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0:00:29 We all have bad days, and sometimes bad weeks, and maybe even bad years.
0:00:33 But the good news is we don’t have to figure out life all alone.
0:00:37 I’m comedian Chris Duffy, host of Ted’s How to Be a Better Human podcast.
0:00:44 And our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life, actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day-to-day better.
0:00:48 Whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house,
0:00:54 each episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life’s ups and downs.
0:00:57 Find How to Be a Better Human wherever you’re listening to this.
0:01:00 Why do we do philosophy?
0:01:02 What is it even for?
0:01:09 I can almost hear the water bong bubbling as I ask that question.
0:01:12 But seriously, what is it for?
0:01:16 It’s an old question.
0:01:17 It’s an old question.
0:01:20 One of the oldest in philosophy.
0:01:23 And the answer is not obvious.
0:01:28 Some people think the point of philosophy is to make the world make sense.
0:01:31 To explain how everything hangs together.
0:01:38 For others, philosophy is useless if it doesn’t tell us how to live.
0:01:43 If you’re in the latter camp, and I basically am,
0:01:49 then it’s fair to say that you think of philosophy as a form of self-help.
0:01:56 Philosophy should have a lot to offer us when we’re anxious or depressed,
0:02:02 or in one of those uneasy periods of life where you start wondering who you are and what you’re doing and where you’re going.
0:02:05 What’s otherwise known as a midlife crisis.
0:02:12 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:24 Today’s guest is Kieran Setia.
0:02:29 He’s a philosopher at MIT and the author of several books.
0:02:33 Most recently, Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.
0:02:36 And Midlife, A Philosophical Guide.
0:02:43 Setia is that rare academic philosopher who cares about writing for a general audience.
0:02:46 And more importantly, knows how to.
0:02:50 His book about midlife crises is a great example of this.
0:02:55 It’s intimate, accessible, and full of genuine insight.
0:02:59 I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to get him on the show.
0:03:02 And now, he’s here to talk about it.
0:03:10 Kieran Setia, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:03:12 Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
0:03:17 Could you just maybe tell the audience a little bit about the kind of work you do as a philosopher?
0:03:18 What do you study?
0:03:22 What are the big questions driving your work?
0:03:23 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:03:25 So I work on ethics.
0:03:28 So really, the big question is, how should we live our lives?
0:03:32 And that question leads me into lots of related areas.
0:03:35 So I’m very interested in the nature of human action, the nature of agency,
0:03:39 in the nature and possibility of knowledge in general,
0:03:45 and ethical knowledge in particular, and questions about human nature and what kinds of beings we are.
0:03:48 Yeah, tiny questions like, how should we live our lives?
0:03:48 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:03:49 Exactly, exactly.
0:03:58 Well, you are a professional philosopher, so let me just kick this off with a layup question.
0:03:59 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:00 Okay.
0:04:00 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:05 What do you think philosophy is really for? What’s the point of philosophizing?
0:04:06 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:09 Oh, good, yeah. No, it’s good to start with the easy ones. Thank you.
0:04:10 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:16 I mean, I think the best answer to the question of what philosophy is for is related to the question of what philosophy is.
0:04:19 And I think the best way to approach that is historical.
0:04:24 So when I try to explain what philosophy is, I usually start with ancient Greek philosophy
0:04:29 and the idea that philosophy encompasses all systematic inquiry into the world,
0:04:34 our relationship to the world, and how to orient ourselves to and conduct ourselves in the world.
0:04:40 And then what happens through the course of history is that particular disciplines sort of peel off from philosophy.
0:04:47 So you get psychology and economics in the 19th century, you get linguistics, computer science in the 20th century.
0:04:59 And what philosophy is left with are the big, demanding, difficult questions for which we don’t have any accepted results other than think really hard about it.
0:05:02 The negative way of putting it is we’re left with the detritus of inquiry.
0:05:12 The positive way to put it is we ask the kinds of inevitable, essential, important questions that the other disciplines can’t answer and don’t really even know how to ask.
0:05:17 Yeah, I sometimes get asked why I ended up choosing philosophy as a major.
0:05:22 And I don’t really have a great answer other than I always just kind of love the questions more than the answers.
0:05:25 And so that’s just where I naturally landed.
0:05:36 I mean, I think you have to have a certain kind of patience with questions to really sustain work in philosophy because the progress is fitful and uncertain.
0:05:41 And a lot of what you’re doing is trying to figure out what the questions are and how to make them tractable.
0:05:52 And I think some of the questions philosophy asks, like, how should I live my life, are ones that people are implicitly and often explicitly asking every day and they’re really unavoidable.
0:06:00 And I think some of the questions philosophy asks are ones you could probably go your whole life without really spending a lot of time confronting.
0:06:19 Some of them, like, how should I live my life, are ones that people are implicitly and often explicitly asking every day and they’re really unavoidable, but still have this philosophical character that we don’t have an off-the-shelf method for answering them other than try to think it through using every tool you can lay your hands on.
0:06:24 Yeah, I’ve always found this debate in the history of philosophy fascinating.
0:06:41 You know, does philosophy exist to explain the world or is it supposed to tell us what to do, how to live, or is it just another human activity like painting that really only justifies itself by how much beauty and meaning it adds to life?
0:06:46 It sounds like you kind of land on, no, it should tell us how to live.
0:06:47 Otherwise, what are we doing here?
0:06:50 I definitely think that’s one of the goals of philosophy.
0:06:58 I think, just going back to the history again, one thing that happens is you have these pre-Socratic philosophers before Socrates in the 5th century BCE.
0:07:01 They’re mostly metaphysicians.
0:07:03 They’re interested in the nature of reality and how the world works.
0:07:12 Socrates then comes along and says, guys, the urgent question is how should we live our lives and is interrogating the ethos and the ethics of the Athens of his time.
0:07:18 And then Plato and Aristotle and some other philosophers who follow him say, actually, we’ve got to do both.
0:07:24 Like the only way to really answer the question how to live is through more abstruse metaphysical reflections.
0:07:31 So the idea that philosophy should answer the question how to live and try and guide us in our lives is there from pretty early on and is one that we shouldn’t give up.
0:07:36 If I had to place you in some philosophical camp, I’m not sure which one it would be.
0:07:44 I mean, is there a school or a tradition or a particular philosopher that you identify with?
0:07:51 Is there a label like Stoic or Existentialist or Aristotelian that you’re comfortable with?
0:07:55 I do have a philosophical hero and it’s the novelist philosopher Iris Murdoch.
0:08:09 She’s my hero in part because she is the person who really developed the idea that accurate description of reality is a demanding, complicated, arduous moral task.
0:08:15 And that it’s a much bigger part of what ethical reflection looks like than typical philosophers appreciate.
0:08:23 And she has a book called The Sovereignty of Good that it’s one of the few philosophy books that I go back to for solace.
0:08:26 Like when I’m feeling down, there’s not a lot of philosophy I think, this will cheer me up.
0:08:33 But with Murdoch, I find it so inspiring, the ambition of what she’s doing in this very short, dense book.
0:08:38 If I was going to declare allegiance to a philosopher, it would be kind of continuing the spirit of her work.
0:08:45 Well, the essay you wrote that caught my attention posed this question, is philosophy self-help?
0:08:52 Now, self-help is a strange term we can get into a little bit, but is that how you conceive a philosophy is essentially a tool of self-help?
0:08:54 A lot of it depends on the connotations of self-help.
0:09:08 So I think self-help as a distinctive genre now is often associated with a kind of narrow concern for one’s own happiness as opposed to how to live a good life in general, which involves how you relate to other people.
0:09:14 And it’s a kind of particular literary genre that is a little bit at odds with how philosophers tend to operate.
0:09:24 There’s a sense in which asking the question how to live in a way that’s practical surely ought to count as a project of guiding our lives and helping us to live better.
0:09:32 But it doesn’t fit neatly with how self-help is understood in this sort of contemporary, narrower, generic sense.
0:09:47 So I think the thing that’s easier to define pithily is the literary genre, which has a kind of definite origin.
0:09:59 So historians who write about the literary and cultural genre of self-help often trace it back to the amazingly named Samuel Smiles, the first self-help guru in 1859.
0:10:15 And he wrote this book, self-help, and he was a kind of social activist, but he had the idea that a book aimed at a general audience telling people how to change their own lives to flourish in the world was a good thing to do.
0:10:28 And that idea that there’s a kind of genre of writing that tells you how you can change yourself, and that’s the sort of self-help idea, and it’s on you to flourish in the world.
0:10:34 That descends from Smiles and then really kind of explodes through the 19th, 20th, 21st centuries.
0:10:40 So that’s one way to define it, is it’s a kind of literary genre that has some pitfalls to it.
0:10:43 I mean, one of the pitfalls is it’s very individualistic.
0:10:52 It’s very much focused on the idea that you can change yourself, and less focused on the idea of changing society or structures in which it’s difficult to flourish.
0:10:58 And also, it tends to be very focused on individual happiness rather than treating other people well.
0:11:07 On another understanding of self-help, it’s just reflective thinking about how to live a better life, and then it looks like really it is just philosophical ethics.
0:11:17 But if you go back to the beginning, at least in the Western tradition, philosophy was essentially understood as a form of self-help, right?
0:11:19 I mean, Plato definitely thought of it that way.
0:11:28 Yeah, I mean, certainly in the sense of there’s the project of making our lives better that drives Socrates.
0:11:36 And then when Plato writes the Republic, there’s a lot of metaphysics, there’s the nature of the forms, there’s the parable of the cave and the idea that we don’t really know true reality.
0:11:41 There’s all this metaphysical and epistemological stuff to do with knowledge.
0:11:49 But the guiding question is, how should I as an individual live, what would flourishing be, and how should the state be organized?
0:11:53 So in that sense, it’s self-help from the beginning.
0:12:00 The ways in which I think it differs from contemporary self-help have partly to do with the idea that the goal there is not just that you feel happy.
0:12:06 It is about living a flourishing life, and that’s understood in terms that this is a little anachronistic.
0:12:08 We’d think of it as partly moral.
0:12:11 It’s about justice and the treatment of other people.
0:12:14 You don’t get a lot of self-help books today.
0:12:21 Things that are about how to be a more just person or what your moral obligations are typically don’t get classified as self-help.
0:12:24 It’s much more about your own happiness and feeling good.
0:12:34 And the other thing that’s a difference and that’s a challenge is that Plato is writing in an often esoteric way, like the work is difficult, it’s demanding.
0:12:39 So genre-wise, it’s not quite as outward-facing as contemporary self-help.
0:12:50 And there’s a question, should we expect that philosophical reflection of this dense, theoretical, ambitious kind into the nature of reality is going to make us feel happy?
0:12:54 Yeah, Socrates may have been wrong that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.
0:13:05 No, and there’s a sense in which certain kinds of philosophical reflection, this sort of more theoretical reflection, it doesn’t seem essential to me to living a good life.
0:13:08 There’s lots of people who are friends of mine who are living very good lives.
0:13:18 They do engage in ethical reflection, but it doesn’t look a lot like the abstract theory construction that one might associate with academic philosophy.
0:13:22 Well, you wrote a book called Life is Hard.
0:13:29 Not that your philosophy of life can be summed up in three words, but if you had to sum it up in three words, is that it?
0:13:44 I think it’s partly about the way in which philosophers like Plato and in the Republic and Aristotle and his ethics, these ancient Greek philosophers, tend to think about the question how to live in terms of the ideal life.
0:14:01 And that can be both unrealistic and in a certain way self-punitive. I mean, often the right way to approach the ideal life is to think that’s not available. I shouldn’t beat myself up about the fact that that’s not available.
0:14:19 Really, what living well is about, or living as well as I can is about, is dealing with the ways in which life is difficult. And I think when you think about the conversations you have with friends in which you start to worry about how to live, often they’re, “Should I quit my job which I don’t like?” or “I’m having trouble with my parents or my kids.”
0:14:26 It’s problems that generate the urgency of the question how to live, or the sense that life is absurd, or the world is going to hell.
0:14:38 And so I do think the right method for doing moral philosophy or ethics is to start with the ways in which life is hard, and think about how philosophy can tackle them.
0:14:49 When we get back from the break, why do we have midlife crises?
0:14:52 And can philosophy help guide us through them?
0:14:53 Stay with us.
0:15:03 How do you navigate an entire career change after losing everything?
0:15:11 This week on Net Worth and Chill, I’m chatting with Lewis Howes, the host of the School of Greatness podcast, with over 500 million downloads.
0:15:15 Lewis went from rising professional athlete to broke after a career-ending injury.
0:15:18 I believe self-doubt is the killer of dreams.
0:15:25 When we doubt ourselves, it doesn’t matter how talented or smart you are, you’re going to limit yourself on what you’re able to do.
0:15:26 But that was just the beginning of his story.
0:15:35 It’s an episode packed with raw honesty and failure, practical advice for career pivots, and the financial wisdom that comes from losing it all and rebuilding it.
0:15:40 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com/yourrichbff.
0:15:42 Hi folks, this is Kara Swisher.
0:15:52 This week on my podcast, on with Kara Swisher, I’m speaking with philanthropist, businesswoman, and women’s rights advocate, Melinda French Gates, on how she’s refocused after her divorce from tech mogul Bill Gates.
0:16:00 We talk about why investing in women in politics and business is playing the long and smart game, and we discuss her new memoir, The Next Day.
0:16:05 My mom used to say to me as I was growing up, “Set your own agenda or someone else will.”
0:16:10 I know society is better off when women are in positions of power.
0:16:21 I really enjoy this conversation because it’s an interesting moment where women in technology are having much more of an important impact than men who are still moving fast and breaking things.
0:16:24 Have a listen to “On with Kara Swisher” wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16:33 We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.
0:16:36 That is not a recipe for economic prosperity.
0:16:43 Vice President J.D. Vance, defending the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, hit China squarely below the belt.
0:16:46 And China hit back with memes. Cue music.
0:16:58 Americans on assembly lines, at sewing machines, in fields, eating chips, drinking coke, looking ill-prepared for factory work, to put it politely, which the memes are not.
0:17:04 China’s argument since this trade war began is that America cannot win it.
0:17:07 China is tougher, more resilient, and better prepared.
0:17:15 On Today Explained, as this trade war escalates, we ask, “What if that’s true?”
0:17:34 Today Explained, every weekday.
0:17:43 One of the things about life that appears to be hard is middle age.
0:17:47 And you wrote a book about midlife crises.
0:17:50 How do you define a midlife crisis?
0:17:55 Actually, kind of like the self-help movement, midlife crisis is one of those funny cultural
0:17:58 phenomena that has a particular date of origin.
0:18:04 So, in 1965, this Canadian psychoanalyst, Elliot Jacques, writes a paper, “Death and the Midlife Crisis.”
0:18:05 And that’s the origin of the phrase.
0:18:10 And he is looking at patients, and also, in fact, the lives of creative artists, who experience a kind of
0:18:15 midlife creative crisis. So, it’s people in their late 30s.
0:18:21 I think the stereotype of the midlife crisis is that it’s a sort of paralyzing sense of uncertainty
0:18:26 and being unmoored. Nowadays, I think there’s been a kind of shift in the way people think
0:18:32 about the midlife crisis, that people’s life satisfaction takes the form of a kind of gentle
0:18:39 U-shape. That basically, even if it’s not a crisis, people tend to be at their lowest ebb in their 40s.
0:18:44 And this is men and women. It’s true around the world to differing degrees, but it’s pretty pervasive.
0:18:49 So, I think nowadays, often when people like me talk about the midlife crisis, what they really
0:18:55 have in mind is more like a midlife malaise. It may not reach the crisis level, but there seems to be
0:19:02 something distinctively challenging about finding meaning and orientation in this midlife period in
0:19:03 your 40s.
0:19:09 Well, I’m 42. I just turned 42. Sounds like I’m right in the middle of my midlife crisis.
0:19:14 I think you’re, you know, not everyone has it, but you’re predicted to hit it, yes.
0:19:22 Yikes. Well, what is it about midlife that generates all this anxiety and disturbing reflection?
0:19:26 I think, really, there are many midlife crises. It’s not just one thing. I think some of them
0:19:31 are looking to the past. So, there’s regret. There’s the sense that your options have narrowed. So,
0:19:37 whatever space of possibilities might have seemed open to you earlier, whatever choices you’ve made,
0:19:42 you’re at a point where there are many kinds of lives that might have been really attractive to you,
0:19:48 that it’s now clear to you and in a vivid sort of material way that you can’t live. So, there’s missing
0:19:52 out. There’s also regret in the sense of things have gone wrong in your life, you’ve made mistakes,
0:19:58 bad things have happened. And now the project is, how do I live the rest of my life in this imperfect
0:20:02 circumstance? The dream life is off the table for most of us. And then I think there’s also things
0:20:09 that are more present-focused. So, often people have a sense of the daily grind being empty. And that’s
0:20:15 partly to do with so much of it being occupied by things that need to be done, rather than things that
0:20:22 make life seem positively valuable. It’s just one thing after another. And then death starts to look like
0:20:29 it’s at a distance that you can measure in terms you kind of really palpably understand. Like, you have a
0:20:33 sense of what a decade is like, and there’s only three or four left at best.
0:20:41 The thing about being young is the future is pure potential. Ahead of you is nothing but freedom
0:20:51 and choices. But as you get older, life has a way of shrinking. Responsibilities pile up. You get trapped in
0:21:02 the consequences of the decisions you’ve made. And the feeling of freedom dwindles. That’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with.
0:21:07 I think that’s exactly right. I mean, part of what’s philosophically puzzling about it is
0:21:13 that it’s not news. That in a way, whatever your sense of the space of options was when you were, say,
0:21:17 20, you knew you weren’t going to get to do all of the things.
0:21:18 Yeah.
0:21:22 So there’s a sense in which it’s kind of puzzling that when, at 40, even if things go well,
0:21:26 you didn’t get to do all of the things. That’s not news. You knew that wasn’t going to happen.
0:21:33 What it suggests, and I think this is a kind of philosophical insight, is that there is a profound
0:21:41 difference between knowing that things might go a certain way, well or badly, and knowing in concrete detail
0:21:47 how they went well or badly. And that’s something that I think we learn from this transition that we
0:21:52 make in midlife. The kind of pain of just discovering the particular ways in which life isn’t everything
0:21:56 you thought it might be, even though you knew all along that it couldn’t be everything you hoped it
0:22:02 might be. That suggests that there’s a certain aspect of our emotional relationship to life that
0:22:07 is missed out if you just ask in abstract terms what will be better or worse, what would make a good
0:22:12 life? And so I think philosophy needs to kind of incorporate that kind of particularity, that kind
0:22:18 of engagement with the texture of life in a way that philosophers don’t always do. I mean, I think
0:22:22 there’s another thing philosophy can say here that’s more constructive, which is part of the sense of
0:22:28 missing out has to do with what philosophers call incommensurable values. The idea that, you know,
0:22:34 if you’re choosing between $50 and $100, you take the $100 and you don’t have a moment’s regret. But if you’re
0:22:40 choosing between going to a concert or staying home and spending time with your kid, either way,
0:22:45 you’re going to miss out on something that is sort of irreplaceable. And that’s pretty low stakes.
0:22:50 But one of the things we experience in midlife is all the kinds of lives we don’t get to live
0:22:56 that are different from our life, and there’s no real compensation for that. And that can be very painful.
0:23:01 On the other hand, I think it’s useful to see the flip side of that, which is the only way you
0:23:06 could avoid that kind of missing out, that sense that there’s all kinds of things in life that you’ll
0:23:12 never get to have. The only way you could avoid that is if the world was suddenly totally impoverished
0:23:17 of variety, or you were so monomaniacal, you just didn’t care about anything but money, for instance.
0:23:21 And you don’t really want that. So there’s a way in which this sense of missing out,
0:23:25 the sense that there’s so much in the world we’ll never be able to experience,
0:23:30 is a manifestation of something we really shouldn’t regret and in fact should cherish. Namely,
0:23:33 the evaluative richness of the world, the kind of diversity of good things.
0:23:36 And there’s a kind of consolation in that, I think.
0:23:44 So is that to say that FOMO is always and everywhere a philosophical error? Or is it actually valid in
0:23:44 some ways?
0:23:49 I think it’s a philosophical insight in a way. I think this kind of existential FOMO is part of
0:23:53 what we have in midlife or sometimes earlier, sometimes later. But I think that sense that
0:24:00 it really is true that we’re missing out on things and that there’s no substitute for them. That’s really
0:24:05 true. The kind of rejoinder to FOMO is, well, imagine there weren’t any parties you didn’t get to go
0:24:11 to. That wouldn’t be good either, right? You want there to be a variety of things that are actually
0:24:16 worth doing and attractive. We want that kind of richness in the world, even though one of the
0:24:19 inevitable consequences of it is that we don’t get to have all of the things.
0:24:30 One of the arguments you make is how easily we can delude ourselves when we start pining for the roads
0:24:37 not traveled in our lives. And, you know, you think, what if I really went for it? What if I
0:24:43 tried to become a novelist or a musician or join that commune or, I don’t know, pursued whatever
0:24:51 life fantasy you had when you were younger? But if you take that seriously and consider what it
0:24:59 really means, you might not like it. Because the things you value the most in your life,
0:25:07 like, say, your children, well, they don’t exist if you had zigged instead of zagging 15 or 20 years
0:25:12 ago. And that’s what it means to have lived that alternative life. And I guess it’s helpful to remember
0:25:16 that sometimes, but it’s easy to forget it because you just, you’re imagining what you don’t have.
0:25:21 This is, again, about the kind of danger of abstraction that, in a way, philosophy
0:25:25 can lead us towards this kind of abstraction, but it can also tell us what’s going wrong with it. So,
0:25:30 the thought, I could have had a better life, things could have gone better for me, it’s almost always
0:25:35 tempting and true. But when you think through in concrete particularity what would have happened if
0:25:40 your failed marriage had not happened, often the answer is, well, I would never have had my kid,
0:25:45 or I would never have met these people. And while you might think, yeah, but I would have had some
0:25:51 other unspecifiable friends who would have been great, and some other unspecifiable kid who would
0:25:57 have been great. I think we rightly don’t evaluate our lives just in terms of those kinds of abstract
0:26:02 possibilities, but in terms of attachments to particulars. And so, if you just ask yourself,
0:26:09 could my life have been better? You’re kind of throwing away one of the basic sources of consolation,
0:26:15 rational consolation, I think, which is attachment to the particularity of the good things, the good
0:26:20 enough things in your own life, even if you acknowledge that they’re not perfect and that
0:26:24 there are other things that could have been, in a certain way, better.
0:26:31 This is why I always loved Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, this notion that you have to say yes to
0:26:37 everything you’ve done and experienced. Because all the good and bad in your life is part of this chain of
0:26:43 events. And if you alter any of those events at any point in the chain, you also alter everything
0:26:47 else that followed in unimaginable ways.
0:26:53 I mean, I do think there’s a profound source of affirmation there. I think my hesitation is just
0:26:58 that it’s not that all the mistakes that we make or the terrible things that happen to us are redeemed
0:27:04 by attachment to the particulars of our lives. It’s that there’s always this counterweight. At the very
0:27:11 worst, we’re going to end up with some kind of ambivalence, and that’s better than the situation
0:27:17 of mere unmitigated regret. But it’s not quite the full embrace of life that a certain kind of
0:27:27 philosophical consolation might have given us. What precipitated your midlife crisis and what role did
0:27:31 your philosophical education play in helping you through it?
0:27:36 My philosophical education probably created it, and then it did help me to work through it. Which
0:27:42 was that I think I loved philosophy. I still love philosophy, but I loved it as a teenager and a
0:27:47 college student in a way that was not professionalized. I mean, I just loved these
0:27:51 questions. I love thinking about them. I love talking about them. And then I wanted to keep doing it. And the
0:27:58 way academia works, there’s a tendency for love of a certain kind of intellectual engagement to get
0:28:06 channeled into getting into a grad program, finishing your PhD, getting a job, getting tenure, getting
0:28:12 promoted, publishing a book, getting this article into this fancy journal. And what happens, and this is
0:28:19 sort of the diagnosis I came to, is that something that is not really directed at particular achievements
0:28:25 becomes transformed into something that is. And then what you find yourself valuing is these achievements
0:28:29 one after another. And you finish them, and then you’re like, “Well, what next?” And what you lose is
0:28:34 the sense of the love of just doing philosophy and thinking about it and engaging with it.
0:28:38 At the time, what happened was I thought, “I’ve got everything I want, everything I’ve worked
0:28:43 for for 20 years. But there’s something deeply hollow about the idea that I’m just going to write
0:28:46 another article, and then another article, teach another class, and then another class.”
0:28:52 There’s an emptiness to this. And then I thought, “Well, that is very philosophically puzzling. Like,
0:28:58 how can it be that I’m doing things that I think are worth doing, and I’m incredibly fortunate to be
0:29:03 able to do them, and yet I still think there’s something deeply wrong with my life?” And I thought,
0:29:08 “Well, maybe I can work on that philosophical problem, since that seems to be my problem.”
0:29:14 And then, you know, the judo move of using philosophy to solve my problem with being a philosopher.
0:29:19 And I think when you put it that way, I think what I’m describing was in some ways idiosyncratic to me,
0:29:24 but I think it is one of the canonical forms of midlife crisis. It’s the type-A project-driven person
0:29:28 who is achieving quite a lot of the things they set out to achieve, and then has this sense of
0:29:34 hollowness, and what next? Just more of that forever, until I die? And that was the shape my
0:29:36 particular midlife crisis took.
0:29:38 And how has philosophy helped?
0:29:44 In terms of the midlife crisis, I think the biggest thing was the shift from valuing what I
0:29:49 call telic activities, from the Greek telos or end, where you’re aiming at an endpoint, a project or
0:29:54 achievement, which has this problem that the thing you want is always in the future, and then the moment
0:29:59 you’ve got it, it’s over, and it’s in the past. And what you’re doing is basically pursuing something
0:30:05 with a view to getting it out of your life, like you’re checking off the box. And I think not all
0:30:11 activities are like that. So having a kid, that’s a thing you can finish doing. But then parenting is
0:30:17 just this ongoing process. Or writing a book, you get it done. But thinking about a topic, that just goes
0:30:22 on in this what I call an atelic way. And with atelic activities, where they’re not directed at a
0:30:27 particular accomplishment or outcome, you don’t have the sense that you’re deferring the thing you really
0:30:32 value to the future. If you want to be thinking about a topic or talking about philosophy as we are right
0:30:37 now, it’s happening right now. It’s not like we’re putting it off to the future or trying to, you know,
0:30:43 finish something. And so insofar as you value the atelic process of what you’re doing, that can mitigate
0:30:50 this sense of emptiness. I think the way in which philosophy can help us grapple with difficulties
0:30:56 like failure or loss is often not by saying, I’ve got this grand theory, I’ll apply it to whatever’s
0:31:03 happening in your life. It’s by saying, let’s try to describe what the problem of loss or grief is
0:31:06 in a way that helps us to understand and come to terms with it.
0:31:16 Yeah, you know, I have a decent philosophical education and I have all these ideas I’ve encountered over the
0:31:27 years in my head. But, you know, often when real pain strikes, it is not always easy to find relief in ideas.
0:31:37 Two of the hardest moments of my adult life were the sudden loss of my mother a few years ago and
0:31:47 the unexpected loss of a baby last year. And I think like a lot of people, I did that thing where I felt
0:31:53 victimized, you know? Like, the world is conspiring against me and, you know, you go through the anger of
0:31:59 all that. But then you remind yourself that you’re not, in fact, uniquely unlucky that this happens to
0:32:06 people every day and no one’s immune. Pain and loss are part of life as central to life as anything else.
0:32:16 And philosophy can help with that awareness. And in that way, it can bring real peace. But it’s hard.
0:32:17 It is very hard.
0:32:23 Yeah, I’m so sorry to hear about both of those losses. That sounds incredibly hard. And I think
0:32:28 what philosophy has to do is what human beings have to do faced with those kinds of difficulties,
0:32:35 which is not switch too rapidly into what I call assurance advice mode, which is saying,
0:32:41 it’s all going to be fine. Or, hey, here’s what you do. And those are things we do in personal
0:32:46 interaction. But there are also versions of philosophical approaches to the difficulties of life.
0:32:51 There’s the kind of theodicy where philosophers argue that all is for the best. They’ve got some
0:32:56 proof that although this seems bad, it’s going to work out well. Or they have some kind of theory
0:33:01 where they say, my philosophical principle is this. I’ll just apply it to your situation. And those are
0:33:06 rarely good philosophical tactics for dealing with the kind of difficulties you’re describing
0:33:12 for reasons that are not unrelated to the fact that they’re rarely good interpersonal ways of approaching
0:33:19 difficulty. So the fact that as people to people, the starting point is sitting with difficulty,
0:33:25 acknowledging it, trying to take in what’s really happening, really describing the particularity of it.
