democratic candidates who came was so smug and sanctimonious

and so cloying in the things he was talking. This is a person who's accomplished like nothing legislatively, you know, but it was very illustrative for me of the fundamental problem, I think, which goes to your point, which is that instead of being honest and real and thus relatable, the stories that the Democrats are talking about just don't work. And I think the story you're talking about has...

is complicated and there's some nuance and there's good and bad. And you know what I mean? Like it's, it's just, that's a text story. Right. My point is an important part of it. Okay. Well the left, when they were able to tell, like if you have cartoon evil, like you had, you know, with the, with lynchings in the South, yeah, you can tell a simple story of courage, right? The idea that you're going to not be able to tell the stories of our time is, I mean, it's exactly the same point again, but,

All of the great left of center stories in the modern era begin with we screwed up. Yes. Or we suck. You suck. You're the worst. No, we may, we screwed up on trade. Yeah. We screwed up on immigration and we screwed up on terror. We told you that if somebody says Allah, who Akbar after a mass killing, that that means absolutely nothing. Yeah. And that made you feel crazy because everybody,

If you have any Muslim friends, they're telling you, hey, we have a problem in Islam. You guys aren't taking it seriously. And every time I hear somebody say that terror and Islam have nothing to do with each other, I always tell them, you've just told me that you have no close Muslim friends. Because if you had them, they would be telling you we have a problem in Islam with terror. Yeah. Okay. So when you do that thing, you make people like, I can't...

I talk about this as a Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie mystery called the Allahu Akbar murders. Nobody can figure out why anybody's uttering this phrase after all of these mass killings. And Hercule Poirot is the only one who can solve the case. That's crazy making. This trade thing, go back to Brad DeLong recently, who was one of the architects of NAFTA. And he said,

He pulls off, he rips off the mask and he says, you know, this improves your lot based on the cube of your wealth. It's a social Darwinist welfare function. Okay. Okay. You pushed a social Darwinist welfare functions. Like, I don't understand. We made some people poor in the Midwest, but people got much richer in the Mexican countryside. It's like, what did you just say? Right. Right. Okay. And then the last one is immigration.

We are an immigrant loving country. We love our immigrants. We come from immigrant stock. And as a result, what did you do? You use the fact that we love immigrants and that we're open to the world to figure out a way to redistribute wealth and put a vacuum into most of our pockets that exhausts into yours.

So you used immigrants to transfer wealth and then you said, oh, you wouldn't hit, you know, you wouldn't hurt a puppy dog. You wouldn't hit a girl with glasses. You wouldn't say anything against an immigrant. Okay. All of those things are invidious. They're embittering. And the idea that America is taking its middle finger and sticking it into the eye of the Democratic Party. Yeah.

is warranted unless and until it makes contact with, yes, we had a group of people associated with Davos who played those games on you and created massive amounts of income and asset inequality. They're gone now. We can't do that. They're still there. They still want to play the same games. They won't let us tell our stories. I mean, like, you know, the whole Me Too thing that happened in Hollywood.

there was a lot of texture in that movement that could have revealed all of the different ways in which, you know, there's type one error, there's type two error, there's ambiguity, but instead it was done incredibly starkly, very simple story. - Ivory victims.

I believe all women. Yeah, right. You know, it's just, that's not workable. Well, and it's, but, and I think it's a betrayal of what are supposed to be the sort of core virtues that we supposedly all care about in terms of the, I think what's interesting is, is,

there is no what what what is what is the actual belief of the like what is the belief of the democratic party what do they actually stand for and what are they what are their actual sort of clear policy uh objectives like when i think back wealth transfer well what i think back to the 2016 campaign is in retrospect and i feel like i missed it which is embarrassing as someone who writes about media is like

it's very obvious what Trump was campaigning on. He was going to build a wall, he was going to kill terrorists, you know, he was going to do away with political correctness, he was going to sock it to the media. You know what? He said what he was going to do.

And what was Hillary going to do? Hillary campaigned on I'm Hillary Clinton. And people hate Hillary Clinton. And so I think even now you're watching these five or six, you know, as the pool winnows, they're primarily campaigning on who they are. And they're all fundamentally different.

uncharismatic people rather than as advocates for charismatic, seductive ideas. The big issue is Gini negative policy. What can you, if the Gini coefficient measures the extent to which income and asset inequality is increased, what are you going to do to decrease the Gini coefficient and create a more equal society? So my claim is that

On the far left, you have things like wealth caps, you know, no more billionaires or wealth taxes, asset taxes. Then you have sort of neutralist things like UBI, which where Andrew's just- Loan debt. Right. And then on the right, you have things like renegotiation of trade and immigration. Yeah. And so all of these are intended to be genie negative programs. Okay. And so that's a common consensus that we should do some genie negative thing. Okay. Yeah.

