Joel Kotkin is a geographer and the author of a number of books, the latest of which is The Coming of Neofeudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. In this episode, Joel talks about the decline of the middle class, the rise of the tech companies, and the role of public intellectuals in society.
00:01:53.220My family's been in New York since about 1900.
00:01:57.420So I have roots there. I moved to California, went to the University of California at Berkeley in the early 70s, which was interesting.
00:02:07.160And then I've been a journalist basically all my life. I've had university think tank affiliations, but my mindset is that of a writer, of a journalist.
00:02:17.520And, you know, one of the things that's missing today is as we keep trying to find specialties, so people write about this and write about that, but they don't write about the big picture.
00:02:28.440You know, it's like Sorokin wrote many years ago that we know more and more about less and less.
00:02:35.660And I think that's where we're, you know, where we've headed.
00:02:42.740And if you say who would I consider, you know, role models or people that I would look up to would be people like de Toadful, Weber, but many people who were not necessarily academics.
00:03:00.700And one of the interesting things in the last few years is that many of the really interesting books are not coming from academia.
00:03:20.420And they said, because, you know, you write in this strange language called English in a way that people can understand.
00:03:30.700And I think that that role as a writer, as somebody without a particular political affiliation, without an ideological sort of stamp, that kind of person and function in society has really diminished in the last 50, 60 years.
00:03:49.940What we used to call public intellectuals, they almost don't exist anymore.
00:03:54.540And I think that whether or not that can be revived or not is going to be a big question.
00:04:26.680Well, I think there are some good things and some bad things. I mean, I think certainly attitudes towards race, towards gay people have certainly improved considerably, maybe gone a little bit overboard in some areas.
00:04:44.660But basically, I think those are improvements. I think the offerings, if you can afford them, of quality of food, quality of certain kind of entertainment experiences, that's gone on. I lived in Los Angeles in 1975 with Southern California. We moved to Orange County six years ago.
00:05:05.360But, you know, living here, Los Angeles, when I moved there, it was in a lot of ways more endearing than it is today.
00:05:13.560But the food is better. The culture is better.
00:05:16.720It's a more, there's certainly much more integration of particularly Hispanic and Asian Americans in the society.
00:05:28.780The negatives, the spirit of intellectual debate is being squashed.
00:05:33.980The rise of the oligarchic tech companies and their Wall Street backers are constraining speech, constraining how people talk.
00:05:46.300And even in some cases, as a parent, I noticed they've had a very negative effect in many ways on younger people in the sense of tying them more and more to their phones and making it a little bit more difficult for them to relate to other people.
00:06:02.480And obviously on the education side, it's a disaster. I mean, the kind of standards that we had at, let's say, at Berkeley or in almost any school in 40, 50 years ago, people actually read books.
00:06:19.300I don't know if you've noticed that, like right now, if I assign three books, four books for a class, maybe they'll get read.
00:06:31.680And sometimes you'll, in the past, I could have eight or nine books and they would read the books.
00:06:38.100I mean, so what we're doing is we're sort of, you know, even as we're technologically advancing in many ways, we're socially and intellectually regressing.
00:06:46.820that's a bad combination it is i agree with you and so speaking of what you're talking about in
00:06:53.680your book which is essentially the ever-growing gap not only in wealth and income but also in
00:06:59.680influence and power between a small elite and everybody else a friend of mine who's a fan of
00:07:04.780the show sent me a a graph earlier today which was the genie coefficient uh for the western world
00:07:10.700And it's literally like a line like this for the last 60 years, basically.
00:07:15.800So the rich are getting richer or the rich part of society is getting richer
00:07:19.980and the poor part of society is not at anything like the same rate.
00:07:23.820And what you talk about is the logical end product of that process, right?
00:07:29.740And which is already, you know, clear.
00:07:31.940Like, you know, you think about how we discuss, let's say, the issue of urban renaissance
00:07:37.400It's a favorite topic of the progressive elites and also the real estate interest, including many from the right.