0:33:32 It is connected with a kind of philosophical methodology that I have come to embrace. And this,
0:33:38 it’s sort of a shift from thinking, well, philosophy is going to be about coming up with really cool arguments
0:33:45 that prove you should think this or that to thinking there’s a real continuity between the literary
0:33:52 and human description of phenomena like grief and philosophical reflection. Because often what
0:33:59 philosophical reflection provides is less a proof that you should live this way and more concepts with
0:34:05 which to articulate your experience and then structure and guide how you relate to reality. And seen that way,
0:34:10 we can sort of understand how philosophy can operate as self-help when just saying, hey,
0:34:16 here’s some philosopher’s argument, feels like it’s not making contact with the texture of the difficulties
0:34:23 we’re dealing with.
0:34:42 After one more short break, we finally get to the easy questions. Like, what’s the point of life? Stay with us.
0:34:54 25 years ago, McDonald’s restaurants across the country were being robbed by a masked man who always
0:34:57 entered through the roof and was always polite.
0:35:02 He was a gentleman going so far as to use ma’am, sir.
0:35:12 And I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be scared because, you know, you see in the movies, robberies are not like that.
0:35:22 I’m Phoebe Judge. Listen to part one of The Roof Man right now on Criminal and listen to part two early by becoming a member of Criminal Plus.
0:35:32 The regular season is in the rear view, and now it’s time for the games that matter the most.
0:35:35 This is Kenny Beecham, and playoff basketball is finally here.
0:35:39 On Small Ball, we’re diving deep into every series, every crunch time finished,
0:35:43 every coaching adjustment that can make or break a championship run.
0:35:45 Who’s building for a 16-win marathon?
0:35:48 Which superstar will submit their legacy?
0:35:51 And which role player is about to become a household name?
0:35:56 With so many fascinating first-round matchups, will the West be the bloodbath we anticipate?
0:35:58 Will the East be as predictable as we think?
0:36:00 Can the Celtics defend their title?
0:36:04 Can Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard push the young teams at the top?
0:36:10 I’ll be bringing the expertise to pass in the genuine opinion you need for the most exciting time of the NBA calendar.
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0:37:22 We’re not always right, but our hearts are in the right place.
0:37:23 We’re more raging than moderate.
0:37:40 There is an ethos in our culture that says happiness is the goal of life.
0:37:44 So if you’re not happy, you must be failing in some sense.
0:37:48 Is this something that you really do want to challenge head on?
0:37:50 Yes, I do.
0:37:54 I mean, I think philosophers often make this point in a way that may be a little bit unrelatable,
0:37:57 which is with kooky thought experiments where they’ll say,
0:37:59 you know, you think happiness is the goal of life?
0:38:06 Well, let’s imagine someone who is suddenly deceived and plugged into a kind of matrix scenario
0:38:10 where they’re fed a stream of fake experiences and they feel great and they’re super happy.
0:38:14 But suppose they don’t interact with anyone ever again.
0:38:18 They’re just plugged into this machine and nothing they think they’re doing or hardly any of it are
0:38:18 they really doing.
0:38:20 And it’s all an illusion.
0:38:23 Is that what you want for your loved ones?
0:38:26 And the answer is for most of us, rightly, I think, no.
0:38:31 But that person could be experiencing a state of mind of great happiness.
0:38:36 I think what we should be aiming for is to live the way we should.
0:38:38 And all of the things that matter in life come into that.
0:38:42 Living the way you should is being responsive to all the kinds of reasons there are.
0:38:46 Not just to worry about your own feelings, but about other people, the world around you,
0:38:50 injustice in the world around you, the needs of other people.
0:38:56 And so when we re-conceptualize the goal of self-help from just feeling happy to
0:39:03 living a good enough life, living as well as we can, it starts to look much less narcissistic.
0:39:08 And also, it looks like sometimes the answer to the question of what’s the best way I can
0:39:12 live in this circumstance is, well, it’s going to involve a fair amount of unhappiness.
0:39:19 And I think grief is one case that many of us have experienced in which it seems clear that a
0:39:26 certain amount of sadness is not in opposition to living the way we should is grief. The pain of
0:39:30 grief is not as it were something that would be better if we just didn’t have. It’s not like the
0:39:36 ideal scenario would be one in which when people we love die, we just feel nothing. It’s part of
0:39:40 something we deeply value, namely loving attachment to others, that we have to go through this.
0:39:46 Again, that’s just a more concrete illustration of the contrast between happiness as a kind of
0:39:53 positive state of mind and living well as responding to the real world we’re confronting
0:39:55 in the kind of ways that it calls for.
0:40:03 I think this is the main reason why I recoil at a lot of the new-agey self-actualization
0:40:09 nonsense, because in the end, it is a lot of sublimated narcissism.
0:40:15 And the message is that you help yourself. And of course, conveniently, you help the world
0:40:22 by loving yourself and taking care of you. That’s the road to happiness and fulfillment.
0:40:28 I’m not against loving yourself, to be clear. But I don’t think that’s the way to a meaningful,
0:40:37 good life. The greatest gift of parenting and marriage, for me at least, has been caring about
0:40:45 other people more than I care about myself. Spending less time in my own head, which I have always done,
0:40:52 quite naturally. And just spending more time being present for other people, directing my attention
0:40:58 towards other people. And too much of the self-help stuff seems to lead people in the opposite direction.
0:41:02 It seems to lead them inward. And that’s a moral dead end.
0:41:08 I think we’re exactly on the same page about that. I think there are dangers of narcissism in a certain
0:41:13 kind of self-help tradition. And it’s not that happiness isn’t a good thing and doesn’t matter,
0:41:18 but sometimes unhappiness is not a sign that there’s anything going wrong with you.
0:41:24 It’s that your unhappiness registers something wrong in the world, and you’re right to be unhappy.
0:41:29 So if you look at injustice in the world around you and you’re angry, and in that sense, really
0:41:35 unhappy about it, the fix to that is not going to be, I think, changing you. It’s going to be trying
0:41:40 to change the world. And if you can’t change the world, you’re going to find yourself in a situation
0:41:46 where part of living well and responsively might well involve a certain feeling of unhappiness. And I
0:41:51 think the consolation has to be not there’s some secret ticket to happiness. It’s my unhappiness about
0:41:58 this is not a sign that I’m going wrong. It’s a sign of me facing reality in the way that I should.
0:42:05 And there’s a recent fashion for a certain kind of Stoicism, a kind of neo-Stoic movement in
0:42:10 contemporary self-help that has a philosophical pedigree. But one of the ways in which it risks
0:42:15 going wrong is that there’s this sort of Stoic idea that you should let go of what you can’t control.
0:42:21 And for the Stoics, this is backed by a picture of the cosmos in which the divine mind,
0:42:25 Zeus, ensures that everything works out for the best. There’s this theodicy. And if you think
0:42:30 everything works out for the best, I can see why you’d say, well, if you’re raging against something
0:42:34 that seems bad, you’re just kind of missing the divine plan. But if you take away that backing,
0:42:42 I think this Stoic advice to just accept what’s out of your control is often an advice to not pay
0:42:46 attention to reality and not respond to reality in the way it calls for. I think sometimes we have to and
0:42:53 should feel grief or anger about things we can’t control. And that’s part of living well,
0:42:55 even if it involves unhappiness.
0:43:04 I’d say maybe the most common platitude you find in the self-help, self-improvement space is some
0:43:11 version of what people call the law of attraction. You know, this idea that positive things happen to
0:43:15 positive people. You manifest the things you want. So if you just assume the right attitude,
0:43:21 the right posture, you will be happy. Do you think this sort of thing is wise or helpful?
0:43:26 I mean, there’s a kind of empirical question of which I don’t quite know how to judge about what
0:43:32 the likely effects are of being more or less upbeat. It’s not that I could say, hey, my more downbeat
0:43:36 approach has paid off in spades. I mean, I find the world difficult to cope with. And I think this idea
0:43:41 of positive thinking, like, look at the positive, don’t dwell on the negative, the risk is partly that
0:43:47 we won’t have the acknowledgement of difficulty that connects us to others. And in that way, it is a kind of
0:43:54 isolation and drawing away from other people. I think being willing to dwell on the negative
0:44:00 is a condition of certain kinds of supportive intimacy. And, you know, I think we lose that
0:44:02 if we just say, hey, be positive, get over it.
0:44:09 It’s not that I think it’s good to be negative or that it’s not healthy to maintain a positive attitude.
0:44:16 I mean, sure. Yeah. Hell yeah, actually. Why not? The issue is that taken too far,
0:44:24 it can make you become a little blind to the tragic dimension of life. You start seeing people as
0:44:31 responsible for their suffering or their happiness in a way that isn’t really true. And more importantly,
0:44:38 isn’t compassionate. Both parts of that seem right to me. I think there’s a kind of honesty and realism
0:44:43 that you risk if you take that kind of positive thinking approach. I think one of the kinds of
0:44:49 moments of bonding we have with other people is sharing difficulties. That’s a kind of intimacy that
0:44:55 is unavailable if you refuse to take in the negative. And it can be punitive as well. It can be a way of
0:44:59 saying to people who are dealing with difficult things that the problem is with them and their
0:45:04 attitude. Often the compassionate and just and honest response is that the problem is with the
0:45:07 world in which they’re dealing and that we should change the world around them.
0:45:14 That is well said. And again, I don’t think anyone should wake up every day and spend the first eight
0:45:21 hours ruminating on all the terrible shit in the world. I just mean living purely or mostly for
0:45:29 individual happiness can blind us to other moral pursuits that require more sensitivity to the
0:45:30 suffering of other people.
0:45:36 Yeah. No, I totally agree with that. In Life is Hard, there’s a chapter on infirmity where I talk
0:45:42 about my own experience with chronic pain. Having written about it, people will contact me and say,
0:45:48 “Oh, have you tried this?” or “I’m experiencing something similar.” And there is this solidarity and community
0:45:53 that comes out of sharing difficulty. And I think that is a really profound and important thing.
0:45:57 I don’t think it’s inevitable that confronting suffering in your own life will be a source of
0:46:04 compassion, but I think it can be. I mean, I remember when I was first facing this diagnosis that was
0:46:10 chronic, it’s not going away. I remember sitting outside the clinic, looking at people walk by with
0:46:15 this sense of incredible bitterness, thinking, “You people, you don’t know how good you have it. You’re
0:46:20 walking past pain-free.” And then there was a beat and I thought, “I have absolutely no idea what’s
0:46:24 happening with any of these people. They could be going through much worse things, worse pain,
0:46:30 grief, loss. What am I thinking here? What am I talking about?” So that moment where you flip from
0:46:36 the kind of self-pity of thinking, “Other people don’t realize how hard I have it,” to saying,
0:46:42 “Yes, and by the same token, I am often unaware of and insensitive to the difficulties other people
0:46:46 have.” I don’t think it’s inevitable that thinking about your own suffering will lead you in that
0:46:53 direction, but I think there are moments where it can pivot from recognizing one’s own invisible
0:47:00 difficulties to acknowledgement of and reaching out towards the invisible difficulties of other people.
0:47:07 And so, yeah, I think we would lose something if we didn’t dwell in difficulty to a certain extent.
0:47:12 Not for its own sake, not because we want to dwell in hardships, but precisely because
0:47:19 it’s by dwelling in it that we can find solidarity and find ways of coming to terms with or changing
0:47:23 the world to cope with it. So if individual happiness
0:47:28 shouldn’t be the goal of life, what should the goal of life be? And I apologize for the
0:47:33 ridiculously hard question, but if anyone can answer it, it’s you, so I’m going to ask.
0:47:37 Well, I feel like we’re going back to the, yeah, we started with what is philosophy and now we’re
0:47:42 coming back to the other easy question, what should we aim for in life? I mean, I think it’s very hard
0:47:49 to say in general terms what that should be. I do think that what we can say is that it’s about responding
0:47:55 to reality as we should. So, taking in reality, that’s an essential part of living well. And then
0:48:00 responding to it as we should, I think there are limits to how much philosophical argument
0:48:07 can show us about how we should respond. I think the way we actually are guided is by trying to describe
0:48:13 reality and let those descriptions guide us. So, when I think of how philosophy contributes to this,
0:48:20 I think of concepts philosophy provides. So, allowing us to think about the distinction between, say,
0:48:25 TELIC and ATELIC activities and say, “Hey, am I putting too much value on projects when I should be
0:48:31 thinking about the ongoing process of what I’m doing?” Or when philosophers coin concepts like structural
0:48:37 injustice or alienation and we think, “Hold on, something feels wrong with the world. Is this a
0:48:42 way I can conceptualize it?” And I think the way in which we find an answer to this question, how should
0:48:49 we live, is by finding descriptions that capture the problems we’re facing and then orient us towards
0:48:56 them. So, I think it’s not going to come in the form of a kind of pithy slogan that goes beyond,
0:49:02 find the right kinds of descriptions of reality and let them guide you in your responses to it.
0:49:07 And then the philosophical project is not necessarily that they’re going to prove to you
0:49:11 this is how you have to live. It’s that they’re coming up with a kind of conceptual structure that
0:49:17 allows you to understand a situation and that understanding then guides and orients you towards
0:49:24 it. So, I think attention to reality plays this absolutely central role in philosophical reflection and in ethics.
0:49:31 And I love what you say, that this is really the great achievement of moral and political philosophy,
0:49:40 that it gives us a language to think about and frame and conceptualize our own lives and its relation to
0:49:44 other people. I mean, this is always why existentialism was very important to me when I was younger, because
0:49:49 it gave me this language, freedom, engagement, responsibility. Those terms have a concrete meaning
0:49:53 for me. And that’s what philosophy at its best can do.
0:49:59 David I totally agree. And I think philosophers should be attentive to the fact that, as it were,
0:50:06 what people remember and take away from philosophy are those concepts. So, probably what even philosophers
0:50:13 remember about a text that they studied intricately is not every intricate detail of the argument. It’s a kind
0:50:19 of concept that orients them towards problems. You know, you could say, well, you know, this is a terrible
0:50:24 failing. But really, ideally, we’d remember all the details of every little intricate argument in a
0:50:29 philosopher’s work. And there’s value to engaging with those intricate details. But the fact that what
0:50:36 people take away into their lives are the concepts that articulate their experience and that then they can
0:50:42 lean on to kind of guide themselves in situations should inform how philosophers think about what
0:50:48 they’re doing. And I think that helps us understand how philosophy can operate as a form of self-help,
0:50:55 even if some of the esoteric, intricate arguments philosophers write about are important but not widely
0:51:03 accessible. Often the concepts and understandings and orientations that arise from them are shareable and really can help
0:51:06 help people grapple with the kind of problems they’re facing.
0:51:15 I do think modern philosophy has lost its way a little bit and become too academic, too specialized,
0:51:24 too removed from everyday life, which is why I’m very happy to see someone like you doing more
0:51:29 public philosophy in this way, because I think that’s what we need. And I think there’s a real
0:51:34 hunger for that. It’s one of the reasons I do the show, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s
0:51:38 a privilege to have people like you on it. So, yeah, thanks.
0:51:44 Thank you very much. And I think shows like this are important for that reason. I think there’s a
0:51:49 real movement in philosophy to do more public-facing work. It’s a time where there’s a lot of excitement
0:51:52 and potential. I’m really optimistic about it.
0:51:56 Is there anything else you’d like to say before we get out of here?
0:52:04 I think we’ve covered a huge amount from the birth of philosophy to the ills and prospects of
0:52:08 contemporary philosophy. So, we pretty much covered it.
0:52:12 Kieran Setia, this was a genuine pleasure. Thank you.
0:52:34 This episode was produced by John Ahrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:52:41 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:52:46 Alright, I want to hear from you. Hit me up. You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:52:52 This was a personal one. I guess I say that a lot because, I don’t know, I get personal on some of
0:52:57 these. But this one was especially so. And I think it had to be because of, well, the topic.
0:53:03 I’m curious if any of it resonated with you or if you had any thoughts at all, good or bad.
0:53:08 Let me know. The email address is thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:53:23 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.

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0:01:29 Those are the words of the great and now infamous Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher.
0:01:39 You can find them in his 1651 book, The Leviathan, which is often considered the founding text of modern political philosophy.
0:01:47 Hobbes’ big contribution was to challenge the right of kings and religious authorities to rule.
0:01:52 The foundation of political power for him was the consent of the governed.
0:01:58 And the only reason to hand over authority to the state, or anyone else for that matter,
0:02:00 was for the protection of the individual.
0:02:05 If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
0:02:12 That’s basically the political philosophy that came to dominate the Western world from the Enlightenment on.
0:02:15 It’s what we now call liberalism.
0:02:21 But we’re in an era where liberalism and democracy are being contested from within and without.
0:02:28 And while I wouldn’t say that liberalism is dead, that doesn’t quite make sense.
0:02:31 I would say that it’s wobbly.
0:02:35 What should we make of that?
0:02:38 Is the liberal experiment coming to an end?
0:02:43 And if it is, what does that mean for our political future?
0:02:50 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:03:03 Today’s guest is political philosopher John Gray.
0:03:12 We spoke before last year’s elections, and lately, I have found myself returning to that conversation over and over again.
0:03:18 In his book, The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism,
0:03:27 Gray challenges the idea that the liberal dream of history, with a capital H, is over, and that liberal democracy has won.
0:03:35 Hobbes is at the center of his book because he thinks Hobbes’ liberalism was more realistic in its ambitions,
0:03:41 and that his most important lessons about the limits of politics have been forgotten.
0:03:48 It is, as you might suspect, a challenging book, but it is an essential read.
0:03:56 And I invited Gray onto the show to talk about what he thinks has gone wrong, and more importantly, where he thinks we’re headed.
0:04:03 John Gray, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:04:04 Thank you very much, Sean.
0:04:12 What’s interesting about this new book is that you’re not even bothering to announce the death of liberalism.
0:04:17 Like Nietzsche’s madman screaming about God in the town square.
0:04:22 You’re saying liberalism has already passed, and most of us don’t quite know it yet.
0:04:23 Is that right?
0:04:33 Yes, I think there are many visible signs that anything like a liberal order or a liberal civilization has passed.
0:04:43 In the last 30 years, shall we say, since 1990, 30-odd years, there’s been an enormous…
0:04:52 After that moment in which it seemed that liberal democracy was going to become universal or nearly universal following the collapse of communism,
0:04:58 What, in fact, happened was that the transition from communism to liberal democracy did not occur in Russia.
0:05:00 It has not occurred in China.
0:05:15 The wars that were fought, so-called wars of choice, by the United States and its followers, including Britain, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, to some degree, and Libya, were all failures.
0:05:28 None of those countries became democratic or anything near it, and, in fact, they only damaged those countries in profound ways and damaged the United States, and particularly the United States and Britain in various ways.
0:05:39 So, I think if you just look at geopolitical trends, you can see that the so-called liberal West, if something like that ever fully existed, is in steep retreat.
0:06:08 And in Western societies themselves, what were taken for granted, even within my lifetime, and perhaps yours, Sean, as fully accepted, liberal freedoms of speech and inquiry and expression and so forth, have been curtailed, not by a dictatorial state, interestingly, as in the former Soviet Union or today in Xi’s China, but actually by civil institutions themselves.
0:06:27 It’s been universities and museums and publishers and media organizations, that of charities and cultural institutions and so on, have imposed various kinds of limits on themselves, such that they police the expression of their members.
0:06:36 And those who deviate from a prevailing progressive orthodoxy or are in various ways canceled or excluded, that’s quite new.
0:06:39 But it’s rather widespread now and pervasive.
0:06:50 And although, of course, it’s true that there are enclaves of free expression, enclaves or niches like the one we’re enjoying now.
0:07:00 Although we’re not in the position that people are in, in Xi’s China or Putin’s Russia, we can still communicate relatively freely.
0:07:12 There are large areas of life, including the institutions I mentioned earlier, which used to be, let’s say, governed by liberal norms, and aren’t any longer.
0:07:26 So I think it makes sense just as an empirical observation to say that liberal civilization that existed and could be described as a liberal civilization, with all its faults and flaws, doesn’t exist any longer.
0:07:34 Of course, you might say liberalism as a theory continues to exist, but then so does medieval political theory or any modern political theory.
0:07:36 It just doesn’t describe the world anymore.
0:07:46 Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here, because the term liberalism is one of those big, unwieldy terms that means a million different things to a million different people.
0:07:53 What do you mean by liberalism, just so it’s clear what we’re diagnosing the death of here?
0:08:08 The core of liberalism as a philosophy is the idea that no one has a natural right to rule, and that all rulers, all regimes, all states serve those whom they govern.
0:08:11 So that this is a view which differs from Plato.
0:08:24 Plato thought that philosophers had the best authority to rule because they could better than other people perceive truths beyond the shadows of the improbable world.
0:08:32 In Hobbes’ day, some people believed, many people believed that kings had divine right to rule.
0:08:40 And later on, we’ve had beliefs, we have had philosophies which have developed according to which it’s the most virtuous people who should rule.
0:08:52 And I think actually the hyper-liberal, or what is now sometimes called the woke movement, has something of that in it, which is that they imagine that they represent virtue better than, and progressiveness better than others.
0:08:58 And therefore, they have a right at least to shape society according to their vision.
0:09:11 But a liberal, and in this sense, Hobbes is a liberal, and I’m still a liberal in this sense, actually, is one who thinks that any sovereign, any ruler, depends for their authority on protecting the well-being of the ruled.
0:09:15 And in liberal theory, it’s normally, liberal thoughts are normally individuals.
0:09:19 And when it doesn’t do that, then any obligation to obey is dissolved.
0:09:23 And Hobbes says explicitly, the book is partly about Thomas Hobbes, of course.
0:09:30 As you know, the 17th century political philosopher that wrote the book, Leviathan, that’s why it’s called New Leviathan.
0:09:53 Hobbes said that when the sovereign, which could be a king or a Republican assembly or a parliament or whatever, but when the sovereign fails to protect the individual from violence for other human beings, when the sovereign fails to provide security, all obligations are dissolved, and the individual can leave or kill the sovereign.
0:09:54 Kill the sovereign.
0:09:59 So there is a fundamental equality between the ruler and the root.
0:10:00 I think that’s the core of liberalism.
0:10:03 And in that sense, I say Hobbes is still a liberal, and so am I.
0:10:12 But it had many, many different meanings later or attached to it about rights and progressiveness and so on, which I don’t subscribe to, and neither did Hobbes.
0:10:22 Do you actually call Hobbes the first and last great liberal philosopher, which might surprise more than a few political philosopher types?
0:10:23 Why is that?
0:10:25 Why is he the first and the last great liberal philosopher for you?
0:10:27 Well, it shouldn’t surprise them.
0:10:36 If they knew a bit more than they normally do about the history of political ideas, they would know that the best 20th century scholars of Hobbes all regarded him as a liberal.
0:10:44 So Michael Oakeshott, the British conservative philosopher, the Canadian Marxist philosopher, C.B.
0:10:51 Macpherson, and Leo Strauss, the American conservative philosopher, they all regarded Hobbes as a liberal.
0:10:57 And so it’s only philosophers who don’t read ideas and their philosophy, which is the majority, I’m afraid.
0:11:00 It’s only those who are surprised by it.
0:11:01 So they shouldn’t be.
0:11:07 But I think the sense in which he is is exactly the sense of which I just mentioned earlier, which is that he doesn’t accept any.
0:11:09 The most virtuous don’t have the right to rule.
0:11:12 The cleverest or the most intelligent don’t have the right to rule.
0:11:15 None are appointed by God to rule.
0:11:24 States or sovereigns or human constructions or human creations, which exist only so long as they serve the purposes of those over whom they rule.
0:11:30 And so that, I think, is still alive, that idea, not only in philosophy.
0:11:31 I think it’s alive in the world.
0:11:39 And there’s nowhere in the world now, there was in the past, even relatively recent past, where anyone rules by prescriptive right.
0:11:51 If someone just says, I have the right to rule you, as our King Charles did in the Civil War in Britain in the 17th century, I have the divine right to rule.
0:11:51 He was executed.
0:11:53 He was executed by the parliament.
0:11:57 So that liberal idea, I think, is still quite strong in the world.
0:12:02 But it’s quite different from lots of other liberal ideas about progress and humanity and rights and so on.
0:12:12 I used to teach Hobbes, and I always wondered what it was I liked so much about him, because he is so dark and gloomy.
0:12:21 I mean, even if you’ve never read Hobbes, you probably know his famous description of human life as nasty, brutish, and solitary, and short, that kind of thing.
0:12:29 And I think what appeals to me in his thought is the tragic dimension.
0:12:34 You know, anarchy, for him, was never something we transcend.
0:12:36 It was something we stave off.
0:12:38 But it remained a permanent possibility.
0:12:45 That awful state of nature that he worried about was always lurking just beneath civilization.
0:12:59 Do you think modern liberalism went awry when it lost sight of this and maybe drifted away from Hobbes’ very limited view of the purpose of the state, which is just to keep us from eating each other, basically?
0:13:05 I think liberalism, over time, turned into something different.
0:13:12 I mean, one has to say that, although historically, in terms of the history of ideas, Hobbes is definitely a liberal.
0:13:30 Most people who’ve called themselves liberals subsequently in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries wouldn’t regard Hobbes and don’t regard Hobbes as a liberal, because although he has this feature that sovereigns or states serve the individuals over whom they rule,
0:13:41 He doesn’t think that what the state or the sovereign can do to provide security can be limited or should be limited by rights or some of the principles.
0:13:42 He doesn’t think that.
0:13:58 And that’s the sort of difficulty that many people find in thinking about Hobbes, which is that although he thinks the state has a very limited purpose, it can do anything that it judges, the sovereign judges, that will achieve that purpose.
0:14:04 So, for example, the state in Hobbes has no obligation to respect freedom of speech.
0:14:10 If freedom of speech harms social peace and political order, it can intervene.
0:14:18 Hobbes even says that the sovereign can define the term, define the words used in the Bible to kind of define what those words mean.
0:14:31 And probably when you taught him, you notice this, so that society can avoid the religious wars that were raging, had been raging in Europe in his time and around his time over what the Bible meant.
0:14:33 Peace determines everything.
0:14:35 So there’s no right to free speech.
0:14:39 There’s no right to demonstrate that none of these rights can restrain the state.
0:15:01 On the other hand, and here he’s different from modern liberals, the state can’t intervene in society, can’t curb human beings in order to achieve some idea of social justice or progress or a higher type of humanity, a more civilized or superior or ethically superior type.
0:15:05 It can’t do that either, it shouldn’t promote virtue, it’s indifferent to those matters.
0:15:08 So, it’s a very unfamiliar type of liberalism.
0:15:11 But I share your view, I’m not sure it’s tragic.
0:15:12 I would just say it’s a reality.
0:15:20 Hobbes thought it was a reality that at any time, order in society can break down anywhere, if certain, and it can happen quite quickly.
0:15:23 In other words, order is fragile in human life.
0:15:26 The default condition of human life is not harmony.
0:15:29 I guess that’s where he differs from many liberals.
0:15:34 They’ve assumed that basically human beings want to cooperate, that’s what they try and do.
0:15:44 And if they’re thwarted, it’s by tyranny or reaction or evil demagogues or some sort of evil force which prevents them.
0:15:45 Hobbes doesn’t assume that.
0:15:57 Hobbes thinks the default condition of humanity is conflict and that, therefore, one can fall into brutal and terrible and civilization forms of that conflict at any time.
0:16:03 And I would say that the history of the 20th century exhibited that in many ways.
0:16:12 The main destroyers, I guess, of human life and peace and the main agencies that inflict violence then were states.
0:16:16 But in the 21st century, they’re not necessarily states.
0:16:19 They can be terrorist organizations or criminal gangs.
0:16:31 And so anarchy has emerged now, I think, in the 21st century as at least as much of a threat to human security and human freedom as totalitarian and tyrannical states were in the 20th century.
0:16:35 And that’s, I think, a relatively new development in recent times.
0:16:39 And it’s one which, I think, makes Hobbes more topical, if you like.
0:16:52 I mean, when it was states that were committing vast crimes, his argument that the state should be unfettered in its pursuit of peace kind of seemed weak because states weren’t pursuing peace.
0:16:57 They were pursuing other gods and were killing countless or tens of millions of human beings.
0:17:05 Now, it’s more often the case that states are collapsed or are destroyed.
0:17:15 And sometimes they’re destroyed, as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Libya, for example, by the attempt to bring in a better kind of state.
