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0:00:46 What makes for the perfect summer read?
0:00:53 Maybe it’s a romance or that nonfiction book you’ve been meaning to get around to, or maybe it’s something else.
0:00:58 The summer vibe is like easy, breezy, lesbian vampires. That’s the vibe.
0:01:00 No, no, like summer.
0:01:05 What we read and why we read during the summer.
0:01:07 That’s this week on Explain It To Me.
0:01:11 New episodes every Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:17 American higher education is under attack.
0:01:21 Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly.
0:01:31 Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
0:01:38 And in the end, change what students are encouraged to study, and what professors are allowed to teach.
0:01:42 The question we’re left with is why?
0:01:44 And is it working?
0:01:50 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:01:56 Today’s guest is Michael Roth.
0:02:05 He’s the president of Wesleyan University, and also a historian, a professor, and the author of several books about college,
0:02:09 like Beyond the University and A Student, A Short History.
0:02:13 Roth is one of higher ed’s most vocal defenders.
0:02:19 But he’s also honest about where things have gone wrong and what needs to change.
0:02:26 And he’s willing to take a moral and political stand against authoritarian overreach from the government,
0:02:33 which he sees as an attack not just on colleges and universities, but on civil society itself.
0:02:38 It’s a pressing, urgent topic, one that I happen to care a lot about.
0:02:45 So I invited him on the show to talk about everything that’s happening right now and why it matters.
0:02:54 But also to zoom out, to use this critical moment to ask, what is college actually for?
0:03:00 Michael Roth, welcome to the show.
0:03:01 Glad to be here.
0:03:07 I have heard you say that being a university president is the best job in the world.
0:03:14 I got to say, man, from where I sit, it sure doesn’t look like the best job in the world right now.
0:03:17 Is this still your official position?
0:03:21 It is my position, both officially and unofficially.
0:03:25 Presidents do a lot of whining about how hard it is.
0:03:30 But we’re very well paid, as most people know, because it’s public.
0:03:38 And I get to be around lots of interesting young people, scholars, researchers, teachers.
0:03:42 So, of course, there are challenges, especially now.
0:03:48 The federal government has stepped into the breach to provide extraordinary challenges.
0:03:56 But, despite all the protests of how hard it is, a woe is me that you hear from presidents, I think it’s a very cool job.
0:03:59 I mean, I’m working now, talking to you as part of my job.
0:04:01 You know, I go to a football game, I’m working.
0:04:02 Lucky you.
0:04:03 You get to talk to me.
0:04:03 Yeah.
0:04:13 Higher ed, as you know, is in a pretty tough place at the moment for a variety of reasons that we will get into.
0:04:21 You have been out there as much as any university president, maybe more than any other, defending universities.
0:04:29 You were just at a conference, in fact, and you said very bluntly that the federal government, and now I’m quoting,
0:04:36 the federal government is trying to destroy civil society by undermining the legitimacy of colleges and universities.
0:04:39 I want to just start there.
0:04:40 That’s a pretty dramatic statement.
0:04:45 What do you mean, help people understand what’s actually happening right now?
0:04:50 Well, I guess I should start with what did I mean by civil society?
0:05:01 I see, and I’m not alone in this, the march of authoritarianism, often characterized by the effort to erase what philosophers,
0:05:13 political theorists have called intermediary institutions, be they churches or corporations, schools, universities, entertainment, we would say these days.
0:05:22 Parts of the society that have legitimacy independent of the government’s ideology or power.
0:05:31 And when you have an authoritarian or would-be authoritarian, one of the things they often do, maybe always do,
0:05:39 is try to either erase those independent sources of legitimacy, or as the Nazis say, coordinate them, you know,
0:05:46 gleichschalten, to somehow coordinate all of them in the direction that the leader wants to go in.
0:05:57 And so I think it’s extraordinarily clear that the Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying civil society,
0:06:08 understood as that arena of our culture and our polity that has sources of legitimacy independent of the ideology of the person in the White House.
0:06:15 And you see that in the attack on law firms, you see it in the attack on the press.
0:06:20 I mean, it’s an enormous success of this has been that we got used to that kind of stuff.
0:06:24 And the war on universities is similar to that.
0:06:32 You know, they’re not really going after universities that have egregious issues of civil rights violations.
0:06:41 They’re going after the high-profile, high-legitimacy institutions like Harvard, like UVA, like the other Ivy League schools, with the exception of Dartmouth.
0:06:54 And they’re doing that because these schools have a claim on our allegiance or our respect that is not founded in the ideology of those currently in the White House.
0:06:57 Well, when you say destroying, what do you actually mean?
0:07:10 What is the administration actually doing to stifle or censor or otherwise disrupt the mission and the independence of universities across the country?
0:07:12 Well, they start with the easy thing, right?
0:07:15 Like, trans women athletes.
0:07:20 I think there are 12 in the country in NCAA varsity sports.
0:07:25 And that’s a winning issue for a variety of reasons.
0:07:32 And so the White House is going to determine who plays volleyball.
0:07:34 Okay.
0:07:42 And then they’re going to determine how to teach Mideast or Near Eastern studies.
0:07:44 Okay.
0:07:55 They’re going to say, if you don’t teach Near Eastern studies the way we want you to, with appropriate respect for Israel, let’s say, then you’re not going to get money for Alzheimer’s research.
0:08:07 Now, again, okay, it’s not Harvard, but what happens is that everybody in higher education starts hedging their bets.
0:08:17 That is, they start moving away from anything that might offend those in the White House and those beholden to people in the White House.
0:08:47 And so you have this slide from the university as fostering an oppositional culture, which it has in the United States for a long time, at least since the Second World War, towards the universities as institutions in which people with money, power, diplomas, legitimacy, that they start trying to anticipate what they should say to not annoy or even to please the president and his friends.
0:09:04 And that, to me, is destroying higher education, just like it would be destroying journalism if the administration was able to punish broadcast journalists for editing interviews.
0:09:09 Make it just impossible to make it impossible without pissing off the president.
0:09:14 Then you’re going to destroy journalism.
0:09:16 Not in one fell swoop.
0:09:25 But the news this morning at Paramount has decided to, what, send $16 million to settle what everyone knows is a bogus case.
0:09:32 It’ll mean that journalists just move closer to those in power.
0:09:37 And that, to me, will destroy the independence of the sector.
0:09:39 And I think that’s the point.
0:09:44 I don’t think President Trump really cares what kind of Alzheimer’s research is being done at Harvard.
0:09:52 But he wants to make sure that people at Harvard and then everyone who doesn’t have the resources that Harvard has to fight, everyone else lines up.
0:09:59 And I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of opposition from colleges and universities right now, because everyone has already started lining up.
0:10:03 Well, you mentioned UVA, and I wanted to ask about that, because it’s in the news.
0:10:11 And for people who don’t know, the president of UVA recently resigned, or I shouldn’t say resigned.
0:10:25 He was forced out by the Justice Department as a condition to, I guess, settle the civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity or DEI program, however you want to put it.
0:10:31 I assume you are in a, you’re the leader of a university president signal group chat.
0:10:35 What are your colleagues saying about this?
0:10:38 How would you characterize what went down there?
0:10:42 And do you see it as pretending what might be coming elsewhere?
0:10:43 I do.
0:10:45 I mean, and I think that’s the point.
0:10:53 I mean, it wasn’t it, Christine Ohm, who said something like, colleges should beware, pay attention.
0:10:56 Do you, you know, we can do this to you too.
0:11:00 And so what happened at UVA, what I know is only what’s in the press.
0:11:03 I actually, I know Jim Ryan a little bit.
0:11:07 You know, he was, he was dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion.
0:11:17 By the way, the mission statement of the University of Virginia calls, says it’s, the university is defined by a diverse community.
0:11:20 That’s actually in their own mission statement.
0:11:34 And, and President Ryan had gotten the governing board to approve significant expenditures to try to create a more, a more diverse community at UVA.
0:11:45 And that, of course, is currently running a, would run afoul of the president’s interpretation of civil rights statutes.
0:11:47 Key word there is interpretation.
0:11:52 Yeah, my view is that actually the guys who win the election have the right to do that.
0:12:04 You know, when Obama and Biden were in power, they interpreted the civil rights statutes to say that if you’re accused of sexual assault, you don’t get to cross-examine the person accusing you.
0:12:08 And that was an extraordinary step.
0:12:15 And, and they, and they threatened schools with severe punishments if they didn’t implement those policies in that time.
0:12:21 But they actually never punished any school, as far as I know.
0:12:27 I mean, they just, they negotiated with them to change the way they handled sexual assault on, on campuses.
0:12:40 But I do think the Trump administration has the right to say that anything that smacks of reverse discrimination is a violation of the civil rights statutes.
0:12:48 And I don’t think this is a wise policy myself, but they won the election.
0:12:51 And we have at Wesleyan changed the way we approach this.
0:12:55 We had a policy where we said we had target of opportunity hires.
0:13:14 I mean, you had an all white department and you knew of a really great scholar who was going to add racial or ethnic diversity to your department or military veteran who was going to join the physics department where you, and you didn’t have many veterans, let’s say, in that section of the sciences or any veterans.
0:13:20 Then we would say, let’s try to hire that person, even if it wasn’t their turn, so to speak.
0:13:22 We can’t do that anymore.
0:13:24 And I accept that.
0:13:29 I mean, I don’t, again, I don’t like it, but I, I don’t, you don’t always get what you want in democracy.
0:13:31 So that seems to me fine.
0:13:46 But what they did at UVA is to say that the university wasn’t moving quickly enough to change its policies, to be in accord with this new interpretation of civil rights statutes.
0:13:58 And they had done many changes as far as I could tell, but I, it seemed to me, and this is my interpretation, I have no inside knowledge of this, that, that they wanted a trophy.
0:14:05 They wanted Jim Ryan’s resignation as a trophy because that’s a warning to other people.
0:14:14 You put Ryan’s head on a stick and you put it out there and then other presidents say, I don’t want to run afoul of this administration.
0:14:21 And when you say the government has a, you think the government has a right to encroach in this way, what do you mean by that?
0:14:29 Well, I think that their understanding of it is an interpretation that I find mistaken, but it’s not incoherent.
0:14:35 In other words, I think the decision about affirmative action and admissions was, was wrong.
0:14:46 I don’t like it, but it’s, it’s, there’s an argument for it that states very clearly that discrimination in the current environment
0:14:59 is wrong, even if it is meant to correct historic or, uh, historic discrimination or patterns of sociological discrimination, systemic, uh, we like to say, uh, discrimination.
0:15:02 They say, no, what matters is individual fairness.
0:15:07 I think that’s wrong, but I think that’s coherent position that individual fairness trumps everything.
0:15:15 And that you can’t, uh, substitute history and sociology for individual judgment.
0:15:19 Again, I, we can have an argument about why that’s wrong in my view.
0:15:24 And when they would say why it’s right in their view, my view is that they run, they won the election.
0:15:32 They get to enforce the rules, uh, in a coherent way that, and stay within the law.
0:15:49 What we’re seeing instead is the use of civil rights legislation to ensure the obedience of, uh, institutions, uh, here, you know, because the, the, in UVA was about DEI at Harvard.
0:15:58 Now it’s about protecting Jews, um, uh, which is, uh, is, I think just, uh, a sham, uh, a lie.
0:16:08 Uh, uh, uh, but they’re using that as a cover to ensure that the institutions conform to the wishes of those in power.
0:16:10 And that is different.
0:16:15 Can I ask, Michael, are you feeling any of this at Wesleyan right now?
0:16:18 What are you dealing with there on the ground?
0:16:22 What are you hearing from students, parents, professors?
0:16:24 Has this touched your university?
0:16:27 Yeah, it has in small ways.
0:16:40 I think if you have a hospital or massive PhD programs in the sciences, it, it hits you very differently than, let’s say, a liberal arts university like ours, where we do have PhD programs in the sciences and we do have federal funding.
0:16:52 And so we’re not immune to these threats, but they’re not, um, they’re not existential either.
0:16:56 So we feel it to some extent for sure.
0:17:05 I mean, we have Pell Grant students and we have grants from the national endowments, um, and from the NIH, and we’ve had some grants canceled.
0:17:15 Uh, but I, I, I, I, we haven’t felt it the same way as, uh, some of the schools one reads about in the newspaper.
0:17:21 As you know, a lot of people shrug their shoulders at all of this.
0:17:24 They think, what’s the big deal?
0:17:30 These campuses are full of privileged people with predictably extreme views, views that aren’t representative of most of the country.
0:17:32 So who cares?
0:17:34 To that sort of reaction.
0:17:36 And it is a common reaction.
0:17:37 What do you say?
0:17:40 Well, it’s been an orchestrated reaction.
0:17:51 I think that, um, you know, the, at UVA, the fastest growing majors, uh, I think our computer science and the fastest growing minor is data science.
0:18:02 Hardly the stuff of woke lunatics, uh, and, um, at Harvard, you know, the, the most popular majors are the ones that lead to wall street.
0:18:13 Um, again, this, this notion that, that Harvard or UVA is filled with people with extreme views who are unrepresented of America.
0:18:17 They’re, they’re, they’re unrepresented of America because they’re, they’re, they’re really smart.
0:18:19 They’re smarter than I am.
0:18:22 No, I mean, you know, you know, I couldn’t get in there.
0:18:26 I couldn’t get, I’ve gotten it when I was a, a, a young person.
0:18:27 I certainly couldn’t get in today.
0:18:30 I mean, they’re just really smart, gifted people.
0:18:38 And so, of course, there’s a lot of resentment to them, which is a reaction that is cultivated by, uh, the right these days.
0:18:46 Uh, and, and it’s unfortunate because in a democracy, you can also be really proud of people who excel.
0:18:51 And we are, right, where we are proud of people who excel, even though they do things we can’t do.
0:19:03 Like when I watch, I don’t know, uh, Patrick Mahone’s, uh, play quarterback and escape a crazy rush, uh, you know, I’m, I’m filled with admiration.
0:19:10 I don’t feel like, oh, he should, he should, I don’t know, we should shoot him in the leg or something because he’s so good.
0:19:20 Or, uh, you know, the elite, uh, fighters in the Navy SEALs, let’s say, or the Army Rangers, we don’t look, we don’t think of them as elitist.
0:19:22 We just think of them as exceptional.
0:19:32 But, uh, at some of these schools, we resent them for having, um, created an environment where people like those guys can thrive and the rest of us don’t have access to it.
0:19:50 So I think that the, um, that in a, in a healthy democracy, you allow people to experiment with ideas, with art, with science, with, uh, politics.
0:19:52 There’s, it’s never totally open-ended.
0:19:56 Of course, there are always some guardrails or, uh, on these things.
0:20:09 Uh, and what we’re seeing now is a concerted effort to bring those guardrails in so that people have to resemble the, those in power right now.
0:20:13 And that is unusual in the history of the United States.
0:20:14 It has happened in other countries.
0:20:24 But that reduction of a space of experimentation is not just about Harvard or University of Michigan or your local community college.
0:20:29 It’ll also be about the, um, newspapers you read.
0:20:32 It’ll be about broadcast television.
0:20:33 It’ll be about Hollywood.
0:20:35 It’s already about law firms, right?
0:20:37 Which ones get to have access to federal buildings?
0:20:49 I mean, that notion, those executive orders that said, if you have defended certain people that the president doesn’t like, your company will no longer have access to federal buildings.
0:20:55 I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s wildly ambitious in its authoritarianism.
0:21:05 If they get to push around Harvard, they certainly will push around Wesleyan and Middlesex Community College and, um, and Rutgers and, you know, et cetera.
0:21:07 You use the word orchestrated.
0:21:10 Do you think this is completely manufactured?
0:21:14 Do you think this is just partisan opportunism or, or is there something deeper going on here?
0:21:30 I mean, even if some of this backlash, some of this resentment is cynical and, and engineered, and no doubt a lot of it is, how much have universities contributed to it through leadership failures or bad policies?
0:21:33 Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a fair question.
0:21:48 I don’t like it, as you can imagine, because I, I, I, I, when, when people ask me this question, I say, it would be like saying to the Ukrainians, hey, come on, Hunter Biden, corruption.
0:21:56 You have, you have problems in the mining industry, all of which, I mean, there’s, there’s some, there’s some stuff there.
0:22:03 It’s not great, but when the Russians are attacking, I mean, it’s not, that’s not why they’re attacking.
0:22:07 The Russians are attacking Ukraine because they want to take it over.
0:22:12 The Trump administration is attacking colleges, universities, because they want to take them over.
0:22:21 Not because they, they, they, I don’t know, they shouldn’t have had encampments or because not enough conservatives are going into physics.
0:22:41 So, yes, universities have, have real problems, but I don’t think that those problems are what has led to the assault on free speech, on freedom of association, and on the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit.
0:22:49 The problems of universities are political problems, and we haven’t done a good job in solving them.
0:22:51 Let me just mention two quick things.
0:22:57 I’m sorry to go on so long and answer to your, your brief question, but let me just mention two things.
0:23:11 One is the ideological conformity or the ideological narrowness of faculty in most colleges and universities, especially at those like mine and highly selective schools in the Northeast.
0:23:24 But all over the country, university faculty, faculties are, are mostly people left of center, and that has gotten much worse over time.
0:23:35 And I think it’s about prejudice on the part of the faculty, not only prejudice, but that faculty members hire folks who, with whom they’re comfortable.
0:23:39 And so they hire people whose political views they’re more comfortable with.
0:23:42 And I think that’s a problem.
0:23:43 I think it should be fixed.
0:23:48 I think that it could, and I think it should be fixed by the faculty itself.
0:23:53 That is, they should, being aware of their prejudices, they should counteract them as best they can.
0:23:57 So I think that’s a significant problem.
0:24:05 And then there’s the broader cultural problem, is that American higher education has, for a good chunk of time now,
0:24:10 defined its quality on the basis of the number of people that are excluded from it.
0:24:14 So we prize being highly selective.
0:24:16 I used that phrase myself a few moments ago.
0:24:18 We’re a highly selective university.
0:24:19 What does that mean?
0:24:23 We don’t, we reject most people who want to go there.
0:24:27 And that has, that’s a very American thing.
0:24:32 It’s not only American, but it’s, it’s, you know, that you want the thing you can’t get access to.
0:24:39 That’s a traditional capitalist bourgeois fact.
0:24:43 Lots of people want the thing that they have trouble getting access to.
0:24:52 And colleges and universities, I have said over time, have cultivated condescension rather than democratic practices.
0:25:11 So in a culture that, of grievance and resentment, which is ours in the last, at least decade to 15 years, colleges and universities are especially vulnerable because we have prided ourselves on how hard it is to get into our schools.
0:25:24 Rather than these schools that are so extraordinarily wealthy deciding to educate, not another 100 or 200 people, but to educate five times as many students because they can afford to do so.
0:25:26 But they don’t take that step.
0:25:37 And then the last thing I’ll mention quickly, which is such an obvious thing that colleges and universities do that’s dramatically unfair, is that they give preferences to their own.
0:25:41 Legacy preferences, which the Trump administration has not targeted.
0:25:48 They probably could do it without political cost, but legacy preferences to, you know, you take somebody because their parents went to your school.
0:26:01 I mean, it’s so obviously unfair at a highly selective school that it’s, California’s trying to do away with it, but in the Northeast, it’s very much entrenched.
0:26:07 And it’s, it’s, it’s a great symbol for people of how the system is rigged against newcomers.
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0:30:42 I think the basic problem that elite colleges in particular have right now, right, it’s not just the sort of prejudice you’re talking about in terms of hiring, right?
0:30:43 It’s about the content.
0:30:46 It’s about the teaching, the material itself, right?
0:30:58 I think people outside of these institutions increasingly think they are places where ideology has been confused with inquiry, where education has been confused with activism.
0:31:01 Columbia, for instance, has embraced its identity as a protest campus.
0:31:02 Well, I think it’s a problem.
0:31:24 I think it’s a problem when schools define, let’s say, activism or civic engagement in a very ideologically restricted way.
0:31:26 I think it’s an intellectual problem.
0:31:28 I think it’s a moral problem for schools.
0:31:29 I’ll give you an example.
0:31:35 I’m giving a talk at some conference and a guidance counselor from a high school says,
0:31:43 I’ll just tell you, if one of my students was applying to Wesleyan and she said her civic engagement was protecting the rights of the unborn,
0:31:49 it would be professional malpractice for me to allow her to put that in the application.
0:31:52 Now, I guess I was naive.
0:31:54 I was shocked by that.
0:31:56 You know, I’ve been a president for a long time.
0:31:57 I’ve been a faculty member.
0:31:59 And I said, come on.
0:32:02 Everybody knows that is civic engagement.
0:32:09 And he said, and everybody in my world, he said, and guidance counselors know that your admissions people won’t like it.
0:32:21 That was, to me, a slap in the head that I needed because I have no reason to doubt he was right because all these guidance counselors are like shaking their heads.
0:32:33 And I think that’s a way in which the soft despotism of prejudice in the college or university constricts this free speech, the realm of contestation.
0:32:48 And I’ve been fighting against it now for the last decade or so, both as a person who has access to the media and writes articles about such things, give speeches about such things.
0:32:52 But also as a teacher, adding more conservative voices into my own classes.
0:32:57 I teach courses in the history of moral philosophy or a course on the modern and the postmodern.
0:33:02 And so I’ve always privileged the kind of mavericks in philosophy or political theory.
0:33:11 But now I’m also adding to my classes criticisms of those voices, of those progressive thinkers.
0:33:22 So sometimes the students are quite surprised by it, and they’re totally capable of dealing with the issues.
0:33:32 In other words, they may not, on their own, gravitate towards conservative critiques of progressivism.
0:33:39 But when it’s exposed to them, they’re perfectly happy, willing, able to deal with a variety of perspectives.
0:33:49 So all that is to say that a school can define a civic purpose, I think, that’s not in tension with its educational purposes.
0:33:57 And most schools in the United States, ever since the 1700s, have had a civic purpose as part of what they do.
0:34:02 I think it’s nonsense what some of the presidents these days are saying, or we’re just for the pursuit of truth.
0:34:08 Colleges in America have always been about character and about civics.
0:34:14 And so we can embrace that, but we can’t do it in a parochial way.
0:34:28 Because if we do it in a parochial way, we’re limiting the educational potential of our students to explore ideas that may not be currently fashionable in their generation or among the faculty.
0:34:49 And I found at Wesleyan, many faculty members, who themselves might be leftists, you know, but are perfectly happy to teach a range of material, not satirically or critically, but actually because they know it’s important, even if it’s not where they’ve come down themselves.
0:34:56 And if schools do that, I think they also make better citizens.
0:35:05 That is, they make people who are more capable of dealing with disagreement and conflict in the public sphere.
0:35:12 Do you see some cultural or institutional or moral harm in too much ideological conformity on a campus?
0:35:16 I do, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
0:35:22 I think people don’t ask certain questions that conservatives have long asked.
0:35:32 They will neglect questions around, let’s say, the family as an incubator of social practices.
0:35:41 They won’t ask questions around inequality that conservatives might ask that progressives don’t ask.
0:35:47 So I think a lot of things just don’t get asked because there’s no one to ask those questions.
0:35:53 Like, you know, when I was a graduate student, women were starting to go to graduate school and they were asking questions about women’s history.
0:35:55 And the men were like, women’s history?
0:35:56 Just history, you know?
0:35:59 And they said, no, well, actually, it’s men’s history.
0:36:04 You know, you haven’t asked these questions about, let’s say, childbirth or about women’s work.
0:36:07 Eventually, people said, oh, my gosh, those are really interesting questions too.
0:36:09 You don’t have to be a woman to ask them.
0:36:11 It just so happens that men didn’t ask them.
0:36:23 And so I think in some areas, having religious people, having people with libertarian perspectives, having conservatives, it really does open up questions that are productive.
0:36:25 Someone will say, what do you want, Nazis?
0:36:26 No, I don’t want Nazis.
0:36:29 You don’t want flat earth people in the geography department.
0:36:40 But there’s a long way between a department that defines itself in, let’s say, Marxist terms or in anticolonial terms and Nazism.
0:36:47 And there’s a lot of other things there that can be asked that don’t get asked in some colleges and universities because of ideological conformity.
0:36:58 Universities would be stronger if they were more intellectually diverse because we learn more from people with whom we disagree than from people with whom we agree.
0:37:07 Is that to say that you think the university should be a place where people sometimes feel uncomfortable?
0:37:14 And if it is, and I think we both believe that it is, how do you distinguish productive discomfort from actual harm?
0:37:17 It’s a good question, theoretically.
0:37:23 It’s, I don’t find it, no, no, I mean, I don’t find it that hard, actually, you know, like.
0:37:26 A lot of people seem to.
0:37:29 I know, but I don’t believe them, frankly.
0:37:41 Like yesterday, my grandson was sitting there, he’s six years old, and he says, he found out that there’s a button in the car that somebody pushed by mistake and his seat got very warm, you know, and his seat warmer.
0:37:45 So he’s looking at that button, he’s thinking, what if I push it by mistake?
0:37:48 And he starts getting upset, because what if my foot hits it?
0:37:54 And the proper answer is like, just calm down, basically, right?
0:37:56 Because he’s not really being harmed by that button.
0:38:04 I’ve had to say to students, and I know not every, my colleagues don’t always agree, but they’ll say to me, I don’t feel safe, I’ll say, you are safe.
0:38:07 And they say, I don’t feel safe.
0:38:08 And I said, that’s really not my problem.
0:38:10 My problem is if you’re not safe.
0:38:11 That’s my problem.
0:38:16 I had a student years ago wanted to ban someone from graduation.
0:38:24 This guy had done some stupid stuff, and he was punished for it.
0:38:25 He said, but I don’t want him at graduation.
0:38:30 And to me, that was like, he wanted a scalp, he wanted a trophy of saying I had him banned.
0:38:33 I said, no, I guarantee you your safety.
0:38:36 If you don’t want to come, that’s up to you.
0:38:47 We had a speaker this year who had a controversial inquiry about trans issues, especially about gender-affirming care for young people.
0:38:52 She hadn’t taken a stand on it, but she had explored these issues and the real controversies around them.
0:38:58 A group of students came and said, we think you should cancel this because I think you’re doing actual harm.
0:39:06 And I have said, our duty is to protect the vulnerable, like trans students and immigrants, undocumented people.
0:39:07 I’ve said that publicly many times.
0:39:10 So they said, well, come on, Roth, protect us.
0:39:14 I said, I’m not going to protect you against somebody who’s asking good questions.
0:39:16 You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.
0:39:19 But no.
0:39:27 But if there’s somebody who’s harassing a student, intimidating them, harassing them, I want them kicked out.
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0:41:06 It’s Today Explained.
0:41:09 What’s going on, my boys and, in some cases, gals?
0:41:12 Recently, one of you emailed us with this request.
0:41:13 You’ve got mail.
0:41:13 Hello.
0:41:18 I’m an avid listener, and I strongly believe you should cover the story of Curtis Yarvin.
0:41:23 It’s important to explore who he is and how he has influenced the MAGA and the Tech Bros movement.
0:41:33 Curtis Yarvin is a very online far-right philosopher whose ideas include the fascinating, the esoteric, the absurd, the racist, and so on.
0:41:39 Six months into the Trump administration, there’s evidence that he is influencing the MAGA movement, and even President Trump.
0:41:41 J.D. Vance knows him and likes him.
0:41:44 Elon consulted him about this third-party idea.
0:41:47 Yarvin can take some credit for inspiring Doge.
0:41:58 And, as you’ll hear ahead, one of Trump’s most controversial, doesn’t even begin to cover it, ideas may have come from Yarvin or someone who reads his substack.
0:42:00 I can almost guarantee you that Trump does not.
0:42:01 Everything’s computer.
0:42:04 Today Explained, weekday afternoons.
0:42:13 Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about media and tech and what happens when they collide.
0:42:19 And this may be hard to remember, but not very long ago, magazines were a really big deal.
0:42:28 And the most important magazines were owned by Condé Nast, the glitzy publishing empire that’s the focus of a new book by New York Times reporter Michael Grinbaum.
0:42:42 The way Condé Nast elevated its editors, the way they paid for their mortgages so they could live in beautiful homes, there was a logic to it, which was that Condé Nast itself became seen as this kind of enchanted land.
0:42:47 You can hear the rest of our chat on Channels, wherever you listen to your favorite media podcast.
0:43:09 Let’s zoom out from this a little bit because there’s a more fundamental question that we’ve wrestled with on this show.
0:43:16 And I don’t normally have a university president here, so I want to ask.
0:43:20 And the question is, what is college for, really?
0:43:24 Should we think of it primarily as a way to get prepared for a job?
0:43:28 Or should we see it as something much more than that?
0:43:32 I believe that college is for three things.
0:43:37 The first thing is to discover what you love to do.
0:43:42 I think that that can be in a community college, it could be at a trade school, it could be at a liberal arts school.
0:43:50 But to have the freedom not to, I don’t say discover your passion, because that sounds so psychological.
0:43:56 I think it’s actually what stuff you like to do that makes you feel alive when you’re working.
0:44:05 And so I think it’s so important for students to have the freedom to make that discovery.
0:44:10 Because, you know, at a selective school, they say, well, I got A’s in this subject.
0:44:20 But they may not like doing that, or they’ve never tried, fill in the blank, you know, engineering, or they’ve never tried astronomy, or they’ve never tried poetry.
0:44:27 And so a place where they can discover the kinds of things that give them meaning when they do those things.
0:44:30 I mean, I think that’s the first thing that a college is for.
0:44:39 The second thing a college is for is to make the person who’s discovering what they love to do get much better at what they love to do.
0:44:42 And we can do a better job of that.
0:44:45 I mean, grade inflation drives me batty.
0:44:48 It makes me feel like the old man that I am.
0:44:55 But I think we need to kick the students in the butt, because a lot of the time, they think they’re pretty good at something.
0:44:57 And maybe they’re pretty good, but they can get a lot better.
0:45:04 And so I think it’s really important that every student go to a school that’s going to make them work really hard.
0:45:16 And it’s so against the grain of American consumer view of higher education, which is it should be this time in your life where you get to, you know, have so much fun.
0:45:17 You make your friends.
0:45:17 You get married.
0:45:19 You have a lot of sex and blah, blah, blah.
0:45:21 And that’s fine.
0:45:23 That’s discovering what you love to do in a way.
0:45:31 But I think they should go to a school where there are people around you who are making you get better at what you love to do.
0:45:39 The third thing is that you learn how to share what you’ve gotten better at and you love to do with other people.
0:45:42 And that usually means, often means, selling it, actually.
0:45:49 It means getting a job where you can continue to practice the things you love to do and that people will pay you for doing it.
0:45:53 People will say to me, well, I just got to love poetry, so I sit in the basement and write poems.
0:45:54 No, no, no, no, no.
0:45:56 I mean, you’ve got to get better at it.
0:46:00 And then you’ve got to be able to take it out into the marketplace, out into the world.
0:46:14 If you have those three things, discovering what you love to do, getting much better at it, and then learning to take it out into the world, finding a job where these things can, not going to be identical, but they can be aligned.
0:46:21 That, I think, is a way that college can help people thrive long after they graduate.
0:46:23 Are colleges still doing that?
0:46:25 I mean, we talk a lot about AI on this show.
0:46:27 I know you think about it as well.
0:46:29 You’ve talked about it.
0:46:35 There’s always been a debate about the exact value of higher education, what the point of it is.
0:46:43 That debate feels especially live in the age of AI as more and more work and learning is being automated.
0:46:49 How do you think about this as the president of a university like Wesleyan?
0:46:53 Do you worry that AI is a threat to the model that you just described?
0:46:57 It can be a tool for the model I just described.
0:47:05 I mean, I use AI all the time when I’m trying to find out information about things or get various takes on an issue.
0:47:10 I think it’s really helpful.
0:47:31 But I do worry that the joy that I’ve tried to describe of thinking for yourself in the company of others or discovering what you love to do and getting better at it, that you might just not have that experience because you can outsource it to a bot.
0:47:34 Now, take athletes as a counterexample.