00:07:45.080Well, what they're writing about is the world that they live in.
00:07:48.100Like when I was working on a project in London, yes, there are some of the richest precincts in the world and certainly in the UK are in London.
00:07:56.640But if you bother to go outside of those areas, actually, there's also some of the highest rates of poverty in all of Europe.
00:08:08.360I mean, it's not even, you know, you see that in New York where they'll say, oh, the cities come back.
00:08:16.220But the poorer areas have become poorer.
00:08:19.200And many of the middle class suburban areas went through somewhat of a decline.
00:08:24.660So, you know, what we have is we have a media that functions in a way, but that gives us a very distorted picture of what's actually going on in the society and how things are reported.
00:08:40.720I mean, my wife has to listen to me when I, well, I can't, sometimes I can't even read the New York Times.
00:08:46.720I'll read a piece and I say, where was the editor?
00:08:48.920Did they ever think that maybe there's another point of view or maybe to question it, particularly on issues like race, climate, gender, it is like, you know, it is newspeak now.
00:09:01.560I mean, it's just like you cannot, you can't, you can't even acknowledge that there's another side.
00:09:08.180You can't acknowledge that maybe there's some nuance here.
00:09:11.280So I just find the intellectual environment, you know, very, very difficult.
00:09:16.240And I have no, by the way, I have no sympathy for the far right at all.
00:09:27.700And what these people on the left and don't seem to understand is that by doing these pieces, by ridiculing people, by not letting people into the conversation, all you're doing is emboldening them and you're radicalizing them.
00:10:39.680So I'm, you know, I've had a pretty good run as much of my generation. I look behind me and I say, if I were a young, a white male in trying to get a job in a corporation today, I realize that I'm in a race with lead weights on my feet.
00:10:58.560Now, if that's the case, which I think in many cases it is, those people are going to be resentful and you're going to sow racial resentment by establishing racial quotas in societies like the UK, like the US, like Australia, like Canada, that have had some terrible racist past, but had moved to a position where they were making sure that there was no discrimination.
00:11:26.560Now we're moving to a different kind of discrimination. That can only create an ever more angry society on both the minority point of view and in the, let's say, the native born predominantly white population. It's a recipe for social chaos.
00:11:46.860Are you tired of using bulky old wallets, giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be?
00:11:53.820My old wallet was massive, so it brought all the ladies to the yard,
00:11:58.280which was a huge distraction and got in the way of my esteemed work on trigonometry.
00:12:03.780Ridge wallets have an incredible solution for you.
00:12:06.980This is mine, sleek, stylish, and with an industrial look to it.
00:12:10.760It can fit 12 cards with cash on the back using a clip like this one or a strap.
00:13:06.620And the other problem is, Joel, saying to these people, you know, you're lucky, you're privileged.
00:13:10.400And they're going around going, well, look, wages haven't increased in real time.
00:13:14.420inflation through the roof and by the way i'm probably never going to be able to own a property
00:13:19.800right right when this and and this is an issue that i would say if the left focused on issues of
00:13:28.180upward mobility and how to make life better for for people irrespective of the race you know
00:13:34.740why should we have a system where a kid from appalachia in which there has been generations
00:13:43.060of poverty or in the north of England, you know, in some coal mining town where things have not
00:13:49.300gone well for 50 years or more, why is that child who's brought up in very difficult circumstances,
00:13:57.380very similar circumstances to an inner city minority population, how do you get that population
00:14:05.520um and and say to them you're privileged but the you know many of um african americans and and
00:14:15.340certainly other minorities are upper middle class or middle class and and are doing fine i mean you
00:14:22.060can't it you you've really got to approach it from a class point of view from a class perspective
00:14:27.780of how do you raise the the the lower classes how do you raise the working class to middle class
00:14:34.460How do you provide incentive for the middle class to work hard and provide for themselves?