The problem with the institutional left as opposed to the imagined left or the historical left is that it is genie positive. Okay. The Davos crowd figured out how to increase genie coefficients while all the time saying- That they want to do the opposite. Well, no, that they're in love with the world and the planet and that we have to move beyond. And so the idea is that while they're playing their anthem, they're picking your pocket. Got it.

That situation is something where the easy play to take the, you know, everything you just said about Trump. Yeah. Trump makes it sound like maybe the foreigners are bad. Yeah. Like, you know, foreigners aren't the problem. It's the importers of foreigners, the Americans who are horrible. Right. Right. Sure. On trade. What did we do? We came up with trade policies to enrich an elite. Right.

And not an intellectual elite or a contributing, like a rent seeking elite. Yeah, sure. And Trump is going to say, hey, we have bad trade policies. The reason you're out of work in part is automation. Part of it is due to the fact that somebody negotiated your job away and screwed you. Right. And then the political correctness. What is the left's major tool?

Every time you try to do something that breaks out of the left of center narrative, you get hit with this wall of insult and invective. A grifter. You try to earn a living as a member of the commentary and you're not part of the club, everyone's a grifter. Just hysterically funny. Now, all of those sorts of things

The left has to recognize, hey, we just screwed two to three generations of people out of the American dream. Do you hear a point about dream boarding? The other thing would be universities. Like just the way...

we have a warm feeling about immigrants. We have a warm feeling about education and training. - That doesn't mean the current institutions we have are good. - Well, it allowed them to become parasitic because we weren't thinking. We were so emotionally wrapped up in singing our alma mater songs. - Right. No, that's true.

Yeah, yeah. So, and there's an honest, there's a, even if it's not true, there's a perceived honesty in that we've, we screwed up. We're different now. It's a compelling narrative and it's different than, it's different than saying this time it will be different. Yeah, no, it's making the claim that under new management, you used to find rats and cockroaches in your soup when you ordered here. Right. That those days are over. Those people don't live here anymore. Right, right, right.

Let me ask you one final one about Gawker and Teal and the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. If I'm honest, Gawker was doing both good things and bad things. Yeah. So, for example, on the Epstein stuff, I think that, you know, I don't know whether it's a broken clock being right twice a day, but they were reporting on it when others were not. Yeah. And a number of things. Louis C.K. they talked about. Bill Cosby they talked about. Harvey Weinstein they talked about. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

On the other hand, they were doing stuff that was like really personal and invasive that wasn't, in my opinion, warranted. It was coming out of kind of a gossipy bitterness that was truly frightening. Yeah. And so if we accept that Gawker was a superposition of both good and bad, I think a lot of the claim about whether Gawker

it was justified to take Gawker down relies on another set of questions. Do you view this as a legitimate use of the courts or do you view this as an unadvertised hacking opportunity to use the courts? Now, that's enough in play, at least two major ambiguities as to whether or not, if there was both good and bad and there was both a legitimate and a potentially novel hacking aspect to the use of the courts.

That gives plenty of room for everyone to come down wherever they want to from moment to moment. Yeah. Do you think it's a resolvable question about what happened during the Gawker story? I mean, I should say I was close to Peter and I didn't know about it for most of its existence. What I love about the story is it's like a Shakespeare play. You,

Each of the characters is saying or doing something brilliant. Each has exaggerated flaws and weaknesses. And at the end, it's resolved, but fundamentally unresolved. You know, I love it in that sense. Like, I know...

Bad Blood and My Book Conspiracy came out at the same time. Bad Blood has sold extremely well. My Book has sold well, and I think it'll make a great movie when it gets turned into a movie, but not Bad Blood, because in Bad Blood, Elizabeth Holmes is the irredeemable villain, Theranos is a complete fraud, and the story is black and white and clear. And I don't think this story has that. - Oh, I thought we were complicit as a next character.

that because of our desire to see... In Theranos? Yes. Yeah, sure. But that's not the plot of the book. Okay. The plot of the book is like, this woman perpetrated a massive fraud and let's look at her rise and fall. Yeah, I think there's infinitely complex questions in the thing because it's like, oh, okay, Gawker's argument was not we're right. Gawker's argument legally was...

