On the anniversary of 9/11, we remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the years to come defending our liberties in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. And how are we treating them? How do we treat them?
00:09:20.120None of this stuff really matters that much.
00:09:21.900There was a great, actually, this was maybe right around the time when you were first on Fox.
00:09:28.040There was a poll that I found very heartening where they're asking people about various TV pundits.
00:09:33.040And it's old enough that Keith Olbermann was on the list.
00:09:35.360So I remember Keith Olbermann being on the list.
00:09:36.880And with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, the most common answer in every category wasn't trust him, don't trust him, like him, don't like him.
00:09:45.220The most common answer was never heard of him.
00:09:47.420And most people don't know about this stuff.
00:09:49.160We who work in the media tend to get worked up about these intra-media things that happen sometimes.
00:09:55.560So when I went through the nonsense with The Atlantic, you know, there are columns in The New York Times and columns in The Washington Post and all that sort of stuff.
00:10:02.120And two weeks after I got fired, I called my dad, and he's like, so how's the new job going?
00:11:26.320You know, the only foreign language I ever studied in school was Latin.
00:11:29.760So unless I happen to be at the Vatican, if I'm in a non-English speaking place, I don't understand the news or people's conversations, things like that.
00:11:44.040And you can just kind of be alone with your own thoughts again for a while.
00:11:46.140And it's kind of, you know, it was real.
00:11:49.000I hate to say this because I really like Australia.
00:11:50.760I would live in Australia if, you know, and I would live there comfortably, not with all the socialism and all the, but it's not my country.
00:12:16.680How do you know what's important, what you engage in, what you don't?
00:12:22.500Yeah, I think that, well, anything that can be summed up in five seconds on Twitter and the answer to which is people on the other side are evil and we're good.
00:12:36.280There aren't any real simple answers to things.
00:12:38.720I have a thing I jokingly call Williamson's first law of politics, which is that everything is simple when you don't know a thing about it.
00:13:25.380I really kind of hope for his sake it's not.
00:13:27.860I would be less embarrassed for him if he were outsourcing it than if he actually were writing that crap.
00:13:31.760But the story we want to tell ourselves is that everything that's wrong with the world is that there's someone evil out there who's causing this to happen.
00:13:45.880The people we don't like are the evil ones.
00:13:48.240And everything would be fine if it weren't for them.
00:13:50.020And if you've got a country in which about 40% of the people believe that, about 40% of the other people, and those 40% reciprocate that belief, and 20% of the people are just watching The Bachelor or doing whatever the rest of the people do, you're not going to have a healthy democratic culture in the long term.
00:14:07.840You know, if you think about a guy like Lincoln who was in office in a much more difficult time.
00:14:55.240Again, I think those things, they reveal things about us and they intensify things because they give us the opportunity to do bad immediately before we stop and think about it.
00:15:26.960People shake their heads when I can't remember this.
00:15:28.880Anyway, she was talking about this weird thing of being on social media where you set yourself up on this little stage and then you wait for applause.
00:15:34.740And for someone who actually is a performer to feel weird about that and to understand that weirdness is one thing.
00:15:40.400For people who aren't professional performers, who still in their everyday lives are basically trying to live psychologically the same way, I think is really very difficult for them and is bound to be unsatisfying.
00:15:51.620I think a lot of this has to do with changes in the way we live and work in the last 30, 40 years where a lot of us move more often.
00:16:01.980We don't go to church as much as we used to.
00:16:04.800So things that used to provide us with relationships and a sense of belonging, status, significance have either been diminished or for many people taken away entirely.
00:16:13.820So people go looking for new things to belong to and new sources of identity and meaning.
00:16:18.380And unfortunately, they've turned to this really dumb form of cowboys and Indians politics on social media.
00:16:26.520It's a conservative thing as well as a progressive thing.
00:16:28.920It's team red and team blue of screaming at each other and saying, you're evil, you're evil, you're dumb, you're dumb, you're rotten, you're rotten.
00:16:35.780And they somehow managed to convince themselves that they're doing something other than playing a game.
00:16:42.020But they're really just playing a role-playing game.
00:16:43.660That's why things like Antifa are a problem.
00:16:48.520I think anytime you've got ordinary political violence happening in a city like Portland, it's a problem.