00:14:41.980That whole sort of gestalt of politics that dominated much of American and European politics is being transformed by an obsession on climate, an obsession on race, an obsession on gender,
00:14:58.000which, by the way, is heavily funded by the oligarchs, because as long as we're not talking about class, as long as we're not talking about the fact that maybe it's not a great idea that Microsoft controls 90 percent of the operating systems on computers.
00:15:14.800As long as we talk about race, talk about about transgender, talk about, you know, how the culture should should relate to certain groups.
00:15:26.120that isn't what we should be discussing the real problem in in in the u.s and and around the western
00:15:33.800world in increasingly in east asia certainly soon in china is this class divide and if we don't
00:15:40.600figure out a way to provide younger people with something close to the opportunities that our
00:15:45.680generation had my generation had i think we're in for a lot of trouble of and coming from different
00:15:51.440directions. And when I think about feudalism, I sort of see a Game of Thrones type of world,
00:15:58.920right? And one of the features, of course, is that if you're born into the royal family, let's say,
00:16:05.120you're going to stay in the royal family. You're going to be rich and powerful and influential in
00:16:09.340that world. And if you're born a peasant, you're going to die a peasant. If you're born a blacksmith
00:16:14.500son, the best you can be is a blacksmith, right? Are you genuinely seeing that kind of future for
00:16:23.120us where your parents and their station in life almost predetermines your outcomes?
00:16:29.080Well, let's put it this way. Upward mobility is more difficult. You mentioned property,
00:16:33.940probably the most important way that the middle and working classes have traditionally developed
00:16:38.180wealth. I mean, you think about my mother or my mother-in-law, as they got into their 80s and
00:16:45.42090s, it was that property that allowed them to retire, not in subsistence, but with a certain
00:16:52.640degree of comfort. That next generation isn't going to have that opportunity in large numbers,
00:16:59.100particularly who can afford, I live in Orange County, one of the nicest places you could ever
00:17:05.460want to live in many ways. But, you know, a house here is going to cost even at the bottom,
00:17:13.580maybe eight, nine hundred thousand dollars. And a decent house in a good school district is going
00:17:19.860to probably run you over a million. How many people who do not have wealthy parents are going
00:17:25.900to be able to afford that? So what you're seeing is like when you poll people and you say, young
00:17:30.620people say well how are you going to buy a house the biggest um factor now is inheritance you know
00:17:36.660that literally you can you know so that like for instance if you like i have a friend who who is
00:17:42.720selling real estate in brooklyn and in a very nice part of brooklyn and and what she tells me is that
00:17:48.840half the over half the people over 45 under 45 um have to have co-signing parents so if you're
00:17:57.520from a poor family, exactly how are you going to get in this market? So what we have to figure out
00:18:03.520is how do we expand ownership? How do we expand entrepreneurship? How do we expand opportunity?
00:18:09.720Now, I think this is what Democrats should be talking about and what the Labour Party in the
00:18:16.080UK should be talking about and the Labour Party in Australia should be talking about and the
00:18:21.720liberals in Canada should be talking about. But they're not. They're talking about transgender
00:18:27.520issues and what a woman is. And they're talking about, I don't have a particular position.
00:18:35.120And I'm just like, this is their obsession. Systemic racism, canceling people who may
00:18:42.120have said something that somebody somewhere may have found remotely offensive. Having special
00:18:48.440programs for people by skin color. This is a terrible agenda, defunding the police. I mean,
00:18:55.960that's a particular issue here. Adopting climate policies where the rich who push for extreme
00:19:03.100climate policies are not affected. What they're saying is, you've got to cut back. So I'm going
00:19:09.400to be told by Jeff Bezos, you've got to reduce your carbon footprint. Here's a guy whose company
00:19:17.980his carbon footprint is probably bigger than those of some African countries. And you've got a guy
00:19:25.460who's got four or five houses, you know, God knows what. I don't begrudge him. I mean, I think
00:19:32.000I've met Jeff. I think he's a really smart guy. And, you know, and he has created a terrific
00:19:37.640product, unlike some of the other people who have also made a lot of money. But the reality is,
00:19:43.720You know, if you're going to address climate change, you can't have it in a situation at very medieval, I have to say, where the rich buy indulges.