0:47:46 If I say to somebody on the football team, you know, instead of hitting that guy or running laps, why don’t you just get a video, like, just play Madden or something?
0:47:50 You know, just do or go on and have a very good AI version of football.
0:47:54 Put your immersive thing on and you don’t have to play.
0:47:56 They’ll look at me.
0:48:00 I think they’ll look at me like I’m crazy because it’s an embodied practice.
0:48:03 It’s not just watching football.
0:48:09 Now, the question I think that the hard question that you’re pointing to is, do people want to think?
0:48:12 Or will they be happy if AI thinks for them?
0:48:26 I believe they want to think if you invite them to think and give them that experience of thinking with tools and figuring out where they themselves stand on any particular issue.
0:48:34 I think people want to think, but if you make it too easy for them not to think, they’ll take it.
0:48:39 I mean, we just a couple weeks ago had a journalist, James Walsh, who was talking about college students who are using AI to cheat.
0:48:40 Yeah.
0:48:54 And the way he described it, you know, cheating is so widespread at this point and so hard to detect that it’s sort of throwing into doubt what it even means to earn a college degree at this point.
0:48:55 I mean, you know, you’re not just a president.
0:48:56 As you said, you’re also a professor.
0:49:00 I don’t know if you’re experiencing this in the classroom.
0:49:01 Are you seeing this?
0:49:02 I am.
0:49:03 Okay.
0:49:05 I mean, does that worry you?
0:49:07 It worries me.
0:49:10 It worries me, but I find it’s interesting.
0:49:18 In my class, this moral philosophy class and others, I have them write something every week in relation to the reading.
0:49:19 Usually it’s just a question about a quotation.
0:49:22 So occasionally I’ll see one.
0:49:29 It’s so, you know, it’s good and it’s coming from a guy who sits in the back with a hoodie on and doesn’t want to be called on.
0:49:31 They say, oh, it must be AI.
0:49:39 So, and I call on Max and I say, what, what, you know, what do you mean when you ask this question about Virginia Woolf?
0:49:42 Very confident that he doesn’t know what the hell it is.
0:49:45 And he blows me away and says some very interesting things.
0:49:46 So I can’t tell.
0:49:48 I can’t tell when it’s being used.
0:49:56 So what I’m going to do this year is I’m going to actually have the students have dialogues with AI about the issues in the class.
0:50:00 And then they’re going to have to talk about it in discussion groups orally themselves.
0:50:02 I’m not totally sanguine about this.
0:50:09 I’m not, because some people are better at just speaking out like orally than others.
0:50:14 I want people also to have the experience of working things out on a page.
0:50:17 I’m not sure exactly how I’ll get that now.
0:50:18 I mean, that’s going to be a challenge.
0:50:31 But I do believe that we as teachers need to encourage students to think for themselves with others around them.
0:50:36 That’s going to be much easier to do in a seminar.
0:50:42 You know, in a small discussion class, you’ll be able to tell than in a large lecture class.
0:50:45 That, I think, will present some real issues.
0:51:00 But I do worry that the invitation to think for yourself is an invitation to work and to be uncomfortable and to find your notions challenged.
0:51:05 And some people will avoid that more easily because of AI.
0:51:11 Other people, because of AI, will actually encounter things that make them more uncomfortable and make them think harder.
0:51:24 So my job as a teacher is to invite students to think for themselves in a way that encourages them to do so.
0:51:28 That actually gives them the appetite, enhances their appetite to do so.
0:51:30 And if I can’t do that, I’m not a good teacher.
0:51:32 The whole thinking for yourself thing.
0:51:36 I mean, that’s what a humanities, that’s what a liberal education is supposed to be.
0:51:37 Yes.
0:51:45 And, you know, I’ve heard administrators, I’ve even heard professors trying to defend the humanities in market terms.
0:51:45 Right?
0:51:49 Like just talking about the transferable skills and all that sort of thing.
0:51:53 And I really hate what gets lost in that framing.
0:52:01 I mean, do you worry that the case is being made too defensively, always in terms of skill or utility, rather than this intrinsic value?
0:52:03 I don’t worry about that so much.
0:52:13 I’ve had my arguments with folks like Stanley Fish always tells me, you know, I’m giving up the game if I say that it’s useful to do humanities.
0:52:17 And I’m a pragmatist, so I think if it’s not useful, it’s probably not worth doing at all.
0:52:20 It just depends how you define usefulness.
0:52:21 Right.
0:52:22 I’m not naive.
0:52:28 I don’t think that you should study poetry for four years and then we don’t care about what job you have.
0:52:31 I care that they get good jobs when they graduate college.
0:52:37 To not recognize that they have to work in the world and that their education should be relevant to the work they do.
0:52:38 It doesn’t have to be the same as the work they do.
0:52:41 But that it should be relevant to the work they do.
0:52:43 I think that’s an easy one.
0:52:48 I think otherwise it’s just, it really is just an education for those people who don’t have to work.
0:52:51 And that’s a different kind of education.
0:53:05 There’s another story in the news, I’m sure you’ve seen it, about Indiana University, where something like 100 academic programs are being suspended or eliminated.
0:53:18 And the Republican governor there, the explicit justification, is that this is about reorienting our program so that it’s more practical and geared towards better workforce outcomes.
0:53:31 But when you look closely, you see what’s also going on here, which is an attempt to control what’s being taught and purge programs that are deemed too ideological.
0:53:36 I just wonder what you think when you see something like that.
0:53:40 Public universities are in a very different situation than I am.
0:53:44 I have a board that, you know, they’re very supportive.
0:53:45 If they weren’t, they’d fire me.
0:54:01 In a public institution, you have to deal with politicians who aren’t as devoted to the university as typical members of board of trustees at private institutions, because the politicians have lots of other competing interests, not just universities.
0:54:09 What they’re doing in Indiana is so terrible, especially because Indiana has had such a great public system for so long.
0:54:11 And you can reform it.
0:54:16 I mean, look what the president of Purdue did a few years ago.
0:54:20 I mean, he really changed the direction, the economics of Purdue.
0:54:24 And he’s a conservative guy, he’s a Republican, and that can happen.
0:54:31 But it happens in talking with faculty and thinking about the educational purposes of the university.
0:54:46 This wholesale closing of programs without giving the faculty a chance to figure out what will benefit students’ education in the long run, I think is a horrible thing.
0:54:55 People are very bad at determining what students should learn and that it will be practical in five years.
0:55:00 Eight years ago, everyone, all these people were telling me, Michael, you should require everyone to learn coding at Wesleyan.
0:55:01 Learn to code, right?
0:55:02 Learn to code.
0:55:03 What a bunch of bullshit, right?
0:55:05 Now, no one’s going to learn that.
0:55:07 AI will do that for you.
0:55:11 This idea that they know what’s going to be practical in five or six years is, I think, really wrongheaded.
0:55:21 We need students to learn how to think, how to work hard, how to be creative, how to work with others, how to serve something in the public.
0:55:23 All of these things can happen through a variety of subjects.
0:55:27 The politicians don’t know what the future will hold.
0:55:32 They should allow the university to decide within its budget how to organize itself.
0:55:41 Just on a more personal level, obviously, this is your job, but lots of people have your job and they’re not showing up on my pod.
0:55:42 You could have stayed quiet.
0:55:44 You could just run your university.
0:55:46 But you’ve put yourself out there.
0:55:54 You’ve decided very publicly to defend universities, to defend liberal education.
0:55:56 Why?
0:55:59 I mean, what makes this fight worth having for you?
0:56:15 You know, my parents thought of, I think, college education as a sign that they had achieved a certain amount of economic security.
0:56:18 They could afford to send their kids to college, whatever college was.
0:56:21 I mean, that, you know, didn’t really mean a lot to them.
0:56:42 For me, as a student, it really was discovering a kind of freedom that I still enjoy, find profound, gives my life meaning.
0:56:44 I mean, there’s so many dimensions.
0:57:07 As a teacher, I have seen students of all kinds, you know, from all walks of life, and the various places I’ve taught, use the opportunity for education to connect with people in very different ways than they would have otherwise,
0:57:18 to discover resources to discover resources in themselves that they never knew existed, and to really thrive as human beings in ways they would not have without the education.
0:57:22 And I know this because they tell me.
0:57:26 Some of them tell me, like, around the time they’re graduating.
0:57:31 Now I have students in my classes whose parents were my students, you know, many years ago.
0:57:40 And I think that it’s a great gift that America gives to many different kinds of people in many situations.
0:57:42 In other words, they’re not all like Wesleyans.
0:57:55 It could be my wife teaches in the prison in Connecticut, you know, and she has students who tell her, this is when I feel free, when I’m studying literature in the Wesleyan prison program.
0:58:06 And I just think that that’s why authoritarians hate it so much, because what you experience in an authentic education is you experience being free.
0:58:09 And then it depends, what are you going to do with that?
0:58:10 How are you going to build on that?
0:58:15 And, you know, the threat of AI is that you won’t experience being free.
0:58:17 You’ll just, you know, press some buttons.
0:58:26 But that experience of freedom is extraordinarily fulfilling and something great to build on.
0:58:30 And so I want to defend it because I believe so strongly in it.
0:58:34 Michael Roth, you’ve got a big job, a lot to do.
0:58:37 I appreciate you being so generous with your time.
0:58:38 Thank you very much.
0:58:39 It was a pleasure to talk with you, Sean.
0:58:49 All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:58:54 As you can tell, this is a topic that’s very close to my heart.
0:58:55 I used to teach.
0:58:57 I love the university.
0:58:59 I love the idea of the university.
0:59:05 And I am worried about what’s happening to it and where it’s headed.
0:59:07 But I appreciate Michael’s perspective.
0:59:13 And I’m very thankful that people like him are out there making these arguments.
0:59:16 And I hope you got something out of it as well.
0:59:18 As always, we do want to know what you think.
0:59:20 We listen to everything you send in.
0:59:21 We read all the emails.
0:59:22 So keep them coming.
0:59:25 Your notes help us make a better show.
0:59:31 Actually, here’s a voicemail we just received that I really appreciated.
0:59:36 Sean, hello, and thank you for your show.
0:59:40 I’m responding to your latest episode, Hopeful Pessimism.
0:59:59 Your guest, Mara Vandeluk, sparked me to realize that so much of my existence in almost 69 years on this planet have been steered by the various forms of pessimism and optimism exhibited by my mother, father, grandmother, and the church that they grew up with.
1:00:14 I’m also aware, again, thanks to this great episode, that I have been optimistically rebelling from their attitudes, et cetera, and trying to find my balance between these two poles of optimism and pessimism.
1:00:25 Today, I believe that I must look for the nuances that allow me to hold pieces of both sides, possibly intention, while creating a peace of mind in myself.
1:00:34 It’s definitely a conscious journey to find this hybrid stance that does not swing the extreme poles of life from the world around me.
1:00:35 Thanks, Sean.
1:00:36 Keep it up.
1:00:43 John, if you’re out there listening, I am grateful for that note.
1:00:43 Thank you.
1:00:52 If any of you want to learn more about Hopeful Pessimism, that episode is right before this one in our show’s feed.
1:00:54 Okay, now it’s your turn.
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0:01:18 We live in a culture obsessed with hope.
0:01:23 Trained to believe that keeping the faith is the key to sustaining success.
0:01:25 You’ve heard this before.
0:01:30 The sun will come out tomorrow, and when it does, we’ll take the sunny side of the street.
0:01:35 And as long as we don’t stop believing, what a wonderful world this will be.
0:01:37 That’s nice.
0:01:39 But, just hear me out.
0:01:46 What if the path to a better world isn’t through blind hope?
0:01:54 What if what the world needs now is a particular kind of hope, balanced with a little clear-eyed pessimism?
0:01:59 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:04 Today’s guest is Mara van der Lute.
0:02:10 She’s a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and the author of Hopeful Pessimism.
0:02:21 It’s a quietly radical invitation to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about hope, despair, and what it means to live with dignity in a breaking world.
0:02:27 For van der Lute, despair is not always the enemy, and hope is not always a virtue.
0:02:39 Instead, she argues that the fuel we need to drive forward, to have the courage to be activists, to make change, to fix a broken future, is pessimism.
0:02:48 Mara van der Lute, welcome to the show.
0:02:50 Thank you for having me.
0:02:51 I’m glad you’re here.
0:02:58 I have been called a pessimist many times, and I’ve always recoiled a little.
0:03:04 Because usually when people say that, it’s a soft insult.
0:03:08 It means you’re, you know, pathologically negative.
0:03:11 And that pisses me off.
0:03:18 Because if you’re not blindly optimistic, or if you’re just being honest about the world, as best you can be,
0:03:24 that doesn’t mean you’re a hopeless pessimist, but that is the way a lot of people think.
0:03:29 And that seems to be what you’re trying to dispel in this book.
0:03:32 Is that a fair characterization?
0:03:34 Yes, I think so.
0:03:38 I think I’ve noticed similar things as you have as well.
0:03:48 That when someone is called a pessimist, or when we talk about pessimism, it tends to be an insult or an accusation of some sorts.
0:03:56 Similarly, when people call themselves an optimist, it’s like the kindest way to pay yourself a compliment without outright doing it.
0:03:58 It’s sort of, well, I’m an optimist, so that’s my virtue.
0:04:02 And people don’t say the same thing about pessimism.
0:04:05 I do think there are different kinds of pessimism.
0:04:15 And I think prefacing it with a kind of hopeful pessimism is maybe a way of dispelling some of that anxiety that people feel around the term.
0:04:20 I’ve always struggled with cynicism a bit, and I suppose that’s a cousin of pessimism.
0:04:23 Yeah, I think so.
0:04:34 I think cynicism, nihilism, defeatism, fatalism, those are all the ones that we should be rightly a bit more cautious towards.
0:04:38 But those are not, they can go together with pessimism, but they don’t necessarily have to.
0:04:52 I was going to ask you what you think most people get wrong about pessimism, but is it kind of what you’re saying now, that it gets confused with passivity and resignation?
0:04:55 Yeah, I think that’s probably the main thing.
0:05:04 The book comes a lot out of concern over climate change and the way the climate change debate gets carried out in particular.
0:05:09 But even outside of that, I think there’s often an assumption that there’s just two options.
0:05:16 Either you’re optimistic about the future and you’ll do what you can to make it better, or you’re pessimistic and you’ve already given up.
0:05:20 And I think that’s way too easy.
0:05:31 A lot of people who would call themselves pessimists, they might think, for instance, that the future is likely to get worse or that there are very bad things happening in the world.
0:05:37 So it might be a certain vision of reality now or of the future that’s quite pessimistic.
0:05:39 It might be quite dark, quite bleak.
0:05:41 That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do anything about it.
0:05:45 It might make us all the more committed to work for change.
0:05:54 And I think there have been examples of what I call hopeful pessimists or activistic pessimists, both in the past, but they also exist today.
0:05:57 Well, there’s a lot of nuance here, right?
0:05:58 I mean, these things exist on a continuum.
0:06:14 And part of the problem is this moral binary, is the phrase you use in the book, where optimism is framed as courage and pessimism as despair or defeatism, where optimism is good, pessimism is bad.
0:06:17 Where does that framing come from?
0:06:21 Is that a legacy of enlightenment thought or some other period of thought?
0:06:24 Or has it always been framed this way?
0:06:31 I think, in part, some of the dichotomy really comes from the first inception of these terms.
0:06:37 But that’s, and that’s early 18th century, and that’s in the context of the problem of evil.
0:06:41 And so how could a good God have created a world full of suffering?
0:06:42 Is life worth living?
0:06:45 Do the goods of life outweigh the benefits?
0:06:52 And that has to do rather with what I call value-oriented optimism and pessimism.
0:06:57 So that’s more about the value of reality, what life is ultimately like.
0:07:04 And only later do the terms get used in a more future-oriented way, which is how we tend to use them today.
0:07:07 So about expectations about the future.
0:07:14 And I think the sort of the tendency that there’s this binary or that there’s this dichotomy, that it’s really an existential choice.
0:07:19 You’re going to be either one or the other, and there’s going to be a moral failure on the other side.
0:07:27 I think that comes into being quite early in the debate, but it shifts meaning over time as these terms also shift in meaning.
0:07:35 I do believe that in the course of the 20th century, when we really start seeing optimism and pessimism being used in these future-oriented ways,
0:07:47 so as expectations about the future, I think very early you get this comfort with pessimism, as well as this enthusiasm for optimism,
0:07:51 as if optimism is naturally a kind of virtue that we have.
0:07:55 There’s another kind of extreme pessimism.
0:08:01 It’s the person who is certain about what’s going to happen and believes not just that it might go badly,
0:08:05 but that it absolutely will go badly.
0:08:10 I mean, is what I’m talking about here not really pessimism to you?
0:08:14 Is this more like fatalism or even nihilism?
0:08:17 Yes.
0:08:20 So I think it exists on the same spectrum.
0:08:27 But as soon as someone says, well, this will certainly happen, or things are bound to get worse,
0:08:34 I would say that that’s no longer pessimism, that’s something like fatalism or nihilism or defeatism.
0:08:40 That’s one of the other, the related, the siblings on the spectrum, so to speak.
0:08:46 In the pessimist tradition, people like Schopenhauer, they would not have espoused something like that at all.
0:08:51 They say, you know, the pessimist withholds certain expectations about the future.
0:08:55 We don’t have that kind of certainty because of the kinds of beings we are.
0:08:57 So I would say I’m with you.
0:08:58 I think that’s very problematic.
0:09:04 And that’s one of the things that I’m most concerned to kind of dispel or to counter in the book.
0:09:09 And when it comes to fatalism, there can be both pessimistic and optimistic kinds as well.
0:09:13 What would an optimistic fatalism look like?
0:09:14 I’ve never even thought of that.
0:09:22 Well, a pessimistic fatalist would say something like, well, things are bound to get worse, so we may as well give up.
0:09:23 There’s nothing we can do.
0:09:23 Yeah.
0:09:33 An optimistic fatalist, more subtly, would say something like, it’s all going to be fine, technology will save us, humanity is going to solve this problem for us.
0:09:40 And that also means, well, if there’s a problem, it’s not necessarily a problem for me, because things are going to work out in the end.
0:09:41 Things are going to be fine.
0:09:53 That’s also a kind of closing off of the future in actually quite a problematic, but maybe even more nefarious way, because it often assumes a kind of fatalism that it doesn’t wear on its sleeves.
0:09:57 It doesn’t pronounce itself as the kind of fatalism that actually it implies.
0:10:00 That just sounds like blind hope to me.
0:10:02 Well, maybe it is.
0:10:07 Maybe you could call it blind hope, but it does declare itself as a kind of optimism.
0:10:24 If pessimism defined in the fatalistic mode is something like being certain that things are going to get worse, then the optimism that stands counter to it would be the kind of attitude that believes, well, things are definitely going to get better in the end.
0:10:27 I would be fine with also calling that a blind hope.
0:10:31 That’s same, perhaps, as the other kind is maybe a sort of blind despair.
0:10:32 That’s all fine.
0:10:35 These terms can coexist together.
0:10:45 But I think those are important modes and thought processes to also recognize, because I think they’re equally dangerous and important to dispel.
0:10:57 I do want to talk more about the dangers of hope, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, because I do want to linger a little bit more.
0:11:09 I do want to talk more on pessimism, and I’m very intrigued by this argument that pessimism actually makes room for action, because in your words, it expects nothing.
0:11:22 Why do you think this is a better approach than acting in the hope or even the expectation of success?
0:11:32 I’m wondering, what possible harm is there in expecting to succeed and expecting that things will go the way you want them to go?
0:11:35 Why isn’t that just as motivating?
0:11:48 Well, I want to be a bit cautious there, because I’m also in the book, I’m very careful to say, if that’s the drive behind your activism and it works for you, fine, do that.
0:11:49 Be an optimistic activist.
0:11:52 Be driven by that sort of expectation.
0:11:55 But I do want to make a case for the other kind as well.
0:11:58 And there’s several reasons for that.
0:12:03 I think there can be a risk with the expectation-driven or optimistic activism.
0:12:21 And the risk there is that if our activism hinges on a kind of expectation or a kind of prognosis or an achievable outcome, if that outcome is not just defeated temporarily, but really shattered as it might be.
0:12:27 Say that, for instance, a certain president is elected and climate change funding gets cut drastically.
0:12:28 Hypothetically.
0:12:30 Or, you know, that might happen.
0:12:37 Or consider there might be a number of ways where suddenly we’re confronted with a dashing of our expectations.
0:12:40 And the question is, what do we do then?
0:12:45 Should we then have other either success stories or prognoses?
0:12:48 I think we can do that.
0:12:51 And a lot of journalism tries to offer that.
0:12:54 And to some extent, that can be inspiring.
0:13:01 But again, it also makes it very vulnerable to being cut down by that sort of shattering of very high expectations.
0:13:05 And that’s something that you can see some historic evidence for.
0:13:15 And the question is then, so if we imagine a sort of darker timeframe or something that has happened where it becomes very difficult to see our way forward,
0:13:20 is there also a different kind of hope that might sustain us or a different kind of motivation?
0:13:23 And that I think we can find that.
0:13:35 But it has to do rather with being focused or oriented on things like values, things that we know that we hold dear, as well as this openness of the future.
0:13:55 And aside from that, I think there is also a risk that narratives which say that activists have to be optimistic, place maybe too much of a psychological burdens on not just activists, but anyone who is concerned about how things are going to also espouse a sort of psychological mode that we might not feel.
0:14:01 Yeah, we’re definitely going to get there because I want to ask about that in this specific context of the climate movement.
0:14:05 But you did mention a second ago, historical evidence.
0:14:15 Did you have examples in mind of this sort of pessimistic activism that serves as a good example for what you have in mind here?
0:14:21 Yeah, so you can get several examples and they’re slightly on different scales.
0:14:33 One of the hopeful pessimists, as I call them, that I use as an example in the book is Albert Camus, so the existentialist philosopher, though he didn’t call himself that.
0:14:33 My hero.
0:14:49 As a fascinating thinker who, not just in his philosophical writings, but also in his novels, but also in his personal commitment, his decision to join the resistance in the course of the Second World War,
0:15:04 the kinds of formulations that he gives for his activism is very explicitly not driven by optimism, but by a kind of pessimism that’s both about the world as it is now, but also about the future.
0:15:17 And it’s not, it doesn’t hinge on expectation, but on the kinds of certainty that we might have in otherwise uncertain times has to do with things like values, things that we know we are committed towards.
0:15:36 And I think that’s, for instance, in the novel, The Plague, which everyone was reading during COVID, but should reread now in the light of climate change, is very much about what do we know, what are the values we know we hold dear, and then deciding what to do, regardless of the consequences which are out of our, out of our hands.
0:15:40 You know, Camus has that line, I don’t remember it exactly.
0:15:53 This may have been in his notebooks, or in one of his articles for combat, but he says something like, you know, I’m pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about humankind.
0:15:57 And I was never quite sure what to make of that.
0:16:03 I think I have a better understanding of it after reading your book, but I don’t know, what does that mean to you?
0:16:18 When he says, I’m an optimist about humankind, it’s about having a positive belief in the potential of humanity, even if the world is a very bad place or if we think that things are going to be pretty bad.
0:16:24 So it’s actually, it’s an articulation of a kind of hope, even in the darkest circumstances, I think.
0:16:28 Do you ever worry about falling into the trap of nihilism?
0:16:29 You know what I mean?
0:16:36 Believing there’s no realistic chance of success isn’t the same as believing there’s no point in doing anything at all.
0:16:47 But you can definitely see how one can lead to the other without any, I don’t know, philosophical guardrails.
0:16:50 That’s an interesting question.
0:17:01 I think you do see that happen in a lot of the literature on, for instance, on pessimism, where there can be a kind of temptation to go into it and then keep going.
0:17:13 And then everything becomes not just uncertain, but there can be a tendency to only see the wound in everything and to only see the dark side of everything.
0:17:21 And I think that’s a temptation that exists on both sides when we try to unsee another part of existence.
0:17:33 I don’t think I’ve ever been tempted to go all the way into, not that I have anything against nihilists, they can be great people, but I don’t think I’ve gone quite as far as that.
0:17:45 However, there can be a tendency when you’re really researching the pessimistic literature, it’s full of the dark matters, the suffering and the pain and the grief.
0:17:47 And it tells you, look at this, look at this.
0:17:51 And at some point you think, OK, well, yes, I’ve looked at this.
0:17:53 But then you also have to see the other side.
0:18:07 So I think being open to both sides of existence is part of what the challenge is, not just for not only for I think for both for optimists and pessimists and anyone who is on any any gradation of those of those two.
0:18:21 And I think actually where I find myself now, and maybe that’s why the book is called Hopeful Pessimism, is trying to negotiate a way of seeing seeing these two sides of reality without ever unseeing the other side.
0:18:24 It’s about living in that tension, right?
0:18:25 I think so, yeah.
0:18:25 Yeah.
0:18:29 And well, first off, I’m going to take a bold stance against the nihilist here.
0:18:32 So I will, I will, I just want to be clear.
0:18:37 I am, I am against the nihilist, but I respect your, I respect your neutrality.
0:18:39 Well, let’s talk a little bit.
0:18:40 I think, yeah.
0:18:41 Now go ahead, please, no, please go ahead.
0:18:51 Well, I was, I was going to say sometimes there can be people who are philosophically nihilists, but then in their practical lives are just as, as ethical and
0:18:55 warm-hearted people as, as, as others.
0:18:56 So fair enough.
0:18:57 I see your concern.
0:19:03 I want to talk a little bit more about hope too, which is the other part of this equation.
0:19:09 And just as there are different ways to be pessimistic, you also describe different ways to be hopeful.
0:19:12 You talk about green hope and blue hope.
0:19:19 What’s the difference and which form of hope do you find most useful?
0:19:20 Yeah.
0:19:30 So I found myself researching the history of hope and hope today gets framed in these very positive ways, right?
0:19:35 You see it everywhere, not just in climate change, but also in political rhetoric.
0:19:42 Everyone wants to be the hopeful candidate or have the agenda of hope, no matter where on the political spectrum you are.
0:19:45 At some point I thought that’s, that’s really interesting.
0:19:55 But if you look into the, into the history of philosophy, you actually see that, for instance, for instance, the ancient philosophers were actually very critical, very skeptical about hope.
0:20:01 Because hope can also lead us to, we might not be hoping for the right things.
0:20:03 What if we’re hoping for something really bad to happen?
0:20:04 Is that necessarily a virtue?
0:20:08 Might it also distort our expectations about the future?
0:20:11 There’s a risk maybe of hoping falsely or blindly.
0:20:15 So the ancients were really worried about hope, which I found really interesting.
0:20:27 And then I kept finding in various authors from Tolkien to Vaclav Havel, the Czech politician and writer, that sometimes people were talking about two kinds of hope.
0:20:32 And sometimes they do that in slightly different ways.
0:20:36 But I thought there seems to be something there because there are these different modes of hope.
0:20:39 I ended up calling them green hope and blue.
0:20:44 If you think about a color spectrum, the distinction is gradual.
0:20:46 So there can be, you can also go back and forth.
0:20:48 There can be bluish green and greenish blue.
0:20:51 But sometimes we have just blue and green.
0:20:51 Okay.
0:21:02 So my idea of green hope is one where you see a narrative that makes hope about the, it’s more, it’s closer to optimism.
0:21:09 It’s about the achievability of success, concrete outcomes, things that we think are pretty likely to happen.
0:21:11 So we feel good about this.
0:21:12 It’s achievable.
0:21:13 We can do this.
0:21:14 Therefore, we are hopeful.
0:21:22 And as I said before, there’s maybe, that can be fine when things are actually going our way, when we’ve got the wind in our sails.
0:21:25 But what if we don’t and things are actually looking pretty grim?
0:21:28 Is there a different kind of hope that can sustain us?
0:21:37 And that’s what I ended up calling blue hope, which is oriented not on certainty or expectation, but rather on the openness of the future.
0:21:39 We don’t know what’s going to happen.
0:21:46 So that could be for worse, but also for better, as well as this sense of commitment to our values.
0:21:56 So even if certain things, if there’s a lot of uncertainty, we might still know what we want to put our efforts towards and what we can be committed to.
0:22:05 Is there some point at which hope becomes a lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid facing reality?
0:22:14 And if there is a point at which that is the case, do you think it’s a moral failure, almost, to keep holding on to hope?
0:22:29 I’d want to be cautious about calling anything a moral failure, be it optimism or pessimism or any kind of hope, unless we become judgmental about the experience of others.
0:22:39 I think, again, I think, again, it depends on what kind of hope we are talking about.
0:22:42 I think there can be a risk in hope.
0:22:56 There are forms of bad hope where, yeah, there can be something at least adjacent to a lie or a moral failure when people don’t think through what the hope entails or what it means.
0:23:09 So say that you had a CEO of a fossil fuel company saying, well, I hope climate change gets much worse than it already is because it’s going to be good for me.
0:23:16 So I hope things are going to get worse because they’re going to be better for me.
0:23:19 We wouldn’t call that admirable.
0:23:25 They might be hoping, but that hope is actually, that would be a kind of moral failure because they’re hoping for the wrong thing.
0:23:30 So hope needs to be oriented towards something worthwhile, towards something good.
0:23:42 But similarly, say that you had some billionaires saying, oh, I’m really concerned about climate change and I hope things will get better while parking their private jet at Davos or, you know, not doing nothing to change it.
0:23:48 Then we’d say, well, you’re not hoping in the right way because you shouldn’t be just hoping you should be doing something.
0:23:53 So I think to be hopeful isn’t necessarily a virtue or it isn’t necessarily a good thing.
0:23:58 It depends, like, what does that hope mean and what does it, what does it call us to do?
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0:28:25 So let’s go back to the climate movement.
0:28:26 All right.
0:28:29 It’s a big part of the book, as it should be.
0:28:36 Do you see this movement, such as it is, as hopefully pessimistic in the way you define it?
0:28:40 And I do realize the climate movement isn’t some monolithic thing.
0:28:49 But broadly speaking, do you feel like the climate movement is guided by the principles of hopeful pessimism?
0:28:57 Well, as you said, I think we have to be very cautious in not generalizing about the climate
0:29:01 movement, if there is even, to the extent that there is such a thing, and I wouldn’t want
0:29:02 to speak for it.
0:29:06 But I think there are a lot of hopeful pessimists in the climate movement.
0:29:16 And I think a lot of the tendencies that you see from some of the most vocal people and figureheads
0:29:24 in the movement, like Greta Thunberg, but also many others, the way that they frame their activism
0:29:30 shows signs of being something very close to or having affinity with a kind of hopeful pessimism.
0:29:37 But you also see this tendency, especially from outside voices, to say, well, no, you have to be
0:29:44 cautious with not being too desperate or too pessimistic or too anxious about the future, because that’s
0:29:46 not going to help you moving forward.
0:29:50 And actually, I think, as a lot of people in the climate movement have rightfully pointed
0:29:57 out, who’s to say, actually, there are a lot of people who are very concerned or even, you
0:29:59 know, are angry or sad or desperate.
0:30:04 There’s a lot of dark emotions in the climate movement that have clearly been very fueling to
0:30:10 sustain a movement, even across a variety of quashed hopes and expectations.
0:30:13 Can you say a bit more about Greta?
0:30:19 I mean, she’s such a contemporary example and someone I think almost everyone knows or has
0:30:19 heard of.
0:30:27 What makes her climate activism hopefully pessimistic to you?
0:30:30 I say hope in a very specific way here.
0:30:36 So I think it’s hopeful in the sense that it believes the future to be open and will strive
0:30:40 for change and be activistic in this forward-looking way.
0:30:46 But at the same time, one thing I find fascinating about Greta Thunberg is that she has been very
0:30:50 critical about the hope narrative in climate debate.
0:30:56 When politicians say we have to be hopeful or we are hopeful, that often it can be a sort of
0:30:57 reason for doing nothing.
0:31:03 So we’ll say, yeah, there’s hope for change and things will go on as they have before.