00:16:53.520But in a sense, you know, groups like Antifa and groups like the Proud Boys or whatever their opposite number is on the right these days are really just playing a game with one another.
00:17:03.520They're not really engaged in serious politics.
00:17:05.520They're not really in pursuit of real political power.
00:17:10.900You know, they've got this role-playing game that they've taken into the public square in places like Berkeley and Washington and some other places.
00:17:17.720And they're essentially playing a game.
00:17:19.100It's a game in which people actually get hurt and killed sometimes.
00:17:21.440But they're essentially playing a game because they're bored and they're lonely and they're alienated.
00:17:26.280And they don't know what to do with their lives.
00:17:27.840I don't think the SA was playing a game.
00:17:34.060No, I think they were a lot more serious.
00:17:36.160I think that, and that's the difference really, is that...
00:17:38.740They were, I mean, they were not so bright.
00:18:12.880I think that we tell ourselves that story.
00:18:14.760I think that, you know, having elected Hillary Clinton in 2016 or electing Elizabeth Warren in 2020 will do a great deal of damage to the country.
00:18:24.700I think so, but I think the country is resilient and can withstand a lot.
00:18:27.680And we made it through the Civil War and the Great Depression and a lot of other stuff.
00:18:30.880And we'll make it through these things, too.
00:18:33.080I think we have these big watershed moments, though.
00:18:52.780TARP, Bush actually saying, you know, Mr. President, you're either going to be remembered as Hoover or you're going to be remembered as FDR.
00:19:50.500We don't like each other for all intents and purposes.
00:19:53.560It seems when, when, and if the economy goes down, you have wolves licking their chops saying free market doesn't work.
00:20:05.360Once you take away the free market, do you have the United States of America?
00:20:11.900No, I don't think you do, but I don't think it probably gets taken away.
00:20:14.980I think even if you elect someone who really, really wants to do it and has the political power to do it, I think it's just, it's almost an impossible thing to do just because the way we live is so enmeshed in that.
00:21:19.980And, you know, if you just look at the way our conception of what the president is supposed to be and do has changed over the years, it's crazy.
00:21:28.720Taft wrote a little pamphlet on it when he was running for re-election about, well, I'm not really supposed to solve every problem.
00:21:34.400I'm supposed to just basically be the CEO of the government and make sure the agencies run the right way.
00:22:03.160But I think that the United States is a country with a lot of strong and functional institutions, some of which we really don't appreciate very much.
00:23:34.060Yeah, I think that people like predictability.
00:23:39.840And that's part of, I think, where our anxiety right now comes from, is that we don't know what's going to happen next.
00:23:48.360You know, I think about people in my father's generation who would work for the same company or for two companies over the course of their lives.
00:23:54.840Whereas a lot of people in my generation, I think I've had 21 employers or something like that.
00:23:59.040Or maybe I'm a bad example of this, but I can't keep a job.
00:24:02.660But our 21 home addresses and 17 employees or something, I get them confused.
00:24:07.180But we don't have these fixed lives anymore.
00:24:11.220And so it's great for a lot of people, and people like me especially, because it brings opportunity and new things.
00:24:26.480We shouldn't sneer at those people and look down at them.
00:24:28.540A lot of people prefer the predictability of life as an employee in an old-fashioned 1960s-style corporation to life in an economy in which everyone has to be, to some extent, an entrepreneur, in which there's no fixity and no security.
00:24:43.940And I think that is part of where this anxiety and hysteria and also this desire for autocracy comes from.
00:24:51.960Because people are looking at the government saying, be my father, you know, be my father, be my chieftain, be my God, solve my problems.
00:24:58.920I will give you my allegiance if you'll just make sure that I've got a roof over my head and that my health care is taken care of and my kids are educated.
00:25:05.780So how do you bring America back to where it was?
00:26:23.620Everyone is just stunned and awed by this display of wealth and ingenuity of having, uh, ingenuity of having, uh, two kinds of fish.
00:26:32.880And you walk into a Walmart, and the poorest people in America can go choose from 70 kinds of fish, and we don't think twice about it.
00:26:40.740Um, but even you read books like, uh, you read Stephen King's The Stand, which was written, I guess it's published in 1980, written in 1978 and 1979.
00:26:49.340There's a guy who's going home to visit his mother in the Bronx, and he's a rock star.