0:17:25 And so I think one big error of contemporary liberalism, which has actually affected policies in America and elsewhere, has been the idea that nothing is worse than tyranny.
0:17:34 Whereas Hobbes’ insight, his relatively simple insight, but his rather profound one, is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny.
0:17:43 And what’s also true is that once you’re in an anarchical condition, once the state is broken down, once you’re in a failed state, it’s very difficult, actually, to reconstruct the state.
0:17:47 Well, in what sense has liberalism, for you, passed into the dustbin of history?
0:17:56 I mean, liberalism is still very much a thing, even if the shape of it has changed, and it is very much alive, if not terribly well.
0:18:02 So what does it mean to say that liberalism has passed away or died or however you like to put it?
0:18:04 Well, as I’ve said, there are still ideas.
0:18:05 Yeah, yeah.
0:18:12 I mean, you could go into a library and pull a book down, and it will describe medieval or ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy to you.
0:18:14 In that sense, these ideas are alive.
0:18:23 But in the actual world, the actual human world, liberal regimes or liberal societies or a liberal civilization, I think, is in the past.
0:18:30 So, well, let me give you a kind of rather obvious example, since we’re talking partly in an American context.
0:18:48 Thirty years ago, I wrote that I thought that what would happen, I quote myself, perhaps rather vainly, in this new book of mine, I wrote that what I expected to happen in the United States was that as more and more freedoms and activities became covered by rights, by legal rights,
0:19:00 and when some of those rights did not reflect a moral consensus in society, but there were rights to do things that were morally conflicted in society, like abortion.
0:19:03 Now, I’m pro-abortion, but that’s pro-choice, but that’s irrelevant here.
0:19:12 I thought that what would eventually happen would be that the judicial institutions, up to and including the Supreme Court, would be politicized.
0:19:14 They’d become objects of political capture.
0:19:33 Now, when I said that thirty-odd years ago, people like Dworkin, whom I knew in Oxford and others, were incredulous, because for them it was natural, it was some kind of settled fact of life that the majority of judges had become liberal and would stay liberal.
0:19:34 I never thought that for a moment.
0:19:47 I thought that a different dynamic would take place, that the more rights discourse and the practice of rights was extended to morally disputable and conflicted areas, the judicial institutions would be politicized and taken over.
0:20:01 So that, I think, is a feature of, if you think of a liberal regime or a liberal society, one of which there are judicial institutions that are not politically contested, that aren’t part of the political arena, then that’s passed away, that’s gone.
0:20:13 And so, I think, also, has the area of private life, of life in which what you say to friends or work colleagues is not sort of judiciable, is not actionable.
0:20:28 That’s much smaller than it used to be, certainly in Britain, which I know well, and I’m pretty sure it is in America, too, in that what used to be a private conversation could be cited against you because it deviates from some progressive norm.
0:20:40 So, the defining features of liberalism, not as a philosophy that exists in libraries, but as a practicing set of institutions and norms, has at least become weaker.
0:20:44 And I would say it’s more of a pretty well gone now, and I don’t expect it to come back.
0:20:57 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after a quick break.
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0:25:11 As you know, Nietzsche thought that liberalism was rooted in these Christian ideas about human equality and the value of the human person.
0:25:21 But modern liberals rejected the religious roots of these values while still attempting to preserve them on secular grounds.
0:25:25 That was a move he thought was destined to fail.
0:25:36 You seem to think that Hobbesian liberalism was intended to be a kind of political atheism, but it eventually shape-shifted into something like a political religion.
0:25:39 Only it didn’t recognize itself as such.
0:25:41 Is that sort of the core problem here?
0:25:42 Or one of them?
0:25:55 One of the core problems – I mean, I think I talk at some length in the book when I discuss the way in John Stuart Mill, who I think for many liberals is still a canonical liberal, or even the canonical liberal.
0:26:06 But he explicitly, undeniably, yet overtly adopted the view that from Auguste Comte, the French positive thinker, who was an anti-liberal, actually.
0:26:17 But anyway, he adopted from Comte the idea of a religion of humanity, which he said should replace all the existing religions and would be better than any of the existing religions.
0:26:22 He explicitly took that from Comte and cited and said that and wrote that in several places.
0:26:30 So, I think it was probably in Mill, at least in Britain, that liberalism became itself a kind of religion.
0:26:39 But, of course, there are still many respects in which it secularized monotheistic assumptions or values or premises.
0:26:59 So, I think it is undoubtedly the case, historically, that liberalism was a set of footnotes to, particularly the liberalism that later emerged as a kind of religion in its own right, to monotheism, to Christian and Jewish monotheism, and as a competitor to it.
0:27:07 And, basically, liberals, conventional liberals, 90% of liberals, are adamantly resistant to this view.
0:27:19 They adamantly insist that their views at no point depend on anything in theism, but they would say it’s a kind of genetic fallacy to think that just something may have come from theism.
0:27:20 It depends on that.
0:27:23 But it’s actually, I think, quite difficult.
0:27:33 You know, it has become more difficult for me to identify what I am, and it’s not just because the fault lines around me are so scrambled.
0:27:41 I think on some level, it’s because, and maybe I’m projecting a little bit onto Hobbes, I have a pretty tragic view of political life.
0:27:54 And because of that, I have a fairly modest understanding of the goal of politics, which is to navigate this tension between order and chaos with the understanding that nothing is permanent.
0:27:59 Everything is contingent, and history has no ultimate direction.
0:28:04 I mean, in so many ways, this was the political lesson of the 20th century.
0:28:13 And after a handful of decades of liberal triumphalism, which is barely a blink in historical time, by the way, people seem to have forgotten this.
0:28:16 And this is probably where you and I are maybe most aligned.
0:28:20 But you don’t think the belief in progress is a complete delusion, right?
0:28:22 I mean, the world has indeed gotten much, much better.
0:28:26 It’s just that that progress isn’t fixed, and it’s dangerous to believe otherwise.
0:28:27 Well, I don’t know.
0:28:35 I mean, what I say in the book is that progress meant in those who believed in it.
0:28:40 It didn’t mean that things would get better for a while and then get worse.
0:28:43 I guess it meant two things, both of which are false.
0:28:53 One is that progress was cumulative in the sense that what was achieved in one generation could be carried on in the next generation.
0:28:54 That’s what meliorism was.
0:29:04 Meliorism as a philosophy isn’t just the idea or the belief, which is some societies or some parts of history, some are better than others.
0:29:08 I think everybody would accept that, whatever their values are, actually.
0:29:13 But it was the belief that the human lot could be cumulatively improved.
0:29:19 That’s to say that certain achievements could be embedded and they would remain fixed.
0:29:21 You could have some retrogression.
0:29:27 You could go from stair seven on the escalator of progress back to stair three.
0:29:33 But then the stakers would start moving again and you would get back to seven.
0:29:35 And then you could get to eight or nine.
0:29:40 So you might make two steps back, but you would then make two or three steps forward.
0:29:41 That was meliorism.
0:29:43 And I think that’s clearly false.
0:29:46 You might be tempted to think that it was true if you thought of only the last 300 years.
0:29:51 But if you look at the larger, there was no apocalyptic revelation 300 years ago.
0:29:53 Some apocalyptic change in human events.
0:30:00 Human beings remained what they were before that in ancient Greece and ancient China and elsewhere.
0:30:01 And then medieval times.
0:30:07 They remained basically, I think, still what they were in their natures and appetites and so on.
0:30:10 And so meliorism in that sense is false.
0:30:21 Well, one thing that seems obvious enough at this moment is that liberal societies are experiencing a lot of internal disruption.
0:30:29 I mean, maybe the only thing that really unites the far right and the far left is their contempt for the society that produced them.
0:30:36 And you say something in the book that I think cuts right to the core of this.
0:30:40 And I just want to read it to you and ask you what you mean by that.
0:30:48 You say in its current and final phase, the liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom.
0:30:51 What does it mean to be possessed by an idea of freedom?
0:31:07 Well, the sense in which I use it in the book is the sense in which it was used by late 19th century intellectuals in Tsarist Russia were possessed by an idea of freedom, which is that an idea of freedom comes to be prevalent.
0:31:30 That means not the reduction of coercion by other human beings or by the state, not a set of procedures which enables people to live together, not a set of norms of tolerance or peaceful coexistence or even of mutual indifference, which enable people to live together in some rough and ready way.
0:31:32 Freedom means self-creation.
0:31:36 Freedom means creating yourself as the person you want to be.
0:31:40 And that I buy here, I think, is definitely not in Hobbes.
0:31:43 It’s not even in Locke or other liberals.
0:31:44 But it is in Mill.
0:32:00 It is in the chapter of Mill’s essay on liberty where he talks about individuality, where he says that anyone who inherits their way of living or what we would now call their identity from the society, from conventions, from traditions, from history, lacks individuality.
0:32:10 Individuality means being the author of your own life, changing it, fashioning it as if it was a work of art so that it fits something unique and authentic about yourself.
0:32:14 And I think that is what the West is what the West is possessed by.
0:32:30 Because the reason it’s an impossible ideal to realize is that if you want to author your life in a certain way and have a certain identity, it doesn’t mean much or anything unless that identity is somehow accepted by others as well.
0:32:34 Otherwise, it’s just a fiction of yours or a dream.
0:32:49 And that’s, I think, one of the things that’s provoked deep conflict in Western society because there is the underlying idea of a strong version of autonomy as self-creation has become not part of the far right or the far left.
0:32:52 It’s not that which has produced the present conflict.
0:32:54 It’s not the far right or the far left.
0:32:57 It’s become part of liberal thinking and practice itself.
0:33:04 And that, I guess, goes back to Mill and to romantic theorists and philosophers who Mill read.
0:33:10 It’s an element in the liberal tradition that wasn’t very strong or perhaps present at all there, but it’s very, very strong now.
0:33:22 So I guess that’s what it means by being possessed by an idea of freedom, that unless you can be what you want to be and unless you can actually somehow have that validated by others, you’re not free.
0:33:24 Well, that’s not really possible.
0:33:34 And I think the more traditional liberal idea of toleration, which is that you don’t have to be fully validated by other people and they don’t have to be fully validated by you.
0:33:42 They can simply, you can rub along as the different miscellaneous personalities and contingent human beings that you are.
0:33:48 That seems to me a more achievable ideal, but it’s not one that satisfies many people today.
0:33:50 Not many liberals, anyway.
0:33:56 Yeah, I mean, I think that the pursuit of individual freedom is good.
0:34:03 The desire to free ourselves from our inherited identities is good and necessary.
0:34:15 But we do seem to run into a ditch if we pursue it too far because the pursuit, as I think you’re saying, the pursuit of self-definition doesn’t end with the self because no one can be wholly self-defined.
0:34:18 So it becomes a political contest for recognition.
0:34:22 And I don’t think liberal politics are equipped to handle that very well or for very long.
0:34:32 Well, I agree with that, especially if it becomes a matter of rights, because then, of course, you have a perpetual conflict between the rights of rival groups, basically.
0:34:41 If these identities, especially if they’re framed in ways which are antagonistic or polarized, it’s a recipe for unending conflict.
0:34:49 I’m not sure, you see, I wouldn’t even go as far as you do in saying that is wanting to free oneself from traditional is necessarily good.
0:34:56 I think some people want it so they can go ahead and live like that in what used to be called a liberal society if they want to.
0:35:02 But others might be quite happy to just jog along with whatever they’ve inherited and be left.
0:35:04 I think people should have the choice is what I was saying.
0:35:05 I don’t mean imposing that.
0:35:06 No, no, not imposing.
0:35:07 But you think it’s, I don’t think it’s even better.
0:35:09 I don’t think one is better than the other.
0:35:11 I think they’re just preferences, actually.
0:35:24 And so I would never say, as Mill does, Mill constantly says, people who accept the definition of their inherited identities are, he doesn’t use the word inferior, but he says, he implies all the way throughout that they’re inferior.
0:35:34 He suggests that they’re not themselves, they obey a convent by rote, they’re puppet-like creatures, and so I wouldn’t say any of that.
0:35:39 There may be those, I mean, who want to construct themselves, turn themselves into works of art, if you like.
0:35:41 They can go ahead and try.
0:35:44 But quite a lot of people, at least in the past, didn’t want to do that.
0:35:48 And I think there are still quite a lot of people who don’t want to do that now.
0:35:55 And they should have as much freedom and as much respect, it’s an important point, I would say, as these others.
0:36:15 I mean, the key point, I guess, of the book is that the problems of liberal society or the fact that it’s passed away, as I claim, isn’t something that’s happened, as many conservatives or leftists or others say, because liberalism has been sidelined by Marxism or post-modernism or some other philosophy.
0:36:25 The problems of liberal societies come from within liberal societies, come from within liberal societies themselves.
0:36:36 And they are all problems, if you like, that liberalism has proved, the problems it’s generated, the contradictions it’s generated, have proved to be ones that it’s not very good at resolving.
0:36:58 This contemporary obsession with self-expression and self-creation and status and that sort of thing, do you see that as symptomatic of some deep failure of liberal politics, that this was bound to happen because liberal politics did not and cannot satisfy this kind of need?
0:37:09 No, I mean, that’s a kind of Hegelian view or a Fukuyama-like view, which says that what people want is recognition and that liberal societies haven’t been able to, etc., etc.
0:37:28 I think that the main challenges to liberal societies now are quite different, which is that the economic model of liberal society, which was adopted after the collapse of communism, after the Cold War, has left large parts of society behind, not just minorities.
0:37:37 There have been working-class communities in Britain and American parts of Europe, which have just been more or less abandoned.
0:37:54 But also, large parts of what used to be called the middle classes have not seen their incomes or their standards ever being improved much or at all in the last 30 years, while the societies as a whole have gotten considerably better.
0:38:16 So, I think the economic model, actually, of Western liberal societies, the dominant one after the Cold War, during the Cold War, we tend to forget now, although it’s within my lifetime, we tend to forget that after the Second World War, there was a model of social democracy in which the state intervened in many different ways to smooth out the hard edges of market capitalism and constrain it.
0:38:24 I think the abandonment of that model after the end of the Cold War has led to deep-seated contradictions, but maybe they’re not what you’re referring to.
0:38:26 They are, certainly in part.
0:38:43 I mean, I’m glad you said that, because one of the things that irks me about a lot of right-wing types who like to rail against identity politics or wokeism, a term I really hate to use because it has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness, in our discourse at least.
0:38:56 There is this whole materialist history to be told about the failures of liberal capitalism, and those failures have produced a lot of our political pathologies, and a lot of people on the right don’t want to hear about that, and I think that’s a huge mistake.
0:39:05 I agree with you, and in fact, I say in the book, it’s a very simple point, but very hard for many liberals, right-wing liberals in particular, to understand.
0:39:17 I say that what these people call populism is the political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies, which they don’t understand or deny.
0:39:19 That’s what populism is.
0:39:29 They talk about populism as if it was a sort of demonic thing that arose from nowhere, that it was a few demagogues that whipped it up out of practically nothing.
0:39:48 I’m not saying there aren’t demagogues, but the reason the demagogues were successful in 2016 and later, and not in 1950 or 60 or 70s in Europe and America, is that there were periods, certainly in Europe, and to some extent even in America, of social democracy,
0:40:01 in which there was a more extensive state, the Eisenhower state, the Rooseveltian state, even before that in America, which limited the impact of market capitalism on human well-being and provided some protection for its casualties.
0:40:17 If you scrap that, which was done to a considerable extent after the end of the Cold War, then over time you create large sections of the population which are suffering and dislocate or simply have no place in the productive process.
0:40:20 And you’ve got to expect some sort of kickback.
0:40:22 So that’s what liberals call populism.
0:40:28 They call populism the political movements around them that they have caused, which they don’t understand.
0:40:30 That’s what populism is, basically.
0:40:33 But you could never get that across to them, actually.
0:40:36 I’ve tried to do this, and they say, but it’s the demagogues.
0:40:37 It’s Trump.
0:40:38 It’s Forrest Johnson.
0:40:40 It’s Nigel Farage.
0:40:41 It’s all these wicked people.
0:40:44 If you could only shut these wicked people up, everything would be fine.
0:40:46 Or some of them say it’s the Russians.
0:40:59 So what they’re doing is they’re denying, or maybe just not understanding, maybe they’re just stupid, they’re just not understanding why these movements have arisen when they did.
0:41:10 I guess the problem for me, and this is why I’m still basically a liberal, is that I don’t think any of the conservative alternatives are preferable for a thousand different reasons.
0:41:14 And I’m not a fan of any imaginable version of authoritarianism.
0:41:17 So I don’t really have anywhere else to go, ideologically.
0:41:18 Liberalism, it is.
0:41:20 It’s up to you.
0:41:27 But it depends how far you think the degeneration of liberal society has gone and how far it can remain livable.
0:41:42 I mean, one of the things in Europe now is that the far right in many European countries, not in Britain yet, but in France and Germany, is now a very substantial political bloc.
0:41:51 In other words, there isn’t a flawed liberal society around us, uncontested, which can carry on pretty well whatever happens.
0:42:01 There are powerful movements, not exactly like in the 30s, but there are powerful far right movements, and in some countries also far left movements, which are challenging it.
0:42:07 So the liberal position might be a kind of luxury of history that is now passing away.
0:42:19 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with John Gray after one more quick break.
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0:45:07 For as long as I can remember, bread has given me hiccups.
0:45:11 I always get the hiccups when I eat baby carrots.
0:45:16 Sometimes when I am washing my left ear, just my left ear, I hiccup.
0:45:20 And my tried and true hiccup here is…
0:45:27 Pour a glass of water, light a match, put the match out in the water, drink the water, throw away the match.
0:45:31 Put your elbows out, point two fingers together and sort of stare at the point between the fingers.
0:45:35 It doesn’t work if you bring your elbows down, but it works.
0:45:38 Just eat a spoonful of peanut butter.
0:45:39 Think of a green rabbit.
0:45:42 I taught myself to burp on commands like…
0:45:46 Excuse me.
0:45:51 And I discovered that when I make myself burp, it stops my hiccups.
0:45:56 Unexplainable is taking on hiccups.
0:45:57 What causes them?
0:46:00 And is there any kind of scientific cure?
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0:46:29 I sometimes wonder how long America can continue to exist with the level of fragmentation and internal confusion that we have.
0:46:31 And the same is true of much of Europe.
0:46:38 How easy is it for you to imagine a political future where America and Europe cease to exist in any recognizable form?
0:46:41 Well, Europe doesn’t exist in any recognizable form.
0:46:44 There isn’t a European super-state, and there isn’t going to be.
0:46:50 What there are are a variety of nation-states with internal problems of various kinds.
0:46:52 And so I think that will basically continue.
0:46:54 They might shift into becoming a kind of…
0:47:00 I mean, what’s been happening in the last few years is that they’re shifting into becoming almost a hard-right block.
0:47:06 Not that the far-right has taken over, though some people might say it did in Hungary and did in Poland for a while.
0:47:10 But it’s the far-right which is shaping policy on lots of issues.
0:47:12 But it won’t become a super-state.
0:47:18 As to America, I don’t expect the American state to fragment in the way that by secession…
0:47:24 I mean, I know some Americans talk about that, and Texans and Californians and others.
0:47:25 I don’t actually expect that.
0:47:38 I would more expect a kind of semi-stable, semi-anarchy, in which there are lots of regions of American society and of cities and so on which are semi-anarchical.
0:47:42 That’s also true in places like Mexico, is it not, and parts of Latin America.
0:47:45 That could go on for quite a long time.
0:47:50 The big change, I guess, will be, if I’m right, it will be in the capacity of America to project its power globally.
0:47:52 I think that is steeply declining.
0:47:59 And I think that will, within your and my lifetime, will be actually seen to be greatly diminished.
0:48:07 Because although America still has an enormous amount, the U.S., an enormous amount of hard firepower, more than anywhere else, actually, China’s catching up.
0:48:13 But also, its capacity to use that hard firepower intelligently has not been very great.
0:48:30 You actually say something pretty interesting, if that’s the right word, about America in the book, which is that it’s become Schmittian in the sense that we believed, rather foolishly, that the law could protect liberal values from political contestation.
0:48:35 But the law has become indistinguishable from politics.
0:48:39 And Trump just pushed us right past the threshold.
0:48:48 And now we’re in, in my estimation, just a full-blown legitimacy crisis, where it doesn’t even matter who wins the next election.
0:48:50 Just something like 30% of the country.
0:48:51 Do you agree with that, by the way?
0:48:52 That is what I think.
0:48:53 But do you agree with that?
0:48:53 Do I agree with what?
0:48:56 That America’s in a legitimation crisis.
0:48:56 Oh, yes.
0:48:58 I’ve written this many times.
0:49:00 It doesn’t matter who wins the next election.
0:49:03 Something like 30% of the country will consider it illegitimate.
0:49:04 That’s that liberal politics, John.
0:49:07 That’s something much closer to war, really.
0:49:09 Well, it’s what Schmitt thought politics was.
0:49:10 Friends and enemies.
0:49:18 And I think the achievement of liberalism in the various liberalism was to replace the war by something else, or at least attenuate the war.
0:49:21 I mean, this was true, by the way, even in my time.
0:49:23 Let me give you an autobiographical example.
0:49:34 During the Thatcherite period, when I was an actor of Thatcherite, I remained, in terms of close friendship, with leading members, both theoretical members and even politicians, in the Labour Party.
0:49:49 So, we could meet, we could have dinner, we could talk with each other, we could share ideas, didn’t agree, didn’t share goals, thought that this great Thatcherite experiment could come to grief in various different ways, as I then came to think, and so on, for slightly different reasons.
0:49:54 But that’s actually, in America, I would say, it’s rare, I would think.
0:49:58 Is it not shown for people to interact in that way?
0:50:02 How many Trumpists have friendly relations with Washington Post liberals?
0:50:03 Not many, I think.
0:50:06 No, I’d say that’s, and that’s becoming increasingly so.
0:50:09 That’s unfortunate, because that’s the triumph of the Schmittian model.
0:50:13 It’s the triumph of friend-enemy relations.
0:50:19 And once you’ve gotten to friend-enemy relations, I think you’re in deep trouble, at least from a liberal standpoint.
0:50:25 It’s very hard to get back from that situation, because both sides want to win.
0:50:27 And that means it’s a sort of downward spiral.
0:50:31 Very hard to, I don’t say impossible, you know, something could happen that we haven’t thought of.
0:50:33 But it’s very difficult to get out.
0:50:35 So I agree completely with you.
0:50:41 And it’s one of the things I constantly say, which is that, in one sense, it’s very important who wins the American election next year.
0:50:45 Because if it’s Trump, the changes will be huge and quick, I believe.
0:50:53 But in another sense, it doesn’t matter at all, because whoever wins will not be accepted, as you say, by maybe a quarter or a third of American society, American voters.
0:50:58 So the legitimization crisis will just get worse, whoever wins.
0:51:06 That’s a very profound fact of the world, because the world still depends on a kind of shadow of Pax Americana.
0:51:09 It still depends on that, or has depended on that.
0:51:23 And as that is comprehensively removed, I mean, if Trump pulls American forces out of Europe, which, if he winds up NATO, if he pulls out of the Gulf, where there is now the new Middle Eastern war, that would be a very profound change.
0:51:31 Yeah, I think the unfortunate truth is that liberalism doesn’t really have a solution to a legitimacy crisis.
0:51:34 No, I agree with you entirely, which is why it’s so difficult to speculate.
0:51:46 I mean, what I don’t expect is any new order emerging from this, whether of the right or the left, but just of continued disintegration, not into civil war in America.
0:51:47 I’m not an American.
0:51:52 Sometimes since I’ve been there, I spent a long time in America in the 70s and 80s and 90s.
0:51:55 So I knew it better then than I do now.
0:51:58 But I don’t expect a full-scale civil war.
0:52:16 But I can imagine a fairly long period, decades, you know, maybe generations of civil warfare, when different identity groups, different political ideologies, different parts of America, states of America, American states and municipalities, just go their own way with lots of the conflicts that that involves.
0:52:33 That involves, but with a kind of area, which I think will still exist of high technology, an oligarchy, which preserves its own position one way or another, and the rest of society is doing as best it can.
0:52:35 I mean, large parts of it abandoned.
0:52:42 That’s what I sort of expect a kind of hybrid like that could go on for an awfully long time.
0:52:50 I don’t think America faces the internal pressures that, say, Russia does, because Russia has powerful ethnic divisions within minorities.
0:52:58 And the state apparatus in Russia, although more ruthless and more violent domestically, is much more corroded and much more corrupt.
0:53:07 So I think there is a real possibility that Russia could actually break up, whereas I don’t actually, you may be more optimistic or less hyperbolic, if you like, than I am.
0:53:09 I don’t see that as likely in America.
0:53:13 I think just continuing decay is a much more likely prospect.
0:53:15 Yeah, I would agree with that.
0:53:17 I have no idea what’s going to happen.
0:53:23 I take some solace in the fact that, at least in America, we’ve survived much, much worse in our past.
0:53:29 And, you know, we may just lumber along in this interregnum for a very, very long time.
0:53:31 It may be a very long interregnum.
0:53:32 It might be.
0:53:35 And look, maybe we need a new order.
0:53:48 My fear has always been the road from the present order to the next one is historically a rather bumpy one, and one probably none of us want to take.
0:53:53 And I’d prefer to fix the world we have before we tear it down.
0:53:54 But I don’t know.
0:53:58 Again, I’m not in the prophecy business, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.
0:54:04 I mean, I’ve been talking about this idea of politics as tragedy, too, for the last few years.
0:54:12 And what some liberals and others say is, they say, well, we want to get to a world where tragedy is diminished.
0:54:23 Now, very few of them say now where there is no tragedy, though some of them say we want to get to a world, some of them have said, in which the only tragedies are failed love affairs or familial disputes and so on.
0:54:26 We’ll never get to a world like that, I’m sure.
0:54:46 But what I think the danger of trying to eliminate tragedy in politics is that in order to survive in any political system and to gain the power and retain the power and exercise the power, you would need to get to a society in which tragedy is supposedly diminished or mitigated or abolished.
0:54:54 You have to enter into tragic choices which replicate the tragedy you’re trying to get rid of, trying to transcend.
0:55:09 So, for example, one of the things that happens in all revolutions, certainly in all the European, Russian, Chinese revolutions and so on, is that once the old regime fails, if it’s really knocked down and fails, then the revolutionary contestants fight among themselves.
0:55:11 And the one that prevails is the one that’s the most ruthless.
0:55:19 So that in Soviet Union, early Soviet Russia, which I know the best, the anarchists were the first to be suppressed.
0:55:22 Then the social revolutionaries, because they were less well organized, they were less ruthless.
0:55:29 So what actually produces the authoritarianism is the struggle by the revolutionary groups against each other.
0:55:30 And that always happens.
0:55:37 And that sort of illustrates my deeper point, which is that in order to get to a supposedly post-tragic world,
0:55:49 you have all kinds of ruthless, tragic decisions have had to be made about shooting anarchists en masse, assassinating, murdering, and putting in camps and so on, various dissidents.
0:55:55 And once you’ve done that, you’re back into the world where you’ve never left it, actually, of tragic choices.
0:56:05 So I would much prefer politics, which accepted that tragedy was primordial and omnipresent and would always be, but use this.
0:56:14 I mean, this is why I’ve had a kind of Occam’s razor approach to tragedy, which is the aim should be to minimize tragedies beyond what was strictly necessary.
0:56:19 And don’t go around, multiply them by trying to create new regimes all over the place.
0:56:21 Tragedy in politics isn’t imperfectibility.
0:56:23 We have no idea of perfection.
0:56:26 It isn’t that progress is always reversible and ephemeral.
0:56:28 It’s something deeper than that.
0:56:38 It’s that there are recurring situations in politics, and always will be, in which whatever we do has deep and enduring losses attached to it.
0:56:40 And I think that will always be the case.
0:56:42 So I think that’s what I prefer.
0:56:59 But I think in order to get a view of the world like that, you do actually have to go back before Christianity to maybe to the book of Job, but also to ancient Greek tragedy, where there’s no ultimate redemption at all, actually.
0:57:16 It recurs a bit in Shakespeare later on in a Christian civilization, but you have to go all the way back to the Greek tragic dramas to get that sense that human beings are not autonomous in the sense of being ever able to shape the choices they have to make.
0:57:23 Tragedies are unchosen choices, choices that human beings don’t want to make and would prefer not to make, but have to make.
0:57:30 Once again, the book is called The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism.
0:57:32 John Gray, always a pleasure.
0:57:33 Thank you for coming in today.
0:57:35 Great pleasure on my part as well.