00:19:52.140Well, I bought, you know, 3,000 acres of woodlands in Brazil.
00:19:57.860So therefore, I can fly in my own private jet and then worry about climate change.
00:20:04.020But you better not get on that Ryanair flight from London to Spain for your one week of sunshine that you look forward to all year.
00:20:18.060I mean, if you're going to make a change, you have to look at what the effects are on working people, on the poor.
00:20:30.560Or, you know, for instance, we go to Africa and we say to Africa, no fossil fuels.
00:20:37.920Well, here's a continent where electricity is in short supply and there isn't going to be enough wind and solar to power those economies as their populations are one place in the world with the populations growing.
00:20:52.000We're not even thinking about the effects.
00:20:55.180I got a, once in a while, you know, I don't know if you probably have these, you know, people embedded in these increasingly insane organizations.
00:21:04.940Occasionally they contact you and say, can I talk to you?
00:21:07.860So I talked to this guy, PhD candidate at Stanford working on electric vehicles.
00:21:15.200And he said, well, so here's my situation.
00:21:20.000I'm working on electric vehicles, and, you know, he's okay with it.
00:21:25.580But he says, every time I ask the question, where's the power going to come from?
00:21:45.640The groupthink, the desire to make, to not ask questions.
00:21:52.220I read newspaper accounts and I just, I say, you know, I said we had fires here in California.
00:22:00.760Now, there are lots of reasons we've had fires in California for a very long time.
00:22:04.740Actually, we have less of the big urban fires than we used to have.
00:22:08.500But, okay, the fires of climate change.
00:22:11.060No, climate change might be part of it, but there are very detailed reports from state commissions that say a lot of it was the policies that the Greens imposed on fires.
00:22:23.780They wouldn't let them take out the old growth, and that was very combustible.
00:22:30.240A reporter should be looking at both of these issues.
00:22:33.700They should be talking about the climate and what the effect might be, and also maybe are we doing something wrong on the policy side?
00:22:40.380Are there other reasons why these things happen than just to say, oh, it's the climate crisis?
00:22:46.400So now we're like medieval clerics running around saying every bad thing, every time there's a drop of rain that happens at a time it shouldn't happen, or every time the temperature is high.
00:22:58.940I always find it interesting that every time we have high temperatures, there's major coverage, and when there's low temperatures, we have very little.
00:23:05.360Now, look, I believe that there's climate change. I think it's probably likely that there's something going on. But instead of thinking about how do we adapt to it, we're deciding that we're going to punish the peasants and make them essentially pay for the obsessions of the aristocrats.
00:23:26.140I mean, you know, it's really, to me, it's just incredible how we sit there and we think about making major transitions that are just absolutely against the interest of a large portion, the majority portion of Western societies.
00:23:43.280And at the same time, we're depriving opportunity to advance for the parts of the world that are the majority of the world, which are developing countries.
00:23:52.980It's just astounding to me that we don't even seem to consider this in discussions because, you know, basically governments in most cases and increasingly are run as technocracies.
00:24:10.920And, you know, to them, every problem has to be solved in a particular way.
00:24:16.360And we don't consider, like, for instance, here in California, they say, well, we want to cut greenhouse gases so everybody has to live in an apartment in a dense area.
00:24:25.860Now, besides the fact that that science there is actually not very good, the reality is if you're telling a whole generation that they're never going to own a house, that they're going to have to pay high rents, and that there's no way that they're ever going to have what they want, what do they expect?
00:24:42.340What kind of society do you think you're going to have?
00:24:44.380You think you're going to have a bunch of happy campers?
00:24:47.380Well, you know, you better be selling SOMA on a massive level if you want that to happen.
00:24:52.600Right. And Joel, one of the things you just talked about is ideology.
00:24:57.000And I'm sure that's a big part of some of the things that are happening.
00:25:00.160But when we talk about the housing crisis, particularly here in the UK, where it's very pronounced.