00:26:52.860He's made all this money, and his mom cleans houses, and she doesn't have very much money.
00:26:56.660And he goes back home, and he finds that she's bought two pounds of butter because she's going to cook for him because it's what mothers do when their sons come to visit.
00:27:02.440And he thinks to himself, how did she ever get the money to do that?
00:27:06.880You know, this was during my lifetime.
00:27:28.780Yeah, and people talk about wanting that because they want the stability, but they don't want the standard of living that goes with it.
00:27:34.300So they want to get all the dynamism and quality of life that comes with having globalization and the other institutions that we have now and the other economic practices we have now, but they don't want to pay the price that goes with it.
00:27:46.900So they've essentially become, you know, as I always say, we're the spoiled children of history.
00:27:50.860We're the richest, freest, happiest, best-off people in the world, and we are miserable.
00:28:06.800But there have been changes that have gone along with that that are not universally welcomed and do make people's lives less stable, less predictable, and more stressful.
00:28:15.140And I think that is really the basic source of our political discontent right now.
00:28:21.360I write about this a lot for National Review that when conservatives look at members of the electorate who don't tend to go along with us on stuff, single women, African Americans, immigrants, if you look at them, these are groups of people who tend to be risk averse and who often have good reasons to be risk averse.
00:28:41.340The market economy has not always been good to African Americans, not when you're being bought and sold in the market economy.
00:28:46.140And this was not a thousand years ago.
00:28:48.340And, you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not 500 years ago.
00:28:53.920There's reason for people to be risk averse.
00:28:55.780And we look at their preference for big government programs as being personal corruption, as being you're lazy, you want welfare benefits, and you're being bought your vote.
00:29:07.480Your vote's being bought by the Democrats.
00:29:08.980We have this stupid plantation talk that people use as though it's impossible that black Americans just simply prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and maybe have good reasons for doing so.
00:29:19.220So we're out there talking about the free market and entrepreneurship and dynamism for people who don't want those things, who are afraid of them, who don't like what they brought.
00:29:28.820And we need to make our argument in the context, I think, of that risk aversion of here's what you stand to lose, first of all, which is your 21st century quality of life and your standard of living, which is very important to you.
00:29:44.380And then people need to understand the tradeoffs between these things.
00:29:47.040And then to the extent that Republicans and conservatives want to offer social policies, welfare policies, social insurance, those sorts of things, they should be tailored in a way to deal with that specific risk aversion because that's really what's going on.
00:30:05.900And we really misunderstand how this stuff even works.
00:30:08.360Again, if you look at the case of African-American voters, they tend to move to the left the wealthier they are and the higher income they are.
00:30:15.220So they become more supportive of redistribution, higher taxes, social spending when they're wealthy.
00:30:21.180So the black voters who are the least likely to benefit from redistribution and from welfare spending are the ones who most support it.
00:30:27.420So this is not about someone out there going, how can I get the government to give me money?
00:30:33.220I've wandered a bit afar from the book here, but that's a reality that I think conservatives and libertarians and free market people need to deal with and need to deal with in a way that's forthright and honest.
00:30:44.500So we're looking at, I mean, nobody will talk, and I don't think this is the answer, but I've had a conversation.
00:30:52.220I've had the conversation that we have to talk about basic minimum income.
00:30:57.560I don't think that's the answer, but the world is changing so much.
00:31:01.740And the wealth will really truly be concentrated in very few hands if the Amazons and the Googles and everything else actually do block people through algorithms or through government regulation.
00:31:19.800And we have a situation to where we could be in trouble only because people have to go out and find something new and different.
00:31:31.800And, you know, my wife is a good example of this.
00:31:36.560She's not cut from the entrepreneurial cloth.
00:31:39.620She's an entrepreneurial person with our children.
00:32:19.540And to the extent that we've got demagogues who want to tell people, I can protect you from this, but I can stop these changes from happening by putting tariffs on this or having a Green New Deal or doing this or that or the other.
00:33:47.540People sort of sneer at the so-called gig economy and Uber drivers and that sort of stuff.
00:33:52.680But I think there's actually some real value there because human effort and human energy and intelligence and ingenuity are inherently valuable.
00:34:04.240So the nice thing about being in a society in which a lot of people have a lot of disposable income and a desire for more time on their hands is they can consume more services.