You'll, we'll never get to a verdict. So it doesn't matter, you know? And that was actually Gawker's, I think, position for much of its history was like, it wasn't doing, running these stolen photos, let's say. It's not a question of whether it was legal or they were, they almost would probably have admitted doing X was not legal. But the enforcement was impossible. Yes. And that you, you,

As the person who is humiliated or embarrassed, whether you're very famous or you're an ordinary person, do not have the means, nor does it make strategic sense for you to try to fight us about it. Because you will only humiliate yourself further by fighting it, right? And so... Do you think it had a kind of...

ideological justification or it was just... I think in a way it was kind of a trolling and a nihilism. It was a what can we get away with? This is fun. It was like a shoot-em-up video game to them. Sometimes they shot actual bad guys and sometimes they just went on crime...

rampages. Do you think that Nick Denton has a kind of hidden moral core that I detect? Nick does. I detect that he does. Nick absolutely does. And in that sense... I've never met him, by the way. In that sense, he and Peter are much more similar than people would think and that they would think. So is there a Girardian aspect? Certainly. Certainly. Probably more so

Denton towards Peter than Peter towards Nick although I think they both I think the cultural cachet and the influence was probably attractive to Peter and the wealth and the dominance and the power and the brilliance was attractive to Nick in each other right I didn't have the sense that Peter was very focused on Nick personally

No, but I don't think he was that concerned about him being collateral damage. But I think what Gawker represented was Nick. I see. But even Nick would talk to me later about how he...

There was an inmates running the asylum kind of a thing. That's what I wondered because, you know, I also saw, I also believe, for example, that Jack Dorsey isn't necessarily in control of Twitter. No. That Mark Zuckerberg is not really in control of Facebook. All of these things have an emergent structure so that like, just like the AGI we keep worrying about, nobody's actually in control of any of these things. Yeah. Peter compared it to that Melville story. It was a Benito, uh,

The one where it's a slave ship and that the slaves take over, but then another slave ship comes up next to it. And so they can't reveal that they've taken it over. So the slaves are patrolling, are walking the, the,

you know, decks of the ship conspicuously sharpening knives and, you know, like, like it's like, it's Nick look like he was the head of the machine, but was not no longer the head of the machine. The toxic culture he'd created was running the show. I mean, even like, so there's a tragic aspect for Nick in that he did have some kind of a moral core that he couldn't fully express through the machine. Yes. Especially as he got older and he,

Got the dream that his, like he became rich, fell in love, was happy. Yeah. Thinking about having kids, you know, was fascinated with big ideas. Was not, which is not the same for AJ Delario, right? AJ Delario had a negative worth of like $50,000 at the time of the verdict. You know, Denton had a net worth of millions of dollars. So that like it's one was,

One owned it, but the other was taking the risks that destroyed the company. Wow. Yeah. So I thought it was very interesting and complex. And I think it's also what happens when you create culture and systems, and then you just see what happens. But yeah, I'm fascinated with the idea that Peter got...

Peter did not manipulate justice in any way, I don't think. It was just... If the fight is between Hulk Hogan and Gawker, Gawker wins.

If Hulk Hogan has an unlimited bank account or if Hulk Hogan can spend the same amount of money as Gawker, Hogan wins. And so is it actually unfair for a billionaire to support that person? Or is it fundamentally fair? Is it actually quite fair? I mean, I think Peter would view it as a fight against nihilism. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think that the forces...

in particular, once the press is emboldened by an unrevisited New York times V Sullivan, like if you think about, I often compare it to the 66 or 67 memoirs versus Massachusetts coming out of the Warren court. These two incredibly idealistic decisions that are very simple and stark and very, you know, morally easy to understand. Um,

one of them gets revisited because it's too insane to actually implement. And the other one sort of stays with us. And that now that the press seems often to be against the public interest, as often as it is for the public interest, like having its own weird independent agenda, it's terrifying to see that much protection. Well, I think it's like, if you're going to get the protections, because in a way journalists almost have where the court, the,

decisions have come in journalists have extra first amendment rights that the ordinary person doesn't have i can't walk down the street and defame and slander people but a journalist provided there's no malice yes they can be proven right right um and uh um what's i'm gonna say uh

So if you're going to have special privileges, like if you're the intelligence community has separate special rights, there has to be a culture of responsibility. It goes with it. And, and without like, you can't be just like, have you ever read the journalist code of ethics? Uh, where is it?

Right? No, it doesn't. I mean, really, there is not one, is what I would argue. There is. I mean, there's different ones, but there's not one that... It's not like the Hippocratic Oath, or it's not like passing the bar. There is one that is more universal than all the others. And when you put journalists in...

contact with it, they freak out. Yeah. But they're not in any... You can be disbarred from being a lawyer. Your medical license can be revoked. That's not really a legal thing. That's like a separate body that we've created to make sure that the people given special rights... It's an as-if body of law. Yeah. There is not one for journalists. And I think cases like this ultimately become necessary to...

as a check if you're not going to have that extra self-enforcing culture on top of it. Ryan, one of the great things about hanging out with you is I feel like just with Tyler, I could go on in any direction infinitely, come back anytime. I would love that. All right. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. All right. You've been through the portal with Ryan Holiday on a variety of topics. Please subscribe wherever you're listening to podcasts and remember to go over to YouTube, subscribe to the channel and click

bell to be notified when our next video episode drops. Be well everybody.