00:26:27.400The point that you make, if everybody's living in a flat share
00:26:30.280with five other people in the city with no access to nature,
00:26:32.980no access to their own property, etc.,
00:26:34.740what is that actually going to do to human brains and human behaviour
00:26:38.220and the stuff that spills out into the streets?
00:26:40.080We only think about the short term right here, right now. What benefit to me?
00:26:44.860Well, we have, you know, we certainly have that here. I mean, there is a strange alliance. And I think you have this in the UK as well. The upper class of property owners are also the biggest environmentalists because they don't want to see development.
00:27:02.220You know, they don't want, you know, somebody to build, you know, 10,000 houses in Essex.
00:27:07.840You know, they don't want to do that because they know that that means that my property, which has gone due to no intelligence of my own, has gone from, let's say, a very common here is California being, you know, probably one of the epicenters of all this.
00:27:26.520you know people who bought a house for 150 200 000 30 years ago it's now worth a million half
00:27:35.340why would i you know why would i want to give this up so the the the danger with is also that
00:27:42.440much of the property is now owned by people who don't have children or um or their children are
00:27:48.900already gone. So they don't really care. And so I think that we do have a, nobody is really
00:27:57.120looking at the future, or not nobody, but most people are not really looking at a future that
00:28:02.900I think is socially sustainable. We can't have a society in which, you know, if we go 20, 30 years
00:28:09.500from now, and let's say in the UK, home ownership goes from, let's say 50% to 30%. Do you think
00:28:17.500that's going to be a stable society. I mean, we spent basically the entire period since the
00:28:23.900Middle Ages, you know, with ups and downs, moving towards a society where if you worked hard
00:28:31.380and you developed a decent number of skills, you could live a modest middle-class lifestyle and
00:28:38.980you could afford to raise a family and you could afford maybe to have a little backyard or a nice
00:28:44.780a nice flat that that was what we had achieved we by 1970 western societies japan as well
00:28:53.960had achieved that goal and now we're moving exactly away from it and if you think that
00:29:00.600you can do that without there being major social disruption i think you're wrong can i just pick up
00:29:06.660on one other point that you made earlier which is about the environmental stuff um and we've got
00:29:11.580net zero here in the UK, and anyone who says anything about how this may cause some problems
00:29:16.440is automatically a climate change denier and all of that rubbish. I'm pretty convinced climate
00:29:22.940change is happening. I'm pretty convinced it's caused by human activity to some extent. But I
00:29:28.800also don't think impoverishing the people who are already poor in society is the answer.
00:29:33.740And the main point I wanted to raise with you is what you said about technocracy, because
00:29:37.640if you had a referendum on net zero in the UK,
00:29:40.760I don't think you would get over 20%, personally.
00:31:27.300We now have the head of the EPA talking about not only do we want to call people who have any question on climate science, we're going to basically kick them off social media.
00:31:41.160Anybody who disagrees how to deal with climate, that disagrees from the party line, they should be excluded too.
00:33:23.060I think that's really, you know, like, you know, people say,
00:33:27.380okay, a guy's running for mayor of Los Angeles.
00:33:31.200You know, I don't know if he'll win or not.
00:33:33.100Rick Caruso, who's a fairly middle-of-the-road candidate.
00:33:36.920And the LA Times starts ranting and raving about,
00:33:39.540Well, you know, he's he's he doesn't have a climate plan. He's mayor. The city is overrun with homeless people. We have a crime wave. The city has some of the worst economic numbers of any in the United States today. A city that should be booming. It's, you know, it's it's the the world's large only megacity that's in an absolutely perfect climate.
00:34:01.640OK, that's that's what Southern California is. And and and we're worried about whether whether you know what he's going to have a climate change policy. We're thinking about one city. If the state of California fell into the ocean tomorrow, it would have it would make up for maybe what China does in two months in terms of increasing emissions.
00:34:22.800I mean, this idea of there being, you know, well, the UK is going to prove how great we are.