0:57:37 Let’s have another conversation in a couple of years, shall we?
0:57:38 Let’s do it.
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0:00:39 There’s a lot of uncertainty when it comes to artificial intelligence.
0:00:44 Technologists love to talk about all the good these tools can do in the world.
0:00:46 All the problems they might solve.
0:00:56 And yet, many of those same technologists are also warning us about all the ways AI might upend society.
0:01:04 It’s not really clear which, if either, of these narratives are true.
0:01:08 But three things do seem to be true.
0:01:11 One, change is coming.
0:01:15 Two, it’s coming whether we like it or not.
0:01:20 Hell, even as I write this document, Google Gemini is asking me how it can help me today.
0:01:21 It can’t.
0:01:24 Today’s intro is 100% human-made.
0:01:31 And finally, it’s abundantly clear that AI will affect all of us.
0:01:39 Yet, very few of us have any say in how this technology is being developed and used.
0:01:43 So, who does have a say?
0:01:47 And why are they so worried about an AI apocalypse?
0:01:51 And how are their beliefs shaping our future?
0:01:57 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:13 My guest today is Vox host and editorial director, Julia Longoria.
0:02:27 She spent nearly a year digging into the AI industry, trying to understand some of the people who are shaping artificial intelligence, and why so many of them believe that AI is a threat to humanity.
0:02:33 She turned that story into a four-part podcast series called Good Robot.
0:02:39 Most stories about AI are focused on how the technology is built and what it can do.
0:02:51 Good Robot, instead, focuses on the beliefs and values, and most importantly, fears, of the people funding, building, and advocating on issues related to AI.
0:03:07 What she found is a set of ideologies, some of which critics and advocates of AI adhere to, with an almost religious fervor, that are influencing the conversation around AI, and even the way the technology is built.
0:03:22 Whether you’re familiar with these ideologies or not, they’re impacting your life, or certainly they will impact your life, because they’re shaping the development of AI as well as the guardrails, or lack thereof, around it.
0:03:29 So I invited Julia onto the show to help me understand these values, and the people who hold them.
0:03:39 Julia Longoria, welcome to the show.
0:03:41 Thank you for having me.
0:03:46 So, it was quite the reporting journey we went on for this series.
0:03:48 It’s really, really well done.
0:03:51 So, first of all, congrats.
0:03:51 Thank you.
0:03:56 Thank you for having me on that, and we’re actually going to play some clips from it today.
0:03:57 I’m glad you enjoyed it.
0:04:03 It’s, it’s, you’re in, I’m in that, you know, nerve-wracking first few weeks when it comes out, so it makes me feel good to hear that.
0:04:13 So, going into this thing, you wanted to understand why so many people are worried about an AI apocalypse.
0:04:18 And if you should be afraid, and if you should be afraid to, we will get to the answers, I promise.
0:04:23 But why were these the motivating questions for you?
0:04:29 You know, I come to artificial intelligence as a normie, as people in the know called me.
0:04:32 I don’t know much about it.
0:04:33 I didn’t know much about it.
0:04:38 But I had the sense, as an outsider, that the stakes were really high.
0:04:52 And it seemed like people talked about it in a language that I didn’t understand, and talking about these stakes that felt like really epic, but kind of like impenetrable to someone who didn’t speak their language.
0:05:02 So, I guess I just wanted to start out with, like, the biggest, most epic, like, almost most ignorant question, you know, like, okay, people are afraid.
0:05:06 There, some people are afraid that AI could just wipe us all out.
0:05:07 Where does that fear come from?
0:05:18 And just have that be a starting point to break the ice of this area that, like, honestly has felt kind of intangible and hard for me to even wrap my head around.
0:05:27 Yeah, I mean, I appreciate your normie status, because that’s the position almost all of us are in.
0:05:35 You know, we’re on the outside looking in, trying to understand what the hell is happening here.
0:05:40 What did being a normie mean to you as you waded into this world?
0:05:46 I mean, did you find that that outside perspective was actually useful in your reporting?
0:05:48 Definitely, yeah.
0:05:52 I think that’s kind of how I try to come to any topic.
0:05:59 Like, I’ve also reported on the Supreme Court, and that’s, like, another world that speaks its own dense, impenetrable language.
0:06:06 And, you know, like the Supreme Court, like, artificial intelligence affects all of our lives deeply.
0:06:20 And I feel like because it is such a, you know, sophisticated technology, and the people who work in it are so deep in it, it’s hard for normies to ask the more ignorant questions.
0:06:31 And so I feel like having the microphone and being armed with, you know, my Vox byline, I was able to ask the dumb question.
0:06:36 And, you know, I think I always said, like, you know, I know the answer to some of these questions.
0:06:41 But I’m asking on behalf of, like, the listener.
0:06:42 And sometimes I knew the answer.
0:06:43 Sometimes I didn’t.
0:07:04 I don’t know about you, but for me, and I’m sure a lot of people listening, it is maddening to be continually told that, you know what, we might be on the wrong end of an extinction event here, caused by this tiny minority of non-normies building this stuff.
0:07:13 And that it’s possible for so few to make decisions that might unravel life for the rest of us is just, well, maddening.
0:07:14 It is maddening.
0:07:15 It is maddening.
0:07:19 And to even hear it be talked about, like, this affects all of us.
0:07:22 So shouldn’t we, shouldn’t it be the thing that we’re all talking about?
0:07:29 But it feels like it’s reserved for a certain group of people who get to make the decisions and get to set the terms of the conversation.
0:07:39 Let’s talk about the ideologies and all the camps that make up this weird, insular world of AI.
0:07:44 And I want to start with the, what you call the AI safety camp.
0:07:46 What is their deal?
0:07:48 What should we know about them?
0:07:54 So AI safety is a term that’s evolved over the years.
0:08:07 But it’s kind of like people who fear that AI could be an existential risk to humanity, whether that’s like AI going rogue and doing things we didn’t want it to do.
0:08:13 It’s about the biggest worry, I guess, of all of us being wiped out.
0:08:18 We never talked about a cell phone apocalypse or an internet apocalypse.
0:08:22 I guess maybe if you count Y2K.
0:08:25 But even that wasn’t going to wipe out humanity.
0:08:30 But the threat of an AI apocalypse, it feels like it’s everywhere.
0:08:34 Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes.
0:08:39 From billionaire Elon Musk to the United Nations.
0:08:46 Today, all 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly have spoken in one voice.
0:08:48 AI is existential.
0:08:55 But then it feels like scientists in the know can’t even agree on what exactly we should be worried about.
0:08:59 And where does the term AI safety come from?
0:09:12 We trace the origin to a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who, you know, I think not all AI safety people today agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
0:09:16 But basically, you know, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about this fear.
0:09:24 Actually, as a teenager, he became popular, sort of found his following when he wrote a Harry Potter fan fiction.
0:09:26 As one does.
0:09:27 As one does.
0:09:31 It’s actually one of the most popular Harry Potter fan fictions out there.
0:09:34 It’s called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
0:09:36 And he wrote it almost as a way.
0:09:38 Love it.
0:09:44 He wrote it almost as a way to get people to think differently about AI.
0:09:53 He had thought deeply about the possibility of building a artificial intelligence that was smarter than human beings.
0:09:55 Like, he kind of imagined this idea.
0:10:02 And at first, he imagined it as a good robot, which is the name of the series, that could save us.
0:10:13 But, you know, eventually he realized, like, or came to fear that it could probably go very poorly if we built something smarter than us, that it would, it could result in it killing us.
0:10:18 So, anyway, that’s the origin, but it’s sort of, his ideas have caught on.
0:10:27 Open AI, actually, the CEO, Sam Altman, talks about how Eliezer was like an early inspiration for him making the company.
0:10:36 They do not agree on a lot because Eliezer thinks Open AI, the chat GPT company, is on track to cause an apocalypse.
0:10:42 But, anyway, that’s, that’s the gist, is like, AI safety is like, AI could kill us all.
0:10:43 How do we prevent that?
0:10:51 So, it’s really, it’s about, it’s focused on the sort of long-range existential risks.
0:10:51 Correct.
0:10:53 And some people don’t think it’s long-range.
0:10:57 Some of these people think that that could happen very soon.
0:11:02 So, this Yudkowsky guy, right, he makes these two general claims, right?
0:11:07 One is that we will build an AI that’s smarter than us, and it will change the world.
0:11:14 And the second claim is that to get that right is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.
0:11:19 Why does he think it’s so difficult to get this right?
0:11:22 Why is he so convinced that we won’t?
0:11:28 He thinks about this in terms of thought experiments.
0:11:38 So, just kind of taking, taking this premise that we could build something that outpaces us at most tasks.
0:11:47 He tries to explain the different ways this could happen with these, like, quirky parables.
0:11:54 And we start with his most famous one, which is the paperclip maximizer thought experiment.
0:12:00 Suppose, in the future, there is an artificial intelligence.
0:12:13 We’ve created an AI so vastly powerful, so unfathomably intelligent, that we might call it superintelligent.
0:12:18 Let’s give this superintelligent AI a simple goal.
0:12:21 Produce…
0:12:23 Paperclips
0:12:33 Because the AI is superintelligent, it quickly learns how to make paperclips out of anything in the world.
0:12:41 It can anticipate and foil any attempt to stop it, and will do so because its one directive is to make more paperclips.
0:12:50 Should we attempt to turn the AI off, it will fight back because it can’t make more paperclips if it is turned off.
0:12:55 And it will beat us because it is superintelligent and we are not.
0:12:57 The final result?
0:13:08 The entire galaxy, including you, me, and everyone we know, has either been destroyed or been transformed.
0:13:15 Into paperclips.
0:13:31 The gist is, we build something so smart we fail to understand it, how it works, and we could try to give it good goals to help improve our lives.
0:13:39 But maybe that goal has an unintended consequence that could lead to something catastrophic that we couldn’t have even imagined.
0:13:45 Right, and it’s such a good example because a paperclip is like the most innocuous, trivial thing ever, right?
0:13:47 Like what could possibly go wrong?
0:13:52 Is Yukowski, even within the safety camp, on the extremes?
0:13:57 I mean, I went to his website, and I just want to read this quote.
0:13:59 He writes,
0:14:07 It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight.
0:14:15 Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with slightly more dignity.
0:14:17 I mean, come on, dude.
0:14:19 It’s so dramatic.
0:14:23 I mean, that, he seems convinced that the game is already up here.
0:14:27 We’re just, we just don’t know how much sand is left in the hourglass.
0:14:31 I mean, is he on the margins even within this camp, or is this a fairly representative view?
0:14:32 Definitely, yeah.
0:14:32 Okay.
0:14:35 No, no, it’s, he’s on the margins, I would say.
0:14:37 It’s, he’s like an extreme case.
0:14:40 He had a big influence on the industry early on.
0:14:47 So, in that sense, he, he was like an early influencer of all these people who ended up going into AI.
0:14:50 A lot of people I talked to went into AI because of his writings.
0:14:53 I can’t square that circle, right?
0:14:54 If they were influenced by him.
0:14:55 No.
0:14:56 And this whole thing is, don’t do this, we’re going to die.
0:14:58 Why are they doing it?
0:15:03 To me, it felt like similar to the world of religion, almost like a schism.
0:15:10 Believers in the superintelligence, and then people who thought we shouldn’t try and build it, and then the people who thought we should.
0:15:21 Yeah, I mean, I, I guess with any kind of grand thinking about the fate of humanity, you end up with these, it starts to get very religious-y very quickly,
0:15:26 even if it’s cloaked in the language of science and secularism, as this is.
0:15:31 The religious part of it, I mean, did that, did the parallels there jump out to you pretty immediately?
0:15:43 That, that the people at the level of ideology are treating this, thinking about this, as though it is a religious problem or a religious worldview?
0:15:44 It really did.
0:16:01 It did jump out at me really early, because I think, like, going into reporting on a technology, you expect to be kind of bogged down by technological language and terminology that’s, like, in the weeds of whatever, computer science or whatever it is.
0:16:14 But, but the words that were hard to understand were, like, superintelligence and AGI, and then hearing about, you know, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, talking about a magic intelligence in the sky.
0:16:18 And the question I had was, like, what are these guys talking about?
0:16:21 But it was almost like they were talking about a god, is what it felt like to me.
0:16:23 Yeah.
0:16:24 All right.
0:16:27 I have some thoughts on the religious thing, but let me table that for a second.
0:16:30 I think we’ll, we’ll end up circling back to that.
0:16:35 I want to finish our little survey of the, of the tribes, the gangs here.
0:16:39 The other camp you talk about are the, the AI ethicists.
0:16:40 What’s their deal?
0:16:42 What are they concerned about?
0:16:48 How are they different from the safetyists who are focused on these existential problems or risks?
0:17:01 Yeah, the AI ethicists that I spoke to came to AI pretty early on, too, like, just a couple years, maybe after, a few years after Eliezer was writing about it.
0:17:02 They were working on algorithms.
0:17:06 They were working on AI as it existed in the world.
0:17:08 So that, that was a key difference.
0:17:11 They weren’t thinking about things in, like, these hypotheticals.
0:17:24 But AI ethicists, where AI safety folks tend to worry about the ways in which AI could be an existential risk in the future, it could wipe us out.
0:17:32 AI ethicists tended to worry about harms that AI was doing right now, in the present.
0:17:56 Whether that was through, you know, governments using AI to surveil people, bias in AI data, the data that went into building AI systems, you know, racial bias, gender bias, and ways that algorithmic systems were making racist decisions, sexist decisions, decisions that were harmful to disabled people.
0:17:57 They were worried about things now.
0:17:59 Tell me about Margaret Mitchell.
0:18:10 She’s a researcher and a colorful character in the series, and she’s an ethicist, and she coined the everything is awesome problem.
0:18:12 Tell me about that.
0:18:15 That’s an interesting example of the sorts of things they worry about.
0:18:22 Yeah, so Margaret Mitchell was working on AI systems in the early days, like long before we had ChatGPT.
0:18:28 She was working on a system at Microsoft that was vision to language.
0:18:35 So it was taking a series of images of a scene and trying to describe it in words.
0:18:43 And so she, you know, she was giving the system things like images of weddings or images of different events.
0:18:50 And she gave the system a series of images of what’s called the Hempstead Blast.
0:19:03 It was at a factory, and you could see from the sequence of images that the person taking the photo had like a third-story view sort of overlooking the explosion.
0:19:11 So it was a series of pictures showing that there was this terrible explosion happening, and whoever was taking the photo was very close to the scene.
0:19:20 So I put these images through my system, and the system says, wow, this is a great view.
0:19:22 This is awesome!
0:19:35 The system learned from the images that it had been trained on that if you were taking an image from, you know, from above, down below, like, that that’s a great view.
0:19:42 And that if there were, like, all these, you know, different colors, like in a sunset, which the explosion had made all these colors, that that was beautiful.
0:19:52 And so she saw really early on before, you know, this AI moment that we’re living, that the data that these systems are trained on is crucial.
0:20:01 And so her worry with systems like ChatGPT are, they’re trained on, like, basically the entire internet.
0:20:08 And so the technologists making the system lose track of, like, what kinds of biases could be in there.
0:20:13 And, yeah, this is, like, sort of her origin story of worrying about these things.
0:20:25 And she went and worked for Google’s AI ethics team and later was fired after trying to get a paper published there about these worries.
0:20:31 So why is the everything is awesome problem a problem, right?
0:20:39 I mean, I guess someone may hear that and go, well, okay, that’s kind of goofy and quirky that an AI would interpret a horrible image in that way.
0:20:44 But what actual harm is that going to cause in the world?
0:20:45 Right.
0:21:06 I mean, the way she puts it is, you know, if you were training a system to, like, launch missiles and you gave it some of its own autonomy to make decisions, like, you know, she was like, you could have a system that’s, like, launching missiles in pursuit of the aesthetic of beauty.
0:21:10 So, in a sense, it’s a bit of a thought experiment on its own, right?
0:21:19 It’s like she’s not worried about this in particular, but worried about implications for biased data in future systems.
0:21:21 Yeah, it’s the same thing with the paperclip example, right?
0:21:27 It’s just, it’s unintended, the bizarre and unintended consequences of these things, right?
0:21:34 What seems goofy and quirky at first may, a few steps down the road, be catastrophic, right?
0:21:38 And if you’re not, if you can’t predict that, maybe you should be a little careful about building it.
0:21:40 Right, right, exactly.
0:21:52 So, do the AI ethics people in general, do they think the concerns about an extinction event or existential threats, do they think those concerns are valid?
0:22:01 Or do they think they’re mostly just science fiction and a complete distraction from, you know, actual present-day harms?
0:22:10 I should say at the outset that, you know, I found that the AI ethics and AI safety camps, they’re less camps and more of a spectrum.
0:22:18 So, I don’t want to say that every single AI ethics person I spoke to was like, these existential risks are nonsense.
0:22:28 But by and large, people I spoke to in the ethics camp said that these existential risks are a distraction.
0:22:37 It’s like this epic fear that’s attention grabbing and, you know, goes viral and takes away from the harms that AI is doing right now.
0:22:45 It takes away attention from those things and it, crucially, in their view, takes away resources from fighting those kinds of harms.
0:22:46 In what way?
0:23:04 You know, I think when it comes to funding, if you’re like a billionaire who wants to give money to companies or charities or, you know, causes and you want to leave a legacy in the world, I mean, do you want to make sure that data and AI systems is unbiased or do you want to make sure that you save humanity from apocalypse, you know?
0:23:09 Yeah. I should ask about the effect of altruists.
0:23:15 They’re another camp, another school of thought, another tradition of thought, whatever you want to call it, that you talk about in the series.
0:23:19 How do they fit in to the story? Or how are they situated?
0:23:24 Yeah. So, effective altruism is a movement that’s had an effect on the AI industry.
0:23:37 It’s also had an effect on Vox. Future Perfect is the Vox section that we collaborated with to make Good Robot and it was actually inspired by effective altruism.
0:23:52 The whole point of the effective altruism movement is to try to do the most good in the world and EA, as it’s sometimes called, comes up with a sort of formula for how to choose which causes you should focus on and put your efforts toward.
0:24:07 So, early rationalists like Eliezer Yudkowsky encountered early effective altruists and tried to convince them that the highest stakes issue of our time, the cause that they should focus on is AI.
0:24:18 Effective altruism is traditionally known to give philanthropic dollars to things like malaria nets, but they also gave philanthropic dollars to saving us from an AI apocalypse.
0:24:27 And so, the AI safety industry is really a big part of how it was financed is that effective altruism rallied as a cause around it.
0:24:36 These are the people who think we really have an obligation to build a good robot in order to protect future humans.
0:24:40 And again, I don’t know what they mean by good.
0:24:44 I mean, good and bad, those are value judgments.
0:24:45 This is morality, not science.
0:24:49 There’s no utility function for humanity.
0:24:58 It’s like, I don’t know who’s defining the goodness of the good robot, but I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s as simple as some of these technologists seem to think it is.
0:25:03 And maybe I’m just being annoying philosophy guy here, but whatever, here I am.
0:25:12 Yeah, no, I think everyone in the AI world that I talk to just like was really striving toward the good, like whatever that looked like.
0:25:17 Like AI ethics saw like the good robot as a specific set of values.
0:25:23 And folks in effective altruism were also like baffled by like, how do I do the most good?
0:25:28 And trying to use math to, you know, put a utility function on it.
0:25:35 And it’s like, the truth is a lot more messy than a math problem of how to do the most good.
0:25:36 You can’t really know.
0:25:41 And yeah, I think sitting in the messiness is hard for a lot of us.
0:25:50 And I don’t know how you do that when you’re fully aware that you’re building or attempting to build something that you don’t fully understand.
0:25:51 That’s exactly right.
0:26:01 Like in the series, like we tell the story of effective altruism through the parable of the drowning child, of this child who’s drowning in a pond, a shallow pond.
0:26:04 Okay.
0:26:08 On your way to work, you pass a small pond.
0:26:14 Children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee deep.
0:26:17 The weather’s cool, though, and it’s early.
0:26:21 So you’re surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.
0:26:31 As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who’s flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond.
0:26:35 You look for the parents or babysitter, but there’s no one else around.
0:26:40 The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time.
0:26:43 If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.
0:26:53 Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago and get your suit wet and muddy.
0:27:01 By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work.
0:27:04 What should you do?
0:27:12 Are you going to save it even though you ruin your suit?
0:27:15 Everyone answers, yes.
0:27:23 And this sort of utilitarian philosophy behind effective autism asks, well, what if that child were far away from you?
0:27:25 Would you still save it if it was oceans away from you?
0:27:28 And that’s where you get to malaria nets.
0:27:32 You’re going to donate money to save children across an ocean.
0:27:38 But, yeah, this idea of, like, well, what if the child hasn’t been born yet?
0:27:43 And that’s the future child that would die from an AI apocalypse.
0:27:49 But, like, abstracting things so far in advance, you could really just justify anything.
0:27:51 And that’s the problem, right?
0:27:52 Yeah, right.
0:28:09 Of focusing on the long term in that way, the willingness to maybe overlook or sacrifice present harms in service to some unknown future, that’s a dangerous thing.
0:28:19 There are dangers in being willfully blind to present harms because you think there’s some more important or some more significant harm down the road.
0:28:27 And you’re willing to sacrifice that harm now because you think it’s, in the end, justifiable.
0:28:30 Yeah, at what point are you starting to play God, right?
0:28:37 So I come from the world of political philosophy, and in that maybe equally weird world.
0:28:48 Whenever you have competing ideologies, what you find at the root of those disagreements are very different views about human nature, really.
0:28:53 And all the differences really spring from that divide.
0:28:58 Is there something similar at work in these AI camps?
0:29:11 Do you find that these people that you talk to have different beliefs about how good or bad people are, different beliefs about what motivates us, different beliefs about our ability to cooperate and solve problems?
0:29:15 Is there a core dispute at that basic level?
0:29:22 There’s a pretty striking demographic difference between AI safety folks and AI ethics folks.
0:29:26 Like, I went to a conference, two conferences, one of each.
0:29:38 And so immediately you could see, like, AI safety folks were skewed white and male, and AI ethics folks skewed, like, more people of color, more women.
0:29:44 And so, like, people talked about blind spots that each camp had.
0:30:01 And so if you’re, you know, a white male moving around the world, like, you’re not fearing the sort of, like, racist, sexist, ableist, like, consequences of AI systems today as much, because it’s just not in your view.
0:30:30 It’s been a rough week for your retirement account, your friend who imports products from China for the TikTok shop, and also Hooters.
0:30:35 Hooters has now filed for bankruptcy, but they say they are not going anywhere.
0:30:39 Last year, Hooters closed dozens of restaurants because of rising food and labor costs.
0:30:47 Hooters is shifting away from its iconic skimpy waitress outfits and bikini days, instead opting for a family-friendly vibe.
0:30:54 They’re vowing to improve the food and ingredients, and staff is now being urged to greet women first when groups arrive.
0:30:57 Maybe in April of 2025, you’re thinking, good riddance?
0:31:01 Does the world still really need this chain of restaurants?
0:31:09 But then we were surprised to learn of who exactly was mourning the potential loss of Hooters.
0:31:11 Straight guys who like chicken, sure.
0:31:14 But also a bunch of gay guys who like chicken?
0:31:19 Check out Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:19 Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:21 Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:21 Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:21 Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:21 Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:21 Today Explained to find out why exactly that is, won’t ya?
0:31:36 Did all the people you spoke to, regardless of the camps they were in, did they all more
0:31:43 or less agree that what we’re doing here is attempting to build God, or something God-like?
0:31:45 No, I think no.
0:31:52 A lot of, I would say a lot of the AI safety people I spoke to like bought into this idea
0:31:55 of a super intelligence and a God-like intelligence.
0:31:59 I should say, I don’t think that’s every AI safety person by any means.
0:32:06 But AI ethics people for the most part just didn’t buy, just completely, everyone I spoke
0:32:14 to talked about it as being just AI hype as a way to like amp up the capability of this
0:32:18 technology that’s really in its infancy and is not God-like at this point.
0:32:27 I saw that when Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he was asked
0:32:30 whether they’re attempting to build God and he said, I have the quote here, I guess it comes
0:32:35 down to a definitional disagreement about what you mean by it becomes a God.
0:32:39 I think whatever we create will be subject to the laws of physics in this universe.
0:32:40 Okay.
0:32:44 So, so God or no God.
0:32:45 Right.
0:32:45 Yeah.
0:32:47 I mean, it’s, it’s, he’s called it though.
0:32:49 I don’t know if it’s tongue in cheek.
0:32:53 It’s all like very, you know, hard to read, but he’s called it like the magic intelligence
0:32:54 in the sky.
0:33:02 And Anthropics CEO has called AI systems machines of loving grace, which sounds like this is religious
0:33:03 language, you know?
0:33:04 Okay.
0:33:05 Come on now.
0:33:09 What in the world is that supposed to mean?
0:33:12 What is a machine of loving grace?
0:33:14 Does he know what that means?
0:33:21 I think it’s like this, you know, it’s a very optimistic view of what machines can do for
0:33:21 us.
0:33:26 Like, you know, the idea that machines can help us cure cancer.
0:33:27 And I don’t know.
0:33:32 I think that’s ultimately probably what he means, but it does, there’s an element of
0:33:36 it that I just completely, you know, roll my eyes, raise my eyebrows at where it’s like,
0:33:43 I don’t think we should be so reverent of a technology that’s like flawed and needs to
0:33:44 be regulated.
0:33:47 And I think that reverence is dangerous.
0:33:55 Why do you think it matters that people like Altman or the CEO of Anthropic have reverence
0:33:57 or have reverence for machines, right?
0:33:59 Who cares if they think they’re building God?
0:34:03 Does it matter really in terms of what it will be and how it will be deployed?
0:34:11 Well, I think that if you believe you’re, if you have these sorts of delusions of grandeur
0:34:16 about what you’re making and if you talk about it as a machine of loving grace, like, I don’t
0:34:23 know, it seems like you don’t have the level of skepticism that I want you to be having.
0:34:27 And we’re not regulating these companies at this point.
0:34:29 We’re relying on them to regulate themselves.
0:34:34 So yeah, it’s a little worrying when you talk about building something so powerful.
0:34:37 And so intelligent and you’re not being checked.
0:34:38 Yeah.
0:34:43 I don’t expect my toaster to tell me it loves me in the morning, right?
0:34:45 I just want my bagels crispy.
0:34:48 But I understand that my toaster is a technology.
0:34:49 It’s a tool with a function.
0:34:55 To talk about machines of loving grace suggests to me that these people do not think they’re
0:34:56 just building tools.
0:34:58 They think they’re building creatures.
0:34:59 They think they’re building God.
0:35:00 Yeah.
0:35:05 And, you know, Margaret Mitchell, as you’ll hear in the series, she talks about how she
0:35:07 thinks we shouldn’t be building a God.
0:35:13 We should be building, you know, machines, AI systems that are going to fulfill specific
0:35:14 purposes.
0:35:18 Like specifically, she talks about a smart toaster that makes really good toast.
0:35:26 And I don’t think she means a toaster in particular, but just building systems that are designed
0:35:32 to help humans achieve a certain goal, like something specific out in the world.
0:35:40 Whether that’s, you know, like helping us figure out how proteins fold or helping us figure out
0:35:45 how animals communicate, which are some of the things that we’re using AI to do in a narrow way.
0:35:52 She talks about this as an artificial narrow intelligence, as distinct from artificial general
0:35:58 intelligence, which is sort of the super intelligent God AI that’s, you know, quote unquote, smarter
0:36:00 than us at most tasks.
0:36:07 I mean, this is an old idea in the history of philosophy that God is like fundamentally
0:36:09 just a projection of human aspirations, right?
0:36:15 That our image of God is really a mirror that we’ve created, a mirror that reflects our idea
0:36:17 of a perfect being, a being in our image.
0:36:23 And this is something you talk about in the series, and that this is what we’re doing with AI.
0:36:31 We’re building robots in our image, which, you know, raises the question, well, in whose image exactly, right?
0:36:35 If AI is a mirror, it’s not a mirror of all of us, is it, right?
0:36:37 It’s a mirror of the people building it.
0:36:44 And the people building it are, I would say, not representative of the entire human race.
0:36:53 Yeah, you’ll hear in the series, like, I latched on to this idea of, like, AI is a mirror of us.
0:36:58 And that’s so interesting that, like, yeah, God, the concept of God is also like a mirror.
0:37:04 But if you think about it, I mean, large language models are made from basically the Internet,
0:37:09 which is, like, all of our thoughts and our musings as humans on the Internet.
0:37:14 It’s a certain lens on human behavior and speech.