0:31:13 And actually, I think the room that she has given to negative emotions such as anger and sadness
0:31:20 and grief, even despair at some moments, people have said to her, that’s not going to sustain
0:31:21 your movement.
0:31:23 And she said, well, it kind of did.
0:31:31 That is, we didn’t give promises about or positive stories about, I don’t know, happy
0:31:37 images or things that are going to make people feel hopeful in this uplifting, optimistic sense.
0:31:43 Actually, we confronted people with the bleak facts and said there’s a reason for urgency.
0:31:48 And that’s actually something that did drive the movement, even if it wasn’t always sufficient
0:31:52 to bring, for instance, politicians and decision makers on board.
0:31:58 Do you think it’s a burden for people to hope that we can solve the climate problem?
0:32:03 Or is it just a problem when we demand hope as a condition of action?
0:32:06 The latter.
0:32:12 I think it’s, it can be fine to, there are so many kinds of hope and ways to be hopeful as
0:32:13 well as desperate, right?
0:32:17 I think it’s fine to be hopeful in whatever way and it’s fine to be desperate in whatever
0:32:25 way as well, as long as we still keep focusing on moving towards what we believe has to be
0:32:31 done, because that’s not up to what we think is hopeful or desperate or what our emotional
0:32:32 responses are.
0:32:39 That’s, that’s a calling of, of, of the world for us to commit to certain values.
0:32:45 We have to do certain things and I think it can be a relief, yeah, a relief of a kind
0:32:52 of burden to, to realize in the end, we just have to do what needs to be done and that can
0:32:54 be hopeful or pessimistic or hopefully pessimistic.
0:32:59 That can be a variety of ways of, of doing that.
0:33:06 And there’s just something deflating about insisting that people feign optimism or pretend to believe
0:33:10 things they don’t believe, like, like everything’s going to work out, you know, just for the very
0:33:12 simple reason that it’s dishonest.
0:33:18 And when people are forced into dishonesty, all you’re left with is just a kind of moral
0:33:19 performance.
0:33:22 And that’s not, that’s not productive.
0:33:22 Absolutely.
0:33:23 No.
0:33:28 And I do think that that is a burden and it’s been documented as a, as a burden as well, because
0:33:32 you can’t keep holding certain emotions.
0:33:37 If you feel that things are, um, if you feel these darker emotions or you feel this concern
0:33:43 or anger or grief and you’re not able or not allowed, or you have to hold them back.
0:33:44 Yeah.
0:33:49 There’s, there seems to be something dishonest in it, but it’s also not psychologically sustainable.
0:33:51 It’s not good for us.
0:33:54 There has to be room for having those sorts of feelings and expressing them.
0:34:00 And, um, but in a way that’s conducive to our, our flourishing and our commitment at
0:34:00 the same time.
0:34:07 And I think one thing that’s been really interesting about the climate movement is that it has increasingly
0:34:12 tried to give room and give voice to those sorts of, uh, to those sorts of emotions.
0:34:15 And I think Greta Thunberg has been very important in, in doing that.
0:34:20 We also say that, that hope can harden into cruel optimism.
0:34:26 And that phrase is striking because again, we don’t usually think of hope as a burden.
0:34:31 We think of it as the thing that gets us through, but what you’re describing is something different.
0:34:37 It’s what we’ve just been talking about that, that forced hope that people are expected to
0:34:40 project, which is dishonest and I think unhelpful.
0:34:43 But what do you think makes it cruel?
0:34:54 Cruelty comes exactly when it becomes judgmental or it becomes something that we force on other
0:34:54 people.
0:35:00 So when there’s this, this assumption that, oh no, you have to be, you have to be hopeful
0:35:06 or you have to be optimistic because otherwise that is a moral failing, failing, or that you’re
0:35:12 not sufficiently in control of yourself or that it’s unpowerful or uncourageous.
0:35:22 That then becomes a form of not necessarily intentional cruelty, but the cruel aspect of it is that you
0:35:29 might find yourself experiencing these darker emotions because you are encountering a reality
0:35:36 that has this darkness to it, that is either desperate or makes you angry or makes you want
0:35:40 to cry or there is something about reality that triggers these emotions.
0:35:45 So you’re, you’re responding appropriately, but already having to bear that burden, you then
0:35:52 also have to bear the burden of either hiding those emotions or expressing contrary emotions,
0:36:02 such as being outwardly optimistic or joyful or lighthearted or having uplifting narratives.
0:36:07 And there’s something, as you said earlier, there’s something dishonest about it, but that also, it just
0:36:08 makes the burden worse.
0:36:12 It’s kind of having, burdening the already burdened with another burden.
0:36:16 And there seems to be something, um, not quite right about that.
0:36:22 As we’ve been saying, you know, being hopefully pessimistic means living in this tension and that
0:36:30 means living alongside despair and grief and anger and not repressing these feelings or telling
0:36:33 yourself a story that makes them go away.
0:36:41 Do you ever think that’s just a hard ask for most people, that most of us just want to feel
0:36:48 secure about the future and that maybe a false hope is preferable to an authentic doubt?
0:36:53 I don’t think so.
0:36:57 So I don’t, I’m not saying that everyone has to be in a state of constant despair.
0:36:58 Yeah, no, I don’t mean that.
0:36:59 I don’t mean that.
0:37:05 I, no, I mean, I, I would read that book if it were written, but I don’t think that
0:37:07 that is, that would be a hard, that would be a hard ask.
0:37:08 Yeah.
0:37:15 In the end, it’s much more, all I’m saying is that, hey, it’s okay to be, to feel those
0:37:19 things or to be pessimistic, um, from time to time.
0:37:22 That’s not something that you have to push away.
0:37:27 And it’s also not something that you’d have to be dishonest about or not express to other
0:37:28 people.
0:37:34 And then I also, I think a lot of people do exist with these realities.
0:37:42 Everyone encounters grief or pain or death, um, at least, you know, at, at, at some point
0:37:43 in our lives.
0:37:50 And if we don’t express that, it just means, it doesn’t mean that we’re not experiencing
0:37:50 these things.
0:37:55 It just means that we’re not talking about them or that we’re not being honest to ourselves
0:37:57 or to other people about them.
0:38:03 So I also, I definitely also think there can be narratives and stories of, um, of love
0:38:06 and joy and joy and wonder about the world as well.
0:38:13 But as you said, these things can exist alongside each other and existing in that tension, I
0:38:19 think will, will only deepen our capacity for human flourishing, not deflated.
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0:42:16 Do you ever think of hopeful pessimism as almost like a secular counterpart to religious
0:42:17 faith?
0:42:24 And I’m asking because, you know, people who are religious often have this deep faith that
0:42:30 this will all make sense in the end, that the moral arithmetic will balance out either
0:42:35 in this life or the next one, and many of them will tell you that they couldn’t imagine
0:42:42 getting through life without this faith, which I can understand even if I don’t share it.
0:42:48 And I feel like your book isn’t exactly a secular alternative to this, but it is taking this aspect
0:42:56 of faith seriously and saying we can find meaning and dignity in a very different and, I guess,
0:42:58 more honest way.
0:43:01 There’s definitely aspects of that there.
0:43:09 When I was thinking about these two kinds of hope, part of why I came up with new terms
0:43:15 for them, so the blue hope and the green hope, is because you do often in a lot of religious
0:43:18 literature see different kinds of hope.
0:43:22 And one is more the secular sort of hope, and the other is more the religious kind of hope
0:43:23 or faith.
0:43:30 So there is going to be something that sustains us, even if the usual hope, the everyday hope
0:43:32 fails, so the hope that’s based on expectation.
0:43:37 Once those expectations fail us, there’s going to be this other reality that will sustain us.
0:43:43 So I’m trying to find a version of that that will work for both religious and non-religious people.
0:43:53 And I think we can find it in this form of hope that doesn’t hinge on achievable outcomes or of our
0:43:59 expectations about the future, but is more about, well, we can know some things for certain, and that’s the things
0:44:05 that we value in life or that we feel are worth fighting for, worth committing to.
0:44:10 It is a kind of faith, in a way, even if it’s not, it doesn’t expect anything.
0:44:14 That’s why some people have spoken of hope without expectancy.
0:44:17 And I think that comes quite close.
0:44:23 I wouldn’t want to say it’s the same thing as faith, but it might perform a similar kind of sustaining
0:44:25 function, a sort of hope beyond hope.
0:44:31 But that’s sort of the problem with religious faith, right, is that it does come with this certainty
0:44:37 about the future and what it will all amount to, right?
0:44:41 It’s a story about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.
0:44:48 And that seems at odds with, like, the sort of core tenet of pessimism, which is maintaining
0:44:55 contact with that uncertainty and never looking away from it, never pretending like you do have
0:44:58 clarity or certainty about the future.
0:45:03 Yeah, so there is, they’re definitely not exactly the same thing.
0:45:09 Although I think even for religious hope or faith, sometimes it’s not always quite so clear-cut.
0:45:11 It’s faith, not certainty.
0:45:24 It’s not, there is often still a grasping or putting oneself towards something without knowing for certain
0:45:26 what is going to come back.
0:45:36 So there is, the faith element has an open-endedness to it that still has a sort of kind of affinity to the hope of hopeful pessimism.
0:45:37 But yeah, they’re definitely not the same.
0:45:38 It’s such a good point.
0:45:52 And I think the best of faith, the best of religion, is the kind that does stay in touch with that faith and doesn’t harden into the sort of certainty we’re talking about.
0:45:54 And that happens quite a bit too.
0:45:55 But that’s not…
0:45:57 It keeps the openness and the open-endedness alive.
0:45:59 Let’s go back to Kimu.
0:46:03 There’s this line that’s frequently attributed to him.
0:46:09 I’m not sure if he’s the one who actually wrote it, but certainly it reflects his general philosophy.
0:46:13 And I was thinking about the sentiment while reading your book.
0:46:22 The line is, the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
0:46:23 I love that.
0:46:34 And I was thinking about it while reading your book because so much of it is about what it means to keep acting after we’ve let go of the usual justifications.
0:46:37 And the usual justification is success.
0:46:41 Our culture justifies everything through success.
0:46:51 If we do what we’ve been talking about and abandon the idea that our actions are justified by their success, what’s our compass?
0:46:55 What words do we use in place of success or progress?
0:46:57 It’s such a good question.
0:47:10 It’s also a big question for me as just a philosopher, thinking my ideas to answer, because it is really about how do we move forward as humanity, right?
0:47:11 I couldn’t answer it.
0:47:14 No, I’m still going to try.
0:47:20 I think, because I do think it really depends on the context.
0:47:27 I’m not saying that we can never, it is good to think about, sometimes it is appropriate to think about, well, what are our prognoses?
0:47:31 And we do want to think about possible outcomes.
0:47:36 We don’t want to, it will be silly not to, we want things to get better.
0:47:39 So sometimes you do have to think, well, what’s the, what’s the best way forward?
0:47:41 What are the achievable outcomes?
0:47:47 And we have to listen to prognoses of what climate scientists tell us and then plot our best way forward.
0:48:04 But it’s more about, ultimately, the reason why we want to act in certain ways isn’t premised on whether that’s going to work or not, or it’s not prognoses oriented in that sort of way.
0:48:25 And ultimately, even if we don’t know what’s going to happen or if those efforts fail us, especially in a case such as climate change, where every incremental change in degrees of warming is going to have huge amounts of difference in the amount of suffering of future generations and even people living now.
0:48:35 We have to, what will then sustain us, what will move us forward, what is ultimately going to drive our commitment?
0:48:54 And I think we already have the answer to that when we think about, if you’re asking about what kind of words that we would use, it’s things like value or duty or justice or goodness, compassion, things that have been such a part of our moral language.
0:48:57 So we already know how to, how to work with them, how to deal with them.
0:49:09 And that’s sort of the idea of being committed to a cause is, has been sustaining to people who had no certainty of outcome.
0:49:14 And that’s how a lot of political and social change has happened.
0:49:21 Sometimes we just don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but we know what’s right to do and to commit towards.
0:49:24 And I think that’s something worth reminding ourselves of.
0:49:37 So maybe alongside the very natural language of prognoses and outcomes and expectation, that could also be this reminder that, yeah, but we’re going to do what we can nonetheless.
0:49:50 I guess we often think of hope as the opposite of despair, but do you think it’s commitment, is commitment actually the opposite of despair?
0:49:56 Staying committed with the world, that’s the antidote to despair, not hope.
0:50:01 I mean, I have ideas about despair.
0:50:06 I’m not sure that despair is always, always a bad thing.
0:50:10 But I think the kind of despair that you’re talking about is like resignation, right?
0:50:12 Or giving up, that sort of despair.
0:50:17 Yeah, I think commitment is the better antidote.
0:50:20 And sometimes when people say hope, that’s what they mean, right?
0:50:24 It can mean a lot of different things.
0:50:32 But I think if we remember things like commitment, and that’s such also a life-affirming thing to say.
0:50:38 So it’s when you’re committed to something or when you commit yourself to something, you’re doing something.
0:50:42 But also you’re putting something of yourself at stake if you’re using the word rightly.
0:50:45 So it also means that you’re going to act in certain ways.
0:50:53 And that’s why I love it when Cornel West says things like, if you say that you’re hopeful, well, what does it demand of you?
0:50:55 What does it ask of you?
0:50:56 What does it cost you?
0:50:59 So that it’s not just a turn of phrase.
0:51:07 So yes, I think I’d be, I like the idea of commitment as the antidote of that sort of resignation or despair.
0:51:11 Let me push on something you said, because you said despair isn’t always a bad thing.
0:51:16 And I wonder when it’s a good thing or useful thing.
0:51:19 Yeah, so I’m always distinguishing things.
0:51:23 So as I’ve got different kinds of hope, I’ve got different kinds of despair as well.
0:51:29 I think despair is often used in different ways.
0:51:36 So when it means something like passivity or giving up or resignation, that’s one form of despair.
0:51:41 So sometimes when a person despairs, it means they’ve given up.
0:51:46 But say that someone were to come to you and say, I’m desperate.
0:51:52 That could also be a plea for help or a recognition that we can’t go on in this way.
0:51:59 Interestingly, there have been movements or there have been voices of desperate resistance as well.
0:52:02 And I think you see a lot of despair in the climate movement.
0:52:07 Rebecca Solnit has this phrase about hope, that hope should shove you out the door.
0:52:10 And I think sometimes the same thing is true for despair.
0:52:13 Sometimes despair also shoves people out the door.
0:52:21 So when you think, oh, I am in despair or I’m desperate, or this is a desperate situation, that demands something from us.
0:52:24 So I don’t think all kinds of despair are necessarily deflating.
0:52:31 And to the extent that it is an emotional response to, say, a desperate situation, it doesn’t have to be.
0:52:38 I don’t want to say I’d recommend it to anyone, but I also think it’s not necessarily something that we should shy away from.
0:52:41 Well, it’s all very Camus-ian, again, right?
0:52:41 Yes.
0:52:48 I guess just like anger, despair can be, in your words, that call to action, right?
0:52:49 And that’s ultimately the test.
0:52:50 What do you do?
0:52:52 Do you answer that call or do you not?
0:53:06 And for Camus, as you know, the foundation of community, the foundation of a human world, really, is when we collectively say, no, this is not okay.
0:53:08 And that very act is affirmative.
0:53:11 It affirms the values that are actually being defended.
0:53:16 And to the extent they can ever be real, that’s what makes them real.
0:53:25 I feel that there’s such potential for Camus being reread in the light of climate change and other political crises of the moment.
0:53:31 Not that he was perfect in any way, but some of the things that he says in the writing and exploring the tension.
0:53:48 And then, yeah, having that idea that this is what it means to say no or to commit ourselves to a certain cause is, I think, deeply inspiring, but also will resonate with many people, especially in times as we live in today.
0:53:54 I want to close out with, um, with a sigh.
0:53:59 No, I’m sure Beth will edit that out.
0:53:59 No, no.
0:54:03 Um, there’s just, there’s just so much in my head.
0:54:12 Um, there’s so many lines and passages in the book that, um, that really landed with me and, you know, they’re appropriately highlighted.
0:54:19 Um, but I decided I just wanted to close out by reading one of my favorites.
0:54:21 And now I’m quoting you.
0:54:24 If anything, the pessimists have taught me this.
0:54:29 With eyes full of that darkness, there can still be that strange, shattering openness.
0:54:31 Like a door cracked open.
0:54:33 For the good to make its entry into life.
0:54:38 Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future.
0:54:44 And so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse.
0:54:50 That feels like a nice capsule statement of really the whole thesis of the book.
0:54:53 I’m glad to hear that that resonated.
0:54:58 And, um, yeah, I still, that’s the thing that the pessimists have taught me.
0:55:02 And I hope that it will be of value to other people as well.
0:55:04 I think it will be.
0:55:06 It certainly was to me.
0:55:10 Once again, the book is called Hopeful Pessimism.
0:55:14 Mara van der Lute, this was a pleasure.
0:55:15 Thank you.
0:55:17 Thank you so much for having me.
0:55:25 All right.
0:55:27 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:55:42 You know, optimism and pessimism are themes we revisit on the show because, like a lot of you, I’m constantly waging a battle in my own mind to not be too pessimistic or too cynical.
0:55:54 And this episode was helpful because it breaks through that binary and gives a new perspective on how to live constructively with both of these emotions.
0:56:03 Anyway, we’ve been overwhelmed by the number of voicemails and emails that we’ve received in recent weeks.
0:56:04 Please keep them coming.
0:56:06 I read all of them.
0:56:08 My team reads all of them.
0:56:10 Your notes help us make a better show.
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0:56:22 So drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:56:29 And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead, rate, and review, and subscribe to the podcast.
0:56:40 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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0:01:14 What happens when we die?
0:01:20 I’ve always been a cold, hard materialist on this one.
0:01:30 Our brain shuts down, consciousness fades away, and the lights go out.
0:01:36 And beyond that, what else is there to say?
0:01:44 I had no experience of life before I was born, and I expect to have no experience of life after I die.
0:01:51 As best I can tell, that’s the most reasonable assumption we can make about death.
0:01:55 But most reasonable does not mean definitely true.
0:02:06 There’s the conventional view taken by major religions that the shape of your afterlife depends on the quality of your actual life.
0:02:08 I have my issues with that.
0:02:10 But it’s a widely held belief.
0:02:16 The point, in any case, is that this is one of the oldest questions we have.
0:02:23 Which means there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness, in some form, might survive the death of the body.
0:02:30 However unlikely these possibilities might be, they’re not impossible.
0:02:35 And if they’re not impossible, how seriously should we take them?
0:02:41 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:54 Today’s guest is Sebastian Younger.
0:03:04 He’s a former war reporter, a documentarian, and the author of several books, including his most recent one called In My Time of Dying.
0:03:09 Younger’s not the religious or superstitious type.
0:03:14 He’s a self-described atheist and a science-minded rationalist.
0:03:22 And I suspect he would have given a very confident response to that question about life after death.
0:03:25 Until the day he almost died.
0:03:30 An experience that didn’t necessarily transform his worldview.
0:03:33 But it did shake it up.
0:03:42 I wouldn’t say my answer to the what happens when we die question is all that different after reading the book.
0:03:46 But I would say that I’m less certain about it.
0:03:48 And that’s sort of the point.
0:04:00 Sebastian Younger, welcome to the show.
0:04:01 Very nice to be here.
0:04:02 Thanks for having me.
0:04:14 Before we get to the strangeness of your near-death experience, can you just describe what happened to you the day you almost died?
0:04:16 Just to set the scene here a little bit.
0:04:16 Yeah.
0:04:18 So I was 58 years old.
0:04:20 I’ve been a lifelong athlete.
0:04:22 My health is, like, very good.
0:04:32 And so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical issue that would send me to the ER or kill me, you know, sort of drop me in my boots, as it were.
0:04:37 So I just had no thoughts like that about myself.
0:04:44 And so one afternoon, it was during COVID, my family and I were living in a house in the woods in Massachusetts that has no cell phone coverage.
0:04:46 It’s at the end of a dead-end dirt road.
0:04:51 On the property is a cabin, no electricity or anything like that.
0:04:54 And we went out there to spend a couple of hours.
0:04:58 And literally, in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of bolt of pain in my abdomen.
0:05:00 And I couldn’t make it go away.
0:05:02 I sort of twisted and turned.
0:05:03 I thought it was indigestion.
0:05:06 And I stood up and almost fell over.
0:05:07 And so I sat back down.
0:05:09 I said to my wife, I’m going to need help.
0:05:10 I don’t know what’s wrong.
0:05:11 I’ve never felt anything like this.
0:05:22 What was happening, I later found out, was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, and one of several arteries that go through the pancreas.
0:05:25 And one of them had a bulge in it from a weak spot.
0:05:28 And aneurysms are widowmakers.
0:05:34 I mean, they’re really, really deadly, particularly in the abdomen, because it’s hard for the doctors to find them.
0:05:40 And if you’re stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, the doctors sort of know where to put their finger, as it were, to plug the leak.
0:05:44 But if it’s just internal hemorrhage, your abdomen’s basically a big bowl of spaghetti.
0:05:46 It’s very, very hard to find it.
0:05:50 So I was losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes.
0:05:54 And, you know, there’s like 10 pints in the human body, 10 or 12 pints.
0:05:55 So you can do the math.
0:05:58 And I was a one-hour drive from the nearest hospital.
0:06:01 I was a human hourglass, basically.
0:06:04 So by the time they got me there, I’d probably lost two-thirds of my blood.
0:06:06 My blood pressure was 60 over 40.
0:06:09 And I was in end-stage hemorrhagic shock.
0:06:10 I was probably 10 minutes from dead.
0:06:11 But I was still conscious.
0:06:15 Blessedly, I had no idea that I was dying.
0:06:17 I was enormously confused by what was happening.
0:06:20 And I had no clue about the seriousness of it.
0:06:21 60 over 40.
0:06:24 My God, how are you even still alive at that point?
0:06:28 That’s sort of where you cross over into a place where you can’t recover from,
0:06:31 even if you get a massive blood transfusion, which I got.
0:06:37 I mean, if you need that much blood, receiving that much blood causes other problems that can also kill you.
0:06:47 So you can die in the hospital from blood loss with plenty of blood in your veins because other things happen chemically in your bloodstream that will kill you.
0:06:47 It’s deadly.
0:06:51 And I was sort of right on the cusp of when that could reasonably have started to happen.
0:06:58 And I’d actually had sort of intermittent pain in my abdomen for about six months, which just being an idiot dude, I just ignored.
0:06:59 Right.
0:07:01 And, you know, it was bad enough to make me sit down at times.
0:07:02 I was like, oh, what’s that?
0:07:04 And then it would go away and I’d forget about it.
0:07:12 And that was probably the aneurysm getting to a kind of critical point where it was starting to leak a little bit, starting to bleed a little bit or something.
0:07:16 You know, if I’d gone to the doctor, I could have avoided a lot of drama, but I didn’t.
0:07:21 Yeah, note to everyone in the audience, if you know something’s wrong with your body, don’t fuck around.
0:07:22 Go get it checked out.
0:07:25 Yeah, I mean, pain’s an indicator and persistent pain’s an indicator.
0:07:34 And frankly, your unconscious mind, listen, you know, I’m an atheist, I’m a rationalist, I’m an anti-mystic, I hate woo-woo stuff.
0:07:38 My dad was a physicist and an atheist, just like that’s who I am.
0:07:42 But the unconscious mind actually has access to a lot of information about the body.
0:07:47 It communicates with your conscious mind in these strange signals and intuitions and feelings.
0:07:54 And one of the stranger things about this was the first time I felt this pain in my abdomen, I had this bizarre thought.
0:07:59 I thought, huh, that’s the kind of pain where you later find out, oh my God, I have terminal cancer.
0:08:07 Like, I immediately thought this was a mortal threat and then immediately dismissed it as, you know, listen, you just have a pain in your abdomen, like don’t worry about it.
0:08:11 And what was the survival rate for your condition that day?
0:08:20 The survival rate is as low as 30%, but I assume that that’s for a reasonable transport time to the hospital.
0:08:23 It took me 90 minutes to get to a doctor.
0:08:28 My survival chances were extremely low.
0:08:33 The brain does such strange things in these moments.
0:08:37 You knew on some level that something was really wrong here.
0:08:45 But even at the hospital, you write about not having any grand thoughts about life or mortality or even about your family.
0:08:49 You wrote, I had all the introspection of a gut shot coyote, which is a great line.
0:08:52 But what the hell is that about?
0:08:58 You think it’s just a kind of defense mechanism in the brain or is it just plain old fashioned shock?
0:09:04 I was in hemorrhagic shock and deep into hypothermia, which comes with hemorrhagic shock.
0:09:06 I was in an enormous amount of pain.
0:09:12 So blood in your abdomen, outside of your vascular system is extremely irritating to the organs.
0:09:15 I was in and out of consciousness, which I didn’t know.
0:09:19 I mean, if you go in and out of consciousness, you don’t know it.
0:09:25 You think it’s all one stream of consciousness, but actually what drops out is the parts where you’re unconscious.
0:09:27 You have no idea you’re in and out of consciousness.
0:09:29 So I didn’t know that about the situation.
0:09:30 And it was belly pain.
0:09:37 And I had this sort of distant thought, you know, it may turn out you’re going to wake up in the hospital tomorrow morning with really grim news that you have a tumor in your abdomen.
0:09:42 And, you know, I mean, I sort of was aware that that might happen, but I didn’t know it was going down right now.
0:09:43 Like I had no idea.
0:09:50 And, you know, I had the level of sort of situational awareness that like someone who’s really, really drunk might have.
0:09:53 And I was an animal, you know, pain turns you into an animal.
0:09:54 I was an animal.
0:09:55 I was a wounded animal.
0:10:04 So when this happened, if your wife, Barbara, wasn’t with you, if you were out running or something like that, you’re probably dead right now.
0:10:05 And we’re not talking.
0:10:08 I mean, how much did that thought rack your brain in the aftermath?
0:10:11 Oh, afterwards, I was tormented by that.
0:10:21 I mean, any other situation, I mean, the traffic jam and the Cross Bronx Expressway, if I was on an airplane, hiking in the woods, running, I mean, anything like anything.
0:10:23 And as it was, I barely made it.
0:10:27 Another strange thing that I should mention about the unconscious.
0:10:40 So two nights prior at dawn, so about 36 hours before the aneurysm ruptured, I was woken by this terrible dream, a nightmare, and it was that I was dead.
0:10:42 Not that I was dying or going to die.
0:10:43 I was dead.
0:10:44 I was a spirit.
0:10:48 And I was looking down on my family, and they were grieving.
0:10:49 They were sobbing.
0:10:53 And I was trying to yell to them and wave my arms, like, I’m here.
0:10:54 It’s okay.
0:10:54 I’m right here.
0:10:55 It’s all right.
0:10:56 Everything’s okay.
0:10:59 And then I was made to understand that I had died.
0:11:01 I was beyond their reach.
0:11:03 And there was no going back.
0:11:04 And this was just how it is.
0:11:07 And I was headed out into the darkness.
0:11:09 And I was so bereft.
0:11:12 I was so anguished by this that it woke me up.
0:11:13 I mean, I was just like, oh, my God.
0:11:16 Thank God that was just a dream.
0:11:24 As a rationalist, I have to sort of think, all right, your unconscious mind has some mechanism of knowing if there’s a mortal threat going on.
0:11:28 And it doesn’t know how to communicate with dumbass up there who’s, you know, okay, six months of pain.
0:11:29 He’s still not taking notice.
0:11:31 All right, now what do we do?
0:11:34 All right, well, let’s give him a really bad nightmare, right?
0:11:35 Oh, he’s still not listening?
0:11:37 Well, we tried.
0:11:41 You know, I feel like the unconscious mind is sort of like a little bit in that place with us.
0:11:44 Yeah, we’re about to careen into some potentially woo-woo stuff here.
0:11:50 So let me pause, back up just a hair, and then we’ll ease into it.
0:11:54 Because I want to actually get to the near-death experience itself.
0:11:59 The way you write about it in the book is so unbelievably vivid.
0:12:02 I mean, I really feel like I experienced it just reading it.
0:12:10 There’s a moment when the surgeons and the nurses are working on you, and they’re on your right side.
0:12:14 And then on your left side, there’s this pit of blackness.
0:12:15 It’s scary as hell.
0:12:23 And your father, who I think has been dead eight years at this point, appears before you or above you.
0:12:25 Tell me about that.
0:12:26 Right, yeah.
0:12:32 So the doctor was busy trying to put a large-gauge needle into my jugular vein, you know, through my neck.
0:12:34 It sounds a lot worse than it actually is.
0:12:36 It didn’t particularly hurt.
0:12:36 It sounds bad.
0:12:38 It sounds bad, yeah.
0:12:40 I mean, I think they numb you with lidocaine.
0:12:42 So actually, I didn’t feel much except the kind of pressure.
0:12:45 But at any rate, so they were working on that.
0:12:51 And seeming to take a long time, and suddenly this black pit opened up underneath me that I started getting pulled into.
0:12:55 You know, again, think of me as extremely drunk, right?
0:12:56 Like, I’m like, whoa, what’s that?
0:12:59 Like, it didn’t occur to me, like, black pit, that makes no sense.
0:13:02 Like, I was like, oh, there’s the pit.
0:13:04 Like, why am I getting pulled into it?
0:13:12 And I didn’t know I was dying, but I sort of had this animal sense that if you—you don’t want to go into the infinitely black pit that just opened up underneath you.
0:13:15 Like, that’s just a bad idea, and if you get sucked in there, you’re probably not coming back.
0:13:17 Like, that was the feeling I had about it.
0:13:18 And I started to panic.
0:13:23 And that’s when my dead father appeared above me in this sort of energy form.
0:13:24 It’s hard to describe.
0:13:26 I can’t describe what it was like.
0:13:27 I just perceived him.
0:13:30 It’s not like there was a poster board of him floating above me.
0:13:31 It wasn’t quite that tangible.
0:13:35 And he was communicating this incredible benevolence and love.
0:13:37 He’s like, listen, you don’t have to fight it.
0:13:38 You can come with me.
0:13:38 I’ll take care of you.
0:13:39 It’s going to be okay.
0:13:42 I was horrified.
0:13:44 I was like, go with you.
0:13:44 You’re dead.
0:13:46 I’m not going anywhere with you.
0:13:48 Like, what are you talking about?
0:13:48 Get out of here.
0:13:50 Like, I was horrified.
0:13:54 And I said to the doctor, because I was conversant, you’ve got to hurry.
0:13:55 You’re losing me.
0:13:56 I’m going right now.
0:14:00 And I didn’t know where I was going, but I was very clear I was headed out, and I did not want to.
0:14:02 And I knew he had to hurry.
0:14:03 So you say communicating.
0:14:04 What does that mean?
0:14:05 Is he actually talking to you?
0:14:10 Is it gesturing or just a feeling or is it telepathically or what?
0:14:12 I didn’t hear words, right?
0:14:16 But his communication to me, I guess you would have to classify it as telepathic.
0:14:17 But it was very specific.
0:14:19 You don’t have to fight this.
0:14:21 I’m here.
0:14:21 I’ll take care of you.
0:14:22 You can come with me.
0:14:30 And so, you know, again, now I’m a rationalist, but I’m a rationalist with questions.
0:14:35 Like, I’m a rationalist with a serious question of, like, what was that?
0:14:36 Is it just neurochemistry?
0:14:42 I mean, when I woke up the next morning in the ICU and the nurse came in, and I was in a lot of distress.
0:14:43 I was throwing up blood.
0:14:44 I was a freaking mess.
0:14:45 I was still not.
0:14:46 I could have still died at that point.
0:14:48 I mean, I was not out of the woods at all.
0:14:52 And the nurse came in and said, wow, congratulations, Mr. Younger.
0:14:53 You made it.
0:14:54 We almost lost you last night.
0:14:55 You almost died.
0:14:59 And when she said that, that’s when I remembered my father.
0:15:01 I was like, oh, my God, I saw my father.
0:15:03 And I saw the pit.
0:15:05 And it all came rushing back to me.
0:15:07 A rationalist with questions.