00:34:29.920Meanwhile, China's just, you know, I wrote a piece recently calling it, you know, the rope-a-dope strategy.
00:34:35.240I don't know, you're probably too young to remember Muhammad Ali.
00:34:51.040They're saying, oh, yeah, we'll get to net zero, but we're going to get to it.
00:34:55.160By the time we get to it, your economies will have been destroyed.
00:34:58.640English economy is already basically, you know, moving in this direction.
00:35:03.680You'll be financial services, media, and a great vacation spot for wealthy Chinese.
00:35:10.340That's your future if you keep going the way you're going.
00:35:12.960Because if England gives up, the UK gives up its industrial and energy production industries and becomes, you know, tries to go this sort of net zero route while China basically supplies all the products.
00:35:30.300That's the other thing. We looked at this in California. Oh, yeah, we can reduce the emissions in California by, A, sending people and companies to other parts of the country. So how does it benefit the climate if a cement works, leaves LA where the customers are right there, and moves to Arizona or Mexico where they have to truck it in?
00:35:55.720You know, it's it makes no sense. It's not even the weird thing is the climate policies, I think, in many cases are more about social control and the vision that many of the the left, particularly the progressive have had and some conservatives have had for decades, for decades.
00:36:15.060If you want to know, you know, basically, the people who are now the dominant powers in our society really, you know, aren't really, I don't think they're thinking very clearly because at some point, the middle and working classes will push back and it may not be very pretty when they do.
00:36:37.280And that's the worry, Joe, that they are going to push back.
00:37:00.220I mean, that's why you get these strange results in elections today.
00:37:04.940Like electing Donald Trump. How could that happen? Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic nominee had the oligarchy and the party establishment not rallied behind Biden and essentially forced everybody else out of the race.
00:37:23.540You could have had a socialist against the lunatic in 2020.
00:37:30.520The anger at the grassroots level is very strong.
00:37:34.140You look at the recent elections in France.
00:37:36.220My wife's family's from France, so I kind of follow it.
00:44:39.380One of the things I really admire about the United States, particularly during COVID, when we had a pretty hardcore, you know, this is good for you, so you can't do anything kind of policy over here.
00:44:50.560There were states in the United States, which you can argue whether they took a better approach or a worse approach.
00:44:56.180But you, as a free citizen of the United States, had a choice.
00:46:53.920The more you concentrate everything in one place, it becomes very expensive and it expels a lot of industry because it has to go elsewhere.
00:47:05.400I mean, if you take a look at what's happening in the tech scene in Europe, it's moving to the east because it's too expensive to be in London or Paris.
00:47:19.020So I think one of the things is decentralization is going to be important. I think a lot of it has to do with self-sufficiency. So let's, like, for instance, Milton Friedman actually had a very good idea, which was a negative income tax. Instead of a basic income, let's incentivize people to work.
00:47:37.020I don't think somebody who's working at Home Depot for $40,000 or $30,000 a year should be paying a lot of income tax.
00:47:47.200They really, you know, actually they should be given incentive.
00:47:50.380On the other hand, I don't want to see what many of the oligarchs want, which is to turn the vast majority of the population into a bunch of sort of mindless serfs who cash a check and maybe occasionally drive an Uber.
00:48:05.260That's not the vision that's going to hold a society together.
00:48:09.040So I think we have to incentivize work.
00:48:11.820We have to make it much easier for families.
00:48:14.700Like, for instance, okay, instead of having a giant bureaucracy to raise children, why don't we allow, you know, grandma to get a little bit of a stipend to watch the kid.
00:48:27.460If the wife or husband has to go out to work, needs somebody to substitute.
00:48:32.420Let's think about how do we preserve institutions like the family?
00:48:35.800How do we preserve the chance for entrepreneurship and property for the next generation?
00:48:43.380Those are the issues that we need to be addressing.
00:48:47.840And I don't see that happening anywhere.
00:48:50.300I think the right is, in many cases, just enslaved to capital.