0:37:22 But it’s also, yeah, like, AI is, like, the decisions that its creators make of what data to use,
0:37:25 of how to train the system, how to fine-tune it.
0:37:30 And when I used ChatGPT, it was very complimentary of me.
0:37:33 And I found it to be this almost, like, smooth, smooth…
0:37:35 It charmed you. You got charmed.
0:37:39 Yeah, I got charmed. It was, like, so, it gave me the compliments I wanted to hear.
0:37:48 And I think it’s, like, this smooth, frictionless version of humanity where it compliments us and makes us feel good.
0:37:53 And it also, like, you know, you don’t have to write that letter of recommendation for your person.
0:37:55 You don’t have to write that email.
0:37:57 You could just… It’s just smooth and frictionless.
0:38:10 And I worry that, you know, in making this, like, smooth mirror of humanity, like, where do we lose our humanity if we keep relying, like, keep seeding more and more to AI systems?
0:38:17 I want it to be a tool to help us, like, achieve our goals rather than, like, this thing that replaces us.
0:38:24 Yeah, I won’t lie. I mean, I did. I just recently got my chat GPT account.
0:38:29 And I did ask it what it thought of Sean Elling, host of the Gray Area podcast.
0:38:30 What did it say?
0:38:31 And it was very complimentary.
0:38:35 It’s extremely, extremely generous.
0:38:38 And I was like, oh, shit, yeah, this thing gets it.
0:38:41 Oh, this is okay. All right.
0:38:41 Maybe it is a god.
0:38:42 Now I trust it.
0:38:45 Clearly it’s an all-knowing, omnipotent one.
0:38:53 That’s what I came away with, like, you know, from the series and the reporting is, like, I think before I used to be very afraid of AI and using it and not knowing.
0:38:59 And now I feel, like, armed to be skeptical in the right ways and to try to use it for good.
0:39:03 Yeah. So that’s what I hope people get out of the series anyway.
0:39:15 Are you worried about us losing our humanity or just becoming so different that we don’t recognize ourselves anymore?
0:39:20 I am worried that it’ll just make us more isolated.
0:39:30 And it’s so good at giving us what we want to hear that we won’t, like, you know, find the friction, search for the friction in life that makes life worth living.
0:39:42 Yeah, yeah. So, look, I mean, the different camps may disagree about a lot, but they seem to converge on the basic notion that this technology is transformative.
0:39:45 It’s going to transform our lives.
0:39:55 It’s probably going to transform the economy and the way this stuff gets developed and deployed and the incentives driving it are really going to matter.
0:40:08 Is it your sense that checks and balances are being put in place to guide this transformation so that it does benefit more people than it hurts, or at least as much as possible?
0:40:11 I mean, was this something you explored in your reporting?
0:40:17 Yeah, I mean, you know, I think a lot of the people I spoke to really wanted regulation.
0:40:25 But I think ultimately, like, there isn’t really regulation in the U.S. on the AI safety front or the AI ethics front.
0:40:32 The technology is dramatically outpacing regulators’ ability to regulate it.
0:40:35 So, that’s troubling. Like, it’s not great.
0:40:42 I would imagine the ethicists would be a little more focused on imposing regulations now.
0:40:45 But it doesn’t seem like they’re making a lot of headway on that front.
0:40:48 I’m not sure how regulatable it is.
0:41:07 Yeah, I think that was one of my frustrations just listening to all this infighting was, like, I felt like these two groups that, like, they have a lot in common and they should be pursuing, like, a common goal of getting some good regulation, of, you know, having some strong safeguards in place for both AI safety and AI ethics concerns.
0:41:16 And ultimately, you know, we tell the story of how some of them did come together to write an open letter calling for both kinds of regulations.
0:41:21 But they’ve not, you know, and that’s encouraging to see people working together.
0:41:29 But ultimately, I don’t think they’ve made, at this point, strides in getting anything significant past.
0:41:30 You know, it’s interesting.
0:41:33 You’re reporting on this in the series.
0:41:38 And our employer, Vox, has a deal with OpenAI.
0:41:45 And in the course of your reporting, you were trying to find out what you could about that deal.
0:41:49 How did that go, if you’re comfortable talking about it?
0:41:50 Yeah, yeah.
0:41:55 Yeah, so our, the parent, we should say, the parent company of our Vox, Vox Media.
0:41:58 I know the language I need to use.
0:42:00 I have it down back, as you can’t tell.
0:42:14 But, you know, kind of shortly after we decided to tackle AI in this series, we learned that Vox Media was entering a partnership with OpenAI, the ChatGPT company.
0:42:20 We learned it meant that OpenAI could train its models on our journalism.
0:42:29 And I guess for personally, it just felt like I wanted to know if they were training on my voice, you know?
0:42:30 Yeah, me too.
0:42:33 That, to me, feels really, yeah, really personal.
0:42:35 Like, there’s so much emotional information in a voice.
0:42:42 Like, I feel very naked going out on air and having people listen to my voice.
0:42:46 And I spend so much time carefully crafting what I say.
0:42:52 And so the idea that they would train on my voice and I don’t do what with it.
0:42:52 I don’t know.
0:42:56 One of our editors pointed out, like, that’s part of the story.
0:42:59 You know, like, AI is, like, entering our lives.
0:43:03 More and more AI systems and robots are entering our lives and having this.
0:43:10 And for me personally, it’s like, yeah, like, literally, my work, our work is being used to train these systems.
0:43:13 Like, what does that mean for us, for our work?
0:43:20 It felt, and, you know, I reached out to Vox Media and to OpenAI for an interview.
0:43:27 And they both declined, which made it feel even, you know, just, you feel really helpless.
0:43:35 And, I mean, there’s not much more answers that I have than that.
0:43:39 Yeah, well, I mean, you even interview a guy on the show.
0:43:41 You know, he’s a former OpenAI employee.
0:43:46 You know, and you’re raising these concerns and he’s sort of dismissive of it, right?
0:43:49 Like, you know, whatever data they’re getting.
0:43:49 He just laughed at us.
0:44:00 I would be quite surprised if the data provided by Vox is itself very valuable to OpenAI.
0:44:03 I would imagine it’s a tiny, tiny drop in that bucket.
0:44:10 If all of ChatGPT’s training data were to fit inside the entire Atlantic Ocean,
0:44:17 then all of Vox’s journalism would be like a few hundred drops in that ocean.
0:44:22 Rightly, you’re like, well, fuck, it matters to me.
0:44:27 It’s my work, it’s my voice, and it may eventually be my job, right?
0:44:33 And the point here is, like, that this is a thing now that our job,
0:44:39 the fact that our job and many other jobs are already tangled up with AI in this way,
0:44:42 it’s just a reminder that this isn’t the future, right?
0:44:49 It’s here now, and it’s only going to get more strange and complicated.
0:44:50 Totally, yeah.
0:44:56 And I don’t know, I guess I understand, like, the impulse from, like, from Vox Media to be like,
0:45:01 okay, we want to have, we want to be compensated for, you know,
0:45:05 licensing our journalists’ work who work so hard and we pay them.
0:45:15 But it feels, yeah, it just feels like, it feels weird to not have a say when it’s the work you’re doing.
0:45:16 So, I have your views on online and online and online and online.
0:45:17 So, I have your views on online and online, like, online and online.
0:45:20 So, I have your views on online and online and online, like, online and online and online.
0:45:22 So, I have your views on online and online, like, online and online and online.
0:45:24 So, I have your views on online and online and online and online and online, like, online and online.
0:45:38 So, I have your views on online and online and online.
0:45:38 So, I have your views on online and online and online.
0:45:40 So, I have your views on online and online and online.
0:45:50 So, have your views on AI in general changed all that much after doing this series?
0:45:57 I mean, you say at the end that when you look at AI, just what you see is a funhouse mirror.
0:45:59 What does that mean?
0:46:07 AI, like a lot of our technologies and I guess like our visions of God, as you talk about, are a reflection of ourselves.
0:46:17 And so, I think it was a comforting realization to me to realize that, like, the story of AI is not some, like, technological story I can’t understand.
0:46:26 Like, the story of AI is a story about humans who are trying really hard to make a technology good and failing to varying degrees.
0:46:44 But, yeah, I think fundamentally the course of, like, reporting it for me just brought the technology down to earth and made me a little more empowered to ask questions, to be skeptical, and to use it in my life with the right amount of skepticism.
0:46:48 So, what do you hope people get out of this series?
0:46:54 Normies who enter into it, you know, without a sort of solidified position on it.
0:46:56 What do you hope they take away from it?
0:47:14 I hope that people who didn’t feel like they had any place in the conversation around AI will feel, like, invited to the table and will be more informed and skeptical and curious and excited about the technology.
0:47:18 And I hope that it brings it down to earth a little bit.
0:47:21 Julia Longoria, this has been a lot of fun.
0:47:23 Thank you so much for coming on the show.
0:47:27 And the series, once again, is called Good Robot.
0:47:28 It is fantastic.
0:47:30 You should go listen to it immediately.
0:47:31 Thank you.
0:47:32 Thank you.
0:47:41 All right.
0:47:43 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:47:53 If you want to listen to Julia’s Good Robot series, and of course you do, you can find all four episodes in the Vox Unexplainable podcast feed.
0:47:57 We’ll drop a link to the first episode in the show notes.
0:48:00 And as always, we want to know what you think.
0:48:04 So drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com.
0:48:12 Or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:48:17 And once you’re done with that, please go ahead, rate, review, subscribe to the pod.
0:48:19 That stuff really helps.
0:48:32 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Erica Wong, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:48:35 New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays.
0:48:37 Listen and subscribe.
0:48:39 The show is part of Vox.
0:48:43 Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
0:48:47 Members get access to this show without any ads.
0:48:49 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
0:48:53 And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

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0:00:20 What do you think about when you think about AI?
0:00:25 Maybe chatbots giving you new lasagna recipes,
0:00:29 research assistants helping you finish that paper.
0:00:33 Do you think about machines taking your job?
0:00:37 Maybe you think of something even more ominous,
0:00:41 like Skynet robots wiping out humanity.
0:00:46 If you’re like me, you probably think of all those things,
0:00:47 depending on the day.
0:00:50 And that’s sort of the point.
0:00:55 AI is not well understood, even by the people creating it.
0:00:58 And even though we all know it’s a technology
0:01:00 that’s going to change our lives,
0:01:03 that’s really all we know at this point.
0:01:10 So how do we confront this uncertainty?
0:01:13 How do we navigate the current moment?
0:01:17 And how do we, the people who have been told
0:01:19 that we will be impacted by AI,
0:01:21 but don’t seem to have much of a say
0:01:23 in how the AI is being built,
0:01:26 engage in the conversation?
0:01:31 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:01:45 Today’s guest is Jaron Lanier.
0:01:48 He’s a virtual reality pioneer,
0:01:50 a digital philosopher,
0:01:54 and the author of several best-selling books on technology.
0:01:57 He’s also one of the most profound critics
0:02:01 of Silicon Valley and the business model driving it.
0:02:04 I wanted to bring Jaron on the show
0:02:07 for the first episode of this special series on AI
0:02:10 because I think he’s uniquely positioned
0:02:14 to speak both to the technological side of AI,
0:02:16 what’s happening, where it’s going,
0:02:20 and also to the human side.
0:02:24 Jaron’s a computer scientist who loves technology.
0:02:29 But at his core, he’s a humanist
0:02:32 who’s always thinking about what technologies are doing to us
0:02:36 and how our understanding of these tools
0:02:39 will inevitably determine how they’re used.
0:02:43 Maybe what Jaron does the best, though,
0:02:45 is offer a different lens
0:02:47 through which to view these technologies.
0:02:51 We’re encouraged to treat these machines
0:02:54 as though they’re godlike,
0:02:56 as though they’re thinking for themselves.
0:03:01 Indeed, they’re designed to make you feel that way
0:03:04 because it adds to the mystique around them
0:03:07 and obscures the truth about how they really work.
0:03:12 But Jaron’s plea is to be careful
0:03:15 about thoughtlessly adopting the language
0:03:17 that the AI creators give us
0:03:18 to describe their creation
0:03:21 because that language structures
0:03:25 not only how we think about these technologies,
0:03:27 but what we do with them.
0:03:35 Jaron Lanier, welcome to the show.
0:03:36 That’s me. Hey.
0:03:39 So look, I have heard
0:03:43 so many of these big picture conversations about AI
0:03:48 and they often begin with a question
0:03:52 about how or whether AI is going to take over the world.
0:03:55 But I discovered very quickly
0:03:57 that you don’t accept the terms of that question,
0:03:59 which is why I’m not going to ask it.
0:04:01 but I thought it would be useful
0:04:03 as a beginning to ask you
0:04:05 why you find questions like that
0:04:07 or claims like that ridiculous.
0:04:10 Oh, well, you know,
0:04:12 when it comes to AI,
0:04:15 the whole technical field
0:04:16 is kind of defined
0:04:19 by an almost metaphysical assertion,
0:04:22 which is we are creating intelligence.
0:04:23 Well, what is intelligence?
0:04:26 Something human.
0:04:28 The whole field was founded
0:04:31 by Alan Turing’s thought experiment
0:04:32 called the Turing test,
0:04:37 where if you can fool a human
0:04:38 into thinking you’ve made a human,
0:04:40 then you might as well have made a human
0:04:42 because what other tests could there be?
0:04:45 Which in a way is fair enough.
0:04:45 On the other hand,
0:04:47 what other scientific field
0:04:50 other than maybe supporting stage magicians
0:04:53 is entirely based on being able to fool people?
0:04:53 I mean, it’s stupid.
0:04:56 Fooling people in itself accomplishes nothing.
0:04:58 There’s no productivity.
0:04:59 There’s no insight
0:05:01 unless you’re studying
0:05:03 the cognition of being fooled, of course.
0:05:06 So there’s an alternative way
0:05:07 to think about what we do
0:05:09 with what we call AI,
0:05:12 which is that there’s no new entity.
0:05:14 There’s nothing intelligent there.
0:05:16 What there is is a new
0:05:17 and in my opinion,
0:05:18 sometimes quite useful
0:05:21 form of collaboration between people.
0:05:23 If you look at something like the Wikipedia,
0:05:25 where people mash up
0:05:27 a lot of their communications into one thing,
0:05:30 you can think of that as a step on the way
0:05:32 to what we call large model AI,
0:05:34 where we take all the data that we have
0:05:35 and we put it together
0:05:39 in a way that allows more interpolation
0:05:43 and more commingling than previous methods.
0:05:47 And I think that can be of great use,
0:05:49 but I don’t think there’s any requirement
0:05:52 that we perceive that as a new entity.
0:05:53 Now, you might say,
0:05:54 well, what’s the harm if we do?
0:05:56 That’s a fair question.
0:05:57 Like, who cares?
0:05:58 If somebody wants to think of it
0:06:00 as a new type of person
0:06:02 or even a new type of God or whatever,
0:06:03 what’s wrong with that?
0:06:06 Potentially nothing.
0:06:08 People believe all kinds of things all the time.
0:06:12 But, in the case of our technology,
0:06:15 let me put it this way.
0:06:19 If you’re a mathematician or a scientist,
0:06:25 you can do what you do
0:06:27 in a kind of an abstract way.
0:06:28 Like, you can say,
0:06:30 I’m furthering math.
0:06:33 And, in a way, that’ll be true
0:06:35 even if nobody else ever even perceives
0:06:36 that I’ve done it.
0:06:37 I’ve written down this proof.
0:06:40 But that’s not true for technologists.
0:06:43 Technologists only make sense
0:06:46 if there’s a designated beneficiary.
0:06:49 Like, you have to make technology for someone.
0:06:52 And, as soon as you say
0:06:56 the technology itself is a new someone,
0:07:00 you stop making sense as a technologist.
0:07:01 Right?
0:07:03 Let me actually take up that question
0:07:04 that you just posed a second ago
0:07:05 with a thought,
0:07:07 I’ve heard from you,
0:07:09 which is something to the effect of,
0:07:11 I think the way you put it is
0:07:13 the easiest way to mismanage a technology
0:07:15 is to misunderstand it.
0:07:17 So, to answer your question…
0:07:18 Sounds like me, I guess.
0:07:19 Yeah. Okay.
0:07:22 If we make the mistake,
0:07:23 which is now common,
0:07:26 to insist that AI is, in fact,
0:07:28 some kind of god or creature
0:07:30 or entity or oracle,
0:07:31 whatever term you prefer,
0:07:33 instead of a tool as you define it,
0:07:34 the implication is that
0:07:37 that would be a consequential mistake, right?
0:07:39 That we will mismanage the technology
0:07:40 by misunderstanding it.
0:07:41 So, is that not quite right?
0:07:42 Am I not quite understanding?
0:07:43 No, I think that’s right.
0:07:46 I think when you treat the technology
0:07:47 as its own beneficiary,
0:07:49 you miss a lot of opportunities
0:07:50 to make it better.
0:07:52 Like, I see this in AI all the time.
0:07:53 I see people saying,
0:07:55 well, if we did this,
0:07:56 it would pass the Turing test better,
0:07:57 and if we did that,
0:07:58 it would seem more like
0:07:59 it was an independent mind.
0:08:01 But those are all goals
0:08:01 that are different
0:08:04 from it being economically useful.
0:08:05 They’re different from it
0:08:08 being useful to any particular user.
0:08:09 They’re just these weird,
0:08:12 to me, almost religious ritual goals
0:08:13 or something.
0:08:15 like they, and so every time
0:08:16 you’re devoting yourself to that,
0:08:18 it means you’re not devoting yourself
0:08:20 to making it better.
0:08:22 Like, an example is,
0:08:25 we have, in my view,
0:08:28 deliberately designed large model AI
0:08:32 to obscure the original human sources
0:08:34 of the data that the AI is trained on
0:08:36 to help create this illusion
0:08:37 of the new entity.
0:08:38 But when we do that,
0:08:41 we make it harder to do quality control.
0:08:43 We make it harder to do authentication
0:08:48 and to detect malicious uses of the model
0:08:52 because we can’t tell what the intent is,
0:08:54 what data it’s drawing upon.
0:08:56 We’re sort of willfully making ourselves
0:08:58 kind of blind in a way
0:09:00 that we probably don’t really need to.
0:09:01 And I really want to emphasize
0:09:03 from a metaphysical point of view,
0:09:05 I can’t prove,
0:09:06 and neither can anyone else,
0:09:08 that a computer is alive or not
0:09:09 or conscious or not or whatever.
0:09:11 I mean, all that stuff
0:09:13 is always going to be a matter of faith.
0:09:15 That’s just the way it is.
0:09:17 That’s what we got around here.
0:09:19 But what I can say
0:09:21 is that this emphasis
0:09:22 on trying to make the models
0:09:25 seem like they’re freestanding new entities
0:09:27 does blind us
0:09:29 to some ways we could make them better.
0:09:30 And so I think, like, why bother?
0:09:32 What do we get out of that?
0:09:32 Not a lot.
0:09:34 So do you think maybe
0:09:35 the cardinal mistake
0:09:37 with a lot of this kind of thinking
0:09:38 is to assume
0:09:42 that artificial intelligence
0:09:43 is something that’s in competition
0:09:45 with human intelligence
0:09:46 and human abilities,
0:09:47 that that kind of misunderstanding
0:09:48 sets us off on a course
0:09:50 for a lot of other kinds
0:09:51 of misunderstandings?
0:09:53 I wouldn’t choose that language
0:09:54 because then the natural thing
0:09:55 somebody’s going to say
0:09:56 who’s a true believer
0:09:57 that the AI is coming alive,
0:09:58 they’re going to say,
0:09:59 yeah, you’re right.
0:10:00 It’s not competition.
0:10:01 We’re going to align them
0:10:02 and they’re going to be
0:10:03 our collaborators
0:10:05 or whatever.
0:10:06 So that, to me,
0:10:07 doesn’t go far enough.
0:10:09 My own way of thinking
0:10:11 is that I’m able
0:10:12 to improve the models
0:10:13 when I say
0:10:14 there’s no new entity there.
0:10:15 I just say they don’t,
0:10:15 they’re not there.
0:10:16 They don’t exist
0:10:17 as separate entities.
0:10:18 They’re just collaborations
0:10:19 of people.
0:10:20 I have to go that far
0:10:22 to get the clarity
0:10:23 to improve them.
0:10:26 It might be a little late
0:10:27 in the language game
0:10:29 to replace a term
0:10:30 like artificial intelligence,
0:10:30 but if you could,
0:10:31 do you have a better one?
0:10:34 I have had the experience
0:10:35 of coming up with terms
0:10:37 that were widely adopted
0:10:37 in society.
0:10:38 I came up with
0:10:39 virtual reality
0:10:40 and some other things
0:10:41 when I was young
0:10:44 and I have seen that
0:10:45 even when you get
0:10:46 to coin the term,
0:10:47 you don’t get to define it
0:10:50 and I don’t love
0:10:51 the way people think
0:10:52 of virtual reality
0:10:53 typically today.
0:10:54 It’s lost a little bit
0:10:55 of its old humanism,
0:10:56 I would say.
0:10:59 So that experience
0:11:00 has led me to feel
0:11:01 that it’s really
0:11:02 younger generations
0:11:03 who should come up
0:11:03 with their own terms.
0:11:04 So what I would prefer
0:11:06 to see is younger people
0:11:07 reject our terms
0:11:09 and come up
0:11:09 with their own.
0:11:11 Fair enough.
0:11:14 I’ve read a lot
0:11:14 of your work
0:11:15 on AI
0:11:17 and I’ve listened
0:11:19 to a lot of your interviews
0:11:21 and I take your point
0:11:22 that AI
0:11:25 is a distillation
0:11:26 of all these human inputs
0:11:27 fundamentally.
0:11:30 but for you at what point
0:11:32 does or can complexity
0:11:35 start looking like autonomy
0:11:37 and what would autonomy
0:11:38 even mean
0:11:39 that the thing starts
0:11:40 making its own decisions
0:11:41 and is that the simple
0:11:42 definition of that?
0:11:43 This is an obsession
0:11:44 that people have
0:11:45 but you have to understand
0:11:46 it’s a religious
0:11:48 and entirely subjective
0:11:50 or sort of cultural obsession
0:11:51 not a scientific one.
0:11:52 It’s your judgment
0:11:54 of how you want to see
0:11:55 the start of autonomy.
0:11:58 So I love complex systems
0:11:59 and I love different levels
0:12:00 of description
0:12:01 and I love the independence
0:12:03 of different levels
0:12:03 of grantedness
0:12:04 in physics
0:12:06 so I’m utterly
0:12:07 as obsessed
0:12:07 as anyone
0:12:08 with that
0:12:10 but it’s important
0:12:10 to distinguish
0:12:12 that fascination
0:12:12 which is a scientific
0:12:13 fascination
0:12:14 with the question
0:12:16 of does crossing
0:12:17 some threshold
0:12:18 make something
0:12:19 human or not?
0:12:21 because the question
0:12:22 of humanness
0:12:24 or of becoming
0:12:24 an entity
0:12:26 that we care about
0:12:27 in our planning
0:12:27 becoming
0:12:28 creating something
0:12:29 that itself
0:12:30 is a beneficiary
0:12:31 of our technology
0:12:32 that question
0:12:33 has to be
0:12:34 a matter of faith
0:12:36 we just have
0:12:36 to accept
0:12:38 that our culture
0:12:39 our law
0:12:40 our ability
0:12:41 to be technologists
0:12:42 ultimately rests
0:12:43 on values
0:12:45 that in a sense
0:12:45 we pull out
0:12:46 of our asses
0:12:47 or if you like
0:12:48 we have to be
0:12:49 a little bit mystical
0:12:50 in order to create
0:12:51 the ground layer
0:12:52 in order to be
0:12:52 then rational
0:12:53 as technologists
0:12:54 in a way
0:12:55 I wish it wasn’t so
0:12:56 it sort of sucks
0:12:57 but it’s just the truth
0:12:57 and the sooner
0:12:58 we accept that
0:12:59 the better off
0:13:00 we’ll be
0:13:00 and the more honest
0:13:01 we’ll be
0:13:02 and I’m okay with it
0:13:03 why?
0:13:05 because
0:13:06 if I’m designing
0:13:07 AI for AI’s sake
0:13:08 I’m talking nonsense
0:13:09 you know
0:13:10 like
0:13:11 right now
0:13:13 it’s very expensive
0:13:13 to compute AI
0:13:14 so what percentage
0:13:16 of that expense
0:13:17 it goes into
0:13:18 creating the illusion
0:13:19 so that you can believe
0:13:20 it’s sort of
0:13:21 another person
0:13:22 when you use chat
0:13:23 how much electricity
0:13:24 is being spent
0:13:25 so that the way
0:13:26 it talks to you
0:13:27 feels like it’s a person
0:13:28 a lot
0:13:28 you know
0:13:29 and it’s a waste
0:13:30 like why are we doing that
0:13:31 why are we doing
0:13:32 why are we creating
0:13:34 a carbon footprint
0:13:36 for the benefit
0:13:38 of some non-entity
0:13:39 in order to fool humans
0:13:40 like it’s
0:13:40 it’s ridiculous
0:13:42 but we don’t see that
0:13:43 because we have this
0:13:45 religious imperative
0:13:46 in the tech
0:13:48 cultural world
0:13:49 to create
0:13:50 this new life
0:13:52 but it’s entirely
0:13:53 a matter of
0:13:54 our own perception
0:13:55 there’s no test
0:13:55 for it
0:13:56 other than the
0:13:56 Turing test
0:13:57 which is no test
0:13:57 at all
0:13:58 I mean
0:13:59 we still don’t even
0:14:01 have a real
0:14:01 definition
0:14:03 of consciousness
0:14:05 and I hear all
0:14:05 these discussions
0:14:07 about machine learning
0:14:09 and human intelligence
0:14:09 and the differences
0:14:11 and I continue
0:14:12 to have no idea
0:14:13 when something
0:14:14 stops being a
0:14:15 simulacrum of intelligence
0:14:16 and becomes the real thing
0:14:17 I still don’t quite know
0:14:18 when something can
0:14:19 reasonably be called
0:14:20 sentient
0:14:21 or intelligent
0:14:22 but maybe the question
0:14:22 doesn’t even matter
0:14:24 maybe it’s enough
0:14:25 for us to think it does
0:14:26 right
0:14:27 so the problem
0:14:28 in what you just
0:14:29 said is the word
0:14:29 still
0:14:32 like it’s a
0:14:33 this
0:14:35 lack of knowledge
0:14:36 is structural
0:14:37 you’re not going
0:14:38 to overcome it
0:14:39 you can pretend
0:14:40 you have
0:14:40 but you’re not going
0:14:41 to
0:14:42 this is genuinely
0:14:43 a matter of faith
0:14:43 you know
0:14:44 and
0:14:46 it’s a very
0:14:46 old discussion
0:14:47 when it comes
0:14:48 to God
0:14:49 but
0:14:50 it’s a new
0:14:50 discussion
0:14:51 when it comes
0:14:52 to each other
0:14:53 or to AIs
0:14:54 and
0:14:54 you know
0:14:55 like
0:14:56 faith is okay
0:14:56 we can live
0:14:57 with faith
0:14:57 we just have
0:14:58 to be honest
0:14:59 about it
0:14:59 and I think
0:15:01 being dishonest
0:15:01 and saying
0:15:02 oh
0:15:03 it’s not faith
0:15:04 I have this
0:15:04 rational proof
0:15:05 of something
0:15:07 it’s not
0:15:08 dishonesty
0:15:08 is probably
0:15:09 not good
0:15:10 especially
0:15:10 if you’re
0:15:10 trying to do
0:15:11 science or technology
0:15:15 maybe we just
0:15:17 maybe we just
0:15:18 hold on
0:15:19 maybe
0:15:20 I’m going to
0:15:21 say this
0:15:23 we probably
0:15:23 just have to
0:15:24 hold on to
0:15:24 some notion
0:15:25 that there’s
0:15:26 something
0:15:26 fundamentally
0:15:27 special
0:15:28 about human
0:15:29 consciousness
0:15:30 and that even
0:15:30 if on some
0:15:31 purely empirical
0:15:31 level
0:15:32 that’s not
0:15:32 even true
0:15:33 maybe believing
0:15:34 that it is
0:15:34 is essential
0:15:36 to our
0:15:36 survival
0:15:37 I don’t
0:15:37 think you
0:15:38 can rationally
0:15:40 proceed
0:15:41 as an
0:15:41 as an
0:15:42 acting
0:15:42 technologist
0:15:44 without
0:15:45 an
0:15:46 irrational
0:15:47 belief
0:15:48 that people
0:15:49 are special
0:15:50 because once again
0:15:50 then you have
0:15:51 no recipient
0:15:52 and if you
0:15:53 say well
0:15:53 there’s going
0:15:54 to be
0:15:54 no belief
0:15:55 all the way
0:15:55 to the bottom
0:15:56 it’s just
0:15:56 going to be
0:15:57 rationality
0:15:57 forever
0:15:58 I mean
0:15:59 it doesn’t
0:15:59 work
0:16:00 rationality
0:16:01 never creates
0:16:01 a total
0:16:02 enclosed
0:16:02 system
0:16:04 we kind
0:16:05 of float
0:16:05 in a sea
0:16:05 of mystery
0:16:06 and we
0:16:06 have like
0:16:07 this belief
0:16:07 that lets
0:16:08 us have
0:16:08 a footing
0:16:09 and it’s
0:16:10 our job
0:16:11 to acknowledge
0:16:11 that even
0:16:12 if we’re
0:16:12 uncomfortable
0:16:13 with it
0:16:15 can I try
0:16:15 another angle
0:16:16 on you
0:16:16 yeah
0:16:17 do you know
0:16:17 my
0:16:17 okay
0:16:18 so there’s
0:16:18 another
0:16:19 argument
0:16:19 about the
0:16:20 turing test
0:16:20 right
0:16:21 turing test
0:16:22 you have a
0:16:23 person on a
0:16:23 computer
0:16:23 they’re each
0:16:24 trying to fool
0:16:24 a judge
0:16:25 and at the
0:16:26 moment the
0:16:26 judge can’t
0:16:26 tell them
0:16:27 apart
0:16:27 you say
0:16:28 well we
0:16:28 might as
0:16:29 well call
0:16:30 the computer
0:16:31 human because
0:16:31 what other
0:16:31 tests can
0:16:32 there be
0:16:32 that’s the
0:16:32 best we’ll
0:16:33 get
0:16:33 okay
0:16:35 so the
0:16:36 problem with
0:16:36 the test
0:16:37 is that it
0:16:38 measures whether
0:16:38 there’s a
0:16:38 differential
0:16:39 but it
0:16:40 doesn’t tell
0:16:40 you whether
0:16:41 the computer
0:16:42 got smarter
0:16:42 or the
0:16:42 human got
0:16:43 stupider
0:16:44 it doesn’t
0:16:45 tell you if
0:16:45 the computer
0:16:46 became more
0:16:47 human or if
0:16:47 the human
0:16:48 became less
0:16:48 human in
0:16:49 any sense
0:16:49 whatever that
0:16:50 might be
0:16:51 so there’s
0:16:52 two humans
0:16:52 the contestant
0:16:53 and the judge
0:16:53 and one
0:16:54 computer
0:16:54 therefore
0:16:56 and this is
0:16:56 meant to be
0:16:57 funny but it’s
0:16:57 also kind of
0:16:57 real
0:16:58 there’s a
0:16:58 two-thirds
0:16:59 chance that
0:16:59 it was a
0:17:00 human that
0:17:00 got stupider
0:17:01 rather than
0:17:01 a computer
0:17:01 that got
0:17:02 smarter
0:17:04 and I
0:17:04 see that
0:17:05 borne out
0:17:05 like when I
0:17:06 look at
0:17:06 social media
0:17:07 and I see
0:17:08 people interacting
0:17:08 with the AI
0:17:09 algorithms that
0:17:10 are supposed to
0:17:10 guide their
0:17:11 attention
0:17:12 I see them
0:17:13 getting stupider
0:17:13 two-thirds
0:17:14 of the time
0:17:14 but then you
0:17:15 know sometimes
0:17:16 really good
0:17:16 stuff happens
0:17:17 so I think
0:17:18 this general
0:17:19 spread of most
0:17:20 of the time
0:17:20 things get
0:17:21 worse but then
0:17:21 there’s some
0:17:22 stuff that’s
0:17:22 really cool
0:17:24 tends to be
0:17:24 true when you
0:17:25 believe in AI
0:17:26 and so
0:17:27 I would
0:17:28 say don’t
0:17:28 believe in
0:17:28 it and
0:17:30 some people
0:17:30 are still
0:17:31 getting it
0:17:31 stupider
0:17:31 because that’s
0:17:32 how we are
0:17:33 but I think
0:17:33 we can get to
0:17:34 the point where
0:17:34 the majority
0:17:35 gets better
0:17:36 instead of
0:17:37 stupider but
0:17:37 right now I
0:17:37 think we’re
0:17:38 at two-thirds
0:17:39 get stupider
0:17:40 yeah that
0:17:41 math checks out
0:17:41 to me
0:17:42 great I
0:17:43 think that’s
0:17:43 a rigorous
0:17:44 argument that’s
0:17:44 what you call
0:17:45 a rigorous
0:17:46 quantitative
0:17:47 theoretically and
0:17:48 empirically supported
0:17:49 argument right
0:17:49 there
0:17:50 so do you
0:17:51 think all
0:17:53 the anxieties
0:17:54 including from
0:17:55 serious people
0:17:56 in in the
0:17:57 world of AI
0:17:58 all the worries
0:18:00 about human
0:18:01 extinction and
0:18:01 mitigating the
0:18:02 risks thereof
0:18:04 does that is
0:18:04 that religious
0:18:06 hysteria to
0:18:06 you or does
0:18:07 that feel
0:18:09 what drives me
0:18:09 crazy about
0:18:10 this I this
0:18:11 is my world
0:18:11 you know so I
0:18:12 talk to the
0:18:12 people who
0:18:13 believe that
0:18:14 stuff all the
0:18:15 time and
0:18:16 increasingly a
0:18:16 lot of them
0:18:17 believe that it
0:18:17 would be good to
0:18:18 wipe out people
0:18:19 and that the AI
0:18:19 future would be a
0:18:20 better one and
0:18:21 that we should
0:18:22 wear a disposable
0:18:24 temporary container
0:18:25 for the birth of
0:18:26 AI I hear that
0:18:27 opinion quite a lot
0:18:27 that’s a real
0:18:28 opinion held by
0:18:29 real people
0:18:32 many many I
0:18:33 mean like the
0:18:34 other day I was
0:18:35 at a lunch in
0:18:36 Palo Alto and
0:18:36 there were some
0:18:37 young AI
0:18:38 scientists there
0:18:39 who were saying
0:18:41 that they would
0:18:42 never have a
0:18:43 bio baby because
0:18:43 as soon as you
0:18:44 have a bio baby
0:18:44 you get the
0:18:46 mind virus of
0:18:48 the bio world
0:18:48 and that when
0:18:49 you have the
0:18:50 bio mind virus
0:18:50 you become
0:18:51 committed to
0:18:52 your human baby
0:18:52 but it’s much
0:18:53 more important to
0:18:54 be committed to
0:18:54 the AI of the
0:18:56 future and so
0:18:57 to have human
0:18:58 babies is
0:18:58 fundamentally
0:18:59 unethical
0:19:01 now okay in
0:19:01 this particular
0:19:03 case this was
0:19:03 a young man
0:19:04 with a female
0:19:05 partner who
0:19:06 wanted a kid
0:19:06 and what I’m
0:19:07 thinking is this
0:19:07 is just another
0:19:08 variation of the
0:19:09 very very old
0:19:10 story of young
0:19:11 men attempting to
0:19:12 put off the baby
0:19:13 thing with their
0:19:14 sexual partner as
0:19:15 long as possible
0:19:16 because I’ve been
0:19:16 there and many of
0:19:16 us have been
0:19:17 there so in a
0:19:18 way I think it’s
0:19:19 not anything new
0:19:19 and it’s just the
0:19:20 old thing but
0:19:21 it’s a very
0:19:23 common attitude
0:19:25 not the dominant
0:19:25 one I would say
0:19:26 the dominant one
0:19:27 is that the
0:19:28 super AI will
0:19:29 turn into this
0:19:30 god thing that’ll
0:19:31 save us and
0:19:32 will either upload
0:19:33 us to be immortal
0:19:34 or solve all our
0:19:34 problems at the
0:19:35 very least or
0:19:36 something create
0:19:37 super abundance at
0:19:38 the very very very
0:19:41 least and I
0:19:45 I have to say
0:19:45 there’s a bit of
0:19:46 an inverse
0:19:47 proportion here
0:19:48 between the people
0:19:49 who directly work
0:19:50 in making AI
0:19:51 systems and then
0:19:51 the people who
0:19:52 are adjacent to
0:19:54 them who have
0:19:54 these various
0:19:57 beliefs my own
0:19:58 opinion is that
0:19:59 the people
0:20:00 how can I put
0:20:02 this the people
0:20:03 who are able to
0:20:04 be skeptical and
0:20:05 a little bored and
0:20:06 dismissive of the
0:20:07 technology they’re
0:20:08 working on tend to
0:20:09 improve it more than
0:20:09 the people kind of
0:20:10 worship it too much
0:20:13 like I’ve seen that
0:20:14 a lot in a lot of
0:20:15 different things not
0:20:16 not just computer
0:20:17 science and I think
0:20:18 I think you have to
0:20:19 have a kind of
0:20:20 like you can’t drink
0:20:21 your own whiskey too
0:20:22 much when you’re a
0:20:24 technologist you have
0:20:25 to kind of be ready
0:20:26 to say oh maybe
0:20:27 this thing’s a bit
0:20:28 overhyped I’m not
0:20:29 going to tell that
0:20:30 to the people buying
0:20:31 shares in my company
0:20:31 but you know what
0:20:32 like just between us
0:20:35 you know and but
0:20:35 that attitude is
0:20:37 exactly the one that
0:20:38 puts you over the
0:20:38 threshold to then
0:20:39 start improving it
0:20:40 more and that’s one
0:20:41 of the dangers of
0:20:42 this kind of
0:20:43 mythologizing of it
0:20:44 oh it’s about to
0:20:45 become this god
0:20:45 that’ll take over
0:20:46 everything but
0:20:48 that what follows
0:20:49 from that is this
0:20:50 very curious thing
0:20:51 which is that the
0:20:52 way of thinking
0:20:53 about it where it’s
0:20:54 about to turn into
0:20:55 this god that’ll
0:20:56 run everything and
0:20:57 either kill us all
0:20:57 or fix all our
0:20:58 problems that
0:21:00 attitude in itself
0:21:02 makes you not
0:21:04 only a little bit
0:21:05 of a lesser
0:21:06 improver of the
0:21:07 technology by any
0:21:08 like real measurable
0:21:10 metric but it
0:21:11 also makes you a
0:21:12 bad steward of it
0:21:15 part of part of
0:21:15 what makes this
0:21:16 very confusing
0:21:17 especially to you
0:21:19 know non-technical
0:21:20 normie outsiders
0:21:21 like me and like
0:21:22 most people frankly
0:21:24 is that it is it’s
0:21:25 just moving and
0:21:26 changing and evolving
0:21:27 really quickly and
0:21:28 the terms and
0:21:29 concepts are very
0:21:30 slippery if you’re
0:21:32 not deep in it and
0:21:32 you know you’re
0:21:33 talking about super
0:21:34 super AI and godlike
0:21:36 powers one example
0:21:37 is and you’ll bear
0:21:38 with me for a second
0:21:39 so I can bring people
0:21:41 along we have this
0:21:42 dichotomy between
0:21:44 AI versus AGI
0:21:45 artificial intelligence
0:21:46 versus artificial
0:21:47 general intelligence and
0:21:48 my understanding is
0:21:50 that AI is a term for
0:21:51 the general set of
0:21:52 tools that people
0:21:53 are building chat
0:21:54 bots and that sort
0:21:54 of thing and that
0:21:56 AGI is still sort of
0:21:57 a theoretical thing
0:21:58 where this tech is
0:22:00 basically as good at
0:22:01 everything as a
0:22:03 normal regular person
0:22:03 is and it can also
0:22:04 learn and grow and
0:22:05 apply that knowledge
0:22:07 just like we can and
0:22:08 we’ve got AI now
0:22:09 clearly but we don’t
0:22:11 have AGI yet and if
0:22:13 we get it and there
0:22:13 are people who think
0:22:14 we’re maybe closer
0:22:15 than we thought
0:22:16 recently that it’ll be
0:22:18 a real Rubicon
0:22:20 crossing moment for
0:22:21 us what’s your
0:22:22 feeling on that do
0:22:23 you think AGI is
0:22:24 even possible in the
0:22:25 way most people
0:22:26 have you not
0:22:26 listened to a word
0:22:28 I said that’s a
0:22:28 religious question
0:22:30 that’s like asking
0:22:30 if I think the
0:22:31 rapture is coming
0:22:33 soon I mean it’s
0:22:33 yeah but you can
0:22:34 have an opinion
0:22:34 about religious
0:22:35 questions I guess
0:22:38 that’s true I mean
0:22:40 there are those who
0:22:41 say we have AGI
0:22:42 already and their
0:22:43 opinion is as
0:22:44 legitimate as
0:22:45 anybody else’s I
0:22:46 mean I just think
0:22:47 the moment you’ve
0:22:48 put the question
0:22:48 that way you’ve
0:22:49 already confused
0:22:50 yourself and made
0:22:50 yourself kind of
0:22:51 useless in talking
0:22:52 about what to do
0:22:53 with the technology
0:22:54 so I have to reject
0:22:55 your question as
0:22:56 being like poorly
0:22:56 framed and
0:22:57 ill-informed I’m
0:22:59 sorry I was hoping
0:22:59 to get through this
0:23:00 fucking conversation
0:23:01 without you having
0:23:02 to beat back at
0:23:03 one of my ill-informed
0:23:04 questions and I
0:23:05 did make it I made
0:23:06 it almost 20 minutes
0:23:07 in yeah good luck
0:23:08 with that my friend
0:23:12 all right sir
0:23:13 it was a valiant
0:23:14 effort you win that
0:23:17 you really I mean
0:23:19 look I mean this
0:23:20 is silly this is
0:23:21 like I’m also
0:23:21 trying to speak for
0:23:22 concerns that I
0:23:23 know a lot of
0:23:24 people I know
0:23:25 because we broadcast
0:23:26 that way of thinking
0:23:27 about it so yeah
0:23:31 look there’s a
0:23:31 thing all right
0:23:33 look I’m I
0:23:35 benefit from people
0:23:36 believing in AI
0:23:37 professionally and
0:23:39 there’s a way that
0:23:39 the whole economy
0:23:40 runs on attention
0:23:42 getting and in a
0:23:44 funny way the way
0:23:45 digital attention
0:23:46 economy works
0:23:51 is it rewards
0:23:52 anxieties and
0:23:54 terror as much
0:23:54 or maybe a
0:23:56 little more than
0:23:59 optimism or you
0:24:01 know goodwill and
0:24:02 so you have this
0:24:03 weird situation where
0:24:05 somebody can play
0:24:06 the villain on
0:24:06 social media and
0:24:08 do very well and
0:24:09 similar things
0:24:10 happening in the
0:24:11 rhetoric of computer
0:24:12 science so when we
0:24:13 say oh our stuff
0:24:14 might be about to
0:24:15 come alive and
0:24:16 it’s about to get
0:24:17 smarter than you
0:24:18 it generates this
0:24:19 little anxiety in
0:24:20 people and then that
0:24:21 actually benefits us
0:24:22 because it keeps it
0:24:24 keeps the attention
0:24:27 on us and so
0:24:28 there’s a funny way
0:24:29 that we’re
0:24:30 incentivized to put
0:24:31 things in the most
0:24:33 alarming way what I
0:24:34 what I will say is
0:24:36 that I like the
0:24:37 idea of models being
0:24:38 useful so I think
0:24:40 of the models that
0:24:41 we’re building as
0:24:42 being wonderful
0:24:43 mashup models so
0:24:44 like for instance
0:24:46 I love being able
0:24:47 to use large models
0:24:48 to go through the
0:24:48 scientific literature
0:24:51 and find correlations
0:24:51 between different
0:24:52 papers that might not
0:24:53 use the same
0:24:54 terminology that would
0:24:54 have been a pain in
0:24:55 the butt to detect
0:24:57 before that’s great
0:24:58 if you present that
0:24:59 with a chat
0:25:00 interface it seems
0:25:01 like a smart
0:25:02 scientist if people
0:25:03 like that I mean I
0:25:04 guess whatever it’s
0:25:05 not my job to judge
0:25:06 everybody but the
0:25:08 thing is you don’t
0:25:09 need to present it
0:25:09 that way you’d
0:25:10 still get the
0:25:11 same value but
0:25:11 that’s the way we
0:25:13 do it we we add
0:25:14 in personhood
0:25:16 fooling to what
0:25:17 would otherwise be
0:25:19 really in a way
0:25:20 more clear
0:25:21 freestanding value I
0:25:23 think but we like
0:25:24 to present the
0:25:24 fantasy
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0:26:16 all right let me try to
0:26:17 pull away a little bit
0:26:18 from religious questions
0:26:22 okay so look i i’m i’m
0:26:23 not worried about the
0:26:23 matrix and the
0:26:25 terminator um i am
0:26:27 worried about a much
0:26:28 more boring and
0:26:30 unsexy scenario but i
0:26:31 think equally bad
0:26:34 possibility is that these
0:26:37 emergent technologies will
0:26:39 accelerate a trend that
0:26:41 i think digital tech in
0:26:42 general and social media
0:26:43 in particular has already
0:26:47 started which is to pull
0:26:49 us away more and more
0:26:50 from the physical world
0:26:52 and encourage us to
0:26:54 perform versions of
0:26:55 ourselves in the virtual
0:26:56 world and because of how
0:26:58 it’s designed it has this
0:27:00 habit of reducing other
0:27:02 people to crude avatars
0:27:03 which is why it’s so easy
0:27:05 to be cruel and vicious
0:27:07 online and why people who
0:27:08 are on social media too
0:27:10 much start to become
0:27:12 mutually unintelligible
0:27:13 to each other and i
0:27:16 worry about ai super
0:27:17 charging some of this
0:27:18 stuff i mean do you even
0:27:19 accept that framing am i
0:27:20 right to be thinking of ai
0:27:23 as a potential accelerant of
0:27:26 these trends yeah i mean i
0:27:29 i think you are correct
0:27:36 so it’s arguable and
0:27:37 actually consistent with the
0:27:38 way the community speaks
0:27:41 internally to say that the
0:27:43 algorithms that have been
0:27:44 driving social media up to
0:27:49 now are a form of ai if you
0:27:52 if you unlike me wish to use
0:27:55 the term ai and what the
0:27:59 algorithms do is they
0:28:01 attempt to predict human
0:28:03 behavior based on the
0:28:05 stimulus given to the
0:28:07 human and by putting that
0:28:08 in an adaptive loop they
0:28:11 hope to drive attention and
0:28:13 sort of an obsessive
0:28:15 attachment to a platform
0:28:18 because these algorithms
0:28:21 can’t tell whether
0:28:23 something’s being driven
0:28:25 because of things that we
0:28:25 might think are positive
0:28:26 or things that we might
0:28:28 think are negative so i
0:28:29 call this the life of the
0:28:30 parody the this notion
0:28:32 that you can’t tell like
0:28:33 if a bid is one or zero
0:28:34 doesn’t matter because it’s
0:28:36 an arbitrary designation in
0:28:38 a digital system so if
0:28:39 somebody’s getting
0:28:40 attention by being a dick
0:28:42 that works just as well as
0:28:43 if they’re offering
0:28:44 life-saving information or
0:28:45 helping people improve
0:28:46 themselves but then the
0:28:47 peaks that are good are
0:28:48 really good and i don’t
0:28:49 want to deny that i love
0:28:50 dance culture on tiktok
0:28:53 science bloggers on on
0:28:54 youtube have achieved a
0:28:55 level that’s like
0:28:57 astonishingly good and so
0:28:58 on like there’s all these
0:29:00 really really positive good
0:29:01 spots but then overall
0:29:03 there’s this loss of truth
0:29:06 and political paranoia and
0:29:09 unnecessary confrontation
0:29:11 between arbitrarily created
0:29:13 cultural groups and so on
0:29:15 that’s really doing damage
0:29:18 um and as is often pointed
0:29:20 out especially to young
0:29:21 girls and so on and so
0:29:22 forth uh not not great
0:29:25 and so uh yeah could
0:29:27 better ai algorithms make
0:29:27 that worse
0:29:31 plausibly i mean it’s
0:29:32 possible that it’s already
0:29:34 bottomed out that it’s kind
0:29:37 of the the badness just
0:29:37 comes from the overall
0:29:38 structure and if the
0:29:39 algorithms themselves get
0:29:41 more sophisticated it won’t
0:29:42 really push it that much
0:29:43 further but i think
0:29:45 actually kind of can i’m
0:29:46 i’m worried about it i
0:29:48 because we so much want to
0:29:49 pass the turing test and
0:29:50 make people think our
0:29:51 programs are people
0:29:55 we’re moving to this um
0:29:56 so-called agentic era where
0:29:59 it’s not just that you have a
0:30:00 chat interface with with the
0:30:01 thing but the chat interface
0:30:04 gets to know you for years at
0:30:06 a time and gets a so-called
0:30:08 personality and but and all
0:30:09 this and then the idea is that
0:30:10 people then fall in love with
0:30:11 these and we’re already
0:30:13 seeing examples of this
0:30:15 here and there um and this
0:30:16 notion of a whole generation
0:30:17 of young people falling in
0:30:20 love with fake avatars i mean
0:30:24 people people talk about ai as
0:30:25 if it’s just like this yeast in
0:30:26 the air it’s like oh ai will
0:30:27 appear and people will fall in
0:30:29 love with ai avatars but it’s
0:30:30 not ai is always run by
0:30:32 companies so like they’re going
0:30:33 to be falling in love with
0:30:35 something from google or meta or
0:30:39 whatever and like that notion
0:30:41 that your love life becomes
0:30:44 owned by some company or even
0:30:45 worse tiktok or a chinese thing
0:30:49 eek eek eek eek i think that’ll
0:30:51 create a a a new centralization
0:30:56 or or or xai eek eek eek eek i’ll
0:30:57 add some more eeks to that and so
0:30:59 this centralization of power and
0:31:02 influence could be even worse and
0:31:04 that might be a breaking point
0:31:06 event and so that kind of thing
0:31:07 ending civilization or ending up
0:31:09 killing all the people does seem
0:31:11 plausible to me and some of my
0:31:12 colleagues would interpret that as
0:31:15 ai become coming alive and killing
0:31:16 everybody but i would just
0:31:17 interpret it as people being
0:31:20 making terrible choices it all
0:31:21 amounts to the same thing in the
0:31:23 end anyway it does at the end of
0:31:25 the day in terms of actual events
0:31:27 the same so jaron from your point
0:31:29 of view is it even possible to have
0:31:33 good algorithms nudging us around
0:31:35 online or are all algorithms bad yes
0:31:37 of course it is okay what does that
0:31:39 look like course it is of course it
0:31:41 is yes yes yes yes give me the good
0:31:42 stuff here give me the good
0:31:44 algorithms well i mean look in the
0:31:49 scientific community we do it like i
0:31:51 mean like okay here’s an example um
0:31:55 deep research from open ai is a great
0:31:57 tool it does a literature search on some
0:31:59 topic and assembles a little report
0:32:03 it has unnecessary chatbot elements
0:32:05 to try to make it seem like there’s
0:32:07 somebody there i view that as a waste
0:32:10 of time and a waste of energy and i i
0:32:11 would be happy without it but but
0:32:13 whatever okay it’s it’s not terrible
0:32:16 though what it does is it saves
0:32:18 scientists a ton of time it makes a lot
0:32:20 of sense i get a lot out of it it’s
0:32:21 great and now there’s some new
0:32:25 competitors to it great that stuff’s
0:32:27 fabulous i really really really it’s
0:32:28 good because the scientific literature
0:32:30 has become impossible to use without
0:32:33 it i do a lot of work that’s pretty
0:32:35 mathematical and the problem is that
0:32:37 every time somebody comes across
0:32:38 similar math they don’t realize
0:32:39 somebody else has done it so they come
0:32:41 up with their own terms for things and
0:32:43 then you have the same ideas or
0:32:45 similar ones with different terms and
0:32:46 all these scattered papers in totally
0:32:47 different communities at different
0:32:48 conferences and different journals
0:32:53 yeah but with a tool like this you
0:32:55 can capture all that and get it into
0:32:59 place it’s like what what what ai is is
0:33:01 it’s a way of improving collaboration
0:33:03 between people it’s a way of gathering
0:33:06 what people have done in a more unified
0:33:09 way that can notice multiple hops of
0:33:12 different terms and similar structures it’s
0:33:15 it’s a better way of using statistics to
0:33:17 connect what we’ve all done together to
0:33:21 get more use out of it it’s great i love
0:33:25 it and the amount of avatar illusion
0:33:27 nonsense is kept to a minimum because
0:33:29 our job is not to fall in love with our
0:33:31 research our fake research assistant our
0:33:35 job is to make progress efficiently on
0:33:37 whatever we’re doing right and so that
0:33:39 that’s great what is wrong with that
0:33:41 nothing it’s fabulous so yeah there’s
0:33:43 wonderful uses if i didn’t think those
0:33:46 things existed i’d quit what i do
0:33:49 professionally in the industry of course
0:33:51 there’s wonderful uses and i think we
0:33:52 need those things i think they really
0:33:53 matter
0:33:56 i guess what i’m hovering around is the
0:33:58 business model right i mean uh the
0:34:00 advertising model was sort of the
0:34:02 original sin of the internet yeah yeah i
0:34:02 think it is
0:34:06 um how do we not fuck this up how do we
0:34:07 not repeat those mistakes what’s a better
0:34:09 model i mean you talk a lot about data
0:34:11 dignity so you’re saying we can say fuck
0:34:13 on this podcast oh you can say whatever
0:34:15 you want if i had known that there would
0:34:17 be a lot of fuckery up to now in my in my
0:34:18 speech it’s not too late anyway it’s not
0:34:23 too late we got plenty of time okay but no
0:34:25 but seriously what how do we get it right
0:34:26 this time how do we not make the same
0:34:29 mistakes what is a better model yeah well
0:34:32 um this is actually more important this
0:34:34 question is the central question of our
0:34:36 time in my view like the central
0:34:39 question of our time isn’t um being able
0:34:42 to scale ai more is is an important
0:34:45 question and i get that and most people
0:34:47 are focused on that and dealing with the
0:34:49 climate is an important question but in
0:34:51 terms of our own survival coming up with
0:34:53 a business model for civilization that
0:34:56 isn’t self-destructive is in a way our
0:34:59 most primary problem and challenge right
0:35:01 now because the way we’re doing it what
0:35:04 we kind of we went through this thing in
0:35:06 the earlier phase of the internet like
0:35:08 information should be free and then the
0:35:09 only business model that’s left is paying
0:35:12 for influence uh and so then all the
0:35:16 platforms look free or very cheap to the
0:35:17 user but then actually the real customer
0:35:19 trying to influence the user and you end
0:35:23 up with what’s essentially a stealthy form
0:35:26 of um manipulation being the central
0:35:30 project of civilization and we can only
0:35:31 get away with that for so long at some
0:35:33 point that bites us and we become too
0:35:36 crazy to survive so we must change the
0:35:38 business model of civilization and so
0:35:41 exactly how to get from here to there is
0:35:44 a bit of a mystery but i continue to work
0:35:46 on it like i think we should incentivize
0:35:48 people to put great data into the ai
0:35:51 programs of the future uh and i’d like
0:35:53 people to be paid for data used
0:35:55 ai models and also to be celebrated and
0:35:56 made visible and known because i think
0:35:58 it’s just a big collaboration and our
0:36:01 collaborators should be valued how easy
0:36:02 would it be to do that do you think we
0:36:05 can or will there’s still some unsolved
0:36:07 technical questions about how to do it
0:36:09 i’m very very actively working on those
0:36:10 and i believe it’s doable and there’s a
0:36:12 whole you know research community devoted
0:36:14 to exactly that distributed around the
0:36:16 world and i think it’ll make better
0:36:18 models i mean better data makes better
0:36:20 models and there’s a lot of people who
0:36:21 dispute that and they say no it’s just
0:36:22 better algorithms and we already have
0:36:25 enough data for the rest of all time but
0:36:28 i disagree with that i think i don’t
0:36:29 think we’re the smartest people who will
0:36:31 ever live and there might be new creative
0:36:33 things that happen in the future that we
0:36:35 don’t foresee and the models we’ve
0:36:37 currently built might not extend into
0:36:39 those things and having some open system
0:36:41 where people can contribute to new models
0:36:44 in new ways is a more expansive and
0:36:47 creative and you know open-minded and
0:36:51 and just you know kind of spiritually
0:36:53 optimistic way of thinking about the deep
0:36:53 future
0:37:15 today explained here with eric levitt senior
0:37:17 correspondent at vox.com to talk about the
0:37:21 2024 election that can’t be right eric i thought
0:37:22 we were done with that i feel like i’m pacino
0:37:24 in three just when i thought i was out
0:37:28 they pull me back in why are we talking about
0:37:30 the 2024 election again the reason why we’re
0:37:33 still looking back is that it takes a while
0:37:36 after an election to get all of the most high
0:37:40 quality data on what exactly happened so the
0:37:42 full picture is starting to just come into view
0:37:45 now and you wrote a piece about the full
0:37:49 picture for vox recently and it did bonkers business
0:37:53 on the internet what did it say what struck a
0:37:56 chord yeah so this was my interview with
0:38:00 david shore of blue rose research he’s one of
0:38:04 the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in
0:38:08 the party and basically the big picture headline
0:38:12 takeaways are on today explained you’ll have to go listen
0:38:15 to them there find the show wherever you listen to shows bro
0:38:35 i think i’m a humanist like you in the end and what i want fundamentally is just the
0:38:39 elevation of human agency not the diminishment of it and part of what that means to borrow your
0:38:45 language is creating more creative classes and less dependent classes yep uh you’ve convinced me
0:38:50 that that’s at least possible i don’t know if it’s likely but i hope it is and and maybe some
0:38:55 some kind of data dignity type model is the most promising thing i’ve heard
0:39:06 no i sort of feel like the human project our our survival is simultaneously both certain and
0:39:11 unlikely if you know what i mean like i i feel like if we just follow the immediate trend lines
0:39:13 and what we see we’re probably gonna
0:39:16 buck ourselves up to use the word i’m
0:39:22 encouraged to say here there you go but i also just have this feeling we’ve made it through a lot of
0:39:26 stuff in the past and i just have this feeling we’re gonna rise to the occasion and figure this
0:39:32 one out really i don’t know exactly how we will but i think we will i don’t know what the
0:39:40 alternative is the alternative is in 200 million years there’ll be smart cephalopods to take over
0:39:45 the planet uh and maybe they’ll do that i mean that’s the alternative but i think we can do it i
0:39:56 really do i really i we just we just have to be a little less full of ourselves and not believe we’re
0:40:02 making a new god no more golden calves that’s really our problem still yeah good luck with
0:40:09 that i mean i i i like i’m constantly thinking more about the the social and political and cultural
0:40:14 dynamics because that’s just my background um and you know i mean i i guess speaking of dependent
0:40:23 classes i a very common concern is is this fear that ai is going to create a lot of social instability by
0:40:29 taking all of our jobs it’s a widespread fear it’s scary as hell and it feels like
0:40:35 the latest iteration of a very old story about new technologies like automation displacing workers
0:40:39 i mean how do you speak to these sorts of fears when you hear them because surely you hear them a lot
0:40:41 yeah and they concern me i mean
0:40:54 look um there’s not a perfect solution to that problem uh there i’ll give you an example of one
0:41:00 that i find tricky to think about uh my mom died in a car accident and i’ve always believed from when
0:41:05 i was very young that cars should drive themselves that it was manifestly obvious that we could create
0:41:13 a digital system that would save many many lives so we have tens of thousands of people killed by cars
0:41:16 every year still in the us and i think it’s over a million worldwide or something like that i mean
0:41:24 it’s like crazy it’s like and so um there are a lot of reasons for it and a self-driving car is never
0:41:28 going to be perfect because it’s not a task that can be done perfectly there’ll be circumstances where
0:41:34 there’s no optimal solution you know in the instant but overall we ought to be able to save a lot of
0:41:42 life so i’m really supportive of that project at the same time an incredibly large number of blue collar
0:41:49 people around the world get by behind a wheel whether it’s truck drivers or rideshare drivers these days
0:42:00 or etc you know and so like how do you reconcile those two things uh and i i don’t think there’s any way to do it perfectly i think there’s
0:42:10 there’s two things that should be true one is that we need to find an intermediate way to love
0:42:15 a social safety net that isn’t all the way to universal basic income because the universal basic
0:42:21 income idea gives people this idea that they’re not worth anything and they’re just being supported by
0:42:27 the tech titans as a hobby and it doesn’t feel very secure or very dignified and or stable there’s like
0:42:33 just a lot of reasons why i’m skeptical of that uh in the long term and i don’t think people like it
0:42:40 or want it but on the other hand um just telling people well you’re thrown out into the mix and in
0:42:45 the u.s you have no health insurance and just figure something out that’s also just too cruel and not viable
0:42:51 if it’s a lot of people at once so we have to find our way to a very unfashionable intermediate
0:43:00 sense of social safety network or uh to help people through transitions and right now the accounting for
0:43:04 that is very very difficult to sort out and especially in the united states there’s a deep
0:43:13 hostility to it and i just don’t see logically any other way but then beyond that um i do think new roles
0:43:18 will appear like the the story that well new things will happen and new new things will be possible
0:43:25 i do believe that like there’s a kind of a vague and uncomfortable sense that surely new things will
0:43:31 come along and i i actually think that’s true i don’t feel comfortable making that claim for all
0:43:35 those drivers like we’re not going to retrain them to be programmers because low-level programming
0:43:43 itself is also getting automated right i don’t know exactly how that’ll work um i have thought a great
0:43:49 great deal about it but that’s who i am for the moment i believe that there could be all kinds of
0:43:57 things we don’t foresee and that within that explosion of new sectors of creativity there will be enough new
0:44:04 needs for people to do things if only to train ai’s that it’ll keep up with human needs and support
0:44:08 some kind of a world of economics that’s more distributed than just a central authority
0:44:13 distributing income to everybody which i think would be corrupted yeah yeah i agree with that
0:44:20 do you think we’re being sufficiently intentional about the development of this technology do you
0:44:27 think we’re asking the right questions as a society now well i mean the questions are dominated by
0:44:33 a certain internal technical culture which is and the mainstream of technical culture is very
0:44:39 obsessed with ai as a new god or some kind of new entity and so i think that that does make the
0:44:47 whole conversation go askew and that said we’re almost like if you go to ai conferences
0:44:54 there might there’s usually more talk where somebody is saying we’re going to talk about how to talk the
0:45:01 ai into not killing us you know and that kind of conversation which to me is not well grounded and
0:45:09 i think it kind of loses itself in loops but that kind of conversation can take up as much time and space
0:45:14 as like a serious conversation of like how can we optimize this algorithm or how can we you know like the
0:45:20 the actual work that we should be doing as technologists um i was at one conference i was
0:45:25 kind of funny where i forget what there were these different factions there’s the artificial general
0:45:30 intelligence and there’s the super intelligence and there’s all these different people who have
0:45:34 slightly different ideas about how awesome ai will be and help might kill us all in different ways
0:45:42 and they were so conflicted that they got into a fist fight um a not very competent fist fight it must be
0:45:48 said but i’m shocked it’s kind of funny anyway i sort of wish i had a film of that that was really funny but
0:45:54 i don’t know i mean i love my world i love the people i do kind of make fun of us a little bit
0:46:00 sometimes because i just think it’s important too you know okay so if we just let’s just set aside for
0:46:06 the moment that the more common fears about ai the alignment problem and taking our jobs and
0:46:12 flattening human creativity all that stuff all that is there all of that um is there is there a fear of
0:46:18 yours something you think we could get terribly wrong that’s not currently something we hear much about
0:46:26 uh god i don’t even know where to start yeah there’s like a lot lot lot lot lot lot lot
0:46:38 lot i’m i mean one of the things i worry about is we’re gradually moving education into an ai model
0:46:46 and the motivations for that are often very good because in a lot of places on earth it’s just been
0:46:50 impossible to come up with an economics of supporting and training enough human teachers
0:46:58 and a lot of cultural issues in changing societies make it very very hard to make schools that work
0:47:06 and so on like there’s a lot of issues and in theory a sort of uh client self-adapting ai tutor
0:47:13 could solve a lot of problems at a low cost in a lot of situations but then the issue with that is
0:47:19 once again creativity how do you keep people who learn in a system like that
0:47:24 how do you train them so that they’re able to step outside of what the system was trained on
0:47:29 you know like there’s this funny way that you’re always retreading and recombining the training data
0:47:35 in any ai system and you can address that to a degree with constant fresh input and this and that but
0:47:40 i am a little worried about people being trained in a closed system that makes them a little less than
0:47:46 they might otherwise have been and have a little less faith in themselves i’m a little concerned about
0:47:53 sort of defining the nature of life and education downward you know and the thing is the history
0:47:59 of education is filled with doing exactly that thing like education has been filled with overly
0:48:08 reductive ideas or overly idealistic and and um biased ideas of different kinds i mean so it’s not like
0:48:14 we’re entering this perfect system messing it up we’re entering a messed up system and trying to figure out
0:48:22 how to not perpetuate it it’s messed up itness i think in the case of education um challenging really
0:48:28 challenging i think i just ask just because i’m just curious what you would say i i have a five-year-old
0:48:37 son and he’s already started asking questions about you know like what kind of skills should he learn what
0:48:42 what should he what should he aspire to do in the world oh man that’s a hard one right and i don’t know
0:48:49 what to tell him because i have no idea what the world is going to look like by the time he’s 18 or 20 or 15
0:48:54 hell you know i what would you what would you tell him if uncle jaron came over oh yeah and he asked
0:48:59 you that what would you say well i have a teen daughter now and when she was younger uh she went
0:49:07 to coding camp you know and loved it and then when uh copilot for github came out and now some of the
0:49:12 other ones that are out she was like well you know the kinds of programs i’d write i can just ask for now
0:49:17 so why did you send me to all this thing why did i waste all my time at these things and i said uh remember
0:49:24 you loved coding camp remember you liked it you liked it it’s like well yeah but i would have
0:49:30 i could have liked spelunking camp or something too like why coding camp and um i i mean
0:49:36 i don’t have a perfect answer for all that right now i really don’t i do
0:49:44 i do think there are new things that will emerge i have a feeling there’ll be a lot of new professions
0:49:51 related to adaptive biology and modifications and helping people deal with weird changes to their
0:49:56 bodies that will become possible i think that’ll become a big thing i don’t know exactly how it’s
0:50:04 too early to say like i there’s a subtle point here i want to make which is um i am very far from being
0:50:12 anti-futuristic or disliking extreme change in the future but what i what i have to insist upon
0:50:18 is continuity so in this idea there’s a term called the singularity uh applied to ai sometimes that
0:50:23 there’ll be this rush of change so fast that nobody can learn anything nobody can know anything and it
0:50:29 just is beyond us beyond us beyond us the problem with the singularity whether it’s in a black hole or in
0:50:35 the big bang or in technology is that it’s very hard to have you know like by definition even if
0:50:41 you don’t technically lose information you lose the ability to access the information in the in the
0:50:46 original context or with any kind of structure so it’s essentially a form of massive forgetting and
0:50:54 massive loss of context and massive loss of meaning therefore and so however radical we get if in the future
0:51:00 we’re all going to evolve into massive distributed colonies of space bacteria flying around
0:51:07 and intergalactically or something whatever we turn into i’m all for it i’m in i’m in i’m in but
0:51:12 the line from here to there has to have memory it has to be continuous enough that we’re learning
0:51:19 lessons and we we remember if we break that because we want the thrill of polpot’s year zero where from
0:51:24 now on we’re the smartest people and everybody else was wrong and we start over if we want that break
0:51:29 we must resist it we must oppose people who want that break year zero never works out well it’s a
0:51:38 really really bad idea and so that to me i’m like pro extreme futures but anti discontinuity into the
0:51:43 future and and so that’s a an in-between place to be that’s a little subtle and hard to get across but
0:51:48 i think that that’s the right place to be well i always try to end these conversations with as much
0:51:55 optimism as possible so do you have any other good news or uh rosy scenarios you can you can paint for
0:52:01 us uh before we get out of here about how things are going to be awesome in the future right now we’re
0:52:09 in a very hard to parse moment things are strange things are scary and what i keep on telling myself
0:52:16 there’s always hope in chaos as much as someone might someone driving chaos might be certain that
0:52:25 it’s under their command but it never is and those of us who watch unfolding chaos looking for signs of
0:52:33 hope looking for optimism looking for little openings in which to do something good we will find them if we
0:52:40 stay alert and so i’d urge everybody to do that during this period jaron lanier i’m a fan of your
0:52:45 work i’m a fan of you as a human being as well i appreciate you coming in oh well that’s very kind
0:52:52 of you thank you so much and i really appreciate all the effort and also just the goodwill and warmth
0:53:03 you put into this interview i really do appreciate it so much
0:53:12 all right i hope you enjoyed this episode there was a lot going on in this one jaron is a unique mind
0:53:22 and i appreciate the way he thinks about all of this this conversation did force me to reflect on the
0:53:31 language i use to make sense of ai and all the assumptions buried in that language so i hope you
0:53:39 found his insights useful but either way as always we want to know what you think so drop us a line
0:53:52 at the gray area at vox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749
0:53:58 and once you’re finished with that if you have a second please go ahead and rate and review and
0:54:09 subscribe to the podcast this episode was produced by beth morrissey edited by jorge just engineered by erica
0:54:17 wong fact check by melissa hirsch and alex overington wrote our theme music new episodes of the gray area
0:54:25 drop on mondays listen and subscribe the show is part of vox support vox’s journalism by joining our
0:54:33 membership program today go to vox.com slash members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show
0:54:51 let us know you

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0:01:03 If I had to pick one word to really capture American politics, for most of my adult life at least,
0:01:07 it wouldn’t be hope or change or forward or future.
0:01:11 The word I’d choose is inertia.
0:01:15 It doesn’t matter what the slogans are or what the speeches say.
0:01:21 In terms of getting things done, or fundamentally changing how we do things,
0:01:24 both parties seem slow to solve problems.
0:01:27 Slow to build new things.
0:01:29 Slow to change anything, really.
0:01:33 Until now.
0:01:39 As you know, the Trump administration has been passing executive orders
0:01:43 and implementing new policies at a breakneck pace.
0:01:50 Attempting to remake entire swaths of the federal government.
0:01:53 And you might not like what they’re doing.
0:01:54 I don’t.
0:01:56 But they are doing something.
0:01:59 And the Democratic opposition?
0:02:02 Well, they don’t seem to have the answers.
0:02:09 At the very least, they cannot articulate a different vision for America’s future that the country wants.
0:02:11 Why is that?
0:02:17 Why couldn’t Democrats craft a message that resonated with voters in 2024’s election?
0:02:22 And why, in the face of Trump and Musk and Doge,
0:02:25 in a relentless attack on American institutions,
0:02:30 are Democrats unable to convince America that their way of governing is better?
0:02:36 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:43 Today’s guest is Ezra Klein,
0:02:45 the former host of this podcast,
0:02:49 the current host of The Ezra Klein Show at The New York Times,
0:02:52 and the co-author of a new book called Abundance,
0:02:55 which he wrote with journalist Derek Thompson.
0:03:04 Ezra argues that in states run by Democrats,
0:03:07 policy failures have contributed to the rising cost of living.
0:03:09 to address this crisis,
0:03:12 and really any crisis America is facing,
0:03:17 it needs to be easier to build and invent the things that America needs.
0:03:21 And in our current system, that’s almost impossible to do.
0:03:26 Not because we don’t have the means, the technology, or the know-how.
0:03:28 We have all of that in spades.
0:03:31 What we don’t have is a political economy that makes sense.
0:03:36 Ezra believes that this idea should be the major,
0:03:39 maybe the only focus of liberal politics in America.
0:03:42 So I invited him onto the show, his old show,
0:03:43 to tell me more.
0:03:49 Ezra Klein, welcome to the show.
0:03:53 Ah, it’s like stepping back into an old couch
0:03:56 that you’ve sat in so much that it slightly has an imprint of your body.
0:03:57 I finally feel like I’m back home.
0:03:59 We’re glad to have you.
0:04:00 I’m glad to be here.
0:04:03 All right, let’s get to the book, Abundance.
0:04:07 You want this book to reorient liberal thinking in America.
0:04:10 Tell me, what are you looking to change?
0:04:15 I think it’s important for liberals, for progressives,
0:04:22 to recenter technology as an engine of social progress.
0:04:25 Most liberals can tell you which five social insurance programs
0:04:27 they’d like to create or substantially expand,
0:04:29 but they can’t tell you which five technologies.
0:04:32 They want the government to really organize resources and intention
0:04:34 towards pulling in from the future into the present.
0:04:38 So the idea of Abundance is that to have the future we want,
0:04:41 we need to build and invent the things we need.
0:04:44 Some of the things we need to build are things we know how to build,
0:04:47 like housing, like clean energy, like high-speed rail.
0:04:50 Some of the things are things we need to invent.
0:04:52 We are not going to hit our climate targets.
0:04:54 I mean, we’re not currently on pace to hit them at all,
0:04:56 but we’re definitely not going to hit them
0:04:57 if we cannot figure out things like green cement
0:05:00 and low-carbon or low-emissions jet fuel,
0:05:02 things we literally do not have,
0:05:05 certainly not at an affordability point we can scale.
0:05:09 There are problems you cannot solve without innovation.
0:05:13 So this is really an effort to put building and innovation,
0:05:17 the expansion of supply, at the center of liberalism.
0:05:20 Well, one thing I do appreciate about the book
0:05:24 is that you’re not trying to offer a suite of policy solutions.
0:05:26 It’s more about articulating the questions.
0:05:29 You think our politics should revolve around.
0:05:33 Why do you think it’s important to begin with the right questions?
0:05:35 You see what you’re looking for.
0:05:40 And I think that American liberalism has learned to look
0:05:42 for opportunities to subsidize.
0:05:44 Health insurance is too expensive.
0:05:45 Can we make it subsidized?
0:05:49 If people need housing, we give them a rental voucher, sometimes.
0:05:53 If they need to go to college, we give them a Pell Grant.
0:05:55 If they need food, we give them SNAP.
0:06:00 If they need income as a retiree or as an elderly person,
0:06:01 we give them Social Security, right?
0:06:06 We know how to look for opportunities to do money or voucher-like things.
0:06:07 That’s really important.
0:06:12 But we do not look for opportunities to expand supply.
0:06:13 And that creates two problems.
0:06:18 One is that if you subsidize something and you don’t have enough supply of it, you will just
0:06:20 have price increases or rationing.
0:06:25 The other is that they’re just things you need that if you don’t increase the supply of them,
0:06:26 you’re just not going to have.
0:06:31 And look, I’m a Californian, and when I look around my home state where I lived for much
0:06:35 of the writing of the book, and I think, what has deranged Californian politics?
0:06:40 Why can Gavin Newsom not run for president in 2028 as he wants to do and say, elect me,
0:06:42 and you can all have the California dream?
0:06:44 Because nobody thinks it’s a dream.
0:06:45 It’s losing people.
0:06:46 And why is it losing people?
0:06:47 Because the cost of living is too high.
0:06:49 And why is the cost of living too high?
0:06:50 We don’t have enough of the things we need.
0:06:53 We don’t have enough supply of housing, child care, et cetera.
0:06:59 And so you will get different answers to the question of how to expand different things.
0:07:03 If you ask me why it’s hard to lay down transmission lines, that is a different answer
0:07:06 than why is it hard to build affordable housing in San Francisco.
0:07:10 But just simply asking the question of how do we get more of the thing we want,
0:07:15 that I think is a more productive place to start and one that just honestly a lot of
0:07:18 liberal governance is going to ride by not centering.
0:07:24 Well, you know, people will hear these kinds of complaints and they will immediately think
0:07:26 of all the ways the other side is to blame.
0:07:34 But you do say pretty early on that some of these outcomes reflect an ideological conspiracy
0:07:35 at the heart of our politics.
0:07:37 What’s the argument here?
0:07:43 So I think that liberals, frankly, conservatives too, are comfortable with the narrative that
0:07:49 we had a conservative movement that arose in the latter half of the 20th century, has attained
0:07:54 yet more power in the 21st, that is anti-government, that wants to, as Governor Norquist famously
0:07:56 put it, strangle government in a bathtub.
0:08:03 That doesn’t really explain, though, why governance in places where conservative Republicans have
0:08:08 functionally no power, California, Illinois, New York, is pretty bad.
0:08:14 And to understand that, you have to start looking at something else that does not get as much
0:08:19 narrative weight in our politics, which is starting in, again, the back half of the 20th
0:08:26 century, there was a liberalism, the new left, that arose in response to the New Deal left.
0:08:30 And what New Deal liberalism put at its center was growing to build things.
0:08:32 We had a rapidly expanding population.
0:08:34 We were this, you know, new superpower.
0:08:36 And we went on this orgy of building.
0:08:37 And we often built recklessly.
0:08:39 We built in ways that damaged the environment.
0:08:44 We, you know, I grew up outside of Los Angeles at a time when you would have that curtain of
0:08:47 smog descend and your eyes would water and people would cough.
0:08:49 And it was really bad for kids and, frankly, adults.
0:08:55 And so this sort of liberalism emerged that was about making it harder to build, that was
0:09:00 about making sure government couldn’t do what, say, Robert Moses did in New York and cut
0:09:02 a freeway right through, you know, a marginalized community.
0:09:07 And frankly, more than that, it ended up being a liberalism that really made it impossible to
0:09:09 cut a freeway through an affluent community.
0:09:13 And a lot of this was not just well-intentioned.
0:09:14 It worked.
0:09:15 We cleaned up the environment.
0:09:17 We cleaned up the air.
0:09:18 We cleaned up water.
0:09:22 We did make it harder for government to do stupid things or act without thinking about
0:09:22 its actions.
0:09:26 Over time, those things grew and grew and grew.
0:09:30 Those statutes, those processes, those movements, liberals became more affluent.
0:09:31 They had more to defend.
0:09:36 And so in places even where you didn’t really have a strong conservative movement, what you
0:09:44 did develop was a way of doing government that was so coalitional, that had so many opportunities
0:09:50 for veto, had so many opportunities for individuals or nonprofits to sue the government, that you
0:09:51 just couldn’t get shit done.
0:09:57 And so construction productivity has been functionally falling in America for a very long time or stagnating
0:09:58 in some areas.
0:10:03 And so as the years have gone by, we’ve gotten really good at building in the digital world.
0:10:07 We can make cryptocurrencies and AI and this whole expansive internet and really quite
0:10:09 shitty at building in the real world.
0:10:17 Look, I think rattling off a bunch of numbers isn’t awesome, but I have to just at least mention
0:10:21 a couple here because it just illustrates the problem, right?
0:10:22 So this is from your book.
0:10:29 It cost about $609 million to build a kilometer of high-speed rail in the U.S.
0:10:31 $609.
0:10:32 Just rail, not high-speed.
0:10:34 Oh, even better.
0:10:37 In Germany, it’s $384.
0:10:39 In Canada, $295.
0:10:41 Japan, $267.
0:10:44 And in Portugal, fuck, they’re really doing something right.
0:10:46 It’s only $96 million.
0:10:48 How is that even real?
0:10:53 So one thing to note about that is that conservatives will say, yeah, the government sucks.
0:10:54 Don’t use it.
0:10:56 But those countries have governments.
0:11:00 Those countries actually have higher union density than the U.S. does.
0:11:04 So there is something about the way we do government here, the way we do building here.
0:11:06 And there’s a bunch of different answers to that.
0:11:10 One of the big ones is we are very focused on adversarial legalism, as it’s called.
0:11:17 We make it the primary way we let people constrain the government is by suing it.
0:11:19 Suing it takes a long time.
0:11:24 I mean, and, you know, at this moment, people are glad we have a way to sue the government under Donald Trump.
0:11:27 So the point is not that it is always and everywhere bad.
0:11:36 But nevertheless, there is a dimension where we have made it so hard for the government to act, so slow for it to act, that it just functionally can’t act.
0:11:43 And one thing about those numbers that you then see is that we just don’t do as many big infrastructure projects anymore for all kinds of reasons.
0:11:47 We’re very afraid of doing anything that requires tunneling in a way they’re not in other countries.
0:11:50 The Second Avenue subway in New York City is like a total nightmare.
0:11:55 And we have just created ways of building that don’t work.
0:11:57 I wish they did.
0:11:58 What’s the Second Avenue subway?
0:12:07 Oh, it’s a subway extension in New York that has been planned for a very, very long time that was supposed to be much more ambitious than it will now be.
0:12:15 Look, when they began building the New York subways, they opened the first 28 stations, I think it was, in four years, if I’m not wrong.
0:12:20 It takes decades now to do anything, to do like one station.
0:12:44 You would think, with the advances in machinery we have, with the advances in imaging we have, with the advances in 3D computerized drafting that we have, I mean, you would think, with everything we have built, advanced machinery-wise, since 1908, we would make things bigger, better, faster, right?
0:12:46 We would be just way better at building things than we were then.
0:12:48 But we’re just not.
0:12:50 I mean, we are safer at building them.
0:12:53 There are things we were better at planning for when we build them.
0:12:55 I don’t want to suggest that no advancement has happened.
0:12:58 But they built the Empire State Building in a year.
0:12:59 A year.
0:13:01 We just can’t do that anymore.
0:13:04 And the reason isn’t that we have forgotten technique.
0:13:11 And the reason isn’t that we haven’t had things advance in terms of machinery and building.
0:13:13 The reason is we’ve made the politics of building very, very difficult.
0:13:16 And we’ve made the process of building very, very cumbersome.
0:13:21 I talk about the example of California high-speed rail at some length, but I think it’s a good one.
0:13:24 And I could say a million things about it, but I’ll say this.
0:13:27 High-speed rail replaces cars.
0:13:28 It’s pretty clean, right?
0:13:34 It’s a good—the reason to do it, in part, is it is an environmentally friendly form of transportation.
0:13:41 The effort to environmentally clear the high-speed rail line that California intended to use began in 2012.
0:13:48 By the time I wrapped the book, at the end of 2024, it was almost, but not quite done.
0:13:51 12 years, and it was not finished.
0:13:59 And the question that that environmental review was asking was not, was high-speed rail having it better than not having it?
0:14:10 It’s in every individual parcel of track, had they considered all the possible consequences of having it?
0:14:14 Mitigated all the possible downsides, which, of course, the status quo does not have to do.
0:14:21 And, you know, most importantly, bulletproofed themselves as much as they can against lawsuits, which can take years to play out.
0:14:26 This replicates across clean energy efforts.
0:14:32 Congestion pricing in New York City was held up for years in environmental assessment.
0:14:35 And these are for things that are good for the environment.
0:14:43 So this is—it’s one example, but these are liberal policies that liberals defend that make it very hard for liberals to deliver on the things liberals say they are going to give people.
0:14:44 That’s a problem.
0:14:54 I just want to stress that part of what makes this so maddening is that it’s an outcome basically no one really wants, right?
0:15:04 It’s the system, it’s the incentive structure, it’s individuals making narrowly rational decisions, which in the end produce incredibly stupid, unhelpful results.
0:15:07 That is definitely a big part of it.
0:15:11 Some things are drift, some things are accidental, some things are unseen, and some things are intended.
0:15:19 When we talk about housing, which is different than something like rail, you’re dealing with a problem that housing has become a core financial asset.
0:15:26 And that asset is often made more valuable, or at least people believe it will be made more valuable, by scarcity.
0:15:39 And the idea that, you know, you’ve got this house on a block of San Francisco or Brooklyn or whatever, and you don’t want a large affordable housing complex going up down the street, it’s not crazy.
0:15:41 I mean, that might actually hurt your parking.
0:15:44 That might actually hurt your home values, depending on how it plays out.
0:15:54 But now you’ve got a real problem, because you’ve made the engine of wealth something that the only way people can feel comfortable to keep going up is to make sure we don’t build enough housing around it.
0:15:56 But we need to build enough housing around it.
0:15:57 And so who’s winning?
0:15:59 You know, the people already who have the assets.
0:16:05 And liberalism has to ask, like, does it hold the values it puts on lawn signs?
0:16:07 You know, human being is illegal and kindness is everything.
0:16:12 And, you know, or is it, you know, and I got mine?
0:16:15 You know, sorry you didn’t get yours ethos.
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0:19:14 Look, I guess we’re a couple of months into this new administration.
0:19:19 People feel as though the government is acting very rapidly.
0:19:21 How do you make sense of that?
0:19:27 I mean, is that just because it’s basically breaking shit and breaking shit is significantly easier than building shit?
0:19:39 Elon Musk and Donald Trump decided, certainly Musk decided, that he just wasn’t going to treat a lot of things that have constrained past administrations as real and binding.
0:19:45 And it turns out from watching them, there’s a lot more you could do than people thought you could do.
0:19:48 The civil service protections were not nearly as binding as people made them seem to be.
0:19:55 I do not like what Elon Musk is doing in terms of indiscriminately and ideologically firing huge swaths of the federal workforce.
0:20:01 But I believe four months ago, and I believe today, that it was way too hard to hire and fire in the civil service.
0:20:11 And because liberalism never fixed that in a way that was conceptually and morally appropriate, now we’re getting this burn-it-down approach.
0:20:13 And I think that’s true in a lot of things.
0:20:20 If you do not make government work, someone else will eventually weaponize the dissatisfaction with it and burn it to the ground.
0:20:30 And liberals had no really good things to say about cost of living and affordability in the 2024 election, in part because they themselves have been bad on cost of living and affordability.
0:20:32 The places they govern have become unaffordable.
0:20:37 And that was part of why they lost to Donald Trump in an election that was about cost of living and affordability.
0:20:42 I don’t want to put everything on liberals or liberalism.
0:20:48 The right deserves – the right has to take responsibility for its own actions, its own failures.
0:20:51 The things they want are very different than the things I want.
0:20:53 But yes, Musk has come in.
0:20:54 Trump has come in.
0:21:01 And they have not treated process as binding or even something worth respecting in the way liberalism has.
0:21:09 And I think the two coalitions have developed mirror image pathologies, which is liberals are much too respectful and obsessed by process.
0:21:15 And the right now has functionally no process and no respect for it and no respect for the legality of things.
0:21:26 And, you know, I would like to see something that is more thoughtfully integrating of these perspectives.
0:21:29 I mean, look, can I just vent for a second?
0:21:30 You know what, man?
0:21:31 It’s a podcast.
0:21:32 It’s your podcast.
0:21:36 I mean – okay.
0:21:39 So, Democrats believe in government, right?
0:21:41 Have used government, as you were saying, to do great things.
0:21:51 And I agree that they have created or helped create a wildly sclerotic system that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to build stuff and do stuff.
0:21:58 But meanwhile, Republicans don’t really believe in government except for defense and national security.
0:22:00 They want to dismantle it.
0:22:01 They want to privatize everything.
0:22:07 And this dynamic is eternally to their advantage because, again, breaking shit is easier than building shit.
0:22:13 And in their efforts to break government, they’ve increased the public’s disgust with it because it keeps not working.
0:22:15 And this is the doom loop.
0:22:20 And I definitely take your point about absurd liberal proceduralism.
0:22:28 But I do think having one of our two government parties enter into politics with the explicit aim of making government not work is a problem.
0:22:34 And I don’t know how liberals and Democrats can solve that because this is a 51-49 country.
0:22:36 Well, maybe it wouldn’t be if we were better at governing.
0:22:37 You think so?
0:22:38 I hope so.
0:22:44 This thing liberals do, where it’s like, oh, man, they’re so bad.
0:22:45 And they are.
0:22:47 Like, I am fucking furious.
0:22:57 And you know what I also am is I’m fucking furious that liberals gave up the, like, mantle of people who would fix your problems to this band of idiots.
0:22:59 It makes me angry.
0:23:01 Like, it should make other people angry.
0:23:05 And just telling yourself endlessly that they are so bad, what are we going to do?
0:23:07 Well, you know what would be good if we did?
0:23:11 Created a situation where people said, California, that’s a well-run state.
0:23:16 Maybe one of any of the 18 national-level figures it has recently produced should be president.
0:23:19 New York, there’s a big economically important state.
0:23:23 Maybe somebody from it should be a plausible national figure.
0:23:33 You can’t, like, it is easier to run for president as a governor of Texas or Florida than the governor of California and New York.
0:23:35 Now, that’s not true for everywhere.
0:23:36 Jared Polis has done a good job in Colorado.
0:23:38 And you know what happened in Colorado in 2024?
0:23:46 They didn’t suffer a complete collapse of the Democratic vote share in the way that happened in California and New York.
0:23:48 Because on some level, governing will does matter.
0:23:55 And, like, I don’t think being a nihilistic party is highly popular, but being an ineffectual party is also not highly popular.
0:24:05 So what you’re preaching, right, doing big things, building big things, actually leading, governing, investing in the future, people will say, well, you know, Joe Biden kind of did this, right?
0:24:06 Or he appeared to do this.
0:24:09 He passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
0:24:10 He did the Chips and Science Act.
0:24:12 He did the Inflation Reduction Act.
0:24:13 And it’s like it never happened.
0:24:14 He got no credit.
0:24:16 It passed away like a fart in the wind.
0:24:19 So, like, what is the lesson of that for you?
0:24:25 Did all of that just fail politically because maybe the money was allocated, but for all the reasons you’ve outlined, nothing actually got done?
0:24:27 Or is it something else?
0:24:28 There are a couple things here.
0:24:34 So, one is that there was a huge problem with running Joe Biden for president a second time.
0:24:35 There just was.
0:24:38 I mean, obviously, with somebody who was not in favor of that.
0:24:49 But I think Joe Biden, if you change nothing about the election except Joe Biden into 65 and can effectively tell a story about his own administration, I think he would have won re-election.
0:24:49 I really do.
0:24:53 Now, his record alone was not that strong.
0:24:58 Part of that was inflation, which they bear a modest amount of the blame for.
0:25:05 It is the case that they put too much demand into the economy at a time when supply chains were choking, and that ended up being a bad idea.
0:25:15 But, yeah, on the other side, when you make it slow to get these things built, it really does harm you.
0:25:20 So, they got $42 billion for broadband access in poor communities.
0:25:22 How many people got broadband?
0:25:23 Approximately zero.
0:25:28 So, yeah, Biden’s a complicated case because I do think there are movements towards abundance.
0:25:34 I don’t think there was a serious effort to show that they’re making government spend in a way that was, you know, meant to benefit people.
0:25:47 I think it’s fucking a problem that Doge is a dark Republican con as opposed to something that was a bright Democratic idea.
0:26:05 I would have loved an actual Department of Government efficiency that was acting with real aggression, not the illegal and almost nihilistic levels of aggression under Elon Musk, but was really, really, really upset about places where government was failing and was making a big show of that.
0:26:10 And you saw something like this under Bill Clinton with the Reinventing Government Initiative, which Al Gore got.
0:26:17 But under Biden, they had this hyper-coalitional approach to politics and hyper-bureaucratic approach to the federal government.
0:26:22 And, you know, they didn’t have any real—they never bought themselves credibility on that.
0:26:25 They never seemed upset about things like they were doing wrong, right?
0:26:27 Everything just kind of got explained away.
0:26:36 And so, yeah, then at the end of the day, people felt prices had increased a bunch, and they were going around saying, no, no, no, we’ve spent all this money to spark a manufacturing boom.
0:26:39 And, you know, the two things didn’t connect.
0:26:42 Okay.
0:26:48 So, let’s talk about how to fix shit, okay?
0:27:04 If the big problem—and this is a book written broadly from the left, by the left, for the left, and the big problem on the left is this soul-crushing proceduralism, what is the solution to that?
0:27:06 There is no one solution.
0:27:11 I’m not, you know, it’s not one weird trick to get rid of your belly fat here.
0:27:22 What I see us as trying to do is build—in certain ways, rebuild—an ideological tendency in politics, but on the left.
0:27:26 And it will take time for that to take root and do big things.
0:27:30 It will take time for it to change processes, if it ever does.
0:27:33 It will take time for it to do new legislation.
0:27:43 You know, one of the most inspiring of the movements here that I think are part of, like, this broader sense of refocusing on supply is the YIMBY movement.
0:27:45 Can you just say what the YIMBYs are just for people to know?
0:27:56 The Yes in My Backyard movement, which is basically a sort of tendency—they want to be bipartisan, but at least began, like, as an intra-liberal fight over saying, no, no, to be a liberal, you can’t be fighting this development.
0:27:58 You can’t be fighting new homes.
0:27:59 You can’t be fighting affordable housing.
0:28:02 You can’t say we can build nothing and then say you’re a liberal.
0:28:07 Liberalism requires building enough that living in this city is affordable for the working class.
0:28:10 And they’ve had incredible intellectual victories.
0:28:13 Kamala Harris is running on building three million new homes.
0:28:18 Barack Obama, you know, brought up functionally YIMBYism during his DNC speech.
0:28:23 But again, in the place where it is most powerful, it has not moved the needle in a significant way.
0:28:27 And it’s because it’s still been bogged down in these coalitional fights.
0:28:31 And, you know, I was talking to somebody who is a developer down there, and I was saying, look,
0:28:36 they’ve passed all these bills in California to give you a fast track to build housing.
0:28:38 Why aren’t you building more housing?
0:28:39 He said, oh, I don’t use any of those bills.
0:28:41 I said, well, why?
0:28:46 He’s like, well, in order to use those bills, I have to agree to a whole new set of standards.
0:28:49 I have to pay higher wages, prevailing wages.
0:28:50 I have to do all these different things.
0:28:56 So in the end, the fast track of that would end up costing me more than just not doing it all.
0:28:58 And he’s like, that’s how I am.
0:28:59 That’s how all my developer friends are.
0:29:01 Like, the budgeting of it just doesn’t work out.
0:29:05 And, you know, all these things are good on some level.
0:29:06 Like, I want people to pay high wages.
0:29:12 But when you have a housing crisis, right, California in 2022, it had 12% of the country’s population.
0:29:14 It had 30% of its homeless population.
0:29:18 It had 50% of its unsheltered homeless population.
0:29:21 California is an astonishing homelessness crisis.
0:29:23 And that is driven by a housing crisis.
0:29:33 When you have a housing crisis and you’re passing a bunch of bills to build more housing and your bills aren’t working, well, then you have to ask, like, are the coalitional decisions you’re making good ones?
0:29:42 Or do you have to deal with the housing crisis in your housing crisis bills and try to think about wages and do an income tax credit or whatever you want to do in other bills?
0:29:46 But if your bills to solve your crisis are not solving your crisis, you’ve got to do something different.
0:29:48 It’s not going to be easy.
0:29:57 It’s going to take a political movement that, you know, over time begins to just see things differently at a lot of different levels and chip away at things in a lot of different ways.
0:29:59 And it will take aggressive leadership.
0:30:03 Again, you know, I don’t want to see what Elon Musk and Doge are doing to become the norm.
0:30:13 But I would like to see much more aggressive leadership from liberal politicians who are furious at government not working and insistent that it has to work and has to deliver the outcomes they actually promise.
0:30:31 This week on Unexplainable, the final installment of Good Robot, our four-part series on the stories we tell about AI.
0:30:36 So what I want you to do first is I want you to open up ChatGPT.
0:30:38 This time, the robots.
0:30:46 And I want you to say, I’m going to give you three episodes of a series in order.
0:30:47 Come for our jobs.
0:30:49 Why are you laughing?
0:30:50 I don’t know.
0:30:51 It’s like a little creepy.
0:31:01 Good Robot, a four-part series about AI from Julia Longoria and Unexplainable, wherever you listen.
0:31:27 Okay, so let’s just assume that we are able to clear the way for big innovations and invention.
0:31:32 What do you think we most need and how quickly do we need it?
0:31:35 So we’ve had abundance of some things for quite some time, right?
0:31:39 We’ve really built the global economy to give us an abundance of consumer goods.
0:31:46 Forty years ago, you could go to public college debt-free, but you couldn’t have a flat-screen television.
0:31:48 And now it’s basically the reverse, right?
0:31:50 You can have a flat-screen television, but you can’t go to college debt-free.
0:32:05 So we’re sort of more interested in abundance in the things that are the building blocks of what we think of as not just a good life, but the building blocks of a kind of creative and generative, productive life.
0:32:17 So the things people really need that allow them to do other things, education, health care, and inside of health care, it doesn’t mean just everybody having insurance, but it means having cures to as much as we can, right?
0:32:28 The value of health insurance, you know, my partner, she’s written a lot about this, so this is not me speaking out of turn, but, you know, she has a bunch of very complex and strange autoimmune diseases.
0:32:40 Our health insurance would be a hell of a lot more valuable to me if it had cures for all of them, you know, and this is true for anybody who, you know, who knows people or loves people or they themselves suffer from difficult diseases.
0:32:43 So what, like, the pace of medical innovation really matters.
0:32:55 Housing, like, you just need to be able to build homes, and I want to see working-class families be able to live in the big, economically productive cities.
0:33:11 And that matters not just because, like, it’s fun to live in New York City or San Francisco, but because it is a fundamental path to productivity and to social mobility and to opportunity to have all classes living in the places that are the biggest economic engines.
0:33:21 And one thing we’ve seen that’s a very, very worrying trend is it used to be that poor people migrated to rich places, and then they got richer, and now they migrate away from them because they can’t afford to live in them.
0:33:27 And that takes away all the opportunity those rich places used to offer to people who weren’t already rich.
0:33:30 Michael Bloomberg used to talk about New York City as a luxury good.
0:33:33 Cities are not supposed to be luxury goods.
0:33:39 They are engines of opportunity, and when we gate them, we have turned off something very fundamental in the economy.
0:33:50 So I love the section at the end of the book about these periods of political order where there’s a broad alignment of values, right?
0:34:02 So after the wreckage of the Great Depression and World War II, we have this spirit of solidarity and collective action, and the power of the state expands enormously, and this is the New Deal era.
0:34:15 And then this consensus collapses in the 70s, and the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, and we get the neoliberal era, which is defined much more by individualism and consumerism.
0:34:26 And I guess my question to you is, to undertake the sort of project you’re talking about here, this era of abundance, that will require a shift in priorities and outlook.
0:34:33 And do you think that’s possible in this environment, in the absence of some kind of truly epic calamity?
0:34:37 Like, do we have the attentional resources to course-correct as a country anymore?
0:34:43 I never think things happen all the way or none of the way.
0:34:46 Like, there was no pure neoliberal era.
0:34:48 Nothing in this period was pure neoliberalism.
0:34:53 Now, there are ideological tendencies that win out during periods.
0:34:56 But, you know, the neoliberal era is full of contradictions.
0:35:02 What is opening possibilities right now are very real problems that people have to figure out how to solve.
0:35:05 Now, history is not, to me, teleological.
0:35:07 I don’t believe the arc of history bends towards abundance.
0:35:10 I think that it could go very badly.
0:35:17 One of the things that we see with Trump is, look, that guy could have run as a sort of conservative abundance.
0:35:19 I mean, he would want different things than I do.
0:35:21 The values would be different.
0:35:23 But he’s not.
0:35:26 He does not want to bring the Texas housing policies to the nation.
0:35:34 He and J.D. Vance have repeatedly used the housing crisis as a cudgel against immigrants and an argument for why we need to close the border, right?
0:35:35 That’s a scarcity approach.
0:35:40 He doesn’t want to increase the flows of international trade by making us build more stuff.
0:35:43 He’s using tariffs to cut them down.
0:35:52 Like, Elon Musk is not expanding what the government can do, given that the government is what allowed him to build Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.
0:35:55 He is trying to slash and destroy what the government can do.
0:36:01 Right-wing populism loves scarcity because at the core of its politics is a suspicion of the other.
0:36:09 If there is the feeling or the reality of there not being enough, then we look with a lot of suspicion on those who might take what we have or what we want.
0:36:12 So I do think it’s going to be up to the left to try to embrace abundance.
0:36:19 But if we don’t or if we fail, yeah, scarcity could just be the politics that wins out in the day.
0:36:21 It has in many eras of human history before.
0:36:33 I wonder if you think we’ll need a fundamentally different kind of communication environment shaped by different tools in order to have something like a constructive form of politics that makes these sorts of changes possible.
0:36:34 I don’t think that.
0:36:36 Why not?
0:36:37 I hope you’re right.
0:36:44 Because I think that the current information ecosystem is bad.
0:36:47 I think it has been often bad in human history.
0:36:52 I don’t think the specific way it’s bad is really at the root of many of the things that I’m worried about.
0:36:59 And I don’t think the information ecosystem cares one way or the other about local permitting.
0:37:06 I don’t think the information ecosystem, like, frankly, I think it’s actually quite friendly to all sorts of different forms of futurism.
0:37:14 I think that it’s not standing in the way of all progress or all change.
0:37:25 And like one just good example of that is that, you know, it in some ways created Trump, Musk, Vance.
0:37:28 But it’s not stopping them from doing things.
0:37:34 And Trump won by the popular vote by 1.5 points.
0:37:40 So, you could very much imagine a Democrat, you know, like, imagine a different world.
0:37:42 Joe Biden does not run for re-election.
0:37:43 We have a Democratic primary.
0:37:48 Maybe Kamala Harris wins it and has more time to put together a campaign that has more to say about the issues of the moment.
0:37:49 And she’s better at talking about them.
0:38:00 Or maybe Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer or, you know, someone else, Pete Buttigieg, Wes Moore, you know, wins the primary and they run.
0:38:01 Like, you just can’t tell.
0:38:06 Like, the thing, this did not all just turn on the information ecosystem.
0:38:10 Or to the extent it did, it could have, you know, turned in many different ways.
0:38:18 And we see different things happening in different states, even though all the states are exposed to the same information ecosystem.
0:38:21 I think you’ve got to get a little less monocasal, my friend.
0:38:28 I’ve never been indeterminous, but I think I’ve just increasingly become one.
0:38:31 And look, you can talk me off the ledge here.
0:38:45 I mean, I think part of, or one of my hang-ups is that I think we’ve lost the capacity as a society to tell ourselves a coherent story about who we are, what we are, where we’re going, what we want.
0:38:54 And I guess maybe the question is, do we need, do we need, do we actually need to tell ourselves a coherent story in order to move a political project like this forward?
0:38:57 Did we ever really need a coherent story?
0:38:59 Or did we ever really have a coherent story?
0:39:11 I think if your view of politics is that it needs some extremely high level of informational and narrative cohesion to function, then your politics has a real problem.
0:39:14 Because that’s very, very, very rarely on offer.
0:39:24 I think one criticism you’ll get from the left is that, you know, what do you attribute to liberal ideology?
0:39:29 Because part of the problem here is the rules written by liberals decades ago being used to prevent building stuff today.
0:39:44 Well, that’s really about wealthy, powerful people using their wealth and power to block progress, which is more about class politics than liberal ideology, that these people aren’t really liberals in any meaningful sense, just rich people protecting their turf.
0:39:46 I don’t know.
0:39:47 How do you tease that out?
0:39:49 Does that distinction even make sense to you?
0:39:54 I don’t have a class politics where I’m like, rich people are always bad and anybody else is always good.
0:39:56 But there are places where rich people are a huge problem.
0:39:58 And you get a lot of it in nimbyism.
0:40:06 You get a lot of it in, you know, Ted Kennedy, the late Ted Kennedy, helping to organize against an offshore wind project near Cape Cod.
0:40:15 I just think you’ve got to be specific about what you’re talking about and then work through what you think the political opposition is and what the problems are and what the process is.
0:40:19 I don’t take that as a particularly useful blanket claim.
0:40:25 Even in the place where you’d expect rich people to speak the most with one voice, should we raise taxes on rich people?
0:40:27 They actually don’t anymore.
0:40:38 The way polarization is structured itself, the way income polarization is structured itself, Democrats are doing better and better with rich people at a time when they’ve become more and more likely and insistent on taxing the rich.
0:40:41 And so, like, that’s a kind of interesting fact of our politics.
0:40:43 It has scrambled a bunch of things.
0:40:48 Democrats sort of think they can, they will get the working class voters they want by saying we’re going to tax rich people.
0:40:52 They’re weirdly winning more rich voters and fewer working class voters.
0:40:55 And instead, you have more working class voters for the first time voting for Donald Trump.
0:40:59 It’s easier if your only problem is rich people.
0:41:04 It’s hard in the sense that they control a bunch of resources, but it’s easier in that that narrative is super clean.
0:41:07 What happens when it’s not, though?
0:41:15 What happens when some of your problems are just, like, upper-middle-class people who are the core of your constituency and you don’t want building happening around them?
0:41:26 What happens when a bunch of your problems are actually other parts of the government you yourself run that over time have developed turf and funding and kind of stakeholder dynamics?
0:41:29 And now all of your processes are incredibly difficult.
0:41:32 So, yeah, rich people are sometimes a problem.
0:41:34 They’re not the only problem.
0:41:37 I just, I don’t have a lot of patience for monocasal politics.
0:41:41 Oh, that feels like a low-key shot there.
0:41:43 I feel attacked.
0:41:46 Oh, well, you know, I have more patience for monocasal media politics, maybe.
0:41:52 I just think everybody, we all have, like, look, abundance is also not a full politics.
0:41:58 Like, asking the question of how do we solve problems you supply does not tell you every problem.
0:42:03 It’s not going to tell you how to solve or even what position to take on a bunch of very difficult cultural and social issues.
0:42:07 It is one set of problems that we could do a better job on.
0:42:08 And better would be better.
0:42:17 Yeah, I mean, one of the things I like about it is that it doesn’t necessarily mat neatly and predictably onto partisan cleavages in that way.
0:42:29 But look, you know, there’s also a movement of people, as you know, who say the only sensible response, actually, at this point in history, is to do the opposite of what you suggest.
0:42:30 Which is degrowth, right?
0:42:36 That this whole model of late-stage consumer capitalism has been a moral and ecological catastrophe.
0:42:40 And we have to scale it back in order to save ourselves.
0:42:42 To that, you say, what?
0:42:43 No.
0:42:45 Say more.
0:42:49 So I have a long, we have a long discussion of degrowth in the book.
0:42:49 Yeah.
0:42:56 And I have a lot I could say and want to say about degrowth, but I’ll say a couple things that are, I guess, maybe narrow.
0:43:04 One, I do not agree that this era has been, like, a moral, it’s been a bit of an ecological catastrophe, but not a moral catastrophe.
0:43:11 It’s still not for human beings who, as part of, I do think degrowth has too little preference for human beings in it.
0:43:16 And the amount of people we’ve pulled out of poverty, the rise in living standards, those are not things to take lightly.
0:43:20 Then I think, again, you’ve got to, like, look at what your problems are.
0:43:27 Degrowth has this kind of interesting dynamic to me of being both too much and not enough of a solution to something like climate change.
0:43:43 If we had not invented our way towards genuinely cheap and plentiful solar energy, wind energy, the possibility of advanced geothermal, new generation battery storage, the only answer we would have to climate change would be sacrifice.
0:43:46 And sacrifice is just a terrible politics.
0:43:47 It doesn’t really work.
0:43:51 If you’re, I would love to see some people run on it and make it work, but I just, I’ve not seen it.
0:43:53 It doesn’t seem to me to happen.
0:43:54 Definitely not at this speed.
0:43:59 And so, our only real shot, in my view, on climate change is technological.
0:44:05 We have to deploy unfathomable quantities of clean energy as fast as we can.
0:44:12 And that will also, as we do that, because of the way these sort of innovation curves work, we will get better and better at using the energy.
0:44:13 It will become more energy dense.
0:44:20 What has happened to solar and wind and battery storage is genuinely miraculous, has outpaced all expectations.
0:44:27 And that is at least a viable politics, promising people that they can actually have, like, great technologically advanced lives.
0:44:36 And it can be built on, you know, abundant clean energy, which is completely conceptually and physically and technologically possible.
0:44:38 Like, that’s a viable politics.
0:44:45 Well, the politics of degrowth, degrowth as a political proposition, is like the platonic ideal of a dead fucking end.
0:44:52 Well, what’s worse is that it doesn’t hold out the possibility that you miss your climate targets by three-tenths of a percent or something.
0:44:59 It’s that you empower a populist right that promises to burn their way back to prosperity, which is what they are doing right now, right?
0:45:00 And I think it’s really important.
0:45:04 Like, when your politics doesn’t work, it’s not like you get half of what you wanted.
0:45:07 You get, like, the opposite of what you wanted.
0:45:15 Like, you really have to be, if you care about these problems and you think these problems are near term, hard-nosed about the political consequences of what you’re about to do.
0:45:18 Well, to that point, I know we’ve got to go soon.
0:45:31 A lot of what’s happening right now is you have an administration in power that is doing their very best to render government inoperable.
0:45:43 Does it concern you that damage might be done that will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to do any of these things after they’re gone?
0:45:47 The damage that will be done concerns me hugely.
0:45:54 The idea that it would then be impossible to do any of these things, I think if decent people win back power, that’s not accurate.
0:45:59 I think the damage that will be done is going to be less than the damage of the Civil War, right?
0:46:08 I mean, less than the—I mean, we have seen countries destroyed by all kinds of natural disasters and wars that were then able to build strong states fairly rapidly afterward.
0:46:14 I am not one of the people who has a view that what they’re going to do is permanently wreck state capacity.
0:46:21 But they could create authoritarianism, right, which would weaponize state capacity in a different way.
0:46:34 My concerns have more to do with democratic backsliding than they do with the idea that we would never be able to rebuild a capable Department of Energy after they shut it down or otherwise corrode it.
0:46:36 Yeah, and just so you know, I’m not even thinking in terms of permanence.
0:46:38 I’m thinking just in terms of that 10-year window.
0:46:40 Oh, you mean on climate change specifically?
0:46:41 Yeah, specifically.
0:46:42 Yeah, I’m very fucking concerned.
0:46:43 I don’t know what to tell.
0:46:58 Like, I’m more worried, again, than that we won’t be able to do good policies in the next administration, if you imagine a better administration following them in 2029, than I am that they will do everything they can to retard our progress in the next four years.
0:47:03 And they are trying to, as we speak, destroy the solar and wind industries.
0:47:06 And this is a really, really, really crucial period.
0:47:09 I am hair on fire about that.
0:47:16 But I don’t have a lever to stop it, you know, like, we’re in the timeline we’re in.
0:47:23 I mean, you also say, too, that you think this era features too little utopian thinking.
0:47:25 I think you’re right about that.
0:47:30 But I also know that utopian thinking gets a bad rap.
0:47:36 But what do you really think of as the practical value of a little utopian thinking?
0:47:37 What do you mean by that?
0:47:39 I think you should think about what future you’re trying to create.
0:47:41 And that helps you work backwards.
0:47:45 I think that too often we settle for parceling out the present.
0:47:50 We think about the present and we think about making it a little gentler, a little kinder, a little fairer.
0:47:53 I think we can think about futures that are quite different.
0:47:57 And we don’t do that enough for a lot of different reasons.
0:47:59 The right tends to be relentlessly nostalgic.
0:48:04 And the left tends to be very just focused on the injustices of the past.
0:48:07 And in that way, I tend to be more on the left with that.
0:48:10 And I think there has been a lot of injustice and we should try to do a lot about it.
0:48:13 But thinking about ways the future could be different I think is important.
0:48:19 I think for a long time for American liberals, the sort of hoped-for future is Denmark or France.
0:48:23 It’s a future with a European-level welfare state.
0:48:25 That has been the grail of where they’re trying to get to.
0:48:27 And that’s fine.
0:48:30 That would be better in a bunch of different ways from my perspective.
0:48:32 But Europe is a basket case.
0:48:33 Productivity is really low.
0:48:35 It’s poor compared to us at this point.
0:48:40 Canada, which a lot of us think of as a much more humane place.
0:48:45 If Canada were a state, it would be like Alabama level in terms of income per capita.
0:48:52 You really do create wealth and dynamism differently in America.
0:48:55 And I think we need a vision of the future that, yes, is kinder.
0:48:56 Yes, is fairer.
0:48:57 Yes, is more humane.
0:48:58 Yes, is more compassionate.
0:49:02 But also imagines, like, amazing things happening.
0:49:06 I don’t think that you have to give up on good ideas from Europe or Canada.
0:49:09 But that shouldn’t be all of it, right?
0:49:11 We can do better than Denmark.
0:49:13 We can do better than France.
0:49:14 We can do better than the UK.
0:49:15 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:49:19 Once again, the book is called Abundance.
0:49:23 Ezra Klein, my friend and former employer, thanks for coming in.
0:49:25 It was great to be back with you here, Sean.
0:49:26 Really, really enjoyed it.
0:49:35 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:49:42 You know, whatever comes of this call for a politics of abundance, I do think there is
0:49:49 enormous value in trying to articulate a new vision forward or a new framework for liberals
0:49:56 in particular, because we are stuck right now, stuck in our old categories, stuck in our
0:49:56 old models.
0:50:03 And even though there’s a lot of angst and uncertainty right now, there’s also, for
0:50:08 the same reasons, a lot of potential for something fresh and maybe even hopeful.
0:50:12 And I got a lot of that in this conversation.
0:50:16 But as always, we want to know what you think.
0:50:24 So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line
0:50:28 at 1-800-214-5749.
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0:50:41 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian
0:50:46 Ayala, fact check by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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