0:15:07 I love that.
0:15:09 That may be my religion.
0:15:10 Yeah, right.
0:15:11 If I have one.
0:15:19 I mean, given what I know about your dad from this book, that he would appear to you almost like an angel.
0:15:29 Seems like exactly the kind of thing he and you, hyper-rationalists and whatnot, would have dismissed as supernatural nonsense before this.
0:15:33 He would have said, as I’m sort of inclined to say, but not entirely.
0:15:37 I think he would have said, well, you know, I’m sure there’s certain neurochemical explanations.
0:15:39 It’s the brain in distress.
0:15:47 There’s probably all kinds of things going on neurochemically, high cortisol levels, this and that, like dopamine, whatever.
0:15:50 I mean, you know, you can make the brain hallucinate.
0:15:52 You can, you know, epileptics have visions.
0:15:55 You know, I mean, there’s analogous phenomena in life with people.
0:15:57 And so I think he probably would have ascribed it to that.
0:16:07 And I’m inclined to as well, you know, sort of, except there’s one thing that sort of stuck in my mind that the doctors and the rationalists couldn’t quite explain.
0:16:11 And let me just say, reiterate again, I’m an atheist.
0:16:13 Now, I still do not believe in God.
0:16:15 Atheist means that you do not believe in God.
0:16:17 I do not believe in God.
0:16:32 There’s something you describe in the book that was maybe the most holy shit moment for me.
0:16:35 And there are several holy shit moments in this story.
0:16:41 So a few days before your dad died of heart failure, you had an intense dream.
0:16:43 He was in Boston.
0:16:44 You were in New York.
0:16:50 But you woke up in the middle of the night as though he was screaming your name from the next room.
0:16:51 You look at the clock.
0:16:54 And it was 3.15 a.m.
0:17:02 And then a few hours later, your mom calls, tells you to go to Boston as soon as you can because your dad tried to throw himself out of bed in a panic.
0:17:08 And when you asked her what time that happened, she said 3.15 a.m.
0:17:10 I mean, come on, Sebastian.
0:17:12 What the hell is that?
0:17:13 That’s crazy.
0:17:14 It is crazy.
0:17:18 And again, the rationalist in me is like, okay, does that prove there’s a God?
0:17:19 No, not really.
0:17:23 It means that humans can communicate in ways that science doesn’t understand.
0:17:25 And even communicate across distance.
0:17:38 And there’s, at the quantum level, at the subatomic level, there actually is instantaneous communication between particles across vast distances, even across the entire universe.
0:17:39 And that’s known to be true.
0:17:40 And we don’t know why.
0:17:41 We can’t explain how that works.
0:17:43 But we know that it does work.
0:17:48 So if that’s possible, can human minds communicate with, quote, telepathy?
0:17:53 That seems to be something that almost everyone experiences with people they love.
0:17:55 So to me, it stands to reason that it’s possible.
0:18:00 Well, you talk to plenty of doctors and scientists about this.
0:18:04 You even tried talking to some of your own doctors about your experience.
0:18:06 What do they make of it?
0:18:08 I’m sure they take you seriously.
0:18:15 But how seriously do they take this story and stories like this, near-death experiences, that is?
0:18:18 Well, it depends on the doctor who you’re talking to.
0:18:19 It depends on the researcher.
0:18:28 And there’s a whole body of research conducted by doctors and neurobiologists and all kinds of very accomplished, educated people.
0:18:32 There’s a lot of documentation of what are called NDEs, near-death experiences.
0:18:43 And sort of hovering above loved ones, as I did in my dream, or seeing a dead person show up to escort you over the threshold are very, very common for near NDEs.
0:18:46 Now, I didn’t know this, so I wasn’t projecting something that I knew.
0:18:55 So some researchers have concluded that this is sort of verifiable proof that there is some kind of afterlife that we don’t understand.
0:19:02 And they do use the word afterlife, which is, of course, on a semantic level is kind of a problem, because death is the end of life.
0:19:06 So afterlife, I don’t even know quite what that means.
0:19:07 It’s clearly not life.
0:19:09 But they do come to that conclusion.
0:19:13 And then there’s a lot of other scientists and doctors, like, nonsense, it’s neurobiology.
0:19:15 We can explain all of this.
0:19:20 And after I came home from the hospital, it was not a sort of joyful party.
0:19:22 I was enormously traumatized.
0:19:27 The fact that I’d almost left my children fatherless was devastating to me.
0:19:36 I became very sort of paranoid that now that I sort of looked over the precipice and realized that any moment of any day, you can suddenly find yourself dying.
0:19:39 In entirely unpredictable ways.
0:19:40 Like, that really rattled me.
0:19:53 And then I got into this other existential bind, which was, I started to worry that maybe I had died, and that I was a ghost, and that I was sort of haunting my family, and they couldn’t see me.
0:19:57 And I just thought they could see me and were interacting with me, but actually, I wasn’t really there.
0:20:01 And I know that sounds totally silly, but it was a real fear.
0:20:04 And at one point, I went to my wife, and I was like, tell me I’m here.
0:20:07 They just tell me that I’m, you know, she said, of course you’re here.
0:20:08 And she sort of reassured me.
0:20:12 But in my mind, I’m like, this is exactly what a hallucination would say to you, right?
0:20:19 Like, I was in a real, very, very difficult place, which is not uncommon for someone who survived something like this.
0:20:27 So I started researching, and eventually I tracked down researching NDEs and quantum physics and all this stuff, trying to explain what happened to me.
0:20:32 And Parnie was kind of rooting that maybe, wow, maybe there is an afterlife.
0:20:34 Maybe we don’t need to be scared of death.
0:20:37 You know, like, ooh, wow, these stories are pretty hard to refute.
0:20:43 And then I’d read the rationalists, and I was like, oh, well, like, nice try, but this clearly is just nonsense.
0:20:50 So I called on some colleagues of my father who were younger than him who were really fond of my dad.
0:20:55 And I invited them for lunch, and I told them what happened to me, and I said, what do you think my dad would have thought of this?
0:21:05 And at one point I asked, what would the odds be of my father reappearing above me, reconstituting himself on some level above me as I was dying?
0:21:07 Are there odds for such a thing?
0:21:11 And he said, well, this is how scientists think, right?
0:21:13 He took me totally literally.
0:21:14 He was like, all right, well, let’s see.
0:21:19 He’s like, well, I would say probably about 10 to the minus 60.
0:21:20 Very specific.
0:21:21 Very specific.
0:21:28 It’s a number with one chance and a number that has 60 zeros following it, roughly.
0:21:30 I was like, what?
0:21:31 What are you talking?
0:21:32 How did you come to that number?
0:21:40 He said, well, it’s roughly the odds of all the oxygen molecules converging in one corner of the room and suffocating us.
0:21:42 The odds are not zero.
0:21:49 They’re almost infinitely small, but they’re roughly, according to statistical mechanics, they’re roughly 1 to the minus 60.
0:22:04 And so those are the odds of the molecules that made up your father or the subatomic particles that made up your father randomly and kind of miraculously having a sort of like reunion in the corner of the room.
0:22:06 Like, there are numbers for this.
0:22:11 And so at that point, I realized the infinite rationality of the scientific mind.
0:22:19 I think when I got to that part of the book, I was reminded that I most definitely do not have the brain of a physicist, for better or worse.
0:22:21 Yeah, for better or worse.
0:22:28 You know, that sort of focus of thought makes human relationships hard because my father missed a lot of the sort of the human element, right?
0:22:30 The sort of emotional element.
0:22:38 He was a very sweet man, but very distant and had no idea how to relate to children or really had sometimes a tough time with adults.
0:22:47 So when he appeared above me, it struck me as the most overtly loving, generous, big hearted thing he’d ever done.
0:22:57 When we get back from the break, what can science tell us about near-death experiences?
0:22:59 Stay with us.
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0:25:40 I’m Claire Parker.
0:25:42 And I’m Ashley Hamilton.
0:25:44 And this week, we’re discussing Hilaria Baldwin.
0:25:46 Why does she have so many kids?
0:25:50 She will not answer that question for you in a way that you want it answered,
0:25:55 but she will respond to every single thing ever written about her in a tabloid in a deeply cryptic way.
0:25:57 She’s taking on the tough questions like,
0:26:00 does ADD make you speak with a Spanish accent?
0:26:03 Does an older man guarantee happiness in a marriage?
0:26:08 We talked to Eliza McClam and Julia Hava from Binge-topia podcast.
0:26:11 They are Hilaria Baldwin experts,
0:26:15 and they dove deep with us on Hilaria’s latest memoir, Manual Not Included.
0:26:20 You can listen to new episodes of Celebrity Memoir Book Club every Tuesday on Amazon Music.
0:26:32 Getting back to the science,
0:26:37 Do we really understand what happens in the brain during these experiences?
0:26:40 Does science have a firm grasp of this?
0:26:41 Yes and no.
0:26:44 I mean, there was a case where a man was dying.
0:26:46 I think he’d had a stroke.
0:26:53 And they had electrodes attached to his skull to signal different brain activity to know how to treat him.
0:26:56 And he passed some point of no return.
0:26:57 And the doctor said,
0:26:58 OK, it’s OK.
0:27:00 You can sort of turn the machines off, basically.
0:27:03 But the sensors were still in place on his skull.
0:27:13 And so they had the chance to watch what was happening to the brainwaves in real time as a person died.
0:27:22 And what they found was that in the 30 seconds before and after the moment of death—and, of course, death isn’t just confined to a single moment.
0:27:23 It’s a spectrum.
0:27:30 But there was a surge in brain activity related to dreaming and memories and all kinds of other things.
0:27:37 And so one of the things that might happen when people die is that they experience this sort of flood of sensations from their life.
0:27:38 Why would they?
0:27:39 Who knows?
0:27:41 Like, it’s hard to come up with a sort of Darwinian reason.
0:27:42 Like, how would that be adaptive?
0:27:43 The person’s dying.
0:27:45 It’s not a question of survival and procreation.
0:27:48 And Darwinism is not concerned with emotional comfort.
0:27:51 It doesn’t matter in those sort of Darwinian arithmetic.
0:27:52 So it’s hard to know what to make of that.
0:27:54 But they did have one chance to do that.
0:27:57 Science is reductionist by design.
0:28:09 You can study near-death experiences, and you can map the neurochemical changes, and you can give a purely materialist explanation for them.
0:28:11 But do you think it’s wise to leave it there?
0:28:19 Or do you think there’s something just inherently mysterious about this that we just can’t quite understand?
0:28:23 At one point, someone said to me, you know, you couldn’t explain what happened to you in rational terms.
0:28:27 Why didn’t you turn to mystical terms?
0:28:32 And I said, because rational terms is what an explanation is.
0:28:38 And the alternative is a story, right?
0:28:43 And humans use stories to comfort themselves about things they can’t explain.
0:28:50 I don’t choose to use the God story or the afterlife story to comfort myself about the unexplainable, which is like what’s going to happen when I die.
0:29:01 But let me say that the one thing that really stood out, I mean, I sort of bought all the neurochemical explanations, all of the sort of hard-boiled rationalists, like we’re biological beings.
0:29:03 When we die, that’s it.
0:29:12 And the flurry of experiences that dying people have is just the dying brain frantically bombarding us with signals, like what’s going on?
0:29:13 Like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
0:29:16 Like, you know, that kind of sort of neurological confusion.
0:29:18 Except for one thing.
0:29:20 And what I don’t understand is this.
0:29:27 Like, if you give a room full of people LSD, we know that 100% of those people will have hallucinations.
0:29:28 We know why.
0:29:29 We know how that works.
0:29:30 There’s no mystery there.
0:29:33 You don’t need God to explain that.
0:29:36 But they’ll all hallucinate different things, right?
0:29:41 And what’s strange about dying is that only the dying seem to see the dead.
0:29:45 And they do that in societies all around the world and have for ages.
0:29:48 I mean, there’s many historical accounts of this as well.
0:29:51 And the people who aren’t dying do not see the dead.
0:29:55 And often the dead are unwelcome and they’re a shock.
0:29:58 It’s not some reassuring vision of Aunt Betty, right?
0:30:00 And it’s just like, Dad, what are you doing here?
0:30:06 Or my mother, as she died, she saw her dead brother, who she was not on speaking terms with.
0:30:08 And when she saw him, she was horrified.
0:30:10 She was like, what’s he doing here?
0:30:12 And I said, Mom, it’s your brother.
0:30:14 I mean, I just took a guess, right?
0:30:15 I said, Mom, it’s your brother George.
0:30:17 You have to be nice to him.
0:30:18 He’s come a long way to see you.
0:30:22 And she just frowned and said, we’ll see about that.
0:30:23 You know, she died a day later.
0:30:26 So it’s not like these are comforting visions or in projections.
0:30:34 And the fact that only the dying see the dead is the one thing that science can’t quite explain.
0:30:40 It’s the one thing that really does make me wonder, you know, maybe we don’t understand everything in scientific terms.
0:30:50 Maybe there is something missing here that is very significant about how reality works, how life and death work, what consciousness is, and ultimately what the universe is.
0:30:54 I don’t want to fetishize doubt or make a virtue of doubt.
0:31:02 But this is the kind of stuff that just leaves me in that same place that just the position of, man, I don’t really know.
0:31:02 Yeah.
0:31:04 And I’m not sure it’s knowable.
0:31:05 And that’s okay.
0:31:06 Yeah.
0:31:09 I mean, like I said, some people rush in with stories to fill that gap.
0:31:10 A lot can go wrong there.
0:31:23 One of the theories about consciousness, a theory that Schrodinger ascribed to, who was one of the pioneers of quantum physics, is that consciousness is actually suffuses the entire universe.
0:31:34 And there’s a kind of colossus of consciousness in the universe, which is 93 billion light years wide at the moment, just so that you understand the scale of the universe.
0:31:43 And that our individual consciousness is sort of a very, very limited experience of the universal consciousness.
0:31:46 It’s sort of scaled down to sort of the puny human size.
0:31:49 But actually, there is a universal consciousness.
0:32:01 And there’s a theory called biocentrism that this consciousness completely affects how the universe is constructed physically, that there’s a symbiotic relationship between physical reality and consciousness where they actually depend on each other.
0:32:03 And you can’t prove it.
0:32:04 You can’t disprove it.
0:32:05 It’s a fascinating theory.
0:32:09 But it’s where, for me, there’s a little bit of comfort.
0:32:21 Like, no, I do not believe in God, and I certainly don’t believe in an afterlife where I, as Sebastian Junger, sort of continue on without the need to eat or sleep, and I can kind of float around talking to all the people I miss.
0:32:34 But it’s possible that when we die, that the sort of quantum information that involved our identity and our consciousness is reunited with the grand consciousness, the colossus.
0:32:40 There is something there that I find a little comforting and scientifically possible, right?
0:32:43 It’s just we’re never going to prove it because I think we just don’t have the tools.
0:32:49 And even to say that there’s an afterlife is not to say that there’s a God, necessarily.
0:32:55 There could be some post-life reality that we just don’t understand or one that’s far weirder than we can imagine.
0:33:00 But that would not mean that any of our religious stories are true.
0:33:02 It would just mean shit’s a lot weirder than we thought.
0:33:09 Yeah, I mean, as I say in the book, you know, our understanding of reality might be akin to a dog’s understanding of a television set.
0:33:16 No concept that what they’re watching is a product of the screen and the wider context that produced the screen.
0:33:21 I mean, religious people, and I, you know, I’ve obviously a number of friends who are religious.
0:33:27 Like, when they hear this story of mine, they’re very fond of saying, so, are you still an atheist?
0:33:29 Like, you saw your dead father while you were dying.
0:33:30 Are you still an atheist?
0:33:34 And, of course, my pat little answer is, look, I saw my dad, not God.
0:33:36 Like, if I’d seen God, we might have a conversation to have.
0:33:52 But I saw my dad, and as you point out, it’s entirely possible that there could be some kind of creator God that created biological life in the universe that when it dies, it dies absolutely and completely, and there’s no, quote, afterlife.
0:34:01 Or there could be a post-death existence at some quantum level that we don’t and can’t understand in a completely physical universe that has no God.
0:34:06 The two things don’t require each other, and you could have one or the other or neither or both.
0:34:07 It’s all possible.
0:34:18 One of the medical paradoxes here is that people who are dying experience near-total brain function collapse,
0:34:26 and yet their awareness seems to crystallize, which seems impossible on its face.
0:34:28 Do scientists have an explanation for this?
0:34:32 Is it even a paradox at all, or does it just seem that way to someone on the outside who doesn’t understand it?
0:34:34 I don’t think anyone knows.
0:34:39 You know, ultimately, no one even knows if what we perceive during life is true.
0:34:47 I mean, it’s known at the quantum level that observing a particle, a subatomic particle, changes its behavior.
0:34:50 Now, of course, when you observe something, it’s a totally passive act.
0:34:52 You’re not bombarding it with something, right?
0:34:53 You’re just watching.
0:35:01 If a particle, a photon, is sent through two slits in an impassable barrier, and it’s unobserved by a conscious mind,
0:35:04 it will go through both slits simultaneously.
0:35:09 And once you observe it, it’s forced to pick one slit.
0:35:18 So, as the early physicists said, observation creates the reality that’s being observed, and then the snake starts to swallow its tail.
0:35:27 And it’s been proposed that the universe is one massive wave function of all possibilities, of all things.
0:35:39 And that the arrival of conscious thought, conscious perception, forced the entire observable universe to collapse into one single thing, which is the universe that we know.
0:35:56 I will say this, I mean, if there is a heaven or afterlife, I don’t think it’s what most people think it is, which is a projection of our earthly wishes, and a rather transparent one at that.
0:36:10 But it might be some bizarre quantum reality that I can’t even pretend to understand, because I don’t know the first thing about physics or quantum mechanics, other than that great line from Einstein calling it spooky action at a distance.
0:36:12 This is sort of where you land, too, right?
0:36:17 That reality is just very strange, and who the hell knows what’s really going on, or what’s really possible, for that matter.
0:36:24 Yeah, I mean, at the quantum level, things happen that contradict everything we understand about the macroscopic level.
0:36:27 So you can’t walk through two doorways at the same time.
0:36:28 You can’t be in two places at once.
0:36:30 But at the quantum level, you can.
0:36:40 And so that opens the possibility of extremely strange—things that are extremely strange in the macroscopic world being absolutely ordinary in the quantum world.
0:36:46 But the granddaddy of them all is the universe.
0:37:01 The universe came from nothing and expanded from nothing to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time that is too small to measure.
0:37:08 So if that’s possible, and we know it’s possible because it happened, we can prove that it happened.
0:37:10 We are proof that it happened.
0:37:15 If that’s possible, in some ways, what isn’t possible?
0:37:22 It’s just a question of, like, how limited our brains are, our amazing brains, but how limited are they in what we can perceive and explain?
0:37:26 You use the phrase the other side a lot in the book.
0:37:31 And, you know, someone was clinically dead, they glimpsed the other side, and then they came back.
0:37:36 I mean, on some level, this is just the only language we have to describe such things.
0:37:42 But what is your understanding of the other side as you sit here now?
0:37:42 Is it a place?
0:37:44 Is it more like an awareness?
0:37:47 Or is it just neurochemicals detonating in our brains?
0:37:57 Well, I mean, my direct experience of it was it was an infinitely black, deep pit that would swallow you and never let you back.
0:38:01 And where you would become part of the nothingness that’s in it.
0:38:06 Whatever you want to say about this, I did have a dream where I experienced being dead.
0:38:08 Whatever you want to make of that, I did have that dream.
0:38:14 And the experience of that dream, for whatever it’s worth, is that I was a spirit.
0:38:18 I didn’t exist physically, but I existed as a collection of thoughts.
0:38:28 And that that entity that was thinking was being pulled away from everything I knew and loved out into the nothingness forever.
0:38:40 And there was a sense of the nothingness being an enormous circle that I was going to start sort of like proceeding around.
0:38:42 And an infinitely huge circle.
0:38:44 There was a sort of circularity to it.
0:38:46 A kind of orbit to it.
0:38:48 And I was getting pulled into this orbit of nothingness.
0:38:51 And it made me panic, right?
0:38:52 It was horrified.
0:38:53 Like, there are my children.
0:38:54 There’s my wife.
0:38:58 So for me, the other side is nothing.
0:39:00 I mean, it’s not like, oh, it’s the other bank of the river.
0:39:03 You know, as the joke goes, like, how do I get to the other side of the river?
0:39:04 You’re on the other side.
0:39:05 It’s not like that.
0:39:07 And that’s a kind of comforting vision.
0:39:10 And it’s one that religions seem fond of.
0:39:11 But it’s not at all how I see it.
0:39:17 And, you know, if it were that way, you’d be looking at an eternity of consciousness with no escape.
0:39:20 Which is its own hell, right?
0:39:23 I mean, I could barely get through math class in high school.
0:39:24 50 minutes, right?
0:39:25 That felt like an eternity.
0:39:28 Really, you want to be conscious for eternity with no way out?
0:39:31 I mean, at least with life, if you need a way out, you can kill yourself.
0:39:34 There’s no way out of an eternity of consciousness.
0:39:38 And suppose that includes unbearable pain or grief.
0:39:39 Suppose it’s unpleasant.
0:39:46 People often talk about the near-death experience as though it’s a gift.
0:39:53 To get that close to death and survive, the story goes, is supposed to bring clarity and peace or something like that.
0:39:55 Do you find this to be true?
0:40:01 It brought an enormous amount of trauma and anxiety and depression afterwards that I eventually worked through.
0:40:03 And I mean work.
0:40:05 I mean, it was work to climb out of that.
0:40:10 The ICU nurse who told me that I’d almost died, she came back an hour later and said,
0:40:11 How are you doing?
0:40:13 And I said, Not that well.
0:40:14 And she said, Try this.
0:40:18 Instead of thinking about it like something scary, think about it like something sacred.
0:40:20 And then she walked out.
0:40:26 And so, you know, as an atheist, I’m happy to use the word sacred for its other wonderful meanings.
0:40:29 You don’t need God to understand that some things are sacred.
0:40:41 So for me, that word means what’s the information that people need to lead lives with greater dignity and courage and less pain.
0:40:43 That’s sacred knowledge.
0:40:47 So did I come back from that precipice with any sacred knowledge?
0:40:51 And it took me a long time to sort of answer that question.
0:40:54 And I read about Dostoevsky.
0:40:57 He sort of provided the final answer in some ways for me.
0:41:01 So when he was a young man, before he was a writer, he was a little bit of a political agitator.
0:41:05 And this is the 1840s during the times of the Tsar and serfdom.
0:41:13 And he and his sort of like his woke brothers were agitating for freeing the serfs, you know, much like in the United States, there was talk about fending slavery.
0:41:20 And the Tsar didn’t take kindly to the intelligentsia talking about such nonsense.
0:41:24 So he threw these kids in jail, but no one thought it was a particularly serious situation.
0:41:25 Right.
0:41:33 And then finally, they were released and, you know, they were sort of put into a wagon and they assumed they were going to be released to their families after eight months.
0:41:45 And instead, they were driven to a city square and tied to posts and a firing squad was arrayed against them.
0:41:52 And the rifles were leveled and the rifles were cocked and the men waited for the order to fire.
0:42:04 And what happened, we know what Dostoevsky was thinking because a writer galloped into the square and said, the Tsar forgives them.
0:42:06 It was all theater, but they didn’t know that, of course.
0:42:08 The Tsar forgives them.
0:42:10 You know, do not stand down.
0:42:11 Like, do not kill them.
0:42:23 So Dostoevsky, through a character that is widely thought to be a substitute for himself in a book called The Idiot, notices sunlight glinting off a roof and thinks to himself,
0:42:24 in moments, I’m going to join the sunlight.
0:42:26 I’ll be part of all things.
0:42:34 And that if I should survive this somehow by some miracle, I will treat every moment as an infinity.
0:42:38 I’ll treat every moment like the miracle that it actually is.
0:42:50 And, of course, that’s an almost zen appreciation for reality that’s impossible to maintain while you’re changing the baby’s diapers and the smoke alarm’s going off because you burned the dinner and blah, blah, blah.
0:42:52 Of course, we’re humans and we get sucked into our drama.
0:43:10 But if you can have some awareness at some point that life happens only in moments and that those moments are sacred and miraculous, if you can get there once in a while, if you can understand that the sunlight glinting off the roof, that you’re part of it and it’s part of you.
0:43:11 And one day it’s all going to be the same thing.
0:43:16 If you can do that, you will have reached a place of real enlightenment.
0:43:18 And I think it deepens your life.
0:43:20 You had a great line in the book.
0:43:28 You wrote, it’s an open question whether a full and unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it.
0:43:29 And it really is, isn’t it?
0:43:35 I mean, we all know that death is inevitable and that it can come on any day.
0:43:42 And living in constant contact with that reality is supposed to be motivation for being more present, for living in the moment, as they say.
0:43:49 But no matter how hard we think about it, our death remains an abstraction until it arrives.
0:43:51 And I just don’t know how you can be prepared for that.
0:44:02 And I love what your wife, Barbara, says about that in the book to the effect of that attitude of life where you feel like you’re always at risk of losing everything.
0:44:06 That doesn’t seem to be healthy, to be in that space all the time.
0:44:16 That’s the needle we have to thread, is be aware of our mortality, but not taken hostage by that awareness, which is what happened to me in the immediate aftermath of almost dying.
0:44:25 So I should say that two of the young men who were with Dostoevsky, by his account, were insane for the rest of their lives.
0:44:27 They never psychologically recovered from the shock.
0:44:31 Dostoevsky went in another direction.
0:44:32 He went towards, you know, a kind of enlightenment.
0:44:33 I don’t know.
0:44:38 I guess never thinking about death seems as unwise as obsessing over it.
0:44:40 So maybe there’s some sweet spot in between.
0:44:41 That’s where we’re supposed to toggle.
0:44:46 You know, one of the definitions of consciousness is to be able to imagine yourself in the future.
0:44:51 Well, if you can imagine yourself in the future, you’re going to have to imagine yourself dead because that’s what the future holds.
0:45:00 And once we’re neurologically complex enough to have that thought, it would be paralyzing for the puny efforts of our lives.
0:45:03 If we weren’t able to use an enormous amount of denial.
0:45:07 So we have this abstract knowledge that, you know, all is for naught, right?
0:45:08 And we’re going to die.
0:45:13 But we have to keep it out of our daily awareness because otherwise it would demotivate us.
0:45:15 It would keep us apathetic and crazy.
0:45:19 And so it’s a balancing act that the human mind does.
0:45:34 And so the trick, I think, in terms of a kind of healthy enlightenment is to allow in that awareness of death only to the extent where it makes life seem precious, but not to the extent where it makes life seem so fleeting that why bother?
0:45:40 And maybe that’s just our fate as finite, painfully self-aware creatures.
0:45:43 We live, we keep rolling our boulders up the hill until the lights go out.
0:45:47 And as Camus says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
0:45:48 Oh, wonderful.
0:45:49 I didn’t know that quote.
0:45:50 That’s a wonderful quote.
0:46:06 After one more short break, we talk about how confronting death changes the way you live.
0:46:07 Stay with us.
0:46:21 Hey, guys, it’s Andy Roddick, former world number one tennis player and now a podcaster.
0:46:25 It’s clay season in pro tennis, and that means the French Open.
0:46:31 On our show, Served, with me, Andy Roddick, we have wall-to-wall coverage for the entire two weeks.
0:46:39 We kick things off with a draw special presented by Amazon Prime, breaking down both the men’s and women’s brackets, making picks, and yeah, probably getting most of them wrong.
0:46:44 Plus, on June 3rd, my idol, Andre Agassi, is joining Served.
0:46:45 Be sure to tune in.
0:46:50 After that, we wrap all things French Open with a full recap show, also presented by Amazon Prime.
0:46:51 That’s June 10th.
0:46:57 So be sure to find the show, Served, with me, Andy Roddick, on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:47:06 This week on Prof G Markets, we speak with Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
0:47:12 He shares his take on the recent tariff turmoil and what he’s watching as we head into second quarter earnings.
0:47:21 This is going to be a contest between market resilience and economic resilience as to whether, in fact, the markets are overestimating the resilience of the economy.
0:47:29 And that’s what the actual numbers are going to deliver is maybe the economy and markets are a lot more resilient than we gave them credit for.
0:47:38 In which case, we’ll come out of this year just like we came out of 2020 and 2022 with much less damage than we thought would be created.
0:47:42 You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets feed.
0:48:01 You spent so much of your life taking risks, calculated risks, I would say, now that you’ve almost died, now that you’re a parent, the game has changed.
0:48:04 I imagine the calculus for you is much different as well.
0:48:08 Oh, I stopped war reporting after my buddy Tim was killed in 2011.
0:48:17 I saw what his death did to everyone who loved him, and I just realized that going off to war suddenly looked like a selfish act, not a noble one.
0:48:19 And so I stopped doing it.
0:48:26 And then six years later, I had my first child, you know, and I’m an older dad, so I feel extremely lucky, extremely lucky to be a father.
0:48:31 And I’m the most risk-averse person you’ll ever meet now.
0:48:33 I won’t cross Houston Street against the walklight.
0:48:34 I mean, you know, it’s ridiculous.
0:48:46 Being a parent is emancipatory in the sense that you’re not living for yourself anymore, which I do believe, I’ve come to believe, is a happier, more fulfilling existence.
0:48:54 But it makes the prospect of death even worse because of what you leave behind, because the people you love need you.
0:48:56 That is what terrifies me.
0:49:02 I had a recent scare with a mole, a funky-looking mole on my arm, and I was so worried about it.
0:49:05 And my wife was like, you’re fine, you’re fine.
0:49:10 But I mean, I was Googling, what does melanoma look like and all this shit?
0:49:12 Oh, Bob Marley had a melanoma on his foot?
0:49:14 Oh, shit, it can happen to him.
0:49:17 Those are the thoughts running through my mind.
0:49:22 Not that I would cease to be, but that my son would not have a father.
0:49:24 And that is the most terrifying thought I’ve ever had.
0:49:30 I talked to a fireman, a father of four, I think, a fairly young man who was trapped in a burning building.
0:49:31 He couldn’t get out.
0:49:33 I mean, he was so desperate.
0:49:37 He started, it was a brick exterior wall, and he started trying to punch his way through it.
0:49:38 He obviously couldn’t.
0:49:41 And he finally got to a window.
0:49:42 There was zero visibility.
0:49:43 It was so filled with smoke.
0:49:47 And he finally got to a window and threw himself out headfirst and survived.
0:49:48 And another guy didn’t survive.
0:49:53 But in those terrible moments, he kept thinking, my son’s going to grow up without a father.
0:49:56 Once you’re a parent, like, it’s foremost in your mind.
0:50:07 And if you’re a parent when you’re young, you know, that’s the point in your life when you’re enormously driven by your own desires and curiosity and juggling that with the responsibilities of parenthood is extremely hard.
0:50:11 And frankly, it’s pretty easy to resent the obligations, right?
0:50:13 I mean, I’m glad I wasn’t a parent at 25.
0:50:15 I think I would have been a selfish parent.
0:50:15 Same.
0:50:18 Like, I became a parent at 55.
0:50:21 And by that point, I didn’t interest me anymore.
0:50:22 Like, I wanted to be a father.
0:50:27 In that sense, as long as I live a long life, it will have been a very good choice for me.
0:50:28 I didn’t interest me anymore.
0:50:30 That’s a good line.
0:50:31 I may have to steal that.
0:50:37 There’s a beautiful passage at the end of the book that I’d like to read, if you don’t mind.
0:50:37 Yeah.
0:50:40 Because it feels like an appropriate way to wrap this up.
0:50:41 So now I’m courting you.
0:50:50 One might allow the quick thought that it is odd that so many religions, so many dying people, so many ecstatics,
0:50:57 and so many quantum physicists, believe that death is not a final severing, but an ultimate merging.
0:51:05 And that the reality we take to be life is, in fact, a passing distraction from something so profound, so real, so all-encompassing,
0:51:13 that many return to their paltry bodies on the battlefield or hospital gurney, only with great reluctance and a kind of embarrassment.