00:34:13.020And, you know, my colleague Michael Brendan Doherty sort of sneers about this sometimes.
00:34:17.640And, well, why is our economy only creating jobs detailing cars and, you know, things like that?
00:34:50.880I do like the idea of a negative income tax where you can take all the stuff that we do in terms of welfare support and just make a check out of it, which I think is fine.
00:34:59.920I think most people can spend their own money and make their own decisions.
00:35:02.900I don't think that patronizing, condescending idea about people who receive benefits is very helpful.
00:35:08.000But you do it in such a way that it incentivizes work rather than disincentivizing work.
00:35:13.180And so I think maybe if we could replace a whole bunch of this stuff with the negative income tax, I think that would be a worthwhile experiment.
00:35:19.220So I don't see us turning around on socialism.
00:35:25.600I don't see us turning around fast on nationalism.
00:35:29.380And I don't see us turning around on socialism.
00:36:00.600And by making bad decisions, by swinging back and forth radically on things, by precluding the emergence of that stability that we were talking about earlier.
00:36:10.420It's sort of like, you know, I say this about tax policy sometimes.
00:36:12.700It's not that I don't care whether the top rate is 39% or 34.5%.
00:36:33.460I think that the people who came up with the original version of Obamacare were essentially trying to adapt the Swiss system to the United States.
00:36:48.100I think the Swiss system is actually pretty good for Switzerland.
00:36:51.560I don't think it's going to work very well for us.
00:36:53.780You go over to those countries and you see...
00:36:56.440I mean, when I walked into Sydney, I always thought Sydney was a giant city.
00:37:11.840But there are things that I think that come from the left on what they want to do with health care reform that I could countenance, even though they're not my preferences.
00:37:20.600Like an individual mandate, I could actually countenance.
00:37:22.880I think if you're going to have one, you need to enforce it.
00:37:24.800And you need to make sure, like, you've got Swiss-style 99.9% compliance.
00:37:31.640I'd be willing to accept some of those things in return for policy stability.
00:37:37.340And that's what we used to do is we used to work toward compromise and consensus.
00:37:41.340And again, this is a big part of what the book is about, is that if we're going to have a political culture in which we interact with one another only as mascots and as representatives of the team and the tribe we don't like, rather than as individuals and citizens having a conversation in the context of the democratic institutions of a democracy, then we can't forge consensus and we can't ever have policy stability.
00:38:06.580And so we get these swings back and forth, back and forth.
00:40:06.660And then we have a 2016 presidential election.
00:40:09.440It's Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, which would be embarrassing as a mayor's race of New York City, much less president of the United States of America.
00:40:16.820Actually, it'd be a pretty good New York mayor's race.
00:40:32.900That there is no special virtue in consulting morons and cretins simply because they exist.
00:40:38.740There's no special moral value in bundling together complex problems and policy ideas and asking 50 percent plus one of a sprawling and almost pristinely ignorant group of barely improved chimpanzees.
00:40:48.940Only a relatively few generations of evolution removed from habitual public masturbation and ritual pooflinging what they think about those bundles and which of them they prefer.
00:40:57.780Yeah, this is why I'm not a huge believer in democracy.
00:41:16.920But the idea that policies or positions or principles or moral propositions become more true because a whole bunch of people believe in them at any given moment is preposterous.
00:41:32.060I don't think any serious person can really can really believe that.
00:41:34.940But we talk as though we believe that because we use democracy as a synonym for good stuff.
00:42:04.620But the laws, the interpretation, if somebody passed it because 90% of the American people said slavery was good, I wouldn't think slavery was good.
00:42:17.900You know, everyone has to account for their own soul and think for themselves.
00:42:22.980It's funny where we get with this stuff.
00:42:24.340I was reading an essay the other day, some idiot writing in Slate, and he was coming down on Clarence Thomas about something.
00:42:29.800And he was shocked, or at least pretended to be shocked, by the idea that Thomas didn't think himself bound by precedent in cases in which that precedent was unconstitutional.
00:42:40.340So he wouldn't support the precedent if he thought the precedent was wrong.
00:42:43.800So I thought, well, what is your alternative here?
00:42:45.980That he's supposed to take something he thinks is plainly unconstitutional and support it because it exists?