00:49:24.140That's what, as a traditional Democrat, that's what I always thought was important.
00:49:29.620You know, if you look at Harry Truman, Pat Brown, even to some extent Bill Clinton, the great appeal of Bill Clinton is Clinton understood, having been a governor of Arkansas, coming from a poor background, he understood that you appeal to people saying, if you work, play by the rules, you should have this.
00:49:51.720now we have an admin a a democratic party says you can go you can commit crimes you could you
00:49:59.380you could you could be disobedient in school you could be disruptive you could do this you
00:50:04.580could do that but you're still going to get the check right you have rights and entitlements as
00:50:09.860opposed to opportunities exactly and and so somebody who's a working class person working
00:50:15.420at Home Depot, working at Walmart, working at the corner drugstore, whatever. That person
00:50:22.860needs to be empowered. That person needs to be respected and not be treated all well. How much
00:50:30.200carbon do you emit? You know, like what kind of vision of humanity is that? And then on the
00:50:38.740climate issue, I would say, look, it doesn't matter what the UK and the US does. We've already
00:50:45.000reduced our emissions by a lot. And we can continue to do it over time. But China and India
00:50:52.040and Africa are not going to be on that, are not going to do that. And that's where the emissions
00:50:57.320are going to grow. So yes, we should try to limit our emissions in a reasonable way, but we don't
00:51:03.300have to destroy our societies in the process. And we can't kid ourselves that we live in a world in
00:51:09.700which Europe and America can determine what's going to happen to the planet. That's over. It's
00:51:14.560been over for 50 years already wake up and and we're not doing that we're we're we're living
00:51:20.520you know and i think a lot of it is like i don't it doesn't matter if california reduces emissions
00:51:26.62025 or 27 it doesn't matter because china and india will wipe that out in you know a very very
00:51:36.140short period of time we need to be thinking about adaptation you know i'm so tired of people saying
00:51:42.020Well, the seas are going to rise. I said, well, why don't you propose seawalls? We're going to not have enough water. Well, maybe we should do desalinization here in California. Maybe we ought to, a friend of mine at MIT is talking about, why don't we build a channel? Since the Midwest seems to be flooding more often, why don't we relieve them of their floodwaters and move them to the southwest in the canal?
00:52:05.420You know, when you think about what the Chinese emperors did in ancient times, what the Romans did with their roads, with what we did here in the United States and what you did in the UK with canals, why aren't we even thinking about how do we adapt?
00:52:21.380The Dutch learned how to adapt because of the, you know, they obviously have a sea level issue and have for a long time.
00:52:32.900Why aren't we talking about adapting to something that we can't fundamentally change because the dynamic of climate change is going to come from China and the developing world for the next 20 or 30 years.
00:52:44.340we should do our our best but to destroy our societies in the process um i think doesn't do
00:52:52.180anyone any good joe it has been a wonderful interview thank you very much before we go we
00:52:59.340always end with our final question which is what is the one thing we're not talking about but we
00:53:04.320really should be i would say more than than anything else what we really need to be talking
00:53:10.220about is the impact of social media on discussion in general and the lack of of just good common
00:53:23.340discussion you know i i've noticed over the years that there are many outlets which i used to do all
00:53:31.000the time. No, my views haven't changed at all. CNN, MSNBC, NPR. You know, I wrote for the New
00:53:41.800York Times. I wrote for the Washington Post. I worked for the LA Times. Very difficult to get
00:53:47.840into those places anymore if you have a contrarian point of view. Very, very difficult. Sometimes I
00:53:54.120sneak my way into the LA Times, but that's about it. I think that what we have is an environment
00:54:05.740where social media is sort of pushing people to the extremes and the legacy media, which should
00:54:12.480be sort of the arbiter and trying to be sort of in between, has decided to go on one side.
00:54:19.780And so that discussion itself has gotten weaker.
00:54:23.840And that's why we come up with, you know, with ideologies that make no sense in terms of reality.