0:51:16 How can I pass up the truth for an illusion?
0:51:18 That’s the end of the quote.
0:51:29 What I would say to that is that there’s something in me that revolts against any ideology that thinks of life itself as an illusion.
0:51:35 I mean, this is why I didn’t care for Christianity, the religion of my community, when I was younger.
0:51:43 Because I didn’t like the idea that this life is some kind of way station en route to the next life, which is supposed to be the more important life.
0:51:49 But hearing these accounts of NDEs, your account, it gives me pause.
0:51:50 I don’t know how else to say it.
0:51:51 I don’t know what to think.
0:51:52 I don’t know what’s true.
0:51:55 There’s something here, something worth taking seriously.
0:51:56 I guess that’s all I know.
0:51:59 I guess I’ll stop there and let you close this out with your own thoughts on that.
0:52:00 Yeah.
0:52:10 So I’m a journalist, and I try to keep my biases out of my work, and I do not come to assertions, to conclusions that aren’t backed up by fact.
0:52:27 So what I found in my research is that there was an extraordinary number of people who, on the threshold of death, like I was, looked back and thought, that’s not the real thing.
0:52:29 Life’s not the real thing.
0:52:30 I’m entering the real thing now.
0:52:41 And then I was surprised that there were some extremely smart people and non-religious people, like Schrodinger, like the physicists, who had a sort of similar thought.
0:52:50 And so I put that in there not because I’m trying to convince anyone of anything, and I don’t even know what I believe particularly, but it’s good information.
0:52:51 It’s important.
0:52:52 It’s interesting information.
0:53:02 It either says something profound about the human brain’s capacity for self-delusion, or it contains something profound about the nature of physical reality.
0:53:13 And I doubt we’ll ever know which it is, but it’s important to keep both in mind and to take all the information we can from these extraordinary experiences and to take them at face value, to take them literally.
0:53:15 Like, these people really did experience this.
0:53:16 What does it mean?
0:53:17 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:53:22 Once again, the book is called In My Time of Dying.
0:53:24 I read it cover to cover in a day.
0:53:27 Just a sublime and honest book.
0:53:28 I can’t recommend it enough.
0:53:31 Sebastian Younger, this was a pleasure.
0:53:32 Thank you.
0:53:32 Thank you.
0:53:34 I really enjoyed the conversation.
0:53:46 All right.
0:53:48 Another episode about death.
0:53:49 How about that?
0:53:54 As you can tell, it’s a recent favorite of mine.
0:53:59 I just, I love the intensity of it, and I love the honesty.
0:54:10 And for a show that prides itself on leaning into the questions and not needing final answers, this one felt pretty on brand.
0:54:12 What did you think?
0:54:17 You can drop us a line at TheGreyAreaAtVox.com and let us know.
0:54:21 And if you don’t have time for that, rate, review, subscribe.
0:54:23 That stuff really helps, and we appreciate it.
0:54:35 This episode was produced by John Ahrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:54:38 New episodes of The Grey Area drop on Mondays.
0:54:40 Listen and subscribe.
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0:00:24 Or catch my mom Jane, Mariska Hargitay’s moving documentary feature directorial debut about her
0:00:29 mother, Hollywood icon Jane Mansfield. There’s something for everyone. Get your tickets now at
0:00:30 Tribecafilm.com.
0:01:02 As that means your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That’s putting
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0:01:10 AI-agents.
0:01:22 Very few ideas stand the test of time. And very few works of literature or philosophy are remembered
0:01:30 even 50 or 100 years after they were written. What about 500? How many 16th century philosophers do you
0:01:33 think you think you could name? Thomas Moore? Sure.
0:01:39 Francis Bacon. Yeah, but it’s high school biology textbooks that are keeping him alive.
0:01:43 Montaigne. Can you name a single thing he wrote?
0:01:48 If you’re a philosophy sicko that listens to this show, maybe.
0:02:03 But normies? I doubt it. But then there’s Machiavelli. What’s up with him? Why, after 500 years, is Machiavelli so famous?
0:02:09 Why does his writing, especially the prince, still resonate so much today?
0:02:22 And why, after 500 years of being dissected, analyzed, dissertated, read, and re-read, is Machiavelli so often misunderstood?
0:02:33 What was he really up to? What have we missed? And what can Machiavelli tell us about our world right now?
0:02:38 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:48 Today’s guest is Erika Benner. She’s a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli,
0:02:56 including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a new interpretation of Machiavelli’s most famous work,
0:03:06 The Prince, which Machiavelli wrote in exile after the Medici family overthrew Florence’s fledgling Republican government.
0:03:14 For centuries, The Prince has been widely viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants.
0:03:16 But Benner disagrees.
0:03:24 She says it’s actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power.
0:03:29 And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine.
0:03:37 He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship,
0:03:43 and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.
0:03:50 If she’s right, Machiavelli is very much a philosopher for our times,
0:03:54 with something to say about this moment.
0:03:57 So I invite her on the show to talk about it.
0:04:01 Erika Benner, welcome to the show.
0:04:02 Hi, Sean. Thanks for having me.
0:04:12 There is the popular caricature of Machiavelli, with which I think most people are familiar, you know, the conniving, manipulative, sneaky figure.
0:04:15 And then there’s the real Machiavelli.
0:04:17 Tell me about the gap between those two.
0:04:24 It’s massive, because if you go and you read, like, Machiavelli’s correspondence, they’re hilarious.
0:04:26 Like, he’s the funniest guy on earth.
0:04:33 The first kind of literary piece that we’ve got notes about, but we don’t actually have anymore,
0:04:35 because it was kind of concealed and then the Pope’s banned everything he wrote.
0:04:42 But one of the first things he wrote was a satirical play about, like, the powers that be in Republican Florence.
0:04:44 So he’s a satirist.
0:04:51 I mean, one of the things I just always want to kind of bring out about the gap between this cold, calculating advisor to princes saying, you know,
0:04:55 better to be feared than loved is this guy is hilarious all the time.
0:04:56 And he’s a dramatist.
0:04:59 Like, he’s a brilliant writer of plays and dramas.
0:05:04 And so that’s one gap that when you read, when you come to The Prince,
0:05:10 I kind of urge people always to kind of bear in mind that before he wrote The Prince and then after he wrote The Prince,
0:05:12 he was writing political satires.
0:05:18 And I think we’re in a kind of atmosphere now in the world where that might be easier to see for a lot of people.
0:05:25 Because if you imagine somebody who doesn’t want to be too direct and preach to people in criticizing the great leaders,
0:05:28 but still wants to kind of take the piss out of them.
0:05:32 He just does that in a very, very subtle Florentine way.
0:05:34 I don’t know if that kind of answers your question.
0:05:36 No, no, it does.
0:05:40 So, you know, when I was in graduate school for political theory,
0:05:49 Machiavelli is introduced as kind of like the first truly modern political scientist,
0:05:53 sort of like the Galileo of politics.
0:05:55 Is that how you think of him?
0:05:57 Is that how we should think of him?
0:05:58 No.
0:06:00 I absolutely don’t think of him.
0:06:01 Say more.
0:06:03 Perfectly, no.
0:06:18 Machiavelli was somebody whose main examples and main interests when it comes to, like, you know, thinking about how politics should work.
0:06:20 His main interest is in ancient history.
0:06:21 That’s clear.
0:06:27 He’s somebody who’s really, really grounded in ancient history, like most of the people who are educated in his times.
0:06:33 His, you know, second big, big book is called The Discourses on Livy.
0:06:46 And that is a commentary on ancient Rome, which is trying to draw from history examples that can, you know, serve as cautionary, you know, warnings to people of his own times and for the future.
0:06:51 But also help us to think about what is actually, you know, what is a good leader in politics?
0:06:52 What is prudent?
0:06:58 And what kind of sometimes seems like a prudent policy, like something to actually achieve some good?
0:07:06 But then if you really, really think ahead and look at history as well and realize what people have done before along those lines, you kind of see the problems.
0:07:13 I don’t think he’s a scientist in a political science way at all, thank goodness.
0:07:16 Maybe you could replace political scientist with just political thinker.
0:07:18 Maybe that’s a little broader.
0:07:21 But you’re right, he is very interested in the past.
0:07:31 And he seems to have a bit of a beef with a lot of these ancient philosophers, you know, the Plato’s and the Aristotle’s.
0:07:40 He seemed to think that they were naive, if that’s the right word, that they weren’t looking at the political world the way it actually is.
0:07:50 But instead, they were projecting their own ideals and fantasies onto the political world and then dreaming up a kind of politics in light of that.
0:07:54 What was his beef with the ancients?
0:08:00 What did you think they misunderstood or got wrong or ignored about actual life?
0:08:03 The kind of view that you just outlined.
0:08:09 I don’t want to get nerdy and too academic about this, but that is talked out.
0:08:10 You’re about to tell me why I’m wrong, aren’t you?
0:08:18 Out of a couple of lines where he says things like, oh, you know, philosophers have imagined ideal republics.
0:08:18 Yes.
0:08:21 But in reality, that’s just one quote.
0:08:26 And then there’s some other little quotes you can pluck out and you can turn into a big modernist system,
0:08:31 which quite a few of my very esteemed Machiavelli scholar colleagues have done.
0:08:48 But actually, you know, in context, it’s a lot more complicated than that because he also has many quotes elsewhere where he said the greatest thing you can do if you can’t actually create a republic is to imagine one.
0:09:04 He has that in one of his pieces that’s called the discourses on government of Florence, where he’s trying to advise them on how to save their flailing, fragile new non-republic and saying, maybe you should turn this non-republic back into a republic.
0:09:11 And he says, I’m not in a position anymore to help do that in practice like I used to be.
0:09:16 So I’m trying to go in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle and imagine one where you can’t have one.
0:09:24 He is not, there is no sharp contrast in Machiavelli properly understood between his ideals and his realism.
0:09:30 And realism, you know, realism and idealism don’t have to be opposite.
0:09:45 That idea in itself is something I think people are really waking up to more and more that if we try to go, you know, if you imagine that you can follow a realistic path towards a better world without having an ideal or two to guide it.
0:09:57 You know, he sort of has the same problem Nietzsche has in that there’s so much irony in so many different voices in his work that it practically begs you to misinterpret it.
0:10:02 Or at the very least, it makes it very easy for the reader to project whatever they want onto the work.
0:10:05 And so it’s his fault, I guess is what I’m saying.
0:10:07 Yeah, but this is what they did.
0:10:20 I mean, this is another thing that I hope we will, I mean, I was just reading something today about AI and why, you know, somebody like a professor saying, don’t we still want students to learn how to read difficult, ambiguous works?
0:10:36 And that reading, one of the reasons we want students to keep reading and not to filter everything to interpret it through a machine is that reading is like a practice in listening and a practice in hearing things that are subtly off or that you could work with.
0:10:38 And that’s, and that’s what you need in politics, right?
0:10:47 Especially in a democracy or a republic, you need people not just to go by hard rules, but to hear the subtleties and be able to judge for themselves.
0:10:49 That’s what he’s trying to get us to do.
0:11:00 Like as, you know, part of recovering the republic is readers have to see, you know, he’s telling you all these shocking things that you ought to do and that princes ought to do.
0:11:05 And readers are supposed to be kind of saying, hang on, hang on, let me judge that for myself.
0:11:11 All right, look, let’s, let’s set about the work of, of cutting through some of these.
0:11:12 You don’t believe me, Sean, do you?
0:11:13 No, I, I do.
0:11:14 I do.
0:11:23 I mean, I, I think, I think once you get into the business of trying to distinguish, you know, what is the wink wink and what is meant to be taken literally, it’s very difficult.
0:11:27 But, but you are, you are a much closer reader of Machiavelli than I am.
0:11:29 So, um, I’m not going to challenge you on that.
0:11:33 And I think your reading is actually very interesting and very persuasive.
0:11:42 Um, part of what I’m doing here is because the popular image of him is so cemented as this, you know, deceptive figure.
0:11:47 Um, I’m really trying to set that up so that you can, you can challenge it kind of, you know, piece by piece.
0:11:50 So, uh, let’s start, right?
0:12:03 I mean, I think one of the, certainly the, the conventional popular view of Machiavelli is that he is someone who wanted to draw this neat, clear line between morality and politics.
0:12:04 They wanted to sever these things.
0:12:08 Um, but you write in the book that that’s not true, right?
0:12:15 That he simply wanted to put, and now I’m quoting, he simply wanted to put morality on firmer, purely human foundations.
0:12:17 So, what does that mean?
0:12:20 How is it different from what people think he’s doing?
0:12:39 Well, what is true is that he often criticizes the morality of the, of the, of the, let’s say the hyper, kind of hyper-Christianity or spirituality that, you know, takes morals into the, puts morals and, and what, you know, judgments of right and wrong into the hands of priests and popes.
0:12:48 And, and, and, and some abstract kind of God that, that, you know, he, he may or may not believe in, but doesn’t think it’s something we can totally access as, as humans.
0:12:58 We can’t, you know, so that we, if we want to think about morality, both on a personal level, but certainly in politics, uh, we’ve got to kind of go back to basics.
0:13:01 Think about what is the behavior of human beings?
0:13:02 What is human nature?
0:13:10 What are the drives that kind of propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad?
0:13:11 And that’s one of the fundamentals.
0:13:16 I think he wants to say, we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil.
0:13:23 We shouldn’t think that human beings can ever be angels and we shouldn’t see them as devils when they behave badly until they really behave badly.
0:13:24 And then we can call them evil.
0:13:25 And sometimes he does.
0:13:29 He calls people cruel, inhuman and evil sometimes, but very seldom.
0:13:36 But the basic is if you want to develop a human morality, you, you study yourself, you study other humans.
0:13:39 You don’t put yourself above other humans because you’re just one, two.
0:13:57 And, and then you kind of start from there and say, right, what kind of politics is going to make such people coexist in ways that are not going to aim at some like divine order, you know, something that’s going to bring higher and higher kind of godly ethics into human life.
0:14:01 We’ve got to be more modest and just talk about, we’re all going to be arguing.
0:14:03 We’re all going to be difficult.
0:14:05 Let’s have rules and laws that help us coexist.
0:14:08 Well, let’s talk about the prince.
0:14:08 I take it.
0:14:13 You do not think this book is very well understood in the popular imagination.
0:14:14 Is that about right?
0:14:16 Do you think most people have this book wrong?
0:14:25 And if they do, tell me what you think is the, the most glaring, obvious misinterpretation of what he’s actually up to there.
0:14:30 Because I think what people think he’s up to is giving this handbook to tyrants.
0:14:33 I think that is what most people think.
0:14:34 Tell me how that’s wrong.
0:14:36 I mean, I used to think that too.
0:14:40 I used to have to teach Machiavelli as part of lots of different thinkers.
0:14:42 And I would just say, well, it’s a handbook for tyrants.
0:14:47 But then he wrote the discourses, which is a very, very Republican book, very openly.
0:14:58 So, so there’s first, that’s the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, well, how could he have switched so quickly from being a super Republican as a political actor to writing the prince to suddenly writing the discourse?
0:14:59 So that’s a kind of warning sign.
0:15:01 And then that got me thinking.
0:15:06 And then I kept coming across earlier authors who I trust deeply, like Rousseau.
0:15:18 I mean, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the 18th century, a great, I think a very great philosopher and a deep Republican, has a footnote in his social contract saying the prince has been totally misunderstood.
0:15:20 This was Machiavelli.
0:15:20 Is that right?
0:15:21 Yeah.
0:15:23 I didn’t, I didn’t, I mean, I’ve read that book, but.
0:15:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:15:25 This is what set me off.
0:15:26 So this isn’t just me making it up.
0:15:33 I mean, I have to say, I’m not like a, I mean, I’m a very, like, I was very uncertain about this too.
0:15:43 But then when I started seeing that some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from Republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally.
0:15:45 And they say it, they say he’s a moral writer.
0:15:50 Rousseau says he has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.
0:15:57 You pick up the prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don’t read them that carefully because they’re kind of boring, modern readers.
0:16:04 The exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality, but like the first ones you go, and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom.
0:16:11 And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cool, cold analysis of this is what you should do.
0:16:13 Chapter five, wow.
0:16:16 It’s like how republics fight back.
0:16:20 And the whole tone, and remember, he’s a literary guy and he’s a dramatist.
0:16:22 The whole tone changes.
0:16:34 There’s suddenly fire, republics are fighting back, and the prince has to be on his toes because he’s probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up.
0:16:35 So who is he talking to?
0:16:37 Who is he really talking to in the prince?
0:16:40 Is he talking to the people or is he talking to future princes?
0:16:51 I mean, I see it as, you know, imagine somebody who’s been kicked out of his job and has a big family to support.
0:16:55 He had a lot of kids and who loved his job and was passionate about the republic.
0:16:57 He’s been tortured.
0:16:59 He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.
0:17:07 And he’s absolutely gutted that Florence’s republican experiment, new, renewing the republic experiment has failed.
0:17:10 And he can’t speak freely.
0:17:17 So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better?
0:17:19 So number one motivation is it makes you feel better.
0:17:31 You know, I mean, you’re just like taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable in a low-key, you know, way, because you can’t be too brutally satirical about it.
0:17:33 It makes you feel a little bit better.
0:17:40 But I think he’s really writing it in a way to kind of expose the ways of tyrants.
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0:22:11 I think one of the more famous sentiments in The Prince is this idea that fear is more powerful than love.
0:22:15 that from the perspective of a ruler, fear is more dependable than love.
0:22:17 What do you make of that?
0:22:18 Do you think it’s true?
0:22:20 Did he actually believe that?
0:22:27 He says, it’s good to be feared and loved, but if you have to choose, it’s better to be feared than loved.
0:22:28 So that’s the context.
0:22:35 And then he gives you examples of what kind of fear should be used.
0:22:43 And what he really means when you look at his examples of the best kind of fear is just, you know, like fear of the laws.
0:22:49 You know, he gives examples that actually relate to transparency and legality.
0:22:51 I’m sorry, but this is true.
0:23:01 If you go to the chapter where he says that, you know, he’s talking, he says, it’s better to be transparent and regular and not to do things in an irregular, arbitrary way.
0:23:03 Do not arbitrarily take people’s property.
0:23:05 Do not take their wives.
0:23:06 Do not do this.
0:23:07 He gives you these lists.
0:23:11 That’s the kind of fear you want people to have.
0:23:17 And it could be fear of you, the ruler, or it could be fear of a legal constitutional ruler as well.
0:23:21 So what he’s not saying is you should just use random terror.
0:23:23 You know, arbitrarily scaring people.
0:23:25 That is a disaster.
0:23:27 He’s really clear about that in The Prince.
0:23:33 Yeah, he says, you know, if you do have to be feared, do not be feared in such a way as to produce hatred.
0:23:35 That’s a very important qualification.
0:23:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:23:51 You know, so, and look, I know part of what you do in the book is you’re driving this, you’re resisting this idea that Machiavelli is very simplistically driving a wedge between politics and morality.
0:23:57 But God, there are these incredible lines, you know, like you’ve been pointing out, right?
0:23:58 And here’s one.
0:24:04 He says, therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good.
0:24:10 And to use knowledge and not use it according to the necessity of the case.
0:24:13 So what is the meaning of a line like that for you?
0:24:19 Is he just saying politics is a dirty business and you can’t survive it without getting your hands dirty?
0:24:22 Or is it more complicated than that?
0:24:23 Yeah.
0:24:32 I mean, unfortunately, this is what the thing about Machiavelli that makes him so susceptible to the kind of reading that’s become popular is he’s got these amazing lines.
0:24:33 Oh, wow.
0:24:34 They’re so good, Erika.
0:24:35 They’re so good.
0:24:36 And they’re so cool.
0:24:37 I know.
0:24:38 They’re so cool.
0:24:50 And if you’re a teacher or professor who teaches political theory, it is kind of sad to kind of think about my Machiavelli being the right one instead of the one that we’ve all grown to kind of hate, love hate.
0:24:57 Because, you know, he’s such a different view of politics than what we’re used to and of ethics.
0:25:07 But I’m sorry to tell you that he’s fantastic because he really is spelling out how human beings really behave and how leaders often behave.
0:25:15 But what he does in that sentence is he’s setting the stage for a series of chapters about what do people think is good?
0:25:17 And are they right?
0:25:19 That’s what the next few chapters are about.
0:25:23 And he has discussion of cruelty.
0:25:25 What do people think is cruel or harsh?
0:25:27 And are they right?
0:25:29 And using money.
0:25:32 When is kind of using money to get ahead okay?
0:25:35 And when is it not okay for you?
0:25:37 Because it’s actually going to get you in deep trouble.
0:25:43 So what he’s doing with that is trying to get you to sort of think there’s good and there’s good.
0:25:49 Is what is conventionally thought of as good the way to go?
0:25:57 And sometimes he says that we have this angelic idea of how leaders should behave, which isn’t suitable.
0:26:07 But that’s not saying that you should compromise, like, your basic standards of transparency and decent, you know, decent rule.
0:26:13 It’s just, it’s very hard sometimes to know when he’s merely describing something and when he’s endorsing it.
0:26:15 He’s deliberately ambiguous.
0:26:17 He’s ambiguous on purpose.
0:26:20 A lot of ancient writers were deliberately ambiguous.
0:26:22 We are the ones who are kind of aberrations.
0:26:27 Modern people who think that everything has to be straightforward, blunt, and clear.
0:26:37 In ancient writers, you find loads of writers, including Plato and all the historians who were deliberately ambiguous because they’re trying to get us to think.
0:26:51 Well, and part of what is very persuasive about your book is that you really get to understand what he’s up to when you see some of his correspondence, some of his private correspondence with, you know, letters to friends and that sort of thing,
0:26:53 where he’s being much more honest.
0:27:01 And with that context, it gives you a much better insight into what he’s actually doing in his work.
0:27:04 And that’s the work that you do.
0:27:10 One of the things he says in the print is that, you know, the ruler must imitate the lion and the fox.
0:27:14 And the book of yours we’re talking about is called Be Like the Fox.
0:27:15 I have it right here.
0:27:18 Why that title?
0:27:20 What do you mean?
0:27:22 What does it mean to be like the fox?
0:27:23 Yeah.
0:27:36 I mean, fox is, again, he’s playing with us because we think of the classical image of, you know, the trope of the fox is associated with cunning, sly, sneaky, Machiavellian.
0:27:38 Hard to pin down.
0:27:39 Hard to pin down.
0:27:43 But if you look at the context again, you look at what he says.
0:27:47 He says, the fox recognizes snares.
0:27:51 He said, people, the ruler should imitate the fox and the lion.
0:27:54 The lion, because the lion can scare wolves.
0:27:57 And the fox, because the fox recognizes traps.
0:28:01 So the skill of the fox he’s highlighting isn’t being shrewd and cunning.
0:28:14 It’s recognizing when someone’s being shrewd and cunning towards you and building up defenses, cognitive and physical, whatever you need, so that that person doesn’t pull you in.
0:28:26 Tell me if I’m wrong, I remember, and I don’t know where I read this, it was a long time ago, but I recall reading about this story that Machiavelli loved, and apparently referenced quite a bit.
0:28:39 And the story was of some ruler, I don’t know who, who sends a man to some principality to put down an insurgency with just brutal force, right?
0:28:46 And the guy does the job, but the people left behind in that principality are really pissed off, and they resent him.
0:28:54 So the prince has the guy who did it, the guy that he ordered to do the job, killed, and then strung up in the public square.
0:29:01 And then he makes a big show of how outraged he is by this man’s criminal act of defiance.
0:29:14 Machiavelli apparently is said to have loved that story, because it demonstrates how flexible and cunning a prince can and should be, and how effective it can be if he’s doing that well.
0:29:22 I think what you’re talking about is chapter seven of The Prince, where he talks about Cesare Borgia, who was the son of Popeye VI, who was a brilliant deceiver.
0:29:24 And Cesare Borgia, he’s the prince of fortune.
0:29:29 Chapter seven is about how to become a prince, not by virtue, but by fortune.
0:29:36 And Cesare Borgia is a really ambivalent figure in The Prince, but he does something along the lines you suggested.
0:29:46 He’s got a guy called Ramiro de Orco, and he sets him up in this small town to kind of be the police guy, the big sheriff on the block.
0:29:48 And then he scapegoats him, basically.
0:29:51 He gets Ramiro to be brutal and kind of suppress all discontent.
0:30:01 And then when all the people start getting upset about this, he goes, hey, I’m just going to like—and so he doesn’t even—Machiavelli just describes it.
0:30:02 He did love telling this story.
0:30:04 He told it in several different places, actually.
0:30:16 But he says, one day the people go into the plaza at dawn, and there’s the pieces of Ramiro de Orco, like in pieces, with a coltello, a knife by his side.
0:30:19 And, you know, this is the image.
0:30:25 And then it says the people were so stupefied that they didn’t dare rebel anymore.
0:30:33 And then if you end it there, and you say, that’s the end of the story, you say, okay, Machiavellian in that.
0:30:35 That’s pretty cynical.
0:30:36 It’s pretty cynical, Erika.
0:30:37 It’s pretty cynical.
0:30:37 Exactly.
0:30:38 But read on.
0:30:39 It is.
0:30:39 It’s very cynical.
0:30:41 Read on.
0:30:42 Don’t get stuck.
0:30:45 My one advice, don’t get stuck on one thing.
0:30:46 Keep reading on.
0:30:48 What were the consequences for Cesare Borja?
0:30:49 What happened to him after that?
0:30:56 Well, everyone starts leaving Cesare, like all the people who are giving him troops and who supported him, all his allies.
0:30:58 They all, like, say, okay, this guy’s crazy.
0:30:59 He’s out of control.
0:31:00 They start dropping out.
0:31:03 The French pull back their troops that they were giving him.
0:31:06 All his closest mates, they conspire against him.
0:31:07 He finds this out.
0:31:10 He brutally slaughters them, and then everyone else hates him.
0:31:14 So within a few months, he’s, like, really in trouble, and then Cesare’s dead.
0:31:16 He doesn’t actually die immediately, but he’s out.
0:31:18 And that’s it.
0:31:25 So if you go to the end of the story, you don’t just stop and say, wow, what a cool thing.
0:31:29 Because, I mean, we can see examples of this all over the world today.
0:31:31 Wow, that was a cool thing.
0:31:32 Somebody did.
0:31:32 That was tough.
0:31:39 Wait till the story continues, because doing that is going to make you feared and hated.
0:31:41 And that’s what happened.
0:31:43 You’re mad at me for not finishing the reading, aren’t you?
0:31:44 Yeah.
0:31:46 I can read that chapter.
0:31:49 Oh, you didn’t even read that chapter in my book.
0:31:51 That was such a good, that is such a good chapter.
0:31:58 I read your book all the way through when I read it the first time, and I didn’t reread
0:31:59 it cover to cover this time.
0:32:02 I did revisit it, but I didn’t reread the whole thing.
0:32:05 But I did, at one point, read the whole thing.
0:32:10 There’s clearly a pragmatism to Machiavelli.
0:32:16 Would you say that he has something like an ideology, or is he just a clear-eyed realist?
0:32:18 Yeah, he’s a Republican.
0:32:22 And again, this is something that if you just read The Prince, you’re not going to get that.
0:32:26 But if you even just read The Discourses, which, as I say, was written around the same time as
0:32:33 The Prince, it’s very, very similar in almost every way, except that it praises republics
0:32:39 and criticizes tyrants very openly, whereas The Prince never once uses the tyrant or the word
0:32:39 tyranny.
0:32:45 So if there’s a guiding set of political views, whether you call it ideology or not,
0:32:46 it’s Republican.
0:32:50 A Republican ideology, if you like, is shared power.
0:32:55 It’s all the people in a city, all the male people in this case.
0:32:57 In Machiavelli’s case, he was quite egalitarian.
0:33:03 He clearly wanted as broad a section of the male population to be citizens as possible.
0:33:08 He says very clearly, the key to stabilizing your power is to change the Constitution and to
0:33:10 give everyone their share.
0:33:12 Everyone has to have their share.
0:33:16 You might want, in the first instance, a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but
0:33:18 in the end, everyone’s got to have a share.
0:33:20 I know you just said he’s a Republican.
0:33:21 He’s defending republicanism.
0:33:25 But do you think of him as a democratic theorist?
0:33:30 Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today?
0:33:36 If you see the main principle of democracy is also sharing power among all the people equally,
0:33:42 which is how I understand democracy, yeah, he’d totally agree with that.
0:33:45 What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have?
0:33:47 He’s pretty clear in the discourses.
0:33:50 He tells you, you don’t want a long-term executive.
0:33:52 You need to always check power.
0:33:59 So anyone who’s in a position of like a magistracy, you know, a political office of any kind needs
0:34:04 to have very strict limits, needs to be under very strict laws, even stricter laws when they’re
0:34:06 in the office than they would be as private citizens.
0:34:07 Can I pause you for a second?
0:34:11 Why is he a critic of people being in power for a long time?
0:34:13 Why does he want limits, term limits?
0:34:14 Power corrupts.
0:34:15 Simple.
0:34:18 He looks at any, and he’s doing this all through Roman history.
0:34:21 So he makes his arguments not by just kind of abstract setting that out.
0:34:24 These are the kind of constitutional principles you need.
0:34:28 He’s saying, this is what the Romans did when they got rid of the kings and they started building
0:34:28 a republic.
0:34:30 They did some really good things.
0:34:34 And then they did some things not so well, and they had to then kind of go back to the
0:34:40 drawing board and rewrite some of the institutions and add some laws that were especially strict
0:34:44 for, against people trying to come back and create a dictatorship.
0:34:51 So he goes through lots of different, you know, kind of things that the Romans did that are now
0:34:55 kind of reflected also in the U.S. Constitution or in, you know, other democracies around the
0:35:00 world because the founding fathers drew on Machiavelli and others had built on him.
0:35:03 The rule of law is really super important.
0:35:07 If you don’t have laws that are kind of constraining everybody and institutions that make sure that
0:35:14 the more powerful are not held in check, then you’re going to have trouble soon because people
0:35:15 are always, always in conflict.
0:35:20 This is another thing I think is really more interesting about Machiavelli’s view of democracy
0:35:22 than a lot of democratic theories you get today.
0:35:25 He stresses how much democracy is turbulent.
0:35:30 Even in a stable democracy, people are going to be fighting all the time about what they’re
0:35:32 kind of, you know, where do they want to go?
0:35:34 What kind of values do you want in there?
0:35:37 Rich and poor, you know, how much should people get taxed?
0:35:39 That’s an eternal problem of democracy, eternal.
0:35:46 And he says, you need to have institutions where everyone can debate that and, you know, checks
0:35:48 on people getting too powerful, also economically.
0:35:53 Why did he think rule of law was so perilously fragile?
0:35:59 Because people don’t want to be equal all the time.
0:36:01 And that’s just a thing.
0:36:01 That’s what he said.
0:36:04 This is what I would say Machiavelli is a realist.
0:36:10 It’s this kind of human nature realism that isn’t, it’s not, you know, good and evil.
0:36:13 It’s, that’s, that’s the wrong lens to read Machiavelli.
0:36:18 He’s going back to this old ancient pre-Christian, you know, traditions that say, look, human
0:36:19 beings are bloody messy.
0:36:26 We’re always doing these things that upset the orders we create with all our great ideas.
0:36:28 And people don’t all want to be equal.
0:36:32 You know, you’re not going to turn people into angels who are happy, just saying, let’s
0:36:33 all just share power.
0:36:37 You’ve got to have institutions and laws that do that for them.
0:36:42 And if you’re going to talk about what kind of democracy would help us, you know, get
0:36:46 more stability, he thinks it would make sense just to have it up front.
0:36:49 But we’re not idealizing human nature.
0:36:51 We’re not idealizing what a democracy is.
0:36:53 Democracy is like hard work.
0:36:55 It’s hard work.
0:37:01 And it means that some people are not going to be happy all the time, but fight for it
0:37:03 because it’s a lot better than the alternatives.