00:42:52.020And someone in 1830 thought this was a good idea?
00:42:55.100Because we've got some decisions you might want to revisit if that's what you think.
00:42:57.800We've had some awful precedents, and awful presidents, too.
00:43:01.440And I'm glad they're both gone and are overturned.
00:43:03.700And I think that the great thing about the American system of government and why I do wish we would return to something more like our actual constitutional architecture is kind of what we started talking about, which is that it says, whoa, you know, it keeps things from happening too fast.
00:43:20.880And all of the best aspects of our government, I think all the ones I really admire the most, are the anti-democratic aspects of the government, like the Bill of Rights.
00:43:29.800You know, the Bill of Rights always describes the great big list of stuff that you idiots don't get to vote on because we've already settled this, and it's done.
00:43:49.580The presidency, as it originally was conceived, was thought to be a break on the House of Representatives, which the founders thought would be too eager because it was too democratic.
00:43:57.980The Senate, of course, was the same thing.
00:43:59.800The Supreme Court is there to keep Congress from being too democratic, from being too demagogic, and responding to what the founders used to refer to as the passions of the moment.
00:44:10.660And not only our constitutional architecture, but also our political culture, and I think our culture more broadly, would do well to return to some of that wisdom and to learn some of those lessons.
00:44:23.780You know, if what's worse about Twitter, and I don't exempt myself, by the way, from any of this.
00:44:28.020Social media never brought out the best in me.
00:44:30.380It certainly doesn't bring out the best in most people, I think.
00:44:48.420It doesn't really affect my readership at all, as it turns out.
00:44:50.840So I can't think of a good reason to do it.
00:44:52.820Although the reason I really used to do it, of course, Twitter is great if you're a writer and you procrastinate.
00:44:57.220Because you don't want to do your real work, so let's see who's being stupid tonight.
00:45:03.340And, you know, and you always end up arguing and slapping around some undergraduate at Lehigh University or something like that, who's maybe not the best investment of your time.
00:45:13.000And because they're at Lehigh, they're not educable.
00:45:18.740And I usually say Texas Tech, but I've had to start doing that.
00:45:22.240So, you know, just was never a real good use of time, never brought out the best in me.
00:45:26.160But this culture of immediacy, of wanting things immediately, needing immediate feedback, immediate attention, someone pay attention to me, listen to what I have to say right now, give me what I want from the government right now.
00:46:00.380Got a lot of money, a lot of smart people.
00:46:04.060We've got a lot of accumulated social capital, which, unfortunately, I think we're spending down a bit of when we need to reinvest in some of that.
00:46:11.720But I'm not a super jingoistic American.
00:46:16.360You know, a lot of conservatives for some reason hate Europe.
00:46:18.380You know, conservatives, like, France is a hellhole.
00:46:31.020But it is true that when you travel, and especially if you do business abroad, you come to appreciate certain things about the United States you do.
00:46:39.860Like, I heard not a super left wing, but a pretty up and down the line progressive Silicon Valley executive a year and a half or so ago who just sounds like Milton Friedman.
00:46:50.760You can talk about doing business in Germany.
00:46:52.560He's like, thank God for the United States.
00:46:53.980It's the only place we can do business.
00:47:11.640And again, this is something I think conservatives especially really need to work on because conservatives hate a lot of the stuff that's successful about America.
00:47:25.040And there's criticisms being made of all those things, but they're also really, really valuable institutions that we should show a little love for from time to time.
00:47:33.060I don't think I hate any of those things.
00:48:34.820You're guilty after you're, you know, you're innocent and then you're proven guilty.
00:48:40.400So I have no problem with business and et cetera, et cetera.
00:48:46.440However, I have tried to figure out, you know, the robber barons were not the robber barons, but they were also, they also had, you know, not enough Hank Reardon in them.
00:51:13.260One of the great ironies of our current politics is that the complaint you're talking about is essentially a complaint about corporatism, you know, where you've got a partnership between big business and big government and each of them trying to use the other for its own advantage.
00:51:31.340And what's been offered as a cure for that is more corporatism.
00:51:40.820And that, of course, is not going to work the way people want it to.
00:51:45.020This is, of course, really the great rebirth of corporatism as a political idea is really the one of the characteristics of our time where you've got people on the left with these crazy Green New Deal things, people on the right saying, well, we're going to have government manage trade.