00:55:10.760Publications like, you know, and of course I write for them,
00:55:13.240unheard spiked um uh quillette um these are these are new ventures and yes they're not gigantic but
00:55:23.800because they are they they are places where i can sit there and say okay i'm not being i'm not i'm
00:55:30.640not listening to some you know ideologically driven presentation i'm i'm i'm i'm getting
00:55:38.200an interesting point of view. So I think that there are some signs. I think there is a rebellion
00:55:45.840among traditional liberals against what the woke have imposed. I think that is becoming very
00:55:52.640obvious. And what's going to be interesting here in the United States after the 2022 elections,
00:55:58.680let's just say the Republicans pick up 25 seats. Unfortunately, most of those seats will be from
00:56:04.640more moderate Democrats, who Nancy Pelosi has sacrificed. And the question will be, well,
00:56:12.700does the party go further left or further right? Does it go back to the center? And whether they're
00:56:20.500capable of learning anything is, of course, an open question at best.
00:56:26.960Joel, do you think institutions like the Washington Post, the LA Times, and New York Times,
00:56:31.340do you think they can be saved or do you think it's now we have to create our own institutions
00:56:37.620we have to do it via substat we have to do it via podcasts like this i i don't i i don't see
00:56:44.220how you turn these around i i i watched in amazement you know i um i did a um um i was
00:56:53.540doing some stuff on the la election so i said oh i wonder you know i have a subscription a digital
00:56:58.840subscription to the la times oh i'll see what the la times are saying it was so incredibly biased
00:57:05.340for you know karen bass the former vence ramos uh person who's probably going to be the next
00:57:13.400mayor good chance she'll be the next mayor um and against caruso favoring all the you know you think
00:57:20.740the san francisco chronicle supports budine you know the the da i mean the um i think these these
00:57:28.360institutions have been so penetrated now, and that there's this whole generation of young
00:57:33.980journalists who have been trained to think that their job is not to inform, as we were taught
00:57:41.040in the old days, or to give people options, is to instruct, to push in a certain direction,
00:57:49.940Very much like, let's just say, would be the case with the old Pravda in the Soviet Union.
00:57:58.700That's really – and, you know, what happens is as the old, mostly liberal editors retire, die off, whatever, and there's nobody left who says, you know, you really have to tell both sides.
00:58:15.420You really, you know, I mean, I know because I read these stories and I said, well, didn't the editor say you should talk to somebody who maybe thinks that there's something else going on?
00:58:26.060You know, whatever, you know, particularly if it's race, gender, climate, anything involving Trump.
00:58:31.400And I think Trump is an awful human being and the country would be infinitely better off if he didn't exist.
00:58:37.600And he would be infinitely better off if he didn't run and he'd be infinitely better off if he was disgraced.
00:58:42.840But the coverage was so venomous and so, you know, so biased, so, you know, things that you would say, well, how, you know, you can't say that in a newspaper account without sounding like you're writing something for the Democratic National Committee.
00:59:01.740That those boundaries have just, they've collapsed almost completely. I mean, you almost sometimes can feel, well, here's what the party line is, and all of a sudden the coverage is all about the party line. I mean, it's astounding.
00:59:17.100And the fact that dissenting voices are either eliminated or put into the, what I call the digital gulag, like, you know, and doing work.
00:59:30.880Try to do a Google search on climate, gender, or race, and you'll see how incredibly skewed their algorithms are now.
00:59:40.160I mean, you know, there are certain topics where I just go to another another search engine because I even though I think Google may be more efficient, it it has been completely taken over.
00:59:53.820And it and, you know, unfortunately, many of the people running our tech companies, they don't really believe in the First Amendment anyway.
01:00:01.220So, you know, and they probably wouldn't even know what it was.
01:00:05.160Well, Joel, we promised to ask you one last question that ended up being an extra 15 minutes.
01:00:09.660So thank you for being so generous with your time.
01:00:13.160We're going to ask you a couple of questions
01:00:15.500for our locals-only supporters that only they will see.
01:00:19.080But for now, thank you so much for joining us.