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0:40:49 If we were looking at Machiavelli for insights into, well, now, where do we start?
0:40:55 What do you think makes him a useful, relevant guide to understanding contemporary politics,
0:40:57 particularly American politics?
0:40:59 This is a really Machiavellian moment.
0:41:05 If you read the prints, kind of looking not just for those outstanding, great quotes, you
0:41:08 know, but look for the criticisms.
0:41:09 And sometimes they’re subtle.
0:41:15 You start to see that he’s often, like, exposing a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing today.
0:41:22 And chapter nine in The Prince, where he talks about how you can rise to be the kind of ruler
0:41:26 of a republic and how much resistance you might face.
0:41:30 And he says that the resistance that you’re going to get, people might be kind of quite
0:41:32 passive at first and not do very much.
0:41:39 But at some point, when they see you start to attack the law, the courts especially, and
0:41:41 the magistrates, that’s when you’re going to clash.
0:41:46 And he says, that’s when you as leader, he’s playing like I’m on your side, leader.
0:41:50 That’s when you’ve got to decide, are you going to get really, really tough?
0:41:55 Or are you going to have to kind of find other ways to kind of soften things up a bit?
0:41:56 What would he make of Trump?
0:42:00 He would put Trump in two categories.
0:42:02 He’s got different classifications of prints.
0:42:08 He’s got the Prince of Fortune, who’s somebody who relies on wealth, money, and big impressions
0:42:11 to get ahead and on other people’s arms.
0:42:15 He would say Trump has a lot of qualities of that because of the wealth question, relying
0:42:18 on a massive wealth to help him campaign.
0:42:24 But he’d also call him, what Machiavelli has this word, astutia, astuteness, which doesn’t
0:42:27 really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality.
0:42:29 But he means like calculating shrewdness.
0:42:36 Somebody who’s great talent is being able to kind of shrewdly manipulate and find little
0:42:41 holes where he can kind of end people’s weaknesses and dissatisfactions and exploit them.
0:42:44 And that’s what he also thought the Medici were good at.
0:42:49 And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time.
0:42:56 People will kind of see this, the good appearances and hope that you would be able to achieve the
0:43:01 things that you can, but in the long term, people who do that don’t know how to build
0:43:02 a solid state.
0:43:04 That’s what he would say on a domestic front.
0:43:10 Let’s also say like, if people are interested, chapter 21 is the most Machiavellian chapter
0:43:14 in a way for our times because it’s about foreign alliances and people’s behavior on the foreign,
0:43:16 on the international stage.
0:43:22 And he’s got this example of Ferdinand of Aragon of Spain, who was like super hyperactive.
0:43:26 Like he comes to power and he’s immediately going out and like doing things that shock
0:43:31 and horrify everyone, beating up Jews, beating up Arabs, beating up doing this and that, and
0:43:34 taking neighboring countries around him.
0:43:39 And Machiavelli kind of is very, very funny in the way he describes this behavior.
0:43:45 But then he ends up in the chapter saying, look, if you don’t have stable alliances, you’re
0:43:45 dead.
0:43:52 You know, stable alliances, thick and thin, transparency, that is the key to kind of steady
0:43:54 long-term government.
0:43:58 Well, just going back to Trump.
0:43:59 Okay.
0:44:00 I didn’t mention him directly.
0:44:04 We’re not running away from this, Erica.
0:44:04 I’m sorry.
0:44:12 No, look, I think there’s an unsophisticated way to look at the Trump administration as Machiavelli.
0:44:17 There are these lines in the prints about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be
0:44:18 ruthless.
0:44:27 But to your point, I don’t think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
0:44:30 And this is my personal opinion.
0:44:33 But I think with Trump, cruelty is often the point.
0:44:35 And that’s not really Machiavellian.
0:44:36 It’s just cruel.
0:44:39 I wouldn’t say Trump is Machiavellian.
0:44:45 I mean, quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I’ve often felt
0:44:49 like he’s getting advice from a lot of young people who haven’t really read Machiavelli or,
0:44:53 you know, put Machiavelli into chat GPT and got some pointers and got all the wrong ones
0:44:58 because the ones that they’re picking out that he and his guys are acting on, especially
0:45:01 at the beginning, were just so crude.
0:45:06 You know, they’re just, yeah, they’re crude, but they sounded Machiavellian.
0:45:07 But cruelty, you’re absolutely right.
0:45:14 Cruelty is, I think, for me too, it’s been the thing that made me most, wow.
0:45:17 This is something that’s very hard to process.
0:45:22 And Machiavelli is very, very clear in the prints that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere.
0:45:23 You’re going to get pure hate.
0:45:28 So if you think it’s ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again.
0:45:35 Again, I’m being a little American-centric here, but obviously one of the problems of our time
0:45:37 is polarization and negative partisanship.
0:45:43 Did he have a lot to say about the dangers of partisanship in democracies?
0:45:44 Oh, yeah.
0:45:45 Oh, yeah.
0:45:48 And that was, again, something that the Romans talked about a lot.
0:45:51 So he’s drawing on a whole history of talking about partisanship.
0:45:59 He talks about divisions developing to such a point that it doesn’t even really matter
0:46:05 that much if the other side is telling the truth or introducing a specific policy that
0:46:08 is, you know, justifiably going to annoy the other side.
0:46:14 It’s just that there’s so little trust that conflict is bound to escalate.
0:46:19 And he calls this kind of thing a sickness that you’ve got to catch as early as possible
0:46:24 because if you let it grow too big, it’s going to be really, really hard to pull back.
0:46:29 Something I hear a lot in my life and from people around me is some version of the argument that,
0:46:32 you know, the system is so broken.
0:46:33 Things are so messed up.
0:46:38 We need someone to come in here and smash the system in order to save it.
0:46:40 We need political dynamite.
0:46:47 And I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility
0:46:54 and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to get done what has to get done
0:46:56 in order to preserve the republic.
0:47:03 Do you think he would say that there’s real danger in clinging to procedural purity?
0:47:05 Yeah, this is a great question.
0:47:09 I mean, again, this is one he does address in the discourses quite a lot.
0:47:14 And he talks about how the Romans, when their republic started kind of slippery, slidey,
0:47:17 you know, going in a wrong way and great men were coming up and saying,
0:47:18 I’ll save you, I’ll save you.
0:47:22 And there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally saved and then it all went to part.
0:47:29 He really says that, you know, there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out.
0:47:32 You have to reform institutions and add new ones.
0:47:33 The Romans added new ones.
0:47:34 They subtracted some.
0:47:36 They changed the terms.
0:47:42 He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various long, excessively long offices,
0:47:47 but also creating some emergency institutions where if you really face an emergency,
0:47:53 that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem.
0:47:59 But that institution, the dictatorship, it was called in Rome, it wasn’t like a random
0:48:01 dictator can come and then do whatever he wants.
0:48:06 It’s like this dictator has executive special powers, but he is under strict oversight, very
0:48:10 strict oversight by the Senate and the plebs.
0:48:15 So that if he steps, you know, takes one step wrong, out and maybe serious punishment.
0:48:21 So he was really into like being very severe and punishing leaders who took these responsibilities
0:48:22 and then abused them.
0:48:29 Anytime we do these sorts of, you know, philosopher episodes or looking back on some important thinker,
0:48:38 I try to close with some sense of the legacy and what they left us and why they’re important
0:48:38 and still matter.
0:48:44 And, you know, Machiavelli is such a unique case because his influence is everywhere.
0:48:49 I mean, he’s really one of the few philosophers that have sort of seeped into the mainstream
0:48:49 culture.
0:48:55 And, you know, whatever you think of him and whatever he may have believed privately, he
0:49:01 did lay out a vision of politics that is easily recognizable today.
0:49:03 It’s our politics in lots of ways.
0:49:09 Did he help make the world that way or did he just see it clearly before most others?
0:49:10 I don’t know, maybe a bit of both.
0:49:14 How do you think about his ultimate legacy?
0:49:21 I mean, you know, obviously, because I think that what he was really trying to do was to
0:49:27 criticize exactly the kinds of actions and leaders that we often see as his children, you
0:49:28 know, his brain children.
0:49:34 And a lot of politicians have cited him as their kind of intellectual grandfather and given
0:49:41 intellectual respectability to a lot of positions which I think he would consider really, really
0:49:44 cheap and amateurish and bad.
0:49:47 So I’m feeling about this legacy.
0:49:54 And I think it would be great if more people would, maybe in the times we’re living in, start
0:50:01 to kind of think, hang on, now I’m kind of getting this idea that maybe Machiavelli was being kind
0:50:08 of cynically funny, but also trying to kind of steer people to criticize what’s going on and
0:50:14 maybe pick up the prints and find some of these passages and realize that maybe this is a kind
0:50:20 of satirical warning signal, a serious satire that’s saying, you know, wake up, people.
0:50:22 This is what they’re doing.
0:50:23 These are the tricks.
0:50:29 But these are also, in a way, he’s empowering citizens, I think, also who read the prints
0:50:33 because he’s saying, these guys are actually vulnerable.
0:50:35 You know, I’m spelling out what they do.
0:50:40 And I’m also, if you read properly to the end of their story, I’m showing you where they
0:50:44 ended up by using these so-called hardcore, you know, realist methods.
0:50:48 So that means that, you know, it’s not lost.
0:50:49 All is not lost.
0:50:50 They are vulnerable.
0:50:52 Recognize that.
0:50:56 Find ways to build up your own power and do it.
0:51:00 Well, we’re doing the important work here of setting the record straight.
0:51:03 And look, Machiavelli is endlessly interesting.
0:51:07 And your book, Be Like the Fox, is fantastic.
0:51:08 Thanks very much for coming in.
0:51:09 Thank you so much for having me.
0:51:09 Thank you.
0:51:17 All right.
0:51:19 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:51:20 You know I did.
0:51:22 As always, we want to know what you think.
0:51:25 So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com.
0:51:33 Or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:51:38 And if you have some time, please go ahead, rate, review, subscribe to the show.
0:51:45 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian,
0:51:49 Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Oberington wrote our theme music.
0:51:53 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:51:54 Listen and subscribe.
0:51:56 The show is part of Vox.
0:52:00 Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
0:52:03 Go to vox.com slash members to sign up.
0:52:06 And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
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0:00:01 Sue Bird here.
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0:01:16 We’re told from a young age to achieve.
0:01:17 Get good grades.
0:01:19 Get into a good school.
0:01:20 Get a good job.
0:01:22 Be ambitious about earning a high salary
0:01:24 or a high status position.
0:01:28 Some of us love this endless climb.
0:01:31 But lots of us, at least once in our lives,
0:01:33 find ourselves asking,
0:01:35 what’s the point of all this ambition?
0:01:37 The fat salary or the fancy title?
0:01:40 Aren’t those pretty meaningless measures of success?
0:01:46 One proposed solution is to stop being ambitious
0:01:48 and start being idealistic instead.
0:01:51 You hear this from a lot of influencers.
0:01:52 Follow your passion.
0:01:54 Small is beautiful.
0:01:57 The idea is that you should drop out of the capitalist rat race
0:01:58 and do what you love.
0:02:00 Yoga, maybe.
0:02:01 Or watercolor painting.
0:02:05 Even if it makes very little positive impact on the world.
0:02:09 But what if instead of trying to be less ambitious,
0:02:14 we try to be more ambitious about the things that really matter?
0:02:16 Like helping others.
0:02:19 In an era when there’s so much chaos, injustice,
0:02:22 and frankly, a feeling of widespread despair,
0:02:24 it’s worth asking.
0:02:27 What would the world look like if we start measuring our success,
0:02:29 not in terms of fame or fortune,
0:02:32 but in terms of how much good we do?
0:02:38 I’m Sigal Samuel, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:45 Today’s guest is historian and author Rutger Bregman.
0:02:50 He’s probably best known for what he yelled at policymakers at Davos a few years ago.
0:02:52 Taxes, taxes, taxes.
0:02:55 He’s tried to get billionaires to pay their fair share in taxes,
0:02:59 and he’s also argued for other policies that could make life better for everyone,
0:03:02 like a universal basic income.
0:03:07 Now, he’s written a new book called Moral Ambition,
0:03:10 which urges us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work
0:03:13 and start trying to do more good for the world.
0:03:17 He wants us to be both ambitious and idealistic,
0:03:21 to devote ourselves to solving the world’s biggest problems,
0:03:25 like malaria and pandemics and climate change.
0:03:29 I invited Rutger on the show because I find his message inspiring.
0:03:34 And, to be honest, I also have some questions about it.
0:03:37 I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful,
0:03:41 but I’m not sure that work that helps the greatest number of people
0:03:43 is the only way to do that.
0:03:47 So in this conversation, we’ll explore all the different things
0:03:48 that can make our lives feel meaningful
0:03:52 and ask, are some objectively better than others?
0:03:58 Hey, Rutger, welcome to the show.
0:04:00 Thanks for having me. Good to see you.
0:04:02 Your book is called Moral Ambition.
0:04:05 Why should people be morally ambitious?
0:04:10 My whole career, I’ve been fascinated with the waste of talent
0:04:13 that is going on in modern economies.
0:04:17 There’s this one study from two Dutch economists
0:04:18 done a couple of years ago,
0:04:23 and they estimate that around 25% of all workers
0:04:27 think that their own job is socially meaningless,
0:04:30 or at least doubt the value of their job.
0:04:33 That is just insane to me.
0:04:35 I mean, this is five times the unemployment rate.
0:04:39 And we’re talking about people who have often excellent resumes,
0:04:41 you know, who went to very nice universities.
0:04:45 I’m going to Harvard tomorrow to speak to students there.
0:04:47 And, well, it’s an interesting case in point.
0:04:51 45% of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance.
0:04:54 Not saying all of that is totally socially useless,
0:04:58 but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent.
0:05:01 And as you know, we face some pretty big,
0:05:03 obvious problems out there,
0:05:05 whether it’s, you know, the threat of the next pandemic
0:05:07 that may be just around the corner.
0:05:10 Terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis
0:05:11 killing millions of people.
0:05:15 The problem with democracy breaking down.
0:05:17 I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
0:05:20 And so I’ve always been frustrated
0:05:23 by this enormous waste of talent.
0:05:27 Now, I’m not saying that morality should suck up everything.
0:05:29 I’m personally a pluralist.
0:05:32 I think that there are many things that are important in life,
0:05:34 you know, family, friends, music, art.
0:05:37 And you don’t want to let morality dominate everything.
0:05:40 But I think in a rich, well-rounded life,
0:05:42 it does play an important role.
0:05:44 And if we’re going to have a career anyway,
0:05:46 we might as well do a lot of good with it.
0:05:49 What about that question specifically about,
0:05:51 you know, someone comes to you and says,
0:05:52 I’m a third grade teacher.
0:05:54 I’m a social worker.
0:05:57 Am I not being morally ambitious enough?
0:06:00 So half of the country already works
0:06:02 in these so-called essential jobs.
0:06:04 We discover that during the pandemic,
0:06:07 that, you know, when some people go on strike,
0:06:07 we’re in real trouble.
0:06:10 So my point here is that half of the country
0:06:12 doesn’t need a lecture from me
0:06:14 about being morally ambitious.
0:06:15 They’re already working in essential jobs.
0:06:18 I’m indeed more interested in preaching
0:06:20 to my own people,
0:06:24 to honestly quite a few of my friends.
0:06:26 We used to have big ideals and dreams
0:06:28 when we were still in university.
0:06:31 You know, we wrote these beautiful application essays
0:06:33 about how we were going to fix
0:06:35 tax avoidance and tax evasion,
0:06:37 how we were going to tackle global hunger
0:06:39 and work at the United Nations
0:06:40 and look at us.
0:06:41 What has happened?
0:06:43 It’s pretty sad, isn’t it?
0:06:45 Now we’re old and wrinkled and complacent.
0:06:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:06:50 Something has gone wrong, I would say.
0:06:53 So that doesn’t mean that I don’t think
0:06:54 anyone can be morally ambitious.
0:06:57 Rosa Parks was a seamstress.
0:06:59 Le Kualesa, you know,
0:07:01 the great social revolutionary in Poland.
0:07:04 He was an electrician.
0:07:06 So, I mean, history is littered with examples
0:07:08 of people who weren’t very privileged
0:07:10 and still did a lot of good.
0:07:13 But they don’t need a lecture from me, I think.
0:07:16 I’m mainly talking to people
0:07:18 who shouldn’t just check their privilege,
0:07:21 but also use that privilege
0:07:22 to make a massive difference.
0:07:26 What role does personal passion play in that?
0:07:27 You write in the book,
0:07:29 don’t start out by asking,
0:07:30 what’s my passion?
0:07:32 Ask instead, how can I contribute most?
0:07:34 And then choose the role that suits you best.
0:07:35 Don’t forget,
0:07:37 your talents are but a means to an end.
0:07:39 Yeah, I think follow your passion
0:07:41 is probably the worst career advice out there.
0:07:44 We, at the School for Moral Ambition,
0:07:45 an organization I co-founded,
0:07:48 we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model
0:07:49 of changing the world.
0:07:51 So I always like to say that
0:07:52 Frodo, you know,
0:07:54 he didn’t follow his passion.
0:07:55 Gandalf never asked him,
0:07:57 oh, what’s your passion, Frodo?
0:07:58 He said, look,
0:08:00 this really needs to be done.
0:08:01 This needs to be fixed.
0:08:02 You got to throw the ring into the mountain.
0:08:05 If Frodo would have followed his passion,
0:08:08 he would have probably, you know,
0:08:09 been a gardener,
0:08:10 having a life, you know,
0:08:11 full of second breakfasts,
0:08:13 pretty comfortable in the Shire,
0:08:15 and then the orcs would have turned up
0:08:16 and murdered everyone he ever loved.
0:08:19 So I think the point here is pretty simple.
0:08:22 Find yourself some wise old wizard,
0:08:23 a Gandalf.
0:08:27 Figure out what are some of the most pressing issues
0:08:28 that we face as a species
0:08:29 and ask yourself,
0:08:30 how can I make a difference?
0:08:32 And then you will find out
0:08:33 that you can become
0:08:34 very passionate about it.
0:08:37 It’s just don’t start
0:08:39 with looking at your navel
0:08:39 and thinking,
0:08:41 oh, what is it for me?
0:08:44 Just ask smart people out there
0:08:45 and become passionate
0:08:46 about what they say.
0:08:47 So you’re saying,
0:08:49 do the work first,
0:08:51 trust that the passion will come later?
0:08:52 Absolutely, yeah.
0:08:54 And I’ve got a couple of examples
0:08:55 of that in the book.
0:08:59 One school I’ve got a whole chapter on
0:09:01 is called Charity Entrepreneurship.
0:09:03 They’ve since rebranded
0:09:04 as Ambitious Impact,
0:09:06 but it’s a school that I like to describe
0:09:08 as the Hogwarts for do-gooders.
0:09:10 So they recruit
0:09:14 really driven entrepreneurial people
0:09:15 who want to start
0:09:17 a highly effective nonprofit.
0:09:19 And they continuously
0:09:21 research this question.
0:09:22 It’s called prioritization research,
0:09:23 thinking about,
0:09:23 yeah,
0:09:25 what are some of the most pressing issues
0:09:25 we face?
0:09:28 And then they find these founders
0:09:29 of these nonprofits,
0:09:31 and they basically match the founders
0:09:32 not only with each other
0:09:34 so that you have a co-founder,
0:09:36 but also with these tasks, right?
0:09:38 You basically get a mission.
0:09:40 And one of the most successful charities
0:09:41 they’ve launched
0:09:41 is called
0:09:43 the Lead Exposure Elimination Project.
0:09:44 I believe you guys
0:09:45 have also written about them.
0:09:45 That’s right.
0:09:47 one of the co-founders
0:09:47 is Lucia Coulter.
0:09:49 She used to be a doctor
0:09:49 at the NHS.
0:09:51 Loved her work.
0:09:52 But at the same time,
0:09:53 she was like,
0:09:55 can’t I do more good, right?
0:09:57 I’m currently working as a doctor
0:09:58 in a very rich country,
0:10:00 mostly treating patients
0:10:02 who are already relatively old.
0:10:03 It’s beautiful work,
0:10:04 but I want to do more good.
0:10:06 And you should talk to her now.
0:10:06 I mean,
0:10:08 she’s incredibly passionate
0:10:09 about the work she does.
0:10:10 OK, but so that’s a good example.
0:10:11 So it’s not that
0:10:13 she completely ditched
0:10:14 what she was already doing
0:10:16 and her existing passions, right?
0:10:17 She found a way
0:10:17 to take her passion
0:10:19 for health care
0:10:20 or for global health
0:10:21 and sort of
0:10:23 put it on a different scale,
0:10:24 but still using
0:10:26 her existing core passion
0:10:27 and skill set.
0:10:28 That’s a good point.
0:10:31 Maybe we got to be passionate
0:10:32 on a meta level,
0:10:32 you know,
0:10:34 about our higher level goals.
0:10:36 You can be really passionate
0:10:37 about making the world
0:10:37 a better place,
0:10:38 helping a lot of people,
0:10:39 improving,
0:10:40 global health,
0:10:41 something like that.
0:10:43 But it’s quite risky
0:10:44 if you get too attached
0:10:46 to a certain intervention
0:10:47 or something like that.
0:10:49 I think that’s a very sure way
0:10:51 of massively limiting your impact.
0:10:52 And you see it a lot, sadly.
0:10:54 I’ve been walking around
0:10:55 in the world of philanthropy
0:10:56 for the past two years
0:10:58 and it just drives me nuts
0:11:00 how many of these rich people
0:11:01 are all the time,
0:11:02 you know,
0:11:03 they’re gazing at their navel.
0:11:03 And like,
0:11:05 you don’t have to come up
0:11:06 with the answer yourself.
0:11:07 The research has already been done,
0:11:08 right?
0:11:12 Why do you have to be the one,
0:11:12 you know,
0:11:14 who needs to have this epiphany
0:11:14 about,
0:11:15 oh!
0:11:16 Right.
0:11:17 It’s the pandas
0:11:18 in this specific region
0:11:19 that really need our help.
0:11:22 There are already Gandalfs
0:11:22 and Dumbledores
0:11:24 working on it for you,
0:11:24 figuring it out.
0:11:25 Exactly, exactly.
0:11:27 And it takes a team
0:11:28 to make a big difference.
0:11:31 I think it can be
0:11:32 quite liberating as well
0:11:33 to not have to fight
0:11:34 your passion anymore.
0:11:35 I speak to quite a few
0:11:38 teenagers and people
0:11:39 in their 20s
0:11:41 about what they should do
0:11:41 with their career
0:11:43 and a lot of them
0:11:45 find a lot of relief
0:11:46 in this message
0:11:47 that they don’t have
0:11:48 to find their passion.
0:11:49 That there are other people
0:11:50 out there
0:11:51 who have a job
0:11:52 for them to do, right?
0:11:53 That they can just
0:11:53 sign up for it.
0:11:55 Interesting.
0:11:56 In your book,
0:11:59 there is one Venn diagram
0:12:00 that caught my eye.
0:12:01 It’s, you know,
0:12:02 these three circles.
0:12:04 The first is labeled sizable,
0:12:06 the second is solvable,
0:12:08 and the third is sorely overlooked.
0:12:09 And in the middle
0:12:10 where they all overlap,
0:12:12 it says moral ambition.
0:12:13 Explain that to me.
0:12:14 What does that mean?
0:12:15 Yeah, so this is
0:12:16 the triple S framework
0:12:17 of making the world
0:12:18 a wildly better place.
0:12:20 And it’s connected
0:12:22 to this simple point
0:12:23 that choosing the cause
0:12:25 you work on
0:12:26 is probably
0:12:27 the most important question
0:12:28 you’ve got to answer.
0:12:29 And so,
0:12:30 at the School for More Ambition,
0:12:32 we work with this framework
0:12:35 in selecting these causes.
0:12:37 Take something like
0:12:38 climate change, for example.
0:12:39 Climate change is obviously
0:12:41 a very sizable problem.
0:12:41 It’s very big.
0:12:44 Threatens a lot of people.
0:12:46 It’s also very solvable, right?
0:12:47 We know what we can do.
0:12:49 We’ve got a huge toolbox,
0:12:50 a lot of solutions out there
0:12:51 that are waiting
0:12:52 to be implemented.
0:12:54 And then the question is,
0:12:56 is it also sorely neglected?
0:12:57 And the good news here
0:12:59 is less and less so.
0:12:59 You could ask yourself,
0:13:01 what was the best time
0:13:02 to be a climate activist?
0:13:03 And the answer is not now.
0:13:05 30 years ago.
0:13:05 Exactly.
0:13:06 That was the moment.
0:13:08 So if you, again,
0:13:09 want to maximize your impact,
0:13:10 if you want to ask
0:13:11 the morally ambitious question,
0:13:12 then the question is,
0:13:13 okay,
0:13:15 what would the climate activists
0:13:16 of the 70s
0:13:17 have done today, right?
0:13:19 Or what is the problem
0:13:20 that’s currently
0:13:20 where climate change
0:13:22 was in the 1970s?
0:13:23 You see what I mean?
0:13:27 That is an entrepreneurial way
0:13:29 of looking at doing good.
0:13:31 You are really looking
0:13:31 for the gap in the market.
0:13:32 You could also do that
0:13:34 within a cost area,
0:13:34 by the way.
0:13:36 So if you look at climate change,
0:13:37 then you can think,
0:13:38 okay,
0:13:40 what is the part of the problem
0:13:40 that is currently
0:13:41 most neglected?
0:13:42 Okay,
0:13:43 so looking at the neglected
0:13:44 or sorely overlooked,
0:13:45 looking at the solvable
0:13:47 and looking at the sizable.
0:13:48 I do wonder about
0:13:50 the sizable part of that.
0:13:51 Does moral ambition
0:13:53 always have to be about scale?
0:13:55 Yeah,
0:13:55 I think so.
0:13:55 Yeah.
0:13:56 Yeah.
0:13:57 It’s about making
0:13:58 the biggest possible impact.
0:14:00 And if you can achieve
0:14:01 your goals
0:14:02 during your lifetime,
0:14:02 then you’re probably
0:14:04 not thinking big enough.
0:14:05 Look,
0:14:06 I’m not saying
0:14:06 that everyone
0:14:07 has to be morally ambitious
0:14:08 or something like that.
0:14:09 I’m not like
0:14:11 preaching with my finger
0:14:11 and saying,
0:14:11 oh,
0:14:12 if you don’t live
0:14:13 this kind of life,
0:14:14 you’re a bad person.
0:14:15 I am saying,
0:14:18 if you are ambitious anyway,
0:14:19 you know,
0:14:21 why not redirect that energy
0:14:22 to do a lot of good?
0:14:23 I think it will make your life
0:14:24 much more meaningful.
0:14:25 If you’re going to have
0:14:26 a burnout anyway,
0:14:27 you know,
0:14:27 you might as well
0:14:28 get that burnout
0:14:30 while you help
0:14:30 a lot of people,
0:14:31 right?
0:14:33 And the same is true
0:14:34 for some people
0:14:36 who are very idealistic
0:14:36 but not very ambitious.
0:14:37 Like,
0:14:38 wouldn’t it be nice
0:14:39 to actually achieve a lot?
0:14:40 I mean,
0:14:41 I personally come
0:14:42 from the political left
0:14:43 and,
0:14:45 yeah,
0:14:45 there’s this weird
0:14:46 leftist obsession
0:14:48 with being pure
0:14:48 and irrelevant,
0:14:50 right?
0:14:52 Calling out a lot of people,
0:14:53 winning the debate
0:14:54 in the group chat,
0:14:55 but not actually
0:14:55 making a difference
0:14:57 for the people you say
0:14:57 you care so much about.
0:14:58 I think that’s
0:14:59 what you call in the book
0:15:00 the noble loser,
0:15:01 right?
0:15:01 Yeah,
0:15:01 yeah,
0:15:02 yeah,
0:15:02 yeah.
0:15:04 But I guess
0:15:04 what I’m wondering is,
0:15:05 do you believe
0:15:06 that there is sort of
0:15:07 a moral imperative
0:15:09 to do the most good
0:15:10 you possibly can do
0:15:11 to have the most impact,
0:15:12 the most scale?
0:15:14 Well,
0:15:15 obviously at some point
0:15:17 you’ve done enough.
0:15:19 I talk about
0:15:20 Thomas Clarkson,
0:15:21 my favorite abolitionist.
0:15:23 He was
0:15:25 a British writer
0:15:25 and activist
0:15:28 and when he was 25
0:15:29 he had this epiphany
0:15:30 that slavery
0:15:31 was probably
0:15:31 the greatest moral
0:15:33 atrocity of his time
0:15:33 and he was like,
0:15:34 you know what,
0:15:34 maybe I can make
0:15:35 a difference.
0:15:36 Maybe I can
0:15:38 spend my life
0:15:39 fighting this
0:15:40 horrible institution
0:15:42 and that’s basically
0:15:42 what he did.
0:15:43 The first seven years
0:15:44 he traveled across
0:15:45 the United Kingdom
0:15:46 35,000 miles
0:15:47 spreading his abolitionist
0:15:48 propaganda everywhere
0:15:49 and then
0:15:50 he had a total
0:15:51 nervous breakdown.
0:15:53 Utter burnout.
0:15:53 He couldn’t walk
0:15:54 the stairs anymore.
0:15:55 He couldn’t speak.
0:15:56 He started sweating
0:15:57 profusely whenever
0:15:59 he wanted to say something
0:16:00 and I read that
0:16:00 in his memoirs
0:16:01 and I was like,
0:16:02 Thomas, Thomas, Thomas.
0:16:04 Remember your
0:16:05 breathing exercises.
0:16:05 You can take things
0:16:06 too far.
0:16:07 Now, the reason I say
0:16:08 that only at the end
0:16:08 of the book
0:16:10 because, you know,
0:16:11 most of us first
0:16:12 deserve a kick in the butt.
0:16:13 So, yeah,
0:16:14 there are some
0:16:15 do-gooders out there.
0:16:17 I think they, you know,
0:16:18 take morality
0:16:19 a little bit too seriously.
0:16:20 As I said,
0:16:22 I’m personally a pluralist.
0:16:22 I’m a father
0:16:23 of two young children.
0:16:24 I think they’re
0:16:25 way more important
0:16:26 than, you know,
0:16:27 my career.
0:16:29 But I am
0:16:31 pretty ambitious, right?
0:16:32 I do want to make
0:16:33 a mark on this world
0:16:34 and I think there are
0:16:35 a lot of people out there.
0:16:36 We are all,
0:16:37 or most of us,
0:16:38 are scared to death.
0:16:40 And what do you want
0:16:41 to look back on
0:16:42 when you lie on your deathbed?
0:16:44 All the PowerPoints,
0:16:44 you know,
0:16:46 you hated to make
0:16:47 or all the reports
0:16:48 you wrote
0:16:48 that no one ever
0:16:49 wanted to read,
0:16:50 all the products
0:16:51 that you didn’t believe in
0:16:52 that you still spend
0:16:53 a lifetime selling?
0:16:54 Seems pretty sad to me.
0:16:56 I think this is touching
0:16:57 on something really honest,
0:16:58 which is that
0:16:59 I think a lot of
0:17:01 the desire
0:17:02 for this sort of
0:17:03 big impact
0:17:04 may actually come
0:17:05 from our fear
0:17:07 of our own mortality
0:17:08 and this desire
0:17:09 to leave a legacy
0:17:10 that will outlast us
0:17:11 so that we feel like
0:17:11 in some sense
0:17:12 it actually mattered
0:17:13 that we lived it all.
0:17:15 And I remember
0:17:17 dealing with this myself.
0:17:20 I’m a journalist now
0:17:20 but before that
0:17:21 I was a novelist
0:17:23 and I didn’t care
0:17:25 how many people
0:17:26 my work impacted, right?
0:17:27 It was for me
0:17:28 really not about scale.
0:17:29 My feeling was,
0:17:30 look, if my novel
0:17:31 deeply moves
0:17:32 just one reader
0:17:34 and helps them feel
0:17:35 less alone in the world,
0:17:36 helps them feel
0:17:36 more understood,
0:17:38 I will be happy.