00:52:00.220And we're going to have government oversee the technology companies so that they're being patriotic or whatever it's supposed to be.
00:52:25.200I think ultimately you end up with real market competition reasserting itself over attempts to try to quash it because it's just very difficult to keep that sort of thing down.
00:52:41.160And, you know, when you're talking about these guys in Silicon Valley now taking a more open approach to being regulated, you're right.
00:53:10.000And if you actually are disruptive to an institution, if you are disruptive to your university or to a little magazine that employs you or something like that,
00:53:18.920that's the one thing that corporations will not actually deal with.
00:53:22.440And, you know, whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, whether it's the New York Times, whether it's anyone else.
00:53:28.280An odd period, I think, for that particular reason.
00:53:31.580But I don't think these guys are ultimately going to be able to control what goes on in the markets because even if they really, really hold their regulators hostage,
00:53:40.160and they often can, the power of markets and capital right now is such that the power of states can no longer really adequately control it.
00:53:51.620And I think that's one of the things that Americans, American government's going to have to get used to,
00:53:55.420is that there are a lot of these businesses that employ a lot of people and generate a lot of wealth that don't have to be in California.
00:54:02.300They don't have to be in the United States at all.
00:54:05.800If I were an American tobacco company, why are you incorporating the United States of America?
00:54:10.060I'd be in Singapore or someplace like that, someplace that doesn't hate you.
00:54:14.560You know, and there are a lot of places in the world that'd like to be home to these companies, and they're going to say, okay, I'm here.
00:54:19.720And they'd like to be home to the next one, too.
00:54:21.880You know, so Facebook's already out there.
00:54:24.040But eventually they're going to get a real competitor, and they've already got competitors for some aspects of their business.
00:54:28.920But, you know, in the same way that there was such a thing as MySpace, which no one really remembers,
00:54:32.840that Facebook just sort of swept away, it's not as though Facebook is the utility company.
00:55:56.900You know, Bill Clinton was famously this way, but he's not the only one.
00:56:00.360I think Sasse could quit politics tomorrow and go back and do something that made a lot of money and spend more time with his kids back in Nebraska.
00:56:09.720Yeah, I think he is one of the few people you can point to and say with some confidence that he really is there out of a sense of service and out of a sense of patriotism.
00:56:20.680And so, I wish there were more like him out there, certainly.
00:56:26.100You said that earlier, you said, you know, 40, 40, that's 80, there's 20%.
00:56:30.480I think there's more than that myself.
00:56:56.800Speaking of Philadelphia, you know, we were talking about being in Australia and no news on the televisions.
00:57:02.260The thing I loved about the Union League in Philadelphia, there's no television anywhere, but you could go have lunch and not have a television.
00:57:07.360And if someone took out a cell phone, they would make you put it away or ask you to leave, which I thought was great.
01:00:39.500Or Bernie Sanders or people like that.
01:00:41.220And so we get these swings back and forth because each of the tribes feels that if the other tribe has its man in the White House, then they are marginalized and disenfranchised and humiliated.
01:00:51.740And so they have to swing back the other way.
01:00:54.400And if we could ever come up with a way to get over that politics, which is what I try to point to a little bit in the book,
01:01:02.880what's going to overcome that is reconceiving, among other things, the presidency as a guy who's there to act as a chief administrator.
01:01:12.160And he's not the embodiment of the nation.
01:01:22.600He's just a guy with an administrative job to do who sometimes has some bigger things to do during courses of a national emergency.
01:01:29.580And I've always quite liked the thing about the Swiss where they've got this weird presidency that's got sort of a nine-member rotating council.
01:01:39.100And no one knows at any given time who the actual president is.
01:01:42.060Like you ask the typical Swiss person, they'll be like, oh, oh, yes, that lady.
01:02:18.200Nobody cares about the secretary of agriculture.
01:02:20.600He's the guy that we put in the little, you know, well upholstered hidey hole during the State of the Union because we don't think anyone would bother to murder him.
01:03:27.260And I said, oh, it may happen way before that.
01:03:29.940But we are so close to unlocking so many doors.
01:03:35.140If we don't piss away freedom and don't hand it over to some system like China, it's freedom literally beyond our imagination, beyond anything you've ever read in any utopian book.
