Gregg Hurwitz – An Invitation to the Intellectual Dark Web

Hi everybody, I'm here today again with Greg Hurwitz, an old friend of mine, a former student from Harvard. Um, we've talked before, and we've got some exciting things to talk about today. I'll give you some background on Greg first.

Greg is a New York Times number one internationally best-selling author of 20 thrillers, including Out of the Dark, coming out in 2019, and two award-winning thriller novels for teens. His novels have won numerous literary awards, grace top 10 lists, and have been published in 30 languages. He's written screenplays for, or sold spec scripts to, many of the major studios, including The Book of Henry, and written, developed, and produced TV for various networks.

He's also a New York Times best-selling comic book writer, having penned stories for Marvel's Wolverine and Punisher, and DC's Batman and Penguin. He's published numerous academic articles on Shakespeare, taught fiction writing in the USC English Department, and guest lectured for UCLA and for Harvard in the United States and internationally.

In the course of researching his thrillers, he sneaked onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs, swum with sharks in the Galapagos, and gone undercover into mind control cults. Hurwitz grew up in the Bay Area while completing a BA from Harvard and a master's from Trinity College, Oxford, in Shakespearean tragedy. He wrote his first novel, he was the undergraduate scholar athlete of the year at Harvard for his pole vaulting exploits, and played college soccer in England where he was a Knox Fellow.

So that's Greg, everybody! It's quite an intro. I think I'm just gonna have you follow me around everywhere and read that before I enter a room.

"Dislikes me?"

Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. That's right. That's the sort of intro that makes everyone hope you're a real son of a... after reading an intro like that so they can morally dislike you.

"Yes, the best thing!"

Yeah, there's a lot to morally dislike, Jordan, as you know.

"Yeah, yeah."

So we're not going to talk too much today about Greg's previous exploits. Uh, instead, we're going to talk about some of the work he's been doing in the political realm recently and the reasons for doing that. So, Greg, I'm going to let you take that away.

"Well, so look, I write thrillers, and I have the shorthand that I always give is that about half of my friends are born-again Christian Navy SEAL snipers and half my friends are gay ACLU lawyers. I tour equally in the red and blue states. My readership is very, very diverse, and I think because of that I have a real ear for the buzzwords and phrases and ideological shorthand that really shut people down, um that just make them stop listening. Um my own politics, I’d say, I'm a bit more of a classical liberal. Um, and one of the things that I talk a lot about is there's certain phrases that we've grown up with from both sides that just make people completely stop and it's not dissimilar to what we're trying to do when we're writing. Right? If you write and use buzzwords and catch phrases and clichés, it's less interesting. If you already know what you think before you start writing and there's no room for discovery along the way, then you're not—it’s not real writing, it’s propaganda. Right? It’s Amrand. You're never going to be surprised by something in the third act. And so there's a real overlap for that that I found and so one of the things that I've been trying to do, uh, given how polarized I have found discourse to be and how I found myself moving between vastly different worlds is to try to commit myself to ending, um, or contributing to ending polarizing discourse.

Uh, and so part of that is I've been focused on trying to rebrand the Democratic Party, uh, working with a lot of different candidates and entities in an effort to get away from gridlock and more towards solutions. Um, I have a view that's a lot like Jonathan Haidt, who you've interviewed at length, um, who I think gives a great description of the need and necessity for both conservatives and liberals in that, you know, conservatives like walls around things, right? They like walls around gender. They like walls around countries. Uh, build a wall is sort of a brilliant Republican slogan, and the job of liberals is to say hang on a minute if that wall is too impenetrable, you're not going to have new ideas and people, and then we'll stagnate and die.

And so for me, and you and I’ve talked before about how it's also the case for inventors and entrepreneurs who kind of create things, which tends to be more of a liberal leaning. But if you want them run effectively, often you need conservative managers to come in. And so I want there to be stronger parties on both sides. I mean, I want there to be better discourse. I think if there's a stronger Republican Party, it makes the Democratic Party have to raise their game and come up with solutions. And out of the one thing I will say that has been common of everyone who I talked to is nobody is thrilled with the level of political discourse right now.

Also, there's a couple of things there that are really interesting. I mean you talk about the necessity for, uh, high-quality representation on both sides of the political, um, political—what do you call that? Continuum, let's say, right? And there are really powerful temperamental and philosophical reasons for that. So, you know, you mentioned that the liberal types tend to be entrepreneurs and creators, and, uh, conservative types tend to be managers and administrators. So that's that's pretty well documented in the psychological literature.

But you see echoes of that, and you you mentioned the border issue as well, because of course to categorize things we have to put boundaries around them. But boundaries can artificially separate and and make things stagnant as well, so we have to have a continual discussion about exactly where the boundary should be drawn without ever also presuming that we should just do away with boundaries altogether because that does away with category. And then with regards to hierarchies, well, you know, it seems to be the job of the right wing to put forward the proposition that hierarchies are necessary from an organizational perspective. So if a bunch of people decide to go do something of value, let's say it's of collective value as well as individual value, then inevitably when they operate cooperatively and competitively, they're going to produce a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is actually a tool to accomplish that task in the social arena.

But the problem with that is that a hierarchy can become over rigid and corrupt, and it can dispossess people without that dispossession being a necessary function of the task that the hierarchy is attempting to perform, right? What's that?

"It's always both, right? I mean it's always that we needed to organize and there are always our inequities, but a result of it."

That's right. And the thing that I have found is that when people lock in the political conversations from one side or the other, it becomes all or nothing. For me, nothing gets accomplished in all or nothing. And so to straw man, you know, Democrats that all of them just want to tear down the whole system and you know those are some of the loud voices on Twitter isn't helpful any more than the claim that Republicans have no interest whatsoever in the people who are dispossessed. And so a lot of what's important is to look at, you know, conservatives who are, you know, thoughtful. It's not like they love the fact that people are dispossessed. So the question becomes how do we all help that and how do we actually have a discussion? And how do we how do we get away from the fact that compromise towards solutions is somehow a betrayal? That if you compromise anything from the furthest extreme, you're sort of betraying your own ideology and your own people.

"Yeah, well I think partly you do that by focusing on specific problems instead of broader ideological solutions. And that's so part of what we're trying to discuss today and to contribute to is the re-centralization let's say of the political parties and also to make a case for the necessity of intelligent discourse, knowing that people on both sides of the political spectrum have something intelligent to say."

So the conservatives have every reason to put forward the proposition that hierarchies are both inevitable and useful, but also to keep firmly in mind that they can become corrupt and that they do tend to dispossess. And the liberals have every reason to keep in mind that hierarchies are absolutely necessary in order to get things done, but that the dispossessed need a voice so that the system remains both permeable and fair.

And it's really necessary for both sides to have some, uh, respect for the position of the alternative, of the alternative temperamental type, let's say.

"Well, that's where we have to meet in rational sort of Enlightenment discourse or else we can't win, you know?"

Right. You talked a lot about the big five personality traits and the ways that it orients differently in politics. So it's like liberals are higher in empathy, right? And higher in openness. That's why a lot of artists you find are, um, tend to be liberal. You know, at least the good ones. Like we have Bruce Springsteen. And on the other side it's hard for for for President Trump to fill up an arena with people who are the artists of a certain caliber.

"And you know it doesn't mean that that higher empathy is better. And I think often when liberals are talking, they're trying to push through only empathy and higher empathy and they're trying to educate people in the higher empathy. Well, it's a fixed psychological trait. And the other thing is, you know, republicans or conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, and conscientiousness codes for a bunch of things that are really useful. You know, it codes for better health, better finances, more stable marriages, and longer lifespan. So one of the things when I'm advising, you know, democrats is like you can't if you you have to win an argument on the merits. You have to make a better argument. If you're losing people, you can't just go to them and say be more empathetic. That's not an argument, right? It's like going to President Clinton and saying can't you just be an introvert? These are sort of fixed traits.

And the other thing is, is a lot of conservatives are doing fine over there with their stable marriages and longer lives."

"Well, and the empathy issue is interesting as well because it's easy for that to be regarded reflexively as a virtue, but an excess of pity let's say can be destructive. There's a whole psychoanalytic literature on the negative consequences of fostering over-dependence let's say and that's a real problem. And there is a managerial literature too that suggests that less agreeable managers do better as well as less agreeable people in general having higher incomes because they're better at bargaining for themselves. So it is really necessary to give some consideration to the fact that each of these temperaments has marked advantages and disadvantages and a proper niche where it can function and and other places where it actually constitutes a problem."

"Well, that's where we have to rise above ourselves and meet, like where do we meet? We meet in freedom of speech. There's a reason it's the first amendment. You know, if I was dumb enough to be a single-issue voter, that would be my single issue because part of it is, as as a classical liberal, I tend to approach things I have a strong amount of empathy but I also realize that that's not a trait that I can map onto everybody else. When I'm having a discussion that I have to actually meet and make arguments for people who approach the world in different ways and have different kinds of successes to make higher conscientious arguments in a way that appeals more broadly.

And I mean that's free marketplace of ideas, we have to meet and figure out and discuss these matters and if we're not doing it in words, we're doing with fists. The other problem with agreeableness, let's say, and empathy is that the empathetic identification tends to make the person who's experiencing it feel immediately virtuous because they're on the side of the weaker party let's say, and there's obviously some utility in that but it's not really—it doesn't come with a set of solutions to complex problems. You know, it seems to me that agreeableness is a pretty good virtue for small units like the family where egalitarian distribution is of extreme importance, but it doesn't seem to work very well at higher levels of complexity.

So, for example, it's conscientiousness that predicts workplace proficiency. You know, it's the second-best predictor after IQ. Agreeableness is actually somewhat negatively correlated unless the domain has to do with direct personal care. And so I don't think agreeableness scales very well, which is why conscientiousness has to enter into the picture."

"Yeah, I view it as like a very helpful motivator for myself. I look at a problem, my approach tends to be empathy for people who have been left out or have been who don't have the right end of the dominance hierarchy, um— and for me, it's a motivator to look at actual solutions and problems and issues, and there's a lot of real concrete things that can be attacked. But if you don't attack them from a perspective that's morally condescending, you can actually get stuff done."

"Well, it also—it’s also very helpful to increase the resolution of the problem, right? And to stop trying to solve every problem with one brush stroke. Most things are really complicated. So intelligent political discourse should involve decomposing a problem like poverty, which isn't our problem, but a set of a thousand problems, into each of those thousand problems, and then trying to generate creative solutions to each of them and then to test them. And so the resolution of the discussion has to be increased. One of the things that you and I had talked about was the possibility that these longer-form, the longer-form discourse, um, avenues that are available on the new media, like what we're doing right now, might enable us to identify and promote politicians who are capable of high-resolution discussion, who have real solutions to real problems instead of having to compress everything into a six-second sound bite."

"Well, the other thing that I'm finding really heartening is a lot of the candidates that I am working with, interacting with, and at this point that's in the hundreds, are very focused on actual solutions. And I'm trying to get a handle on, you know, the cultural conversation, whatever the hell that is, it benefits by blowing the extremes up and it feels like that's almost all that we're hearing about. And when I'm dealing with actual candidates, a lot of them are dealing with anti-corruption, healthcare, jobs, and education. Like they’re aware that that isn't the play, and so there's this amplifying effect. And then we have a lot of sort of like this cultural conversation about the cultural conversation—that things become very kind of meta.