0:17:40 So I guess
0:17:42 my question for you
0:17:42 as someone who has
0:17:43 personally struggled
0:17:44 with this issue of scale
0:17:45 is, you know,
0:17:46 are you telling me
0:17:47 I shouldn’t be happy
0:17:47 with that?
0:17:49 The title of chapter one
0:17:50 in your book
0:17:50 is literally
0:17:52 no, you’re not fine
0:17:52 just the way you are.
0:17:55 So I think
0:17:56 there is absolutely
0:17:57 a place for
0:17:59 as the French say
0:18:00 art pour l’art,
0:18:01 right?
0:18:03 It’s just music
0:18:04 or art
0:18:04 for the sake
0:18:05 of art itself.
0:18:07 I don’t want to,
0:18:07 you know,
0:18:09 let everything succumb
0:18:09 to kind of
0:18:12 utilitarian calculus.
0:18:14 I think
0:18:15 it’s better
0:18:16 to help a lot of people
0:18:17 than just a few people
0:18:17 people.
0:18:20 So, and as I said,
0:18:21 in any rich life,
0:18:22 morality does play
0:18:23 a big role.
0:18:25 I wouldn’t want
0:18:26 to live in a society
0:18:26 where everyone
0:18:27 is like Thomas Clarkson,
0:18:27 you know,
0:18:28 running around
0:18:29 on his horseback
0:18:31 doing morally
0:18:31 ambitious work.
0:18:33 But on the margins,
0:18:35 I think in the world
0:18:35 today,
0:18:36 we need a lot
0:18:37 more ambition.
0:18:38 We need much more
0:18:39 moral ambition
0:18:39 than we currently have.
0:18:41 Yeah, I mean,
0:18:41 I personally
0:18:42 would not want
0:18:42 to end up
0:18:42 in a world
0:18:43 where everyone
0:18:44 is so focused
0:18:45 on moral ambition
0:18:46 and scale
0:18:46 that we,
0:18:47 like,
0:18:47 that no one
0:18:48 ever writes a novel
0:18:49 because they worry
0:18:49 it won’t impact
0:18:50 enough people.
0:18:51 You know,
0:18:52 when I was reading
0:18:52 your book,
0:18:53 I kept thinking
0:18:54 of the philosopher
0:18:55 Susan Wolfe,
0:18:57 who has this great
0:18:57 essay called
0:18:58 Moral Saints,
0:18:58 and I know you
0:18:59 mention it
0:19:00 in a footnote,
0:19:00 but I think her ideas
0:19:01 are very,
0:19:01 very important
0:19:02 in this context,
0:19:02 so I want
0:19:03 to talk about them.
0:19:05 Wolfe,
0:19:05 in that essay
0:19:06 Moral Saints,
0:19:07 she says,
0:19:08 if the moral saint
0:19:10 is devoting all his time
0:19:10 to feeding the hungry
0:19:11 or healing the sick
0:19:12 or raising money
0:19:13 for Oxfam,
0:19:14 then necessarily
0:19:15 he is not reading
0:19:15 Victorian novels,
0:19:17 playing the oboe,
0:19:18 or improving his backhand.
0:19:19 A life in which
0:19:20 none of these possible
0:19:22 aspects of character
0:19:22 are developed
0:19:23 may seem to be
0:19:24 a life strangely barren.
0:19:27 Quite an elitist idea
0:19:28 of how to spend
0:19:29 your life,
0:19:29 by the way,
0:19:30 reading a novel
0:19:31 and improving
0:19:32 your backhand,
0:19:33 or maybe just
0:19:34 watching Netflix all day.
0:19:35 Fair, fair,
0:19:36 but you could
0:19:36 swap that out
0:19:38 with reading
0:19:39 your favorite book
0:19:42 and any hobby,
0:19:43 playing soccer,
0:19:44 whatever it might be.
0:19:45 But basically
0:19:46 what she’s saying
0:19:47 is if you try
0:19:47 to make all
0:19:48 of your actions
0:19:49 as morally good
0:19:49 as possible,
0:19:50 you kind of end up
0:19:51 living a life
0:19:52 that’s bereft
0:19:52 of hobbies
0:19:54 or relationships
0:19:55 or all the other
0:19:55 experiences
0:19:56 that make life meaningful.
0:19:58 Talk a little more
0:19:59 about how you square
0:19:59 that with your urge
0:20:00 to be morally ambitious.
0:20:02 There is some tension,
0:20:03 but I think
0:20:04 that tension
0:20:04 is mainly felt
0:20:05 by philosophers
0:20:06 for some reason
0:20:08 and not really
0:20:09 by me
0:20:10 or, I don’t know,
0:20:12 a lot of normies.
0:20:14 It’s just,
0:20:17 as I said,
0:20:17 for me,
0:20:18 it’s super obvious
0:20:19 that life is about
0:20:19 many things,
0:20:20 including improving
0:20:22 your backhand.
0:20:23 I’m not saying
0:20:24 that people aren’t
0:20:25 allowed to play
0:20:26 tennis anymore,
0:20:27 but we spend,
0:20:28 what is it,
0:20:30 2,000 work weeks
0:20:30 in our career,
0:20:32 10,000 working days,
0:20:33 80,000 hours.
0:20:34 That’s a lot of time
0:20:36 still left at the job.
0:20:37 And as I said,
0:20:38 25% of people
0:20:39 currently consider
0:20:40 their own job
0:20:41 socially meaningless.
0:20:42 And a lot of
0:20:43 our so-called
0:20:44 best and brightest
0:20:45 are stuck in those jobs.
0:20:46 So,
0:20:47 I don’t know.
0:20:49 We are living
0:20:49 in a world
0:20:50 where a huge amount
0:20:50 of people
0:20:51 have a career
0:20:52 that they consider
0:20:52 socially meaningless
0:20:53 and then they spend
0:20:54 the rest of their time
0:20:56 swiping TikTok.
0:20:58 That’s the reality,
0:20:59 right?
0:21:01 I really don’t think
0:21:03 that there’s a big danger
0:21:03 of, you know,
0:21:05 people reading my book
0:21:05 and, you know,
0:21:07 moving all the way
0:21:08 in the other direction.
0:21:09 And that’s a problem
0:21:09 I would honestly
0:21:10 like to have.
0:21:11 So,
0:21:11 you’re saying,
0:21:11 like,
0:21:12 we’re currently
0:21:14 very far away
0:21:14 from this problem
0:21:15 of, like,
0:21:15 everyone going
0:21:16 full tilt
0:21:17 on moral ambition
0:21:18 and ignoring
0:21:19 everything else in life.
0:21:20 There’s only one
0:21:21 community I know of
0:21:22 where this has
0:21:23 become a problem
0:21:24 and, as you know,
0:21:25 it’s the effective
0:21:26 altruism community.
0:21:28 In a way,
0:21:29 moral ambition
0:21:30 could be seen
0:21:31 as effective
0:21:32 altruism for normies.
0:21:34 Okay,
0:21:34 I definitely,
0:21:35 I definitely want
0:21:36 to get to that,
0:21:36 but I’m going
0:21:36 to put a pin
0:21:37 in that for a moment
0:21:39 because I just want
0:21:41 to take the flip side
0:21:41 of what you were
0:21:42 just saying.
0:21:42 You’re saying,
0:21:43 like,
0:21:43 okay,
0:21:45 I’m not really
0:21:46 concerned,
0:21:46 Seagal,
0:21:47 that we’re,
0:21:47 like,
0:21:48 edging into this world
0:21:48 where everyone
0:21:49 is so focused
0:21:50 on moral ambition.
0:21:53 But how
0:21:54 do you then
0:21:55 actually know
0:21:56 when it’s enough?
0:21:57 I think you used
0:21:57 the phrase earlier,
0:21:58 like,
0:21:58 at some point
0:21:59 it’s enough,
0:21:59 you know?
0:22:01 And I think,
0:22:01 you know,
0:22:03 you write in the epilogue
0:22:04 of the book,
0:22:05 morality plays a big role
0:22:06 in a rich and full life,
0:22:07 but it’s not everything.
0:22:08 And if your inner fire
0:22:09 burns bright,
0:22:10 no need to stoke it hotter.
0:22:12 But to me,
0:22:12 that is pretty,
0:22:12 like,
0:22:13 fuzzy sounding.
0:22:14 How can I know
0:22:15 what’s enough
0:22:17 and avoid pushing
0:22:17 so far
0:22:18 that moral ambition
0:22:20 does take over my life?
0:22:21 That does happen
0:22:21 to some people.
0:22:24 So how can I concretely know,
0:22:24 like,
0:22:24 Seagal,
0:22:25 you’ve done enough.
0:22:26 Chill.
0:22:27 Well,
0:22:28 it depends
0:22:30 on how far
0:22:30 you want to
0:22:31 push yourself.
0:22:33 Look,
0:22:34 there are no
0:22:35 easy answers here.
0:22:37 I think that at some point
0:22:38 when you really start
0:22:41 to suffer
0:22:42 from your moral ambition,
0:22:43 that’s not where
0:22:45 I would want you
0:22:46 to end up.
0:22:48 I think you should be fueled
0:22:49 for 80%
0:22:50 by enthusiasm
0:22:52 and for maybe 20%
0:22:53 by feelings of guilt
0:22:53 and shame.
0:22:55 So a little bit
0:22:56 of guilt and shame
0:22:56 in the mix,
0:22:57 that’s fine.
0:22:59 It’s actually how,
0:23:00 you know,
0:23:01 this journey started
0:23:01 for me.
0:23:02 You know,
0:23:03 I published
0:23:04 this previous book,
0:23:05 Humankind,
0:23:06 made quite a lot
0:23:07 of money on it,
0:23:07 honestly,
0:23:08 which I never
0:23:09 would have expected.
0:23:10 I always thought
0:23:11 that it would be
0:23:12 a broke history teacher
0:23:13 or something like that.
0:23:15 And yeah,
0:23:16 that gave me
0:23:17 a feeling of responsibility
0:23:18 like,
0:23:18 huh,
0:23:19 what does this mean?
0:23:20 I actually need
0:23:21 to do something.
0:23:23 And I also felt
0:23:23 a little bit ashamed
0:23:25 for spending a decade
0:23:26 in what I like to describe
0:23:28 as the awareness industry.
0:23:28 You know,
0:23:29 I’d been
0:23:32 saying a lot
0:23:32 about all the things
0:23:33 that need to happen
0:23:33 in the world.
0:23:34 A lot of people
0:23:34 would know me
0:23:35 for shouting
0:23:35 taxes,
0:23:36 taxes,
0:23:37 taxes at Davos,
0:23:37 right?
0:23:37 Yep.
0:23:39 And I was a bit
0:23:41 fed up with myself,
0:23:41 honestly,
0:23:43 for standing
0:23:44 on the sidelines.
0:23:45 To me,
0:23:46 what this is indicating
0:23:46 is like,
0:23:47 there’s some element
0:23:48 of subjectivity here,
0:23:48 right?
0:23:49 Like the question
0:23:50 of what percentage
0:23:51 of my life
0:23:52 should be focused
0:23:53 on moral ambition
0:23:53 and what should be
0:23:55 like playing the oboe
0:23:56 or like whatever,
0:23:57 making watercolor paintings.
0:23:58 To some degree,
0:23:59 you’re deciding
0:23:59 how much
0:24:00 you want to push yourself,
0:24:01 how much
0:24:02 you’re okay
0:24:03 with having
0:24:03 some suffering
0:24:04 in your life
0:24:04 to achieve
0:24:05 a greater goal,
0:24:06 how much you’re like…
0:24:08 Can I push back
0:24:08 a little bit?
0:24:09 Yeah, please.
0:24:10 I think the question
0:24:12 itself sort of presumes
0:24:13 that doing a lot
0:24:13 of good
0:24:14 or making a lot
0:24:15 of impact
0:24:16 is not going
0:24:17 to be a nice
0:24:18 experience or something
0:24:18 like that,
0:24:20 that pushing harder
0:24:22 will always involve
0:24:23 more sacrifices.
0:24:24 But if you talk
0:24:24 to a lot
0:24:25 of entrepreneurs,
0:24:26 they find a lot
0:24:27 of joy
0:24:28 in thinking big.
0:24:29 They find a lot
0:24:30 of joy
0:24:31 in climbing the ladder.
0:24:33 It’s what I always
0:24:34 experienced in my career.
0:24:35 I love becoming
0:24:36 a member
0:24:37 of a student society
0:24:38 in Utrecht
0:24:38 in the Netherlands
0:24:39 where I grew up
0:24:41 because I felt
0:24:42 so dumb
0:24:43 compared to all
0:24:43 these older students.
0:24:44 And I was like,
0:24:45 this is awesome.
0:24:45 I want to learn
0:24:46 about philosophy
0:24:47 and anthropology
0:24:48 and history.
0:24:49 And again,
0:24:49 when I started
0:24:49 my career
0:24:50 as a journalist
0:24:52 at the Volkskrantz,
0:24:52 which is sort of
0:24:53 the Guardian
0:24:55 or, well,
0:24:55 I guess the New York Times
0:24:56 at the Netherlands,
0:24:57 I just love being
0:24:59 the youngest journalist
0:25:01 there and learning
0:25:02 from my older colleagues.
0:25:04 And when I started
0:25:06 as a writer,
0:25:07 I had these big dreams
0:25:08 about, you know,
0:25:09 I want to write a book
0:25:10 that will speak
0:25:11 to millions of people
0:25:12 about the big questions
0:25:12 of history,
0:25:13 like why have we
0:25:14 conquered the globe?
0:25:16 What makes humans special?
0:25:19 And then as I did that,
0:25:19 you know,
0:25:21 I was in my early 30s,
0:25:22 I was, yeah,
0:25:23 a bit bored
0:25:24 and looking for the next
0:25:24 ladder to climb.
0:25:27 So for me,
0:25:29 climbing a new ladder
0:25:30 has mostly been
0:25:31 about excitement
0:25:33 and enthusiasm.
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0:28:12 Harvey Weinstein
0:28:13 is back in court
0:28:14 this week.
0:28:15 An appeals court
0:28:16 overturned his
0:28:16 2020 conviction
0:28:17 in New York
0:28:18 saying he hadn’t
0:28:19 gotten a fair trial
0:28:21 and so his accusers
0:28:22 must now testify again.
0:28:25 Weinstein has always
0:28:26 had very good lawyers,
0:28:27 but the court
0:28:28 of public opinion
0:28:29 was against him.
0:28:30 Until now,
0:28:31 it seems.
0:28:32 After looking over
0:28:32 this case,
0:28:32 I’ve concluded
0:28:33 that Harvey Weinstein
0:28:34 was wrongfully convicted
0:28:35 and was basically
0:28:35 just hung on
0:28:36 the Me Too thing.
0:28:37 The commentator
0:28:38 Candace Owens,
0:28:38 who has previously
0:28:39 defended Kanye
0:28:40 and Andrew Tate.
0:28:41 Andrew Tate
0:28:42 and his brother
0:28:43 were actually a response
0:28:45 to a misandrist culture.
0:28:46 Women that hated men.
0:28:47 Before Andrew Tate,
0:28:48 there was Lena Dunham.
0:28:49 Has taken up
0:28:50 Weinstein’s cause
0:28:51 and it seems to be
0:28:53 gaining her followers.
0:28:54 Coming up on Today Explained,
0:28:56 when Candace met Harvey.
0:28:56 When Candace met Harvey.
0:29:26 Let’s talk about
0:29:27 the effective altruism
0:29:28 piece of this.
0:29:28 Some of our listeners
0:29:29 may have heard of it,
0:29:31 but for those who haven’t,
0:29:31 it’s a movement
0:29:32 that’s all about
0:29:33 using reason
0:29:34 and evidence
0:29:34 and data
0:29:35 to do as much
0:29:36 good as possible.
0:29:37 I will say
0:29:39 I’m not an effective altruist,
0:29:40 but I am a journalist
0:29:41 who has reported
0:29:42 a lot on EA
0:29:43 because I work
0:29:44 for Vox’s
0:29:45 Future Perfect section,
0:29:46 which was sort of
0:29:47 loosely inspired
0:29:48 by EA
0:29:50 in its early days.
0:29:52 So I am curious
0:29:53 where you stand on this.
0:29:54 You talk about
0:29:55 effective altruism
0:29:55 in the book
0:29:56 and you do echo
0:29:58 a lot of its core ideas,
0:29:59 like this idea
0:29:59 that you shouldn’t
0:30:00 just be trying
0:30:00 to do good,
0:30:01 you should try to do
0:30:03 the most good possible.
0:30:05 So is being morally ambitious
0:30:06 different from being
0:30:07 an effective altruist?
0:30:09 Yeah, so I wouldn’t say
0:30:10 the most good.
0:30:11 I was like,
0:30:12 you should do
0:30:12 a lot of good.
0:30:14 Okay, okay.
0:30:14 Which is different, right?
0:30:15 That’s not about
0:30:16 being perfect,
0:30:17 but just about
0:30:18 being ambitious.
0:30:20 So in the book,
0:30:21 I study a lot of movements
0:30:22 that I admire.
0:30:23 As you know,
0:30:24 I write extensively
0:30:25 about the abolitionists,
0:30:26 about the suffragettes,
0:30:28 about the civil right
0:30:28 campaigners,
0:30:30 about extraordinary people
0:30:31 like Rosa Parks,
0:30:32 who was such a
0:30:33 strategic visionary.
0:30:33 A lot of people
0:30:34 remember her
0:30:35 as this,
0:30:36 you know,
0:30:37 quiet seamstress,
0:30:38 but she was actually
0:30:39 a highly experienced
0:30:39 activist,
0:30:43 and they really planned
0:30:45 this whole Montgomery bus boycott.
0:30:46 It didn’t just happen.
0:30:47 I talk about
0:30:48 the animal rights movement.
0:30:49 I talk about
0:30:50 Ralph Nader
0:30:52 and the extraordinary
0:30:53 Nader’s Raider movement
0:30:54 in the 60s and the 70s,
0:30:55 when Ralph Nader
0:30:56 was able to recruit
0:30:58 a lot of really talented
0:31:00 young Ivy League graduates
0:31:00 and convince them
0:31:01 to not work
0:31:03 for boring law firms,
0:31:03 but instead
0:31:04 go to Washington
0:31:06 and influence legislation.
0:31:07 There’s one historian
0:31:08 who estimates
0:31:08 that they’ve influenced,
0:31:09 what is it,
0:31:11 25 pieces of federal legislation.
0:31:12 So anyway,
0:31:13 the book is a whole collection
0:31:14 of studies of movements
0:31:15 that I admire,
0:31:16 and indeed,
0:31:17 effective altruism
0:31:18 is also one of those
0:31:19 movements that I admire
0:31:19 quite a bit.
0:31:20 I think there’s a lot
0:31:21 we can learn from them,
0:31:22 and there are also
0:31:23 quite a few things
0:31:24 that I don’t really like
0:31:25 about them.
0:31:28 So the main thing
0:31:29 I think indeed
0:31:30 what I really like
0:31:31 about them
0:31:31 is their
0:31:33 moral seriousness.
0:31:35 As I said,
0:31:36 I come from the political left,
0:31:37 and if there’s one thing
0:31:39 that’s often quite annoying
0:31:40 about lefties
0:31:40 is that they
0:31:41 preach a lot,
0:31:42 but they
0:31:43 do little.
0:31:44 For example,
0:31:45 this simple thing
0:31:46 about donating
0:31:47 to charity,
0:31:49 I think it’s
0:31:49 pretty easy
0:31:50 to make the case
0:31:50 that
0:31:52 that is one of the most
0:31:53 effective things
0:31:54 you can do,
0:31:55 but then
0:31:56 very few
0:31:56 of my
0:31:57 progressive
0:31:58 leftist friends
0:31:58 donate
0:32:00 anything.
0:32:01 So I really
0:32:02 like that
0:32:03 moral seriousness
0:32:04 of EAs.
0:32:05 You know,
0:32:05 you go to conferences
0:32:07 and you will meet
0:32:07 quite a few people
0:32:08 who have donated
0:32:09 kidneys to
0:32:11 random strangers,
0:32:12 which is
0:32:13 pretty impressive.
0:32:14 I’m sorry to say
0:32:15 that I still have
0:32:16 both of my kidneys.
0:32:18 My condolences.
0:32:18 And I’m quite attached to them.
0:32:21 But yeah,
0:32:22 I admire the people
0:32:24 who really
0:32:24 practice what
0:32:25 they preach.
0:32:28 I guess the main
0:32:30 thing I dislike
0:32:31 is probably
0:32:32 what we already
0:32:33 talked about.
0:32:33 Like,
0:32:34 where does the
0:32:35 motivation come from?
0:32:38 One of the
0:32:39 founding fathers
0:32:40 of effective
0:32:40 altruism was
0:32:41 the philosopher
0:32:42 Peter Singer,
0:32:42 obviously,
0:32:43 also one of the
0:32:44 founding fathers
0:32:44 of the mother
0:32:45 animal rights
0:32:45 movement.
0:32:46 And everyone
0:32:47 knows him for
0:32:47 this,
0:32:49 you know,
0:32:50 that thought
0:32:51 experiment of
0:32:51 the child
0:32:52 drowning in the
0:32:53 shallow pond.
0:32:55 I’m pretty sure
0:32:55 that he must be
0:32:56 really fed up
0:32:58 with talking about
0:32:59 that thought
0:33:00 experiment because
0:33:01 like,
0:33:01 I am already
0:33:02 fed up talking
0:33:03 about it and
0:33:03 it’s not even
0:33:04 my thought
0:33:04 experiment.
0:33:05 Right.
0:33:05 So that’s the
0:33:06 thought experiment
0:33:07 where Peter Singer
0:33:08 says,
0:33:09 look,
0:33:09 if you are
0:33:10 walking to work
0:33:10 and you see
0:33:11 a little kid
0:33:12 drowning in a
0:33:12 shallow pond,
0:33:13 you know you
0:33:14 could save this
0:33:14 kid.
0:33:15 Your life will
0:33:15 be in no danger.
0:33:16 It’s shallow,
0:33:18 but you will
0:33:19 ruin your expensive
0:33:19 suit or you will
0:33:20 muddy your shoes
0:33:21 should you do it.
0:33:21 And it’s
0:33:22 supposed to
0:33:22 be like,
0:33:22 yes,
0:33:23 obviously you
0:33:24 should do it.
0:33:25 And well,
0:33:26 by comparison,
0:33:26 you know,
0:33:27 by analogy,
0:33:28 we have money.
0:33:29 It could easily
0:33:30 save the lives
0:33:30 of people in
0:33:31 developing countries.
0:33:33 So you should
0:33:34 donate it.
0:33:34 Yeah.
0:33:35 Thank you so much
0:33:36 for helping me
0:33:36 out with that one.
0:33:37 Anyway,
0:33:39 I never really
0:33:39 liked the thought
0:33:41 experiment because
0:33:41 it always felt
0:33:43 like a form of
0:33:44 moral blackmail to
0:33:44 me.
0:33:45 And now I’m
0:33:46 suddenly supposed
0:33:47 to see drowning
0:33:47 children everywhere
0:33:48 and like,
0:33:48 oh,
0:33:49 this microphone,
0:33:50 it was too
0:33:50 expensive.
0:33:51 Could have
0:33:51 donated that
0:33:52 to, I don’t
0:33:52 know,
0:33:53 a charity in
0:33:54 Malawi or,
0:33:55 you know,
0:33:55 I just had a
0:33:56 sandwich and,
0:33:57 you know,
0:33:59 the peanut butter
0:33:59 on it was also
0:34:00 too expensive.
0:34:01 It’s like a
0:34:02 totally inhuman
0:34:03 way of, I
0:34:03 don’t know,
0:34:04 looking at life.
0:34:05 It just doesn’t
0:34:05 resonate with me
0:34:06 at all.
0:34:07 But there are
0:34:07 quite a few
0:34:08 people who
0:34:10 instantly thought,
0:34:11 yes,
0:34:11 that is true.
0:34:12 they discovered,
0:34:12 hey,
0:34:13 wait a minute,
0:34:13 I’m not
0:34:13 alone.
0:34:15 Let’s build a
0:34:15 movement together.
0:34:17 And I really
0:34:17 like that.
0:34:18 For me,
0:34:19 the historical
0:34:21 comparison is
0:34:22 the Quakers,
0:34:23 the early
0:34:24 abolitionists,
0:34:25 who were very
0:34:26 weird as well.
0:34:27 It was like
0:34:28 this small
0:34:29 Protestant sect
0:34:30 of people who
0:34:31 deeply believed
0:34:31 in equality.
0:34:32 They were some
0:34:33 of the first
0:34:34 who allowed
0:34:35 women to
0:34:36 also preach
0:34:36 in their
0:34:37 meeting houses.
0:34:38 They would
0:34:39 never take an
0:34:40 oath because
0:34:40 they were like,
0:34:41 yeah,
0:34:41 we always
0:34:42 speak the
0:34:42 truth,
0:34:42 so why
0:34:42 would we
0:34:43 take an
0:34:43 oath?
0:34:44 Anyway,
0:34:44 they were
0:34:45 seen as
0:34:45 very weird
0:34:48 and quite
0:34:48 amazing as
0:34:49 well.
0:34:49 The
0:34:50 abolitionism
0:34:50 sort of
0:34:51 started as
0:34:52 a Quaker
0:34:52 startup.
0:34:53 So that’s
0:34:54 also how
0:34:54 I see
0:34:55 EA,
0:34:56 as very
0:34:56 weird,
0:34:57 but pretty
0:34:58 impressive.
0:35:01 And I
0:35:01 think a lot
0:35:02 of people in
0:35:02 there have
0:35:02 done a lot
0:35:03 of good
0:35:03 work,
0:35:04 even though
0:35:05 I’d never
0:35:06 joined the
0:35:06 church.
0:35:08 It’s not
0:35:08 for me.
0:35:09 And there are
0:35:10 some obvious
0:35:12 downsides to
0:35:13 the ideology
0:35:14 as well.
0:35:15 Let’s pick
0:35:15 up on that
0:35:16 weirdness bit,
0:35:16 right?
0:35:17 So in
0:35:17 your book,
0:35:18 you straight
0:35:19 up tell
0:35:20 readers,
0:35:21 join a
0:35:22 cult or
0:35:22 start your
0:35:22 own.
0:35:23 Regardless,
0:35:24 you can’t
0:35:24 be afraid to
0:35:25 come across
0:35:26 as weird if
0:35:26 you want to
0:35:26 make a
0:35:26 difference.
0:35:27 Every milestone
0:35:28 of civilization
0:35:29 was first seen
0:35:29 as the crazy
0:35:30 idea of some
0:35:31 subculture.
0:35:33 I’m curious
0:35:34 how you think
0:35:35 about the
0:35:36 downsides of
0:35:37 being in a
0:35:37 cult.
0:35:38 cults don’t
0:35:39 have a
0:35:39 great
0:35:39 reputation,
0:35:40 do they?
0:35:42 So I
0:35:42 got to give
0:35:43 some credit
0:35:43 to Peter
0:35:44 Thiel here.
0:35:46 Maybe not
0:35:48 someone that
0:35:49 people naturally
0:35:50 associate with
0:35:50 me.
0:35:52 For those who
0:35:52 don’t know
0:35:53 him, he is
0:35:54 a venture
0:35:54 capitalist,
0:35:55 very much on
0:35:55 the right
0:35:57 wing side of
0:35:57 the political
0:35:58 spectrum.
0:35:59 He’s written
0:35:59 this fantastic
0:36:00 book called
0:36:01 Zero to One
0:36:02 about how to
0:36:03 build a
0:36:03 successful
0:36:03 startup.
0:36:05 And indeed,
0:36:06 one of his
0:36:07 advices is to
0:36:07 start a cult.
0:36:09 a cult is
0:36:10 a small
0:36:10 group of
0:36:11 thoughtful,
0:36:12 committed
0:36:13 citizens who
0:36:13 want to
0:36:14 change the
0:36:14 world.
0:36:15 And they
0:36:16 have some
0:36:18 shared beliefs
0:36:18 that make
0:36:18 them very
0:36:20 weird for
0:36:21 the rest of
0:36:21 society.
0:36:23 Now, as I
0:36:23 said, I
0:36:24 spent the
0:36:25 first decade
0:36:25 of my
0:36:25 career as
0:36:26 a journalist
0:36:28 and most
0:36:29 journalists
0:36:30 think that
0:36:30 they should
0:36:31 break out
0:36:31 of their
0:36:31 bubble,
0:36:33 that they
0:36:34 should meet
0:36:34 people on
0:36:34 the other
0:36:35 side of the
0:36:35 political
0:36:35 spectrum.
0:36:36 This is a
0:36:37 debate that
0:36:37 I used
0:36:38 to have
0:36:38 with my
0:36:38 colleagues.
0:36:39 They would
0:36:39 say, yeah,
0:36:40 we’ve got to
0:36:40 make sure
0:36:41 that the
0:36:41 plumbers read
0:36:42 our essays
0:36:43 as well.
0:36:44 And my
0:36:44 response was
0:36:45 always like,
0:36:45 you know,
0:36:46 I would love
0:36:47 for plumbers
0:36:47 to read my
0:36:48 essays, but
0:36:49 currently my
0:36:50 friends aren’t
0:36:50 reading them.
0:36:52 So maybe we
0:36:52 can start
0:36:53 there.
0:36:54 Right?
0:36:56 And this is
0:36:56 why I think
0:36:57 it sometimes
0:36:57 makes sense to
0:36:58 actually double
0:36:59 down on a
0:37:00 cult, because
0:37:01 in a cult,
0:37:02 it can be
0:37:02 radicalized,
0:37:03 and sometimes
0:37:04 that’s exactly
0:37:05 what’s
0:37:05 necessary.
0:37:06 To give you
0:37:06 one simple
0:37:07 example, in a
0:37:08 world that
0:37:08 doesn’t really
0:37:09 seem to care
0:37:09 about animals
0:37:10 all that much,
0:37:11 it’s easy to
0:37:12 become disillusioned.
0:37:14 But then once you
0:37:15 join a safe space
0:37:16 of ambitious
0:37:16 do-gooders, you
0:37:18 can suddenly get
0:37:18 this feeling like,
0:37:19 hey, I’m not the
0:37:20 only one, right?
0:37:21 There are other
0:37:21 people who deeply
0:37:22 care about animals
0:37:23 as well, and you
0:37:23 know what?
0:37:24 I can do much
0:37:25 more than I’m
0:37:26 currently doing.
0:37:26 So it can have a
0:37:27 radicalizing effect.
0:37:29 Now, I totally
0:37:29 acknowledge that
0:37:30 there are all
0:37:31 signs of dangers
0:37:32 here.
0:37:34 Like, you can
0:37:34 become too
0:37:35 dogmatic, you
0:37:36 can be, you
0:37:37 know, quite
0:37:38 hostile to people
0:37:39 who don’t share
0:37:39 all your beliefs.
0:37:41 So I do see
0:37:42 all of that.
0:37:43 I just want to
0:37:44 recognize that if
0:37:45 you look at some
0:37:45 of these great
0:37:46 movements of
0:37:46 history, the
0:37:48 abolitionists, the
0:37:49 suffragettes, yeah,
0:37:50 they had cultish
0:37:51 aspects.
0:37:52 They were in a
0:37:53 way, yeah, a
0:37:54 little bit like a
0:37:54 cult.
0:37:56 I want to push
0:37:58 a little bit on
0:37:59 this question
0:38:00 about, you
0:38:00 know, cults and
0:38:01 dogmatism.
0:38:03 Obviously, a big
0:38:04 downside, as you
0:38:04 mentioned, is that
0:38:05 you can become
0:38:06 dogmatic, you can
0:38:06 become kind of
0:38:07 deaf to criticism
0:38:07 from the outside.
0:38:09 Do you have any
0:38:10 advice for people
0:38:11 on how to avoid
0:38:12 the downside?