01:03:54.340It's that kind of freedom and success and freedom, you know?
01:04:02.020But if you look at my, you know, short lifetime, look at the time since I got out of high school even, which wasn't that long ago, the number of people who die of things like famine and collapsed.
01:05:02.720You know, vaccines where they're worried about having your whole country wiped out by, by something like that.
01:05:06.720But on that same, you know, on that same token, if you look at some of the amazing things that have been done, you know, a bunch of Rotarians not that long ago got together at lunch and said, let's wipe out polio around the world.
01:05:20.840They've gotten real close, except for a couple of places where they just can't operate, like parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the rural parts of Nigeria.
01:05:29.680There's a bunch of guys who sing goofy songs around lunch and, you know, who are, you know, local business leaders in Mayberry and places like that.
01:05:35.200But people, and particularly American people, because we have so many resources at our disposal, can do remarkable things when they set their minds to it.
01:05:45.720And I think that if more people spent more time doing that sort of thing, they would be a lot more satisfied than screaming at people and calling them Nazis on Twitter because they would be involved in something that actually was important.
01:07:44.580What I'm saying is how do we, when you don't have to work and you can 3D print anything you want and it's no big deal, where do you, how does that work with a, in the transition, long-term maybe, in the transition, how?
01:07:59.980This reminded me of a conversation I had 25 years ago with someone in India.
01:08:17.640India was a lot poorer back in the 90s than it is now, but I think that's still true.
01:08:20.880You know, I'm someone who thinks about things in economic terms a lot, and I think that's an important way to look at things from a public policy point of view.
01:08:32.360Because you can have all sorts of disputes and conversations when you're well-fed versus when people are hungry and they're going to eat each other.
01:08:41.360So, I think that material well-being is not the end-all be-all of life, obviously, but it's not to be sneezed at either.
01:08:49.900And I think that, you know, if we continue to work on those things and we continue to press toward what we actually can achieve on that front, there's meaning in that as well.
01:08:59.320You know, it may very well be that the last person who's ever going to die of cancer has already been born.
01:09:06.580And that the person who are going to have a whole different world where cancer is like diabetes, you know, it's a pain, but you manage it.
01:09:14.900And if you do the right things, maybe shorten your life a little bit, but it's not a death sentence.
01:09:58.280And so he started making knives, and he wasn't very good at it.
01:10:00.740But he got on YouTube and figured out how to get good at it.
01:10:03.860And I don't know if he makes a lot of money.
01:10:05.620I think he probably makes an okay living.
01:10:08.320But he gets up every day, and he makes something that is one of the best examples of that particular thing that you can get.
01:10:15.300And I think there is some real value in that.
01:10:17.260There's a sense of accomplishment in that.
01:10:18.820And whether you are someone who is out researching cancer cures or you're someone who's making fancy kitchen knives or you're someone who's detailing a car, there's honor and dignity and meaning in work and in being of service to people and of being productive.
01:10:35.980And I think that we sneer at that too much.
01:10:38.340We particularly sneer at people who work with their hands, which is really dumb because a lot of these people do make a lot of money.
01:13:07.680And the fact is that when you've got a really, really wealthy and enormously productive society like ours, there's room for people who have just regular punch-the-clock jobs to make a good living and have a good standard of living.
01:13:21.240One of the things that I think is very interesting and strange about our time right now is we've spent all this time talking about inequality.
01:13:26.620And I think it's the wrong conversation to have because what we should really care about is what's happening to the absolute standard of living for people at the bottom and how we can bring that up.
01:13:34.640Not how much distance there is between them and the top.
01:13:37.540But for people at the very top, you know, your Silicon Valley CEOs, your Wall Street CEOs and things like that, you know this probably from having been in New York and being in that world a little bit, their lives really have gotten strange.
01:13:53.060Like their lives are radically different from, you know, people who are top 10%, top 5%, top 3%.
01:13:59.320You look at Charles Murray's stuff, you know.
01:14:01.180Back in the 1960s, the top and the bottom were not that different.
01:14:07.320I mean, the sort of billionaire and up world is their lives have become really, really alien, I think, to a lot of people, including very wealthy people.
01:14:16.080There's a difference between being wealthy and being like that guy.