And the level that candidates are operating at and the level that people are, you know, I'm dealing a lot with candidates in different states, people are having a hard time right now and they need hardcore solutions, and they actually don't give a about everyone on Twitter and Facebook who’s, you know, preaching everyone hasn't already unfriended them. They need solutions. They need a government that's functional. They want more transparency and lack of corruption. There's a very common set of things that govern people, but there's a sort of amplified effect from the extremes of the party that are gathering the attention.

And the biggest tool that we have in a democracy in some ways is our attention and where we focus. And if that's being hijacked by, you know, conversations and strawmen... I mean, I would love to engage with reasonable, you know, republicans, a lot of whom are my friends and are my colleagues, to say look, I know we can go and push everything to extremes and fight and debate and score points, but like you don't like some of this anymore than I do. Like what's an actual conversation from our different perspectives, assuming I don’t have all the answers, that we can come up with certain solutions that's going to take care of people who are not doing as well? You know, who are not doing as well, who are not keeping up with the economy. Because that's not good for anybody. That's not a game that is iterable across multiple games and generations. If more and more people are struggling more and more, that ain’t good for anybody, even the people at the top.

So how do we seek to kind of balance that out for people who don't have a fair shot and don’t have—even from a conservative perspective you could say, well how do we stabilize the hierarchy so that the tendency for or the multiple hierarchies for the tendency—for the tendency for people to stack up at the bottom doesn't become so extreme that the entire system starts to shake and tremble, which obviously isn't good for anyone at all.

We're seeing a lot of shaking and trembling. I mean, I think a lot of people in the last election did not feel heard or seen or represented in the choices of candidates, and a lot of people are like I don't care what it is—it's not going to be business as usual, right? So the solution isn't in my estimation to denigrate people who chose to vote for President Trump. I think the solution is to talk about the fact that we need to do better. If we want to promote a—if the Democrats want to promote a viable alternative, we have to do better with what our messaging is. We have to do better on messages that are anti-corruption. We have to make a better argument."

"Yeah. Well, the thing is, you know, I was on Bill Maher’s show a while back, and a lot of the panelists on his show were really taking pot shots at the Trump supporters and, and, you know, with the typical sort of pejoratives that are labeled at— or leveled at them. And I thought that was extremely dangerous because they're basically dissing, let's say to use a terrible cliché, about 50% of the American population and the same percentage that's been voting Republican for about 20 years.

And to just out of hand dismiss your the people who are voting differently than you as somehow primitive or primordial or foolish or ill-advised is very, very dangerous. And also more than that, it's also an abdication of responsibility because the Republicans might have won the last election, or Trump might have won the last election, but certainly the Democrats lost the last election. And so I would have—I thought that their discourse would have been a lot more productive if they would have focused on the failings of the Democratic Party. And that's also a lot more useful because if you can figure out why you didn't succeed, even though it was a very close election, if you can figure out what mistakes you made, then you could rectify it.

I mean, that's exactly along the lines of the things that you and I talk about at length, which is personal accountability. It's like you getting in a fight with your wife or your husband, is the best thing to do to point out the 50 or 80 or 90% where they screwed up, or to actually reflect and think about whatever percent it is or whatever number that you can do something better that's actually within your control. And so for me, that's a scalable notion, you know? I have so many friends too wide and varied and smart who voted for Trump. To dismiss them all as idiots—that's very—you can't denigrate it. And plus, we're married to them. That's 50 years—49.9% of our population. We are married to them and we have to figure out how to talk and to come up with solutions that make sense and that everybody can.

And so for me, a lot of it is to look at what the impulse was that was underlying that and to figure out where Democrats can be better at seeing and hearing people and furthering arguments in ways that feel legitimate and connect with people, and to figure out what the messaging is. And you always clean up your side of the house first, and it doesn't mean that there's a number of policies that I'm highly critical of of President Trump. It doesn't mean that I denigrate his followers or the people who voted for him or that I will dismiss any tendencies that they might have had or hesitations that they might have had about voting otherwise."

"Yeah, well the right message should be something like, um, not so much why your opponent is worse, but why you're better. Why your solutions are better. Why, why, why, why the grass is greener on your side of the fence. Why there's less corruption occurring under your watch. And also marketing the fact that the solutions that you have are both reasonable and practical. I mean, that does require a more elevated form of political discourse, and it would be really nice if that could be facilitated by these, by these long forms that are available online."

"We hear the refrain all the time of like the Democrats don't have a message. Like saying that President Trump is awful is not a message. And I've been, I've been really heartened with the conversations that I'm having with candidates right now that there's a huge focus on kitchen table issues. There's a huge focus on trying to tackle healthcare and education and jobs in ways that are more innovative. When you talk to the actual candidates who I want to start to pull into more and more conversations, I have an enormous amount of optimism.

And the other thing is, is your real money where your mouth is stance against corruption. And there’s some—there’s something called the Disclose Act that a lot of Democrats are working on, which is fully disclosing all of your donors, you know, releasing taxes, um, taking a pledge against no dark money. There's a whole number of different resolutions, you know, fighting voter suppression. And that means whether we lose or not, it's not about fighting voter suppression to sort of tilt the vote in a direction. It's like we need the right to win elections or lose elections fairly.

And so there's a lot of positions that are being put forth right now that I feel are really heartening, including a very strong anti-corruption stance, because you can't—you have to clean up what your side is. And in this wave of candidates that I'm looking at, it's been really impressive to me how they're starting to further articulate what the pop—the argument can be from that side. And I think that's where we can also start to find common ground to talk about the corruption.

I mean, there's a lot of Republicans who aren't thrilled with the level of discourse right now. One of the things that struck me when I've been talking to you lately is when we've been talking about what happened with the Democratic Party is also the idea that the radicals, the identity politics types managed to take over the narrative to a large degree partly because the extremism is more attractive, let's say, among a dying mainstream media.

It's click-baity and easy to attract attention to and loud and, and cinematic and all of those things. But also that the centrist Democrats seem to have lost faith in their central narrative or perhaps have failed to produce one over the last 15 years, and that left a void into which the extremist narrative, the oppressor-oppressive-oppressor narrative, let's say, or pressure-victim narrative has been able to slide in and dominate because of that void. And so that's another thing that needs to be seriously addressed: it's like the center has lost its narrative.

And, and, and that's something I’d like to see the Democrats deal with. Now, in the first ad that you generated, you had a farmer talk, if I remember correctly. You had a farmer talk about success and about what that might mean if you could attain it individually.

I think where we have fallen down as Democrats and—and where we are now reorienting is the discussion of aspirational values. Meaning, is it a rigged game? Like we can absolutely point to things that are disadvantages, you know, but to say it’s a rigged game—the thing that we have to say is all that we're in favor of are fair rules at the starting gate. And if you work harder, if you're an innovator, if you bust your ass, good on you! Like go buy a mansion and three cars! You know, go start a second business. We have to be rewarding of success and speaking of people's aspirations.

And you know, we talk a lot about income inequality and the problem with that is what's the opposite of that? Is income equality? Well, nobody wants that. If you look at the average salaries and incomes of people in the Senate and Congress, they're doing just fine; they don't want that either. And so for me, I think it's much more powerful to talk about income justice because it means that people have a fair shot at the starting gate, and then they can differentiate themselves by their own, you know, abilities and their own willingness to work. And for me, it's about the starting gate and making sure that we look at things that are there."

"Yeah, well, and also that the emphasis that you just placed on rewarding actual achievement. We also have to be in a situation where we can admit that at least one of the factors that differentiates people as they move up competence hierarchies—and we have to admit that some of the hierarchies that exist are actually based on competence and not merely on oppression—is the amount of effort they put into things.

And you know that's become—that's become an anathematic proposition on many university campuses where you're not allowed in fact to state that hard work—that some of the people who have made it have done it as a consequence of working extra hard, because I guess that undermines the narrative that the whole game is rigged. And the truth of the matter is the game is partly rigged, like all games always are. And that is unfortunate, but we can't throw the whole damn game out because it's partly rigged unless you think you can put in place a game that isn't going to be rigged and good luck with that."

"Yeah, I mean there is a very interesting interview between Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro on the podcast, and what's so interesting is they're from completely opposite sides of the spectrum. I think doesn't Eric define himself as a socialist?"

"Well he's certainly on the left, yeah. I mean, so—but you had them discuss, and it was very, very civil discourse. And I think Eric can do a much better job than I can of discussing the ways in which the issue isn't that there's a dominance hierarchy and that people differentiate themselves based on their hard work. The issue is sort of what we've seen with the separation of the working class and people at the very, very top. You know, he points to a lot of trends about what's happening with workers' wages. You know, CEO a few decades ago made 30 times the average worker; now it’s at 300. It's not about overall people doing well if there's an increasing exponential separation between, you know, working people and, and people who are at the top.

And I think that's the skew that's problematic and the fact of the matter is rather than pushing away and, you know, we can talk a little bit also about, you know, conservatives like Ben, but rather than sort of denigrating it, there's a lot of good brains on both sides of the fence and like wouldn’t it be absolutely lovely if we had reasonable conversations about what we all want to do about that rather than the position having to be income equality versus, you know, only self-reliance and put yourself up by your bootstraps because there's some people who can't do that. There are some fundamental problems with the system that's leading to people having a lot harder time, and everyone agrees with that.

And if we can talk about the details, you know, it's sort of like when we talk about universal healthcare—I feel like you come in the door and the minute you say it, people are for and against it. And for me, there's a lot of other arguments to make, it's like look we already have universal healthcare in this country. It's called emergency rooms. It's unamerican and wrong to let people die on the streets we don’t do that. But if people are uninsured, the hospital passes on the cost to insurance companies, who raise our premiums. So the average cost of an emergency room visit in the United States is $1,233. The average cost of a vaccination is $19. We're all paying for it anyways, and there's also a lot less risk of public health hazards and other things if we can figure out a way to come up with a medical system that people are getting the care that they want.

Preventative care is infinitely cheaper than trying to play catch-up in emergency rooms. And if you don't just walk in the door and say I'm for universal healthcare, I'm opposed to universal healthcare because a lot of people say, look, I was out of work and having a hard time; I had to figure out paying my own healthcare. We have to frame it in a way of saying this is good for the robustness of the whole community. And I think there's a lot of arguments and discussions from both sides that we need—we need all those brains pulling together."

"And it's one of the things, as I'm watching a lot of the IDW stuff, I would love to see increasingly increasing conversations like the one that Eric and Ben had where there's two people from the opposite side who are engaging very reasonably and seeing each other's points and trying to figure out what skills they can bring from their respective sides of the proverbial aisle."

"So you see—you think you see within the Democratic Party an attempt at least to increase the resolution of the discussion and to move away from the more polarizing discourse. You see that starting to develop?"

"Absolutely. So tell me some of the concrete things you've seen."

"I mean, you know, I've been meeting with a lot of candidates. I found there's a candidate who I really like called Joseph Cops running in Texas, who's a, you know, 20-year in the army, he's a ranger I believe, he is a bronze star, he's a graduate of, you know, Harvard’s Kennedy School, he's a professor at West Point, and what was amazing with him is, like he was talking about universal healthcare. He started his own business, a private business that led to tons of jobs, and he's this incredible person. And he made an argument in a way I haven't ever thought about it, when he's talking about healthcare. He was like, look, I have my healthcare from the army for life, that allowed me to take a risk and to go out entrepreneurially to start a company that then led to tons and tons of jobs. You know, there's evidence in Canada, our rate of entrepreneurial development in Canada per capita is actually slightly higher than it is in the US, and analysis has indicated that one of the reasons for that is the provision of universal healthcare. Well, people can take entrepreneurial risks in Canada without losing their fundamental safety net."

"So you can make a conservative argument for the provision of a certain level of underlying security, let’s say."

"Right, and it was a great argument for me."

"I mean the other thing is I'm seeing a lot of candidates who are Democrats who are very upfront with their support for the second amendment. And it's like look, the second amendment is an amendment, you can't just get rid of an amendment. And I know that as a classical liberal when people come after freedom of speech, I get really pissed. Right? And people who are living in different regions, in different states that have different cultures, when they hear people start to attack the second amendment or—or when it's global where it's all or nothing, if there's an inherent threat that comes with that.

And a lot of it for me is to look at and go look, every amendment has certain limitations on it, right? So you can't stand up on an airplane and scream that you have a bomb. You can't threaten the President of the United States that you're going to kill him under the first amendment; we have parameters around it. We already have them in place around the second amendment. Everybody knows you can't own a bazooka. Everyone knows you can't own a dirty bomb. So instead of coming in and sort of threatening people in their way of life, if they have handguns, if they're hunting, if they are weapons collectors, if we can boil the resolution down and say we're already having every amendment we have or the first and second amendment, we have certain limitations that we've placed on it for the safety of the community.

So how about if we just talk about violent history checks? Let's just talk about that one piece. So 90% of Americans are in favor of that and 73% of the NRA. And so to have a candidate stand up and say, you know, I love the first amendment, I fully support the second amendment. Believe me, I have a lot of friends who are army rangers, green berets, and seals. I know that culture well. And rather than having some sort of frontal attack on it, to sort of say well what's reasonable? You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. How about if we only discuss that? And I'm standing with 90% of Americans and 73% of NRA members. It's a much more respectful conversation and it's a much more solution-based concept.

It's also a humbler conversation because it requires a certain amount of appreciation for incremental change, right? Because it's very ego inflating to do a great thing to make a massive change, and much less so to work in the background to make a small change. But small changes are solid and they tend not to produce terrible negative consequences. And to work incrementally is to work realistically and properly, and I would also say meaningfully.

"And that—that's another element that needs to be introduced back into the discourse is like well why don't we—you know the people who established the American system were incrementalists fundamentally, and they knew perfectly well that we had a flawed system that was always going to be flawed and the best we could do was tinker away at it incrementally. And that's a really lovely sentiment. I think it's very—it's very mature and wise to understand that what you're working on is like a highway; it always needs repair. There's always going to be construction on it, there's always going to be blockages on it because it needs to be maintained and updated. But you don't—you don't scrap the whole thing with every move.

And part of the problem with the discourse now too is that every issue becomes code for an ideological position. Like I have a real hard time with all the environmentalist noise that I hear on the mainstream media in particular because I always see it as code for a very fundamental anti-capitalist ethos. And so I can't separate the damn wheat from the chaff. I mean I know because I’ve read a lot about ecological issues that there are foolish things that people are doing in the world for a variety of reasons, like overfishing is a real catastrophe and so is deep ocean trawling, as far as I'm concerned. But when I read general environmental claims and these include climate change claims, I can't separate it from a fundamental anti-capitalist ethos, and so I can't decide—I can never decide whether I can trust the information."

"Yeah, and there's that Russoian underlay too that like man is bad and nature is good, right? That's not a rallying cry to say let me pitch original sin to you."

"Right, that argument is to say what are short-term effective gains that can be made in addition to the middle and long-term in business for clean rivers and clean oceans and for fishing industries, um, and also to talk about the things we've accomplished. I mean we closed the ozone hole, and companies did a lot of business there are actually solutions. Um, you know we’ve basically eliminated polio from the face of the earth. There's entrepreneurial and innovative solutions for things that can also be pro-business."

"Yes! And we've reforested the Northern Hemisphere