0:38:14 Yeah, don’t let
0:38:14 it suck up your
0:38:15 whole life.
0:38:16 There’s this quote
0:38:18 from Flaubert, the
0:38:19 novelist, who once
0:38:20 said something like,
0:38:20 if you want to be
0:38:22 violent and original
0:38:23 in your work, you
0:38:24 need to be boring
0:38:25 in your private
0:38:25 life.
0:38:26 I’m paraphrasing
0:38:26 here.
0:38:27 But I’ve always
0:38:29 like that quote.
0:38:30 I don’t know, it
0:38:31 gives you a certain
0:38:32 groundedness and
0:38:33 stability.
0:38:35 So maybe surround
0:38:36 yourself with
0:38:38 other types of
0:38:39 people and other
0:38:40 types of pursuits,
0:38:40 right?
0:38:41 Basically be a
0:38:42 pluralist.
0:38:44 Look, I don’t
0:38:45 know, honestly.
0:38:46 I don’t have the
0:38:48 perfect recipe here.
0:38:53 In general, it’s
0:38:54 super important to
0:38:55 surround yourself with
0:38:56 people who are
0:38:56 critical of your
0:38:57 work, who don’t
0:38:58 take you too
0:38:59 seriously, who
0:38:59 can also laugh
0:39:02 at you, who
0:39:03 have a good
0:39:03 sense of humor,
0:39:06 or who can just
0:39:06 see your
0:39:07 foolishness and
0:39:07 call it out and
0:39:08 still be a good
0:39:09 friend.
0:39:10 But this is
0:39:11 general life advice
0:39:12 for everyone.
0:39:13 Right, right.
0:39:15 Having a strong
0:39:16 dose of pluralism
0:39:17 can help
0:39:20 counteract a lot
0:39:21 of the potential
0:39:22 pitfalls with
0:39:23 these sorts of
0:39:24 ideological movements.
0:39:25 Yeah, absolutely.
0:39:25 At the same
0:39:26 time, you know, I
0:39:27 come from such a
0:39:27 different place,
0:39:28 you know.
0:39:30 I was mainly
0:39:31 frustrated with all
0:39:33 these people on
0:39:33 the left side of the
0:39:34 political spectrum
0:39:35 saying, oh, we
0:39:36 need systemic
0:39:37 change.
0:39:38 We need to
0:39:39 abolish capitalism,
0:39:40 overthrow the
0:39:42 patriarchy, and
0:39:43 write, you know,
0:39:44 a hundred more
0:39:45 monographs about it
0:39:46 in utterly
0:39:47 inaccessible
0:39:48 academic jargon.
0:39:49 And I was like,
0:39:50 come on, can we
0:39:51 actually do
0:39:51 something, right?
0:39:53 Can we actually
0:39:55 find some effective
0:39:55 way of actually
0:39:56 making a difference?
0:40:24 I think one
0:40:25 important question
0:40:26 is the question
0:40:27 of who
0:40:27 should we be
0:40:28 trying to
0:40:28 make a difference
0:40:29 for?
0:40:31 There is a very
0:40:31 interesting concept
0:40:32 that you mention
0:40:33 in the book,
0:40:34 which is humanity’s
0:40:35 expanding moral
0:40:36 circle.
0:40:37 What is that?
0:40:38 It’s, again, a
0:40:39 term from Peter
0:40:41 Singer, the
0:40:41 philosopher, who
0:40:42 makes the simple
0:40:43 case that throughout
0:40:45 history, our
0:40:46 moral circle has
0:40:46 expanded.
0:40:49 So, back in
0:40:49 the old days, we
0:40:50 mainly cared about
0:40:52 our own tribe and
0:40:53 members of our
0:40:53 tribe.
0:40:54 And then, you
0:40:55 know, we got the
0:40:56 big religions and
0:40:57 we started caring
0:40:58 about people who
0:40:59 believe the same
0:40:59 things.
0:41:00 And then we got
0:41:01 the nation states
0:41:02 and so on and so
0:41:02 on.
0:41:03 And he basically
0:41:04 says that moral
0:41:04 progress is all
0:41:05 about expanding the
0:41:07 moral circle and
0:41:08 to keep pushing
0:41:09 that expansion.
0:41:11 A couple of
0:41:11 years ago, I was
0:41:12 actually working on
0:41:13 a different book.
0:41:14 I wanted to write
0:41:14 the history of
0:41:15 moral circle
0:41:15 expansion.
0:41:17 because it’s
0:41:18 really interesting
0:41:19 that a lot of
0:41:19 the first
0:41:21 abolitionists, they
0:41:22 already cared
0:41:23 deeply about animal
0:41:24 rights, which makes
0:41:24 a lot of sense
0:41:25 because once you
0:41:26 start expanding your
0:41:27 moral circle, once
0:41:27 you start opening
0:41:29 your heart to
0:41:30 people who first
0:41:30 weren’t included in
0:41:31 your moral circle,
0:41:32 then the question
0:41:32 is, like, why
0:41:33 stop at some
0:41:33 point?
0:41:34 And I was writing
0:41:35 about that, learning
0:41:36 about that, and I
0:41:37 was like, huh,
0:41:39 maybe I should
0:41:40 finish this book
0:41:41 when I’m 60 or
0:41:42 70 or something.
0:41:44 Maybe I should be
0:41:44 doing this stuff,
0:41:45 you know, not
0:41:46 just be writing
0:41:46 about it.
0:41:47 So for me, that
0:41:48 was incredibly
0:41:48 inspirational.
0:41:50 That’s funny.
0:41:50 Okay, so if the
0:41:51 moral circle is
0:41:52 like, okay, who’s
0:41:53 worthy of our
0:41:54 moral consideration,
0:41:54 who’s not, who’s
0:41:56 in, who’s out, you
0:41:58 kind of acknowledge
0:41:58 in the book, like,
0:41:59 maybe it’s not
0:42:00 obvious how to
0:42:01 tell, are we
0:42:02 including everyone
0:42:03 in the moral circle
0:42:03 that should be
0:42:04 included?
0:42:05 And you have a few
0:42:06 pointers that you
0:42:08 offer people on
0:42:08 how to check that
0:42:09 they’re including
0:42:09 everyone that should
0:42:10 be included.
0:42:11 Do you want to
0:42:12 give us a little
0:42:13 summary, a few
0:42:14 pointers?
0:42:15 I think that
0:42:16 there are some
0:42:17 classic signs
0:42:20 that can tell
0:42:20 us whether we’re
0:42:21 on the right
0:42:22 side of history.
0:42:23 This is one of
0:42:24 those fascinating
0:42:24 questions that we
0:42:25 can ask, right?
0:42:26 We can look back
0:42:27 on, say, the
0:42:29 Romans who threw
0:42:30 naked women before
0:42:31 the lions, but
0:42:32 still thought they
0:42:32 were super
0:42:33 civilized because
0:42:34 unlike the
0:42:35 barbarians, they
0:42:36 didn’t sacrifice
0:42:38 kids to the
0:42:39 gods, right?
0:42:40 and every
0:42:40 civilization
0:42:41 throughout history
0:42:41 has always
0:42:43 thought we
0:42:43 are the most
0:42:44 civilized.
0:42:45 And obviously
0:42:46 we think that
0:42:46 today as well,
0:42:47 like any
0:42:48 modern-day
0:42:49 liberal in
0:42:50 the US or
0:42:52 the West in
0:42:52 the 21st century
0:42:53 will be like,
0:42:53 yeah, there’s
0:42:54 still bad stuff
0:42:55 happening, but
0:42:57 basically we’ve
0:42:57 figured things
0:42:58 out.
0:43:00 And the
0:43:01 uncomfortable
0:43:01 truth is that
0:43:02 probably we are
0:43:04 still committed,
0:43:06 engaged in some
0:43:07 really terrible
0:43:08 moral atrocities.
0:43:09 I mean, that’s
0:43:10 highly likely if
0:43:10 you just look at
0:43:11 the historical
0:43:11 track record.
0:43:12 So the question
0:43:13 is, what will
0:43:14 the historians of
0:43:15 the future say
0:43:16 about us?
0:43:16 And then I’m
0:43:17 not just talking
0:43:17 about, oh,
0:43:18 yeah, the bad
0:43:19 MAGA people or
0:43:19 something like that.
0:43:20 No, no, no,
0:43:21 I’m talking to
0:43:22 you directly who’s
0:43:23 listening to this
0:43:24 podcast right now
0:43:24 and probably thinks
0:43:25 of his or himself
0:43:27 as a pretty
0:43:27 decent person.
0:43:29 Then the question
0:43:29 is, okay, what
0:43:30 is that?
0:43:30 A couple of
0:43:30 signs.
0:43:31 Well, one is
0:43:32 we’ve been
0:43:33 talking about it
0:43:34 for a long
0:43:34 time.
0:43:35 So the alarm
0:43:35 bells have been
0:43:36 ringing for a
0:43:37 long time.
0:43:37 That’s one
0:43:38 clear sign.
0:43:39 In the book,
0:43:39 I give the
0:43:40 example of the
0:43:40 way we treat
0:43:41 animals.
0:43:41 And it’s not
0:43:42 as if these
0:43:43 arguments are
0:43:44 new or anything.
0:43:44 You know, a lot
0:43:45 of smart people
0:43:46 have said this
0:43:46 for a long
0:43:47 time.
0:43:47 You know,
0:43:48 Jeremy Bentham
0:43:49 already in the
0:43:50 late 18th
0:43:51 century wrote
0:43:51 that, you
0:43:52 know, it’s not
0:43:52 about whether
0:43:53 these animals
0:43:54 can speak or
0:43:54 reason or do
0:43:55 mathematics.
0:43:56 No, it’s about
0:43:56 the simple
0:43:57 question, can
0:43:58 they suffer?
0:43:59 And we’ve got
0:43:59 an enormous
0:44:00 mountain of
0:44:01 evidence that
0:44:02 tells us, yeah,
0:44:03 they can probably
0:44:04 suffer really
0:44:04 badly.
0:44:06 So yeah, if
0:44:07 you eat meat
0:44:07 and dairy
0:44:08 today, then
0:44:10 you are, yeah,
0:44:10 that it’s quite
0:44:11 likely that you’re
0:44:11 involved in one
0:44:12 of those moral
0:44:12 atrocities.
0:44:14 I’ve got a few
0:44:15 other signs that
0:44:15 I talk about.
0:44:17 For example, we
0:44:18 rationalize these
0:44:19 kind of things by
0:44:20 saying that they’re
0:44:22 natural or normal
0:44:23 or necessary.
0:44:24 This is what
0:44:25 Melanie Joy, the
0:44:26 psychologist, calls
0:44:27 the three ends.
0:44:28 And you look at
0:44:29 something like
0:44:31 slavery, and that’s
0:44:31 also what we did
0:44:32 back then, right?
0:44:32 We said it was
0:44:33 natural.
0:44:34 Like, throughout
0:44:35 history, every
0:44:35 civilization has
0:44:36 always practiced the
0:44:37 institution of
0:44:37 slavery.
0:44:39 Like, it’s just
0:44:40 what people do,
0:44:40 right?
0:44:41 What are you going
0:44:42 to do about it?
0:44:43 Or necessary, people
0:44:44 would say.
0:44:45 Yeah, it was just
0:44:47 essential for the
0:44:47 economy.
0:44:48 If we would
0:44:49 abolish slavery
0:44:49 today, you know,
0:44:50 the economy will
0:44:51 collapse and there
0:44:51 will be all kinds
0:44:52 of perverse
0:44:53 consequences.
0:44:54 So anyway, it’s
0:44:55 interesting to look
0:44:55 at those signs and
0:44:56 then think, okay,
0:44:57 what are some of the
0:44:58 worst things that may
0:44:58 be happening today?
0:45:00 There’s sort of a
0:45:01 pet peeve I have
0:45:02 about the way people
0:45:03 sometimes talk about
0:45:03 the expanding
0:45:04 moral circle.
0:45:06 People, I find,
0:45:07 typically talk about
0:45:09 it as if moral
0:45:09 progress or the
0:45:10 expansion of the
0:45:11 moral circle is
0:45:11 some sort of
0:45:12 linear process.
0:45:16 But to me, that
0:45:16 seems like a very
0:45:17 Eurocentric reading
0:45:19 of history because
0:45:20 there are other
0:45:21 cultures, right?
0:45:21 I’m thinking of the
0:45:23 Jains in India or
0:45:24 the Quechua people
0:45:25 in Latin America.
0:45:27 For them, you know,
0:45:28 the inclusion of all
0:45:29 animals and all
0:45:30 nature in the
0:45:31 moral circle has
0:45:32 been morally
0:45:33 obvious for a
0:45:34 long time and
0:45:35 that’s still not
0:45:36 obvious to
0:45:36 Americans.
0:45:38 I think that’s a
0:45:38 really good point
0:45:39 you’re making.
0:45:40 So historians call
0:45:41 this the Whig
0:45:43 view of history,
0:45:44 you know, named
0:45:45 after the Whigs,
0:45:47 the political
0:45:49 party in the
0:45:50 UK a few
0:45:51 centuries ago,
0:45:52 which indeed had
0:45:53 this Western
0:45:55 triumphalism baked
0:45:55 into it.
0:45:56 Like, we know
0:45:57 what’s right for
0:45:59 the world and we
0:45:59 will show the rest
0:46:00 of the world,
0:46:00 you know, how
0:46:01 to be good,
0:46:02 how to be moral.
0:46:04 And obviously,
0:46:06 the fight against
0:46:07 the slave trade and
0:46:08 slavery was essential
0:46:08 to that.
0:46:13 So, I have
0:46:13 complicated views on
0:46:14 this.
0:46:15 There are some
0:46:15 people who are
0:46:16 like, look, it’s
0:46:18 just total BS that,
0:46:19 you know, Britain was
0:46:20 so important in
0:46:21 abolishing the slave
0:46:22 trade because, you
0:46:23 know, it was mainly
0:46:24 the revolutions in
0:46:25 Haiti, you know, it
0:46:26 was enslaved people
0:46:27 themselves who did
0:46:27 it.
0:46:30 So, yeah, stop
0:46:30 with the colonists
0:46:31 crap.
0:46:33 And I think that’s
0:46:34 just not true, to
0:46:34 be honest.
0:46:37 People who have
0:46:38 been suffering from
0:46:39 slavery and the
0:46:40 slave trade, you
0:46:40 know, they’ve always
0:46:42 revolted, obviously,
0:46:42 you know, from
0:46:43 Spartacus onwards.
0:46:46 One in ten slave
0:46:47 voyages saw a
0:46:48 revolt.
0:46:49 But the reality is
0:46:50 that this system was
0:46:51 so horrible, and
0:46:52 not just in the
0:46:53 West, in the
0:46:54 colonies in the
0:46:55 Caribbean, but in
0:46:55 many places around
0:46:57 the globe, that
0:46:58 yeah, abolitionism
0:47:00 was for a long
0:47:00 time unthinkable.
0:47:02 And it was really
0:47:03 a new idea that
0:47:05 originated among
0:47:07 Anglo-Saxon
0:47:09 Protestants, first
0:47:10 the Quakers, and
0:47:10 then also the
0:47:11 Evangelicals, this
0:47:13 new idea that you
0:47:13 could actually
0:47:15 abolish slavery as
0:47:16 an institution.
0:47:17 It was really a
0:47:17 small group of
0:47:18 people who had
0:47:19 this crazy idea.
0:47:21 And then because
0:47:21 they did it in
0:47:22 Britain, and they
0:47:23 were successful in
0:47:24 Britain, then that
0:47:25 country was able to
0:47:27 use its power on
0:47:28 the Seven Seas, the
0:47:30 Royal Navy, to
0:47:31 force a huge
0:47:31 amount of other
0:47:32 countries to also
0:47:33 stop slavery, slave
0:47:34 trading.
0:47:34 So the Netherlands,
0:47:36 where I’m from, we
0:47:37 didn’t abolish the
0:47:38 slave trade on our
0:47:38 own.
0:47:38 Like, we were
0:47:39 making a lot of
0:47:40 money and enjoying
0:47:41 it quite immensely.
0:47:43 But then, you know,
0:47:44 these moralistic
0:47:46 British people came
0:47:46 along and, okay,
0:47:47 okay, we will
0:47:48 abolish it.
0:47:49 And that happened
0:47:50 again and again.
0:47:51 The irony is,
0:47:52 obviously, that this
0:47:53 was, again, also an
0:47:54 excuse for more
0:47:55 colonialism, so
0:47:57 that, you know, some
0:47:58 new horrors grew out
0:47:59 of that, that under
0:47:59 the banner of
0:48:01 anti-slavery, a new
0:48:03 colonial era dawned
0:48:04 and the whole
0:48:05 scramble for Africa
0:48:05 happened.
0:48:07 So I really don’t
0:48:09 want to, you know,
0:48:09 suggest that there
0:48:10 are some natural
0:48:11 progress in history.
0:48:13 If the arc of
0:48:15 justice bends, or if
0:48:16 the arc of history
0:48:16 bends towards
0:48:18 justice, then it’s
0:48:20 because, like, people
0:48:20 do that.
0:48:21 And if we don’t
0:48:22 keep bending it, it
0:48:23 might easily snap
0:48:24 back.
0:48:25 And there’s really
0:48:27 no natural order
0:48:28 of things here.
0:48:29 And indeed, in some
0:48:31 ways, we’ve made,
0:48:32 what’s the opposite
0:48:32 of progress?
0:48:33 What’s the English
0:48:33 word?
0:48:34 Backsliding.
0:48:35 Yeah, we’ve been
0:48:36 backsliding.
0:48:37 And I think animals
0:48:38 is a great example.
0:48:40 Imagine a world where
0:48:40 the Industrial
0:48:41 Revolution would have
0:48:42 happened in India.
0:48:43 I mean, maybe we
0:48:43 wouldn’t have
0:48:45 ended up with these
0:48:46 horrible systems of
0:48:47 factory farming.
0:48:49 It could have been
0:48:51 so much better.
0:48:53 Yeah, when I think
0:48:55 about progress, I
0:48:56 mean, I think of it
0:48:58 as, first of all, like,
0:48:58 who gets to define
0:48:59 what’s progress?
0:49:01 I think that depends a
0:49:01 lot on who’s in power
0:49:02 and who’s defining it.
0:49:05 But I don’t see it as
0:49:06 a sort of straight line
0:49:07 linearly going up.
0:49:08 I very much see it as
0:49:09 a messy squiggle.
0:49:11 And it’s entirely
0:49:12 plausible to me that
0:49:15 in 100 years, we will
0:49:17 have expanded our
0:49:18 moral circle in some
0:49:19 ways and given more
0:49:19 rights to certain
0:49:20 human beings.
0:49:22 You know, for example,
0:49:24 that we’ve abolished
0:49:25 factory farming and we
0:49:26 are treating animals
0:49:28 great, even as we’re
0:49:30 now really repressing
0:49:31 certain classes of
0:49:31 human beings.
0:49:33 Does that prediction
0:49:35 sound plausible to you?
0:49:35 Oh, no, no.
0:49:36 I’m not making any
0:49:37 predictions here.
0:49:38 I think the future
0:49:39 could be much worse
0:49:39 than today.
0:49:42 For me, that’s one of
0:49:42 the main lessons of
0:49:43 history.
0:49:44 Things can change
0:49:46 quite radically, for
0:49:46 better or for worse.
0:49:47 I’m pretty sure
0:49:49 that when you would
0:49:50 have talked to, you
0:49:51 know, most Germans in
0:49:53 the 1920s, I mean,
0:49:53 they couldn’t have
0:49:54 imagined, like, the
0:49:55 terrible abyss that
0:49:56 was ahead of them.
0:49:58 If I look at the U.S.
0:50:00 today, I am really
0:50:01 pessimistic, to be
0:50:01 honest.
0:50:03 I think there’s a real
0:50:04 threat of democracy
0:50:06 breaking down, and I
0:50:07 think that things can
0:50:08 get much, much worse
0:50:10 quite soon, actually.
0:50:11 Mm-hmm.
0:50:13 Let’s talk about
0:50:14 what’s ahead for you
0:50:15 personally.
0:50:18 Maybe you have a little
0:50:19 more ability to predict
0:50:20 that, potentially.
0:50:21 It, you know, it
0:50:22 strikes me with your
0:50:24 book, like, you could
0:50:25 have been like, look,
0:50:26 I’m happy, I’m
0:50:27 content to just write a
0:50:27 book about moral
0:50:28 ambition, leave it at
0:50:29 that, you know.
0:50:31 But you did not just
0:50:31 leave it at that, you
0:50:33 also decided to co-found
0:50:34 something that you
0:50:34 mentioned earlier.
0:50:35 It’s called the School
0:50:36 for Moral Ambition.
0:50:38 What is that, and how
0:50:39 did that get started?
0:50:40 I was at a point in
0:50:42 my career where I
0:50:43 looked at what I
0:50:44 had, you know, a bit
0:50:44 of a platform.
0:50:46 I think I have the
0:50:48 ability to, you know,
0:50:50 write things that
0:50:51 perhaps some people
0:50:51 want to read.
0:50:54 But I also felt this
0:50:57 itch, right, and felt
0:50:58 a little bit fed up
0:50:58 with myself.
0:51:00 And I was hugely
0:51:02 inspired by, for
0:51:03 example, what Ralph
0:51:03 Nader did in the
0:51:05 60s and the 70s, that
0:51:06 he was able to build
0:51:08 this beacon, this
0:51:08 magnet for very
0:51:09 driven and talented
0:51:10 people to work on
0:51:11 some of the most
0:51:12 pressing issues.
0:51:15 Throughout history, I
0:51:16 think we’ve seen
0:51:17 movements that have
0:51:18 been successful at
0:51:19 redefining what it
0:51:20 means to be
0:51:20 successful.
0:51:21 That was one of the
0:51:23 epiphanies I had when
0:51:24 I studied the British
0:51:25 abolitionist movement,
0:51:26 is they were actually
0:51:27 part of a much bigger
0:51:29 societal shift that
0:51:30 was all about making
0:51:30 doing good more
0:51:31 fashionable.
0:51:33 So I guess that’s
0:51:34 what we are betting
0:51:34 on.
0:51:36 Again, we are trying
0:51:37 to build that
0:51:37 magnet.
0:51:38 We are trying to
0:51:39 redefine what it
0:51:40 means to be
0:51:41 successful.
0:51:42 So we do a couple
0:51:43 of things.
0:51:45 One is we organize
0:51:45 these so-called
0:51:46 moral ambition
0:51:46 circles.
0:51:47 They’re groups of
0:51:48 five to eight
0:51:49 people who want to
0:51:50 explore what a
0:51:50 morally ambitious
0:51:51 life could mean for
0:51:51 them.
0:51:54 This is all freely
0:51:55 accessible on our
0:51:56 website, moralambition.org.
0:51:57 And at the same
0:51:58 time, we organize
0:51:59 so-called moral
0:52:00 ambition fellowships.
0:52:03 And you could see
0:52:04 them as small SWAT
0:52:06 teams of extremely
0:52:08 talented, very driven
0:52:09 people who have
0:52:10 agreed to quit their
0:52:13 job, follow Gandalf,
0:52:15 and work on some of
0:52:16 the most important
0:52:17 global problems.
0:52:18 We got started in
0:52:18 Europe.
0:52:20 No, no, no, no, no,
0:52:20 no, no.
0:52:21 I’m not coming up with
0:52:22 the mission statements.
0:52:24 It’s actually our
0:52:25 researchers who are
0:52:25 our Gandalfs.
0:52:26 I’m more like the
0:52:27 Muppet, you know?
0:52:30 Like the mascot, you
0:52:31 know, in the silly
0:52:33 suit, right?
0:52:35 That’s me who walks
0:52:36 on the field before
0:52:37 the match gets
0:52:37 started.
0:52:38 That’s my job.
0:52:41 But, yeah, so we
0:52:42 asked our researchers
0:52:43 what are some of the
0:52:44 most important things
0:52:45 we can do in
0:52:45 Brussels.
0:52:46 And to my big
0:52:47 surprise, actually,
0:52:47 one of the things
0:52:48 they advised us is to
0:52:49 work on fighting big
0:52:50 tobacco.
0:52:51 It’s the single
0:52:52 largest preventable
0:52:53 cause of disease
0:52:54 still today.
0:52:55 Eight million
0:52:55 deaths every year.
0:52:56 year, and very
0:52:57 few people are
0:52:58 working on
0:52:59 countering it.
0:53:00 So we’ve been
0:53:02 recruiting corporate
0:53:02 lawyers,
0:53:03 marketeers.
0:53:04 Actually, we’ve got
0:53:05 someone in our
0:53:06 last cohort who
0:53:07 used to work for
0:53:09 Big Tobacco, and
0:53:10 now they’re applying
0:53:11 their skills and
0:53:12 their talents to
0:53:13 doing a lot of
0:53:13 good.
0:53:15 And, yeah, we
0:53:16 want to scale up
0:53:17 this machine.
0:53:18 Obviously, the point
0:53:19 is that it is very
0:53:20 hard to get into
0:53:21 one of our
0:53:22 fellowships because
0:53:22 we want to make
0:53:23 it more prestigious.
0:53:24 You went to
0:53:24 Harvard.
0:53:25 Okay, well,
0:53:25 that’s not
0:53:26 nearly enough.
0:53:27 That’s nice, but
0:53:30 we are, yeah,
0:53:32 it’s quite
0:53:32 extraordinary, I
0:53:33 think, the
0:53:34 groups that we
0:53:35 are now bringing
0:53:36 together.
0:53:38 I think because of
0:53:39 two reasons.
0:53:39 One, because we
0:53:40 want to make doing
0:53:41 good more
0:53:41 prestigious and
0:53:43 more fashionable.
0:53:44 The other thing is
0:53:45 that we genuinely
0:53:46 believe that if you’re
0:53:47 very selective and
0:53:48 that some very
0:53:49 entrepreneurial people
0:53:50 can just do so
0:53:51 much.
0:53:51 where is the
0:53:52 school for
0:53:53 moral ambition
0:53:54 getting all the
0:53:55 funding, getting
0:53:56 the money to be
0:53:56 able to pay
0:53:57 people to quit
0:53:57 their jobs?
0:53:59 Mostly from me
0:53:59 now.
0:54:02 Everything I earn
0:54:02 with the book is
0:54:03 going all into the
0:54:04 movement.
0:54:06 So that’s been
0:54:06 helpful.
0:54:07 And we’ve got a
0:54:09 group of entrepreneurs
0:54:09 supporting us as
0:54:10 well.
0:54:11 So these are
0:54:11 people who have
0:54:12 indeed built their
0:54:13 own companies and
0:54:14 who are looking
0:54:16 to climb, as
0:54:17 David Brooks would
0:54:18 say, their second
0:54:18 mountain.
0:54:19 You know, you
0:54:20 mentioned that
0:54:21 the School for
0:54:22 Moral Ambition is
0:54:24 highly sort of
0:54:25 competitive to get
0:54:25 in.
0:54:27 And most of the
0:54:28 listeners won’t end
0:54:29 up going to the
0:54:31 school, but I am
0:54:32 kind of interested to
0:54:32 hear that you’re
0:54:33 also promoting
0:54:34 these moral ambition
0:54:35 circles that people
0:54:35 can start with
0:54:36 their friends.
0:54:38 I personally am not
0:54:40 really sold on the
0:54:41 idea of maximizing,
0:54:42 like do the most
0:54:44 good possible as my
0:54:45 entire guiding
0:54:46 philosophy for life,
0:54:47 but I am attracted
0:54:49 to the idea of
0:54:50 trying to do more
0:54:51 good.
0:54:52 Exactly.
0:54:53 Right?
0:54:54 We’re totally on
0:54:54 the same page.
0:54:55 Yeah.
0:54:58 And I very much
0:54:59 think I could enjoy
0:55:00 kind of just sitting
0:55:01 with five or six
0:55:02 friends on a regular
0:55:03 basis and trying to
0:55:04 challenge each other
0:55:05 to be more
0:55:06 intentional about
0:55:07 whatever the values
0:55:08 are that we do
0:55:09 believe in, right?
0:55:09 Yeah.
0:55:11 So maybe one way
0:55:12 to say this,
0:55:13 Sikal, is that
0:55:15 when I talk to
0:55:15 some of my banker
0:55:17 friends, I’m not
0:55:18 inclined to talk
0:55:18 about all these
0:55:19 drowning children
0:55:20 in shallow
0:55:21 ponds, right?
0:55:23 I’m also not
0:55:24 inclined to talk
0:55:25 in a more leftist
0:55:25 way and say,
0:55:25 oh, you’re so
0:55:26 bad, you’re so
0:55:27 greedy.
0:55:30 What I’ve
0:55:31 discovered is
0:55:32 that it’s much
0:55:32 more effective to
0:55:33 say something
0:55:34 like, oh,
0:55:35 wow, you’re so
0:55:36 talented, you’re so
0:55:38 experienced, and
0:55:39 this is what you’re
0:55:39 doing?
0:55:40 Boring.
0:55:43 And that hurts
0:55:44 them much more
0:55:46 in my experience.
0:55:47 And it’s also
0:55:48 honestly what I
0:55:48 believe.
0:55:50 Yeah, people
0:55:50 really don’t like
0:55:51 to be boring.
0:55:54 I will say this
0:55:55 conversation has
0:55:55 been far from
0:55:56 boring.
0:55:57 I really enjoyed
0:55:58 chatting with you
0:55:59 and reading your
0:55:59 book.
0:56:00 It’s called
0:56:01 Moral Ambition.
0:56:03 Rutger, just
0:56:03 want to say thank
0:56:04 you so much for
0:56:05 being on our
0:56:05 show.
0:56:06 Thanks for
0:56:06 having me.
0:56:15 I hope you
0:56:15 enjoyed this
0:56:15 episode.
0:56:16 I know I
0:56:17 enjoyed wrestling
0:56:17 with all these
0:56:18 ideas.
0:56:19 And while I
0:56:20 don’t think I’ll
0:56:20 be enrolling at
0:56:21 the School for
0:56:21 Moral Ambition,
0:56:23 I will consider
0:56:23 setting up a
0:56:24 moral ambition
0:56:25 circle with my
0:56:25 friends.
0:56:26 But as always,
0:56:27 we want to know
0:56:28 what you think,
0:56:29 so drop us a
0:56:29 line at
0:56:31 thegrayareaatvox.com
0:56:33 or leave us a
0:56:33 message on our
0:56:34 new voicemail
0:56:35 line at
0:56:38 1-800-214-5749.
0:56:39 And once you’re
0:56:40 finished with that,
0:56:41 go ahead and rate
0:56:42 and review and
0:56:43 subscribe to the
0:56:43 podcast.
0:56:45 This episode was
0:56:46 produced by Beth
0:56:47 Morrissey, edited
0:56:48 by Jorge Just,
0:56:49 engineered by
0:56:50 Christian Ayala,
0:56:51 fact-checked by
0:56:52 Melissa Hirsch,
0:56:53 and Alex Overington
0:56:54 wrote our theme
0:56:54 music.
0:56:56 The episode was
0:56:56 hosted by me,
0:56:57 Sigal Samuel.
0:56:58 I’m a senior
0:56:59 reporter at
0:57:00 Vox’s Future
0:57:01 Perfect, where I
0:57:02 cover AI,
0:57:03 neuroscience, and a
0:57:03 whole lot more.
0:57:05 You can read
0:57:05 my writing at
0:57:06 vox.com
0:57:07 slash future
0:57:07 perfect.
0:57:09 Also, if you
0:57:10 want to learn
0:57:10 more about
0:57:11 effective altruism
0:57:11 and the
0:57:12 drowning child
0:57:13 thought experiment,
0:57:14 check out
0:57:15 Vox’s Good
0:57:16 Robot podcast
0:57:16 series.
0:57:17 I highly
0:57:17 recommend it.
0:57:18 We’ll drop a
0:57:19 link to that
0:57:19 in the show
0:57:19 notes.
0:57:22 New episodes of
0:57:22 The Gray Area
0:57:23 drop on Mondays.
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