This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch in the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcacy? God daddy these people talk as much as you do. Razib Khan's unsupervised learning.
Hey everybody This is Razib Khan with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. I am here with Antonio Garcia Martinez. Antonio, can you introduce yourself?
Hey Razib. Yes, I'm Antonio Garcia Martinez, I wrote a book called "Chaos Monkeys", which was a memoir about my time at Facebook, I've worked at various tech companies and gotten into various bits of trouble. And now I have a substack at "thepullrequest.com"
Great, great. Yeah, so everyone's check out Antonio substack. You know, I want to talk about what happened to you partly because I think people will ask me, why I didn't talk about it. It's just one of those things now. So it's been a while, um, how do you feel about the whole Apple bait and switch? So a friend of mine was explaining that in terms of cancellations, and all that crap. It's kind of like a random process where, periodically someone just needs to be sacrificed to the gods, and then it just blows up in some autocatalytic process. I mean, do you think that's what happened to you? Like, there could be - there's an alternate universe, a lot of alternate universes where there's a little bit of a stink, and then it just kind of like, moves on. They're like, whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I can't talk about what happened with Apple in too much detail for practical reasons. But at a high level. I mean, you know, you can see, you can, you know, read what was publicly reported about me, which was, you know, relatively accurate. And then what came after, right was like a petition about Israel, Palestine, and then one about going back to work that I, for whatever reason, I seem to have sparked this whole set of like Slack petitions inside Apple. And it's certainly not the only company, that suffers from that sort of thing. Google has a similar rigmarole. You know, I think, in my first piece for "pull request", you know, I sort of theorize that interjecting the sort of somewhat noxious dynamics of Twitter into work via Slack and calling it work is part of this, right? And so like the same dynamics of like, dog piles of weird, passive aggressive emojis of like the troll, introducing all that, and by the way, I'm super pro Slack. Like I've used it in companies before at Facebook, we use Facebook internally in a very select, like way. So I think it actually can be an effective work tool. But I think if you actually inject those politics into the workplace, well, you know, you get Twitter, but it's like work and it just sucks.
Yeah, yeah. What do you think this, this sort of thing is sustainable? Because yours is just like, it became a big deal, because it's just one of this general phenomenon of, you know, I mean, do you think this is sustainable in the United States, because I'm not gonna lie. Like, I have friends and acquaintances who are actually outsourcing partly because they just don't want to deal... I mean, yes, it is cheaper, but there's other costs having to deal with people internationally. So it kind of cancels out. But you know, one of the reasons is, they don't want to deal with workplace drama about politics in places like India, people are excited to have a job where they get paid well,. So they don't make a big deal about politics.
Right right, in India, they still have this radical notion that if you get a job, like you show up and do it, right, it's amazing, right? You have to remind Americans that this is kind of how it works.
Yeah, it's not a lifestyle, it's a job, you have something to do. And there's just none of this extra stuff. But like, you know, I have friends who work in tech in the United States at startups. And it's an issue with some of the people where they go to their social media, and they're like, Whoa,
well, you know, I think and people are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I think a lot of our current sort of social progressivism is obviously sort of secularized Protestant Christianity. And the fact that call it capitalism or call it whatever has sort of denuded the Civic landscape of most sources of meaning, whether it be cultural affinity, regional affinity, religion in a traditional mold, that's all gone, right? Like the one of the weird thing is I was realizing, I think you have children too Razib, but you know, when you have a child is like how you do you raise them, sof you, you encounter all these existential issues that used to be kind of like, you know, Friday night, after the fifth glass of wine debate topics are actually like serious issues you have to confront. So it's like, what sort of values do I want to model and I just realized my daughter who grew up in a world in which the only functioning organizations she was exposed to, or corporations, like everything else just kind of sucks and doesn't work. And it's not kind of part of our life. It's only corporations. And so if you know, if you were raised in that, like I said, I'm still somewhat old enough to remember a world kind of a little bit kind of before that. But if you were raised in that, then yeah, then then the corporate slack is your forum for everything of life. And I think that's one of the negatives. Is this whole bring the real you to work?
Yeah, no, no, no, no, you don't want to bring the real Razib to work.
Exactly. Like, who believes that like, you just couldn't say things at work that you would say to a friend And after the fifth beer or whatever, right?
Sure. Well, I will tell you like, you know, I've had experiences where I've worked with people, and I'm kind of well known in the genetic space on social media and stuff. And people have said, Oh, you're not anything like to work with like, you were, you know what I thought from your reading your blog or social media? Why would I be I mean, I'm here to like, do a job with specifications.
Right? Well, that I mean, this gets a little bit to my Apple story, right, like, so the company before I worked at a large startup called "Branch" that people haven't heard of, but it's pretty successful. And, you know, they the that was the first job after my whole writerly interlude following the book. And, you know, the, the founders confided to me they read the book, and they were like, well, he definitely comes off as a little aggro and hardcore, and you know, whatever. And they mean, it's like, Man, you're just so different. Versus like, Yes, I wrote a literary memoir with a certain persona and style has nothing to do with what I'm actually like, inside a product meeting. But um, that's, that's the weird, like, wagging the tail thing where like, if you declare you bring the real you to work, then every aspect of you must be the work you or something. It's just this bizarre reasoning. I don't understand. And, by the way, I also think it's a generational thing. And maybe we're just old. And yeah, like, a lot of this fight is obviously like young millennials, and Gen Z years, and older millennials and Gen Xers, which I am or even boomers kind of engaging in generational combat, basically.
Yeah, yeah. No, I totally agree. And I think we're losing to be frank. But you know, that is what it is, you know, there's, there's a time for everything. And our season is passing. So you brought up religion, I was gonna ask you about religion later, but I'm gonna like ask you now and be spontaneous. I see. I see. You know, you talk about religion, you know, more than more than the usual tech journalist. Let me call you a tech journalist, you know.
Oh my God, what an insult Razib!
No, I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes people call me a science journalist. I'm like, I'm not a science journalist. I have other things going on. But um,
I used to joke - Let me let me just insult the tech journalists because you have to do it. I used to joke that, you know, when I went from technology to journalism, the average IQ in both fields went up.
All right, man, I can see why people were after you.
Yeah...
Keepin it real, keepin it real. Bringing the real you. So sometimes, actually, you know, I just I take it for granted now. But occasionally you will say on Twitter, you know, you'll be you'll say something like, Well, you know what Christians don't understand and then you'll you can talk about being Jewish. So talk about this whole Jewish thing because like, I'm not gonna lie. Antonio Garcia Martinez, I see the name. I'm thinking like a Iberico ham. And then you're just like, you know, as a Jew, and I'm just like, Okay, well, let's let's talk about this.
Yeah, I know. It's definitely not the Jewiest name. And to be clear, I haven't actually converted yet. I don't know that I'd ever start - I haven't started a tweet yet as a Jew, and then I hate the formulation as as anything. Placing this primacy on the lived experience. But anyway, that's a whole separate topic. But yeah, the Jewish thing is strange. Yeah, so there's been this conversion process ongoing. It takes a while. It's like getting a master's degree becoming a Jew. Basically, you it's like this whole post grad thing of like a year or two. There's actually like- you have to like defend the thesis to like a Rabbinical court. It's this while thing. Its a whole thing. They they obviously do raise certain hurdles to get in.
You're a Jewish... You're Jewish candidate, your candidate for the Jews
ABD ABD. Have you call it ABC? All but circumcision. I'm joking. Sorry.
TMI, but go on.
Well, actually, by the way, that actually comes up in the rabbinical conversation because in the more traditional forms of Judaism, it's actually a necessary step.
Yeah. No, I told I told a friend of mine who's converting to Judaism and he is of let's just say he's of subcontinental background, like he's just convert to Islam, because it's not obligatory to you know, do the snip, but anyway,
oh, it isn't. If you convert, you don't have to do the snip?
it depends on which religious school so in the Hanafi, which is the dominant Sunni school in Turkey, Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent, it is considered meritorious, but it is not obligatory as an adult. And in fact, in Islam, it's not like in Judaism, it's more of a customary tradition, infant circumcision. It's not a necessary part of the religion. It's supported by certain Hadith, but it's not in the Quran. It's an Arab tradition that was adopted by Muslims.
Interesting. Okay. I didn't realize it. Yeah, I mean, it's also true that it's some flavors of Judaism don't. But from,
But let's not talk about those because Come on, let's keep it real.
Well, it's just like you could say there. It is interesting, though, that among the various flavors of Judaism, a lot of the issues of the day line up with the same sort of dividing lines of who does or doesn't accept whatever, but anyway the Jewish thing. So yeah, I've got three Jewish kids. And so the kids are part of it. Basically, the the mother, the third kid said.. For the reasons I said earlier, we're like, I didn't want the kid growing up without some sort of religious tradition or something outside of like the American capitalist circus in which nothing but little marketing jingles for Netflix or some bullshit are the only culture she knows. And so I was like, well, you know, I think she should go to Synagog. And she's like, "well..." And then it's funny because the mother is like the grandchild of Auschwitz survivors. So you think she'd be somewhat Jewy, but in fact, not at all. And she's like, "well, if the kid goes to Schul, you're taking her" and so I called her bluff. And I started the conversion process at a local Schul. And it's funny it's had the impact. I've wanted the kid now, you know, went to like a Jewish summer camp and stuff. And so just generally, there's little more Judaism injected into life than would otherwise have been there. If I hadn't made the effort. Of course, you become you become that annoying thing inside any Jewish family, which is like the zealous convert, which pushes themto be way more observant, they would normally and you're just like annoying.
You're not the only one that I you know, that I've known. This is a thing, right? I know people like this to where it's like, I have a Jewish friend, I have a Jewish friend. And he was raised Jewish in New York. And the TLDR is just like, you know, he's sending his kids to Jewish day school and like Hebrew school or whatever. And I'm like, I'm a little surprised by that. He just kind of rolled his eyes and he's like, it's the wife. She sees that she says they need a religious tradition. So his wife is from a Protestant, evangelical background. And so she's like, you need to raise the kids Jewish. He's like, okay, whatever. And he's the he's the Jewish one.
I know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a joke about this about like, Don't marry the shiksa. Because she makes you like, observe Shabbat and all the rest of it. shiksa being Gentile woman, Gentile woman. Yeah. So yeah, so anyway, that's it. And also I find it you know, beyond that, I also find it intellectually...
I mean, it but it's not just it's not just the family. Come on, like, I mean, I talked about it, you're obviously getting intellectually engaged. Yes. So were you raised as a Catholic or Christian?
Well, I went to Jesuit schools when I was younger, and so there was definitely a little bit of holiday Catholic. But you know, Cubans weren't terribly Catholic. At least my family wasn't but you know, yeah, yes. It was definitely in the background. Sure. And I went to a Jesuit school in which reading the various scriptures and Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustin all that was part of like a regular high school education. So, yes. So when I speak about Christianity, you know, it's somewhat as an insider in the sense that, like, I do feel as though it was a tradition I was raised in. And the interesting thing is, I mean, maybe we can get into it, maybe we won't. But you know, I think Christianity informs a lot of what we see in the world right now in terms of social progressivism, wokeness, whatever. And so it's interesting to play it out, and then be kind of moving the other way, right, because usually Jews converted to Christianity to sort of fit in as assimilated Jews. It's rare for people to go the other direction, right? Yeah, weird to be sort of leaving the Christian tradition, and that it's funny, you know, then you can see it very clearly. Like how Christian thought is so strange compared to Jewish that because unless, again, unless you yank the fish out of water, they don't know what water is until they're getting gasping for breath. And so yanking myself out of it has actually been very edifying as a as an intellectual experiment.
So I mean, what are like let's let's just go there, then. Like, what are the top things that you think are different from Christian thought to Jewish thought? Like, what have you learned? Like, what? What worlds have been opened up to you that were totally alien?
Yeah, right. So I just interviewed a guy named Tom Holland, who's a favorite writer of mine. He's I'm definitely a fanboy wrote a book called "Dominion" about - for those who are interested in like, what is Antonio talking about? Tom Holland is a much better job of explaining how Christian thought under, you know, underlies just a lot of Western history. And even now, secular liberalism, in many ways is a secularized form of, of Christianity. So, but just to cut to it, so what do I think so obviously, like, I often joke that, you know, Christianity is Judaism with like, product market fit and a growth team, right? Like, if you gave Judaism to like - a Facebook Growth Product Manager - Christianity is what you'd come up with to actually get to 2 billion users or whatever. Yeah, because it just, but what Christianity does is that it takes a few elements of Judaism, and then like, turns the knob to 11. Right? So it's an obviously the notion of Messianic, you know, the Messiah, according to Christians has come, right. And in some sense, we're, you know, this other worldly utopia, The kingdom of God is very real to them. While it's a very distant abstraction in Judaism, and is a thread that, you know, exists in Judaic thought. But it's, it's a lot, it's a lot less than than it is in Judaism. There's there's two threads, though. I mean, there's a lot of things that you could say that the, you know, everyone uses Judeo-Christian right as this thing, but that, but there's a couple things that I think Christianity does that are kind of unique, or that are so exaggerated, that in some sense, they've escaped their Jewish form. So what is the sort of moral inversion of the Sermon on the Mount? Right, the first shall be last and the last shall be first, the thought that you would take an alleged criminal and a heretic and a hippie that was brutalized by the Roman authorities and killed in the most, you know, degrading way possible the death of a slave, and that that would be elevated as a symbol of divinity. That's an that's a shocking concept. I mean, there's a lot of elements of Christianity that come from that it's an inversion. Yeah, it's a total moral inversion. I mean, it is the victim is hero. And almost no society does that. I mean, there's sympathy expressed, and this and that, but if you just pull back for a second, you walk into a Catholic Church, and you see this bloody figure, like, what other religious side do you go to? And you see like, a bloody criminal as like, literally the form of God on earth. It just doesn't exist, right. That's one side of it. And then the other thing is, and I was when I was talking about this in the context of the Afghanistan withdraw is the and this does exist a little bit in Judaism, but it's still a conflict is universalism, right. Christianity is a religion. For the entire world, right? You are supposed to proselytize it. One of the earliest debates in Christian history was was with Paul, that, you know, with the, you know, Christianity started as a sect of Judaism, right. Would the Gentile converts, in some sense, be forced to get circumcised? Speaking of circumcision, and do all the rest of Jewish practice, or were they not? Would it be like this whole different thing? And the conclusion was no, it would be a whole different thing, actually. And that, that is unique. The thought that again, this, this, you just don't see the societies, the fact that every individual, different tribes, they look different, they sound different, are imbued with the same moral dignity as my tribe that doesn't exist anywhere in the world really, right. I mean, even in Judaism, it exists in tension with particularism, as the chosen people who have a special covenant with God. Yeah, and sure, people who follow the Noahide laws, the basic laws of Judaism are sort of acceptable, but there's definitely kind of a second class status there. And in Christianity, no, there is no and that's, that's really a radical notion as well, actually.
Mm hmm. And so this is that maybe you knew this intellectually? Do you think that you understand it more viscerally now that you are becoming a Jew yourself?
Yes. Yeah. Again, it's, it's the, it's the yanking the fish out of water when I try to explain because again, it sounds weird. I'm sure my friends are tired. And listen to me go on with it about how like Christianity underlies like a lot of our current politics, you have to yank yourself out of the reference frame, and either go to the Judaic reference frame if the Jewish culture is accessible to you, or even the Greco-Roman reference frame, if you have a classical background, right. But again, the it's just there's so much that we think and talk about that are implicitly Christian, that it's hard to yank ourselves out of it if we don't have another tradition to kind of flip our hat into and then say, Aha, seen from this point of view, this shit is crazy. Right? And so that's why to me, I think the Jewish education process has been helpful, because otherwise, it just wouldn't be obvious to me. And now I see it everywhere. Now. I see Christian thought everywhere.
Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing I will say is, you know, I am Gen X as well. And I remember in my in like, say like, 2005 2006, really 2006, a new atheism was really hot. And Richard Dawkins was running around and saying, like, perhaps, if we got rid of religion, there would be no evil. And I'm just like, I don't know if I agree with I mean, I'm an atheist myself, but I don't know if I agree with you. That seems a little naive, Richard. So but, you know, there's been a massive collapse in religion in the United States over the last generation. No, religion,
Formal Religion capital R Religion, right?
formal, yeah, formal institutional religion, like people, like, you know, you know, you're not like a, you're not like an Episcopalian anymore, who just goes a couple of times a year, a lot of people are just dropping that in totality. They're just ripping the mask off. And they're like, "Eh, I don't believe in any of that stuff". You know. So we've done it. But I mean,
you've got to be, but you've got to be a [unintelegable] in your $2 million loft condo in
In this house we believe - in this house we trust in science, you know, and so, it's very interesting because I, I feel - so I grew up in Eastern Oregon, I grew up in a very conservative Republican area with a large Mormon minority. And so, you know, as an atheist, you know, brown kid, you know, I was used to being different, but I feel like sometimes with some of my woke friends, to be entirely frank, I feel like I'm kind of getting flashbacks where, you know, for example, like with academics, they'll just be like, you know, what's, what's the DEI angle on this? What's the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion angle on taxonomy? Linnaean Taxonomy? You know, I mean, but these are, like, the kinds of things that I did used to hear, like, how do we glorify God in running? Yeah, you know, like, my school, like, like, a couple of, like, a bunch of lifters for Christ came to my school, it was like, not mandatory, obviously. But they were lifting for Christ. And it's like, Okay, well...
you know, the thought experiment I often perform myself is take, take whatever like, is the most recent little fashionable trope of like, Woke capitalism, and replace it with a literal crucifix, and just re examine the aesthetics. Do you now think that it's fucking crazy, and that you're like, in some deep Southdown? Yes, then that, in fact, you're living in a religious society just doesn't go by the name. I mean, I'm, I often think of William James and his varieties of religious experience has a quote that says that I'm obviously paraphrasing from memory, but it's like, religion, is the belief that there's some unseen order that we help realize via our actions and our faith. Right. And if that's your definition of religion, then we must live in one of the most religious soaked areas in human history, in my opinion. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe it's just, you know, you know, everything changes, but it's always the same. It's like one of those paradoxes right. So maybe some of the details and specifications are different. I'm gonna be entirely frank and I do feel like the fact that this kind of "awokening" is happening and so non institutional is scares me. I think religions I mean, should I say it but they're Lindy right? They've been around for 1000 years, 2000 years. They have kind of a system to kind of dampen and channel these enthusiasms. But you know, this is like a priesthood of all the woke right now everyone is getting into these competitions of being super woke. And I think like, that's where a lot of the stress tension and social enimity is coming in now, because we're going through this huge change. And everything is engaging in this cultural Darwinian competition, figuring out what works. But, you know, to be frank, if you're a religious person, you already have a system. It's already there.
Yeah, I mean, yes. And no, I mean, I think some traditions are still vital in the sensitive being redefined. And I think if Judaism is defined by anything, it's like constant debate. I mean, they eventually, they essentially invented the subreddit, right? It's called the Talmud, you read a copy of your standard copy of the Talmud, it looks like a subreddit right? You literally have the main text. And then like 100, trolls commenting and like basically backbiting each other with like, almost up and down arrows on the thing. So I think it's still sort of, I think it's still like a vital living document. But you're right, that there's a script in a sense, right? Like, if you, my, my, my father just died? How do I deal with mourning? And how do I deal with that, or my child is turning 12? Or 13? There needs to be some coming of age ritual, or, you know, how does my value system grapple with the use of violence inside a political context? And what is moral and what isn't moral? Right? Like, you have to be a total narcissist, to think that you're going to come up with better answers to those questions. And people's people have been thinking about it for Oh, I don't know, three to 4000 years in the case of Judaism, or, you know, 2000 years in the case of Christianity. So, yeah,
Well, I mean, to use an example, another example, in classical Confucianism, there's the idea of "Jen", which is a good heartedness, you know, where you're trying to do the right thing. But there's also "Li", which is basically ritual or rites. And so the idea is ritual and rites are super important, because they're just like common, just common standards that everyone can agree to, like, this is how you do a funeral. This is how you mourn just how many days you mourn. And everyone can agree on everything. If you don't have the Li if you don't have the common rights, and you think - everyone thinks that they're doing the right thing. Well, what happens? It could be chaos. Right? And I think that's what people are worried about.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's one thing worth highlighting here because again, this is one of the this is another case in which Christian influence is so strong, people don't necessarily realize it in their own thinking, right? Christianity is what what a theologian might call an orthodoxic religion, right in terms of Orthodoxy - rightness of belief, and you accepting a certain belief in your heart defines that religion, but other religions like Hinduism, or Confucianism, or I would say,
Islam, and Islam as well orthopraxic Right?
Orthopraxic. It's about the practice, you do a thing. And that defines you. In fact, there's a line I forget what rabbis said that, like, Judaism agrees, although with varying levels of observance, which should be done, which leaves you free to believe all sorts of things. I mean, there's actually substrains with Judaism, there are avowedly at least agnostic, if not outright atheist, but it doesn't matter. They're like, Well, yeah, we have the practice. And we have the text, whether or not God actually wrote the Tanakh and actually reveal with the Moses with the tablets, it's kind of an irrelevant question to even phrase, and of course, other Jews will say No, in fact, like that is a literal Word of God, and it's perfect. But anyways, it doesn't matter, because either way, there's they but both of those camps agree, there is 613 Mitzvah, and this is how you pray. And that's the end of it. Right? Yeah.
Well, I mean, let me let me bring something into Islam that a lot of people don't know. So Islam has laws against apostasy. And like, obviously, like wrong belief, right? You become an atheist or whatnot, or you convert to a pagan religion or another religion. The issue though, is the Hadiths The commentary on why these laws exist, these death penalties is not because these people have the wrong belief. It's because they express the belief in public and it causes social disorder. And so it's thought of more as treason rather than heresy. I mean, it is technically heresy. But the idea within Islam is is somewhat similar to Judaism. Obviously, there's a Shahada, the professional belief, but ultimately, whatever you believe in the details is less relevant beyond the kind of the simple like, okay, we assume you believe in one God, as opposed to following the Sharia following the law. This is more Sunni Islam, but it's kind of true of Shiaism as well. So in some ways, America and American Christianity, which I think when you're saying Christianity, I think we're seeing the extended end of this as radical Protestantism, where it's always about, like, the personal relationship to Christ and belief and all these things. There's, like, institutional structure. I mean, I mean, I'm not like hating here, but I mean, you know, you you go to a mini mall, and there's something that says it's a church. And, you know, it looks like it used to be a huge clothes store. Like that is only something you can see in America, you don't see that too much in Europe, right? we've, we've really kind of pushed this ideal of Protestant, radical Protestant Christianity, and then used like, you know, modern day marketing, these rock concerts in churches. It's just very strange to a lot of non Americans.
Yeah, the problem here is Protestantism, was it. But it's, you know,
It all began with the 95 theses, that's where Western civilization went wrong.
Well, if you talk to certain Catholics, that would, that would definitely be what they think. But, yeah no, it is weird that the strain of what one would call congregationalism inside Protestantism, right, the notion that there's some kind of shared vibe that in a very distributed, decentralized way to use modern like crypto language or whatever gets interpreted, and yet somehow attains a level of ideological coherence, despite there not actually being an overarching, you know, Inquisition or whatever, as there would be, is really strange. I mean, it gets to the question of, I know we're going a little bit off the beaten path here, but
oh, no, no, no, this is this is this is the path.
Okay, how is it that like every major elite American institution now believes like a razor thin set of beliefs? Like how do we get to the point where literally everyone is sitting here banging the same little drum, even though it's not like the Chinese invaded with paratroopers put a gun to everybody's head and said, here's a little red book, and you've got to believe this. Like, there's no actual top down force. And yet it is the case that we've like, I just saw American Express now has some like, critical race theory training or American Express, like, what are the most eliteist capitalist thing ever? Right? And it's just like, how, how is everything from American Express to the you know, Harvard sociology department, all in complete agreement, at least superficially, around how the world should be run? And that is pure congregationalists.
It is, it is. But I think, let's talk about let's let's pivot to technology a little because that's, that's your beat. I would argue sometimes, to some extent, it's social media and modern tech. So why did the Protestant refermation... so I did a podcast with Patrick Wyman, and his book, The Verge, which talks about 1490 to 1530 and the literature, Patrick sites in there - and there and other things, and Jared Reubens work, they can they have convinced me that the Protestant Reformation was kind of over determined by technology, in terms of Yes, Martin Luther was a big deal. But with the arrival of printing and the decentralization of information, the Roman Catholic Church could not control these heretical passions, frankly, that were always there that were always pent up, but were periodically suppressed or integrated. And so now we're in this world where we have social media, we have, you know, all these like emails, like chainlink, like all of these things, where it's just we're flooded with these memes. And it's like, hyper competition and certain memes are just like, agreed on and these positive feedback loops autocatalytically that's my hypothesis for what's going on here.
Yeah yeah no, and you know, the analogy to the Reformation, the printing press seems like an overused one. But the more you look into it, the more you realize it's actually literally true. So for example, a lot of the early printing - people don't tend to understand what the early days of printing actually were, like, the books in the Bible. I mean, it was definitely part of it. But bigger than that was actually the pamphlets. The pamphlets were actually the - you look at them, it looks like a damn Facebook news story. It is some outrageous photograph that would not pass Facebook's Terms of Service now with a little caption of some outrageous thing that a bishop is doing. And they were called "flugschriften" -flying words -and they would literally go Martin, Martin Luther King, when he was traveling to the Diet of Worms commented on how, like the news of his going to Worms got there days before he physically got there, right? Like, literally the information was spreading faster that people can move, which was a novelty, right? Like we didn't really have another break in that until the telegraph. And now obviously, the smartphone, but you're completely correct that there was a drastic technological change that, and that's the thing, right? If you look at the Internet, it's a consensus kind of disruption or hierarchy destruction machine. What's weird, though, is how you still managed to get to like a sort of different consensus, but it doesn't organically evolve into a replacement for the previous order, right? Like the Arab Spring didn't actually lead to this massive wave of democracy in the Middle East, the Gilets Jaune protests in France and lead to anything as far as I can tell, Occupy Wall Street got to nothing. The protests in Cuba that are going on now, which I would I welcome and I think are a good thing aren't really coalescing into like a dissident movement with a political party, right? And see...
Who leads BLM?
Isn't it? Somebody who has four houses or something?
Yeah, but nobody knows the name. But that's the point like we don't have, we don't have a Martin Luther King. You know, we don't have a Vaclav Havel. Like, everything is decentralized, which means that you can't really suppress it or predict it, but it also means that there's no focus, right? And it tends to run out of steam. So you're having like, you're having seminars about how capitalism is problematic and oppressive within American Express.
Right? I mean, it's like when they asked the Gilets Jaune, the Yellowjacket people in France that held France kind of hostage for a few months, and it's like, What do you want? Give me... and then they produced this platform that was completely incoherent and just went to nowhere? Yeah, yeah, I know. It's, yeah...
Well, so I believe, you know, you know, I think like some of the populist energy, it does produce these incoherent paradoxes. So for example, the Tea Party was about keeping, you know, the government's hands off their Medicare type stuff, you know, where it's like, we laugh about it, but you know, this is literally what people think. And so, you know, people now believe I guess that these big... that Jamie Diamond, before he retired, like taking the knee, taking the knee like they believe in social justice... This is Goldman Sachs. Right? I mean,
the vampire squid.
Yeah. Are you joking? I mean, basically, like what I tell my friends is like, Look, if the big investment banks are backing something, understand that your egalitarian dreams they're not going to like, you know what I'm saying? Like they're not stupid. Yeah.
Also, you're not quite the rebel you think. Like literally every corporate CEO is mouthing your platitudes. You're not you're not really #resist anymore, are you?
Yeah, you are the evil empire. Right. You know, so I mean, that's what's happening with... so I want to ask you, like, are you still on clubhouse?
Ah, you know, I know several of the investors so I feel somewhat awkward saying this. I don't spend as much time as I used to. I do use Twitter spaces occasionally. I do think social audios exciting.
I know. And I want to I want to talk to you about it. So I'm still on Clubhouse. So I do I do one room a week. I actually do two rooms a week, I usually but I do at least one room, the Friday room I do on science. On Tuesday. I do on like history. any case Tuesday or Sunday up. But one thing I've noticed is a lot of the big hitters. They're not all that much. There's still growth, but it's coming from India, it's coming from elsewhere. And a lot of the regular people are slowly dropping off. And they seem to be emphasizing, you know, mediums or smaller rooms rather than rooms that autocatalytically kind of blow up or rooms of like celebrities, which are just going to be big no matter what. Right? So I mean, those are the details with Clubhouse. But I do wonder about this audio revolution that you were talking about? Like, is this just kind of the experimentation phase like you think we'll really see the outcomes within five to 10 years, that sort of thing?
So I have a thesis here, I don't know how long winded you want me to go Razib, but
Just go do you're thing... do you're thing
I have a few. It's kind of like VCs, right? They have a few like investment hypotheses that they think are like affecting the world. So I have two or three like investment hypotheses about what's going on in Western culture right now. I mean, one is out of control, Protestant style, you know, revivalist Christianity. And then you know, the other one is this return to what I would call orality or secondary orality, if your listeners want to like Google something, or look at the Wikipedia entry. And what that means is, there's a big difference the way a textual mind and you know, you and me Razib who spent 20 years in universities and colleges like staring a text and thinking that it's real, right, which is strange, we think about it, right? Like you read about a tiger attacking you and your pulse races, it takes a lot of time to make it such that a little - like literally T I G E R makes your pulse race right. And then all that thinking actually just changes the way your brain is literally wired. This is great book by Joe Hendricks called "The Weirdest People in the World", about how the western paradigm and how just just beating this textuality into the heads of people which came out of the printing press is just changes the way you think about the world. And so and this is another case, kind of like thinking about Christianity, while you're being Christian, it's hard to think about an oral world why you're stuck in textuality that's so foreign to you, but occasionally sort of can, right?and in orality, there's no looking stuff up. Right? The notion even conceptually, there being like an objective external description of a thing without a speaker doesn't exist. Every every, you know, morsel of meaning. You parse as a speaker, and as a listener within some social matrix, right? Things are a lot more emotionally charged, right? memory has to serve as the only thing that reports back. That's why you read the Iliad, and it's full of the most horrific violence, and these you know, grotesque exaggerated characters, because otherwise you would have forgotten them. The notion of a novel of like a Jane Austen society novel with muted little characters and scenes would never have been possible to even record before, you know, text. So anyhow, orality and textuality are just different ways of thinking about the world. And one thing the internet is doing, I think, and others think as well, it's not certainly not an original idea of mine, is that the internet is taking us back to orality and oral ways of thinking about the world. And when I say orality, it can be audio in terms of like, literally the physical audio that we're talking about. It can also just mean oral ways of thinking. So for example, I would claim that Twitter largely is an oral media, even though it's textual, right. It's extemporaneous. Usually ephemeral, although not always, I mean, some some of the shittiness about Twitter is the fact that it's actually searchable and indexable. And a real oral medium it wouldn't be - that's one thing unique about Clubhouse, by the way is that it cannot be saved, which is very much in keeping with oral media, right? And so there's just there's aspects of oral media. And I think if you look a lot of the, you're looking a lot of what sucks about a lot of the internet is that it kind of takes elements of either textual, oral, and then injects the other one and kind of makes it shitty it makes it kind of like Twitter. It's like, Oh, I'm just like tweeting a thing. Like I'd make a joke at a bar. And then it gets me fired seven years later, because the politics have shifted or whatever, right? Yeah, I guess. But then it's like, well, they're applying the standards of textual media as if I like I wrote a 6000 word essay in the New Yorker. And then I'm suddenly called to account for something that was really just like, a one off statement, right. And they're, frankly, mixing oral versus textual media. But it's, but people are evil and nasty. And we live in partisan times. So they do it. But that's what I mean by the divide between oral and textual. But I think, if there's any hope for the future, is that I think media will get better at fixing this right. Like, for example, Clubhouse, you know, I think this may or may not be a bug, but I think the fact that it can't be saved or shared might be a good thing, and that it makes it more purely oral. And that, you know, a Clubouse you did 10 years ago, can't be resurrected, and I'll look Razib said this horrible, terrible thing. And he must lose his job and live under a bridge from now on, right? It just can't happen.
Well but people are recording there are apps to record, You're just saying it's too ad hoc. It's not systematic, right?
It can't be shared. It's like taking screenshots of tweets. Like, you know, it's not the same as re tweeting the virality isn't there...
Yeah, it's also harder to take it out of context in a way because with like texts you just like chop the piece of text out , and you put it out there. Whereas like, you know, you can use like, but it makes a little less sense. So, you know, I...
That's the thing with oral culture, it's heavily contextual, right? So it's hard to rip out of it. Right. It's like, you know, I think Marc Andreessen had a whole story with Taylor Lauren's about supposedly saying this or that, and then somebody recorded it. And then it's clear that A) he didn't even say it. And the person who did it was completely taken out of context. And then when you listen to it, it's just obvious, right? But, I mean, that's the other thing, right. And again, it's either good or bad. oral culture is deeply personal and emotional, you engage with that person, which is why Twitter just fucking pisses you off so much sometimes, because it's like someone's sitting your face telling you a thing. But then it's not quite personal enough for you to treat it, like a person telling you that thing, right? Like a text you can rail at, or, you know, a literary author figure, you can re like as an abstraction, right. But in oral media, you're like yelling at it to the person in their face, which is why I think a lot of Clubhouse rooms tend to be actually better behaved than Twitter threads. Because unless you're unless you're a total psychopath. If you've got the person with a voice on the thing, and you can hear them speaking and they seem human to you, you just cannot be as nasty as you would be, if it's like this textual abstraction in your head. So another thing that I think Clubhouse does very well, and that it's actually more polite than what would you would think as a more formal medium, which is text. But orality actually makes it such that in some sense, you're forced to kind of put a face to what you're saying. And that typically keeps people into check. Look, the real world doesn't work like Twitter, right? And it doesn't have content moderation standards, and it's not a total nightmare. It's because there's different mechanisms there. So yeah,
Yeah, I mean, I will say, as someone that uses Clubhouse, a fair amount, and Twitter a fair amount, there are differences in so far as with Twitter, like I'm a, I can be quite a harsh person. So I can reply to someone and say, "You're stupid, don't reply to me", which I do do. But it doesn't have the same bite as when I rebuke someone on Clubhouse where people are like, "Whoa, you're harsh." and I'm like, "Yes", you know, but then they behave. But also other people have told me it sends a signal that in my rooms, like, I do have some standards, and I will impose them. And that's just how the real world is.
Right? If you're an asshole at the dinner party, you just get booted out or you don't get invited again.
But on Twitter you just like you can just reply again, until you're blocked. But even if you're blocked, you could just keep like tagging the person, right? So there's no, there's, there's no way that to check all that. So I do I do worry that oral culture is kind of how do I say this? So so you know, the world of text - it structures your thoughts, you know, I write like a, you know, 4000 word sub stack. And it's got to have a structure with paragraphs, and it's nested. And there's, you know, some level of recursion and some of these engagements. So I, you know, I think it forces us to think more clearly, and it clarifies thoughts for us. I think I'm a pretty good extemporaneous speaker in Clubhouse. But, I think both of us are, you know, but I think that I'm not as organized in my thought. It's a stream out of my consciousness. And so there's as many facts but there's not as much structure that the facts are nested in. And so I think, frankly, it's kind of a drop down.
But it's it though, because I was having this conversation with someone in one of my Signal groups, we all have Signal groups that we all conspire in nowadays. Yeah. And it's like, it's clear that so many Twitter threads started these signal groups, because it's, it's the Socratic dialogue, right? It's literally Socrates being or questioning somebody and being forced to actually defend the reasoning, which with the right person, or at least, can often be a very fruitful enterprise, even though I agree with you. It's not structured in that almost like programmatic way that human thought is when it's forced to be on 6000 words, but I often think it can spark a lot of cool stuff. Like I think there's, again, when I say oral media, I don't mean to sort of denigrate it at all and say that, oh, it's not that those people aren't as smart as actual people. There's I mean, again, Socrates. In fact, he was anti the alphabet, but there's a whole Yeah, yeah. And one of his dialogues against the alphabet because he thought it would make people dumber. So I don't know, I think there's something to it. I just obviously, Twitter doesn't capture. Twitter is not a Socratic dialogue. Let's put it that way
So, um, you know, I, you know, and that's a true thing. Like the ancient Greeks, there was a whole school, that was against literacy, because they thought it would destroy memory, and it did destroy memory, people's memories actually got worse, after... Well, we don't know about after literacy, but that's what people claim. But we definitely know after the printing press, the whole art of memory, which goes back to the ancient days disappears over time.
You know, I was reading about this, and I was recounting a scene, I was reading a book, little "Little Blue Truck", which maybe you've read to your kids. It's this popular children's book. And I was reading it, I think, I think it was two or three years at the time. And you know, when you read to a kid, you kind of read a few sentences kind of flip through. And I'd realized that this little two year old who couldn't spell her name, and was, you know, functionally illiterate, had memorized the entire book front to back. And that, you know, in the sort of, I think it's kind of like, it's two syllable Iambic trope, so she does a little sing songy thing of the thing she recounted it like a Homeric Bard would with the Iliad, right, she just kind of saying this book. I didn't have the book memorized, I had to read the damn thing. And so she's obviously very bright. She couldn't spell her name, but she could actually recount you know, 30 stanzas of the song that was this book. Yeah. And then of course, all that's gonna get lost. She's gonna go to school and learn the alphabets and be beaten out of her. And she's gonna, like struggle to memorize like a single sonnet, like I do in high school. Yeah, I know. It's sad in a way.
Well, that's an interesting point too, because, you know, I do podcasts, obviously, we're recording a podcast with you, it's recorded, and people asked to record, they're asked, asked, like, why don't you record your talks? You know, on C lubhouse. And, you know, one reason I give is like, it's extemporaneous. If it's recorded, I feel like, you start thinking about what you're going to say you're thinking defensively. And also, like, if I have like engagement and dialogue with people, I don't think everyone's super comfortable, like having everything recorded and blasted out to the world for posterity, you know. So I think it creates a different, almost looser form of engagement, where, you know, obviously, we're being pretty casually here, but we also know that 1000s of people are going to be listening to this at some point. And so maybe you'll, you know, calculator gauge what you're gonna say, in a different way than you would if we were just like talking over beers, and it wasn't recorded.
Right? No, I mean, there's the sort of media savviness to going on podcasts and doing TV hits, and you kind of know, you're not a civilian anymore, you kind of know how the game is played. And like, you know, you don't have to worry about talking to journalists and being on or off the record, and if you screw it up. It's kind of your fault. And I don't know what the hell you're doing. But you know, everyday people are not the same way. Which is why it's weird, like, back in the Trump days, right? Like, you know, the standard -, like CNN would like find some random yokel and God knows where and put a mic in the mouth, and they'd say something stupid, and, but it would always be like, dude, like, you know, this person doesn't know, like, you know, you can't do that. And, but yeah , I agree with you, there's something lost if you record it. It's just, it's strange. Again, one of the weird things, one of the other weirdnesses my theses about the world, right, is that the weirdest thing that's happened the past 200 years, is a total decoupling of information from matter moving around the world, like bits, and atoms are no longer coupled. Even in the I think we're both probably old enough to remember like getting physical letters when we're a kid.
Uh huh. Oh, yeah. Penpals.
I mean, the only way normal people communicated was like letter, like a physical piece of dead tree with a stamp that took three days to get there. And that was it. Right? And the fact that we're in a world in which, like, literally, my eyes and ears are in everybody's pocket, and everybody's eyes and yours or my pocket is just, again, I think we've just boiled ourselves like the frog, like the boiling frog into the situation. We don't realize how weird it is. If you hold back, it is so fucking weird - it is so bizarre, that we just do this. And I think humans have not gotten their head around it. Because Because we are, you know, the singularity hasn't happened yet. We are physical beings, I go and buy my groceries, two bucks down, you know, Gus's Community Market here in Mission Bay. I know the guy there's face. I don't know his name, but I know him. He knows me. He recommends me wine or whatever, right? But it's all based on geographic proximity. And then we have this thing I'm holding my phone in my hand right here, that suddenly makes it such that somebody in Hyderabad can feel closer than the wine guy down the street. And I just, I think the human mind has not wrapped her head about it. And until we get to the singularity and are all inhabiting harddrive, somewhere, there's gonna be no... I don't know, I think....
We might be on a hard drive somewhere. I don't want to, I don't want to derail too much. I will say about technology. So I have my kids are their elementary schoolers or, you know, preschoolers and, my preschooler found a phone from the Ye Olde days of 2009. That was a pre smartphone. And he was super dubious that this was a phone. Right? You know, it was like some Nokia or something. And he was very, very confused. So he's like, asking, "so you, you talked on this? So this is a phone?" And this is 2000s technology. And to him, it's extremely primitive. We can't even explain what a rotary dial phone is like, they just look - And then also, he assumes that all phones, when you talk to someone on the phone, it's FaceTime. And so he's extremely confused by regular calls. He thinks it's very, very strange. It's just that's just how they are, you know, like all these decades of like telephones as part of pop culture. Now, it's totally different.
Yeah, no, I forgot who else tweeted some kind of woeful thing that made me feel very old that mentioned that their kid picked up you know, they're one of these like antiquarian who still get like the Wall Street Journal delivered or whatever, the kid picked up the newspaper and tried to scroll with it. And couldn't understand why the letters weren't moving. And like, "What do you mean? Like, like, this thing just doesn't move". And I'm sure my daughter would do that. Like she that like the Apple UX, she's completely comfortable with doing and yeah, that she'd be weirded out by you know, other things that don't have it? Yeah.
Well, we have we have computers that aren't touchscreen in our house and my kids have false positive multiple times, where they go and try to drag things around on the screen and we're just like that doesn't they just look at us? Like, what is this tech? Like? Why? Why not? Like what's wrong with you,
"You barbarians! What is this crap"
So I gotta ask you, um, you've been talking about you know, let's let's talk about technology again in the future because you've been talking about self driving cars. Tell me about this because you seem bullish.
Yeah. So, okay, I I'm just such a goddamn parody of myself sometimes. So I have to be self deprecating otherwise, it's it's ridiculous. So as part of this whole Apple thing, right I was gonna be like Mr. Commuter worker be leave the writer life behind. You know, a lot of these jobs at big public of tech companies, let's be real are basically semi retirement plans for like techies in their late 30s and early 40s. You have kids who like are getting off this startup rollercoaster to just like, punch the clock and do something slightly cool. And they get paid for right. That was my thing with Apple. They're way the hell down in Cupertino. I assumed the lockdown would lift. So I've got a commuter car. And what car did I buy? I just woke up one day. And it's funny Tesla makes it so easy. I just bought a car online. Like I just went to the website and bought a car. And it arrived that afternoon. And so I bought a Tesla thinking its a good commuter car autopilot would be cool for the 280 which is the highway that connects San Francisco to Cupertino, which is like literally the douche road that all the VCs and all the tech is go on and so I buy this car and then obviously the whole Apple thing happened. But now it's my main car, right? Like I'm not gonna, you know, its a new car. And I have to say, the level of autonomy, what's called level three autonomy in the trade of, you know, autonomous vehicles, which basically means the car mostly drives itself and you intervene occasionally, you definitely can't go to sleep or like, unplug, but you're not you're you're not touching the wheel. You're not really driving it. That's basically the case right now with Tesla. what's called full self driving. It's not quite full. It doesn't drive in cities, but it does drive on on highways or very large cities. I have...
I saw you say something about driving in mountains. Yeah. So I drove back. So officially, I mean, I live in Reno, officially, I'm in San Francisco right now. But I drove back from Reno, San Francisco through the Tahoe mountain passes to here and these big sweeping gorgeous drives. And I just kicked in autopilot, and you just literally go slaloming down this mountain. And the autopilot just does it all. It's just like it's just such a ride.
Is it stressful or are you chill with i.?
I at some point, you have to trust St. - You have to trust St. Elon and the algorithm and ...
St. Elon's. Fire.
But yeah, I was thinking of getting a little bobble head, kind of like a Latin American taxi that has little saints in the dashboard. I need to have like a little Elon bobblehead in my Tesla. So I don't totally trust it. And like when there's roadwork, and then lanes narrow, like I take over and stuff like that, you know, obviously, I don't have total faith in it. But when when you've got you know, regular lanes with a generous shoulder, and you've... Yeah, the car doesn't need any input for me at all, it just 98% of the way on Highway, the thing just drives. Yeah, it's amazing. And I think even if we don't get to what's called level five, which is like the dream of like no steering wheel, you're just getting this box...
Pods Robo pods,
Right, even if we don't get there, which I don't think we're gonna get soon. This will still radically change the way most Americans drive because let's face it, humans suck at driving. And for most of the driving we do, it's not fun driving, it's not in the twisties it's just a fuckin' commute on the 101 doing whatever we want to do is like punch in a location or like our safe destination work, and just have the car take us there. And Tesla does that. Like with full self driving, I literally say like, navigate home and the car just turns on and starts driving me home . And it drives you know, 98% of the way there until I get to the highway off ramp and then I take it from there. And that's how that's how -once this technology gets in every car, that's how everyone's going to drive with the exception of you know, either wealthy people or people who are into performance driving the same way that we still have horses and sailboats, right, like of course, you can still have them large, nobody uses them. Right. You know,
There's gonna be hipsters, they drive their own cars. Oh, wait, so how many Tesla's have this because you're the only one that's tweeting about this a lot.
Dude, I I am not I it's funny people replied the same thing thinking I'm like some special tester. Dude, I am just Joe Schmo who just bought like the entry level. It's not even like the fancy when it's the Tesla three, which is like everyone else thinks it's like the super luxury car. It's, I mean, it's not the cheapest car you can buy. But it starts at 35 which is like a loaded Honda Accord. Like it's not an expensive a car anymore. And so yeah, I bought the Tesla three like a total commuter car. And I don't know, but I well the one thing that did change is that what so the genius of Elon, now it's like a total fanboy, is that he took what is a mechanical device and he made it be a software product, right? And what that means is that like, you know, if Tesla comes up with a new thing, they ship it and your car suddenly better, like nothing physically changed, but your car just runs better now because it's mostly software. The hardware is just batteries and motors and sensors and that's it and then a screen like there isn't that much hardware in the car. It's although the batteries are expensive, but it's really the software defines the car and so they I didn't pay for full self drive when I bought the car that was 10k it was kind of expensive, right against like a $35,000 car. It's like a lot of money to pay for this thing and I didn't know that I totally trusted it right so it shipped with basic autopilot which doesn't do lane change or anything. It just keeps you in the lane. And then the new changes. Sorry I'm getting too wonky but they know They ship the subscription model for full self driving. What that means is instead of paying the 10k up front, I mean, it's just it's a piece of software, right? So they're just charging a fuckload of money as if it's a physical device, but it's not. And they just say, Okay, look fine. Obviously, a lot of money, just pay us 200 bucks a month, and we just go month by month. And that's it. And if you don't like it, turn it off. And that's it. I'm like, Alright, yeah, 200 bucks, I'll do the experiment. Right. So I paid for it. And yeah, what it gives you didn't have before is that it does lane changes, and then it does navigation autopilot. Like I say, like, go here. And it's aware enough to say, change lane off ramp coming, like it actually navigates the car to the destination. And like I said, on normal highways, it you know, it does 99% of the driving, and it's amazing. It's totally amazing.
Wow you're living in the future man.
Well, you know, it's whatever the cliche quote about, like the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. I think that is true. And I think the corollary to that, that Paul Graham said once is like, if you want to know what to build, then like, live in the future and see what's missing. And then... because I, which I know it sounds wacky, and it is, and it's often just kind of bullshit. But a lot of people in Silicon Valley, I think, do live in the future. And then they build like, Well, why don't we have this thing? And then
For everybody
Yeah, right, exactly.
So about the future. The last question I want to ask you is, are you optimistic about the United States? Are you optimistic about the last the next 10-15 years, your kids are gonna grow up? Or they're gonna grow up in this country? I'm gonna be entirely frank. I don't know if the listeners get this from me. But like, I'm not sure if my kids are going to grow into maturity and age in this country, because I'm, I'm very, very ambivalent right now. But,
yeah, I mean, you know, things always look worse than they are. And, you know, we were raised in the Cold War. And I was raised by Cuban exiles in Miami, who had literally just seen - had been the losers in historical struggle and seeing their once capitalist country become the Soviet satellites. Yeah. And then living under the threat of nuclear... but even then, things were pretty people felt pretty positive about things, because I guess we all felt in it together. And now, there's no real existential risk, but we're all at each other's throats. But, um, so I am somewhat pessimistic. I think it could be the case that the United States crumbles, right. I do think that we're at sort of incredible level of political partisanship. And more important than that, we just have different tribes that have axiomatically different values, right. Like it's not we're not debating tax policy anymore. Right. we're debating, you know, issues of right and basic right and wrong,
The good life, what is the good life?
Right, which no one even asked anymore, but right. I mean, of course, to Matt Yglesias. It's just how many dishwashers per capita, or whatever the fuck you have, cuz that's the only thing he can understand. But in any case, sorry, I had dig on him.. his whole hungry thing. But um, you know, but you know, that said, look, I think the United States of America is an incredible democratic experiment, right? That sort of covenantal relationship, which very akin to Judaism, right that this, this document defines this nation. And so long as you agree and abide by the rules of this covenant. We are a nation, I think that's morally superior to the, to the temples to blood and soil that were traditional European countries, or countries anywhere, for that matter, right? Yeah, it's definitely a morally superior way of doing things that said, as happened to the biblical Israelites, if you stop heeding the covenant disaster ensues, as happened to the Israelites at various points in their history. And that could be the case, the United States that said, As [Peter had, say him] constantly reminds us, we have the most blessed geography you could possibly imagine. We keep the world at arm's length. And so realistically, do I see Chinese aircraft carriers sailing through the Golden Gate in my children's lifetimes? No, I don't see that happening at all. So I don't know that said, what I want to maybe see them raised in Europe. Yes. I lived in Spain. And yes, it's a museum and a retirement community. I totally agree with you that said, Yeah, the quality of life, your average middle class person is a lot higher in Europe than it is here. In my opinion. Could it be in Israel, the promised land promised to the Jews, maybe potentially, I could see that actually. So I don't know. I'll keep keeping my options open
okay. I got a follow up on this. Because like, you know, you were you referenced Yglesias, and how the middle class lifestyle in Europe is superior, like, what do you mean by that? Like, like, tell the listeners, I mean, a lot of the listeners are in Europe, but the ones that are in the United States.
I mean, Europe is a broad brush. And I think Americans have lots of like stereotypes of what Europe is. And they think that it's all socialized healthcare, it's all free. Which by the way, it's not, in almost any country. It's not the way it actually works. And and there's a I think there's a there's a quality of living gap between even my partial country, Spain and say, Denmark or Norway, right, like we're talking, we're covering this almost 2x delta and GDP per capita in those countries. Yeah. But there's a big difference. But if you look at I don't know, say, a Germany or France take an example that's kind of middle to top into that spectrum. What the middle class person there kind of accepts as their birthright, right, which is like safe neighborhoods, access to good schooling to their children access to some level of high culture that is like a given. While in the US increasingly, particularly in cities like San Francisco, those are luxuries that you have to struggle to afford, right. If you want good schooling in San Francisco, you have to pay for it - we pay for private. If you want access to culture, it's like this luxury thing. If you want safe neighborhoods, it's super expensive real estate if you can afford it at all. And so there's just a lot of things. I've always said the United States is a country of extremes in all regards. You have some of the smartest most capable people and Some of the most dumbest and slovenly people you ever see your entire life while Europe is like it's a normal distribution in all regards, like everyone's kind of average and if you're average It's okay. Right? And it's like fine and you know if your average if it turns out you're not the next Zuckerberg or Elon Musk maybe it's better living actually in Europe than it is in the United States. But you know people - I feel like Americans never emigrate there's no I mean there's a few but not like you don't go and see like communities of American expats right other than like if they're old and they live in Mexico, whatever but that's basicallya retirement community. The US - people don't leave like the US is somehow like the last stand, nobdy leavves this is where like that's it we make history makes us last stand right here which is exciting to like, I agree. The US has definitely center stage for all the anxiety you know, the dramatic trends in society. There's no question Europe is a snooze fest. But, but I don't know, man. It's nice walking around and getting my baguette get in the morning from the corner baker...
Europe is where civilization goes to retire.
No, exactly. It's a retirement community inside the museum underneath an American military shield. That's exactly what it is. And you know what, that's fine. That's that's that's perfectly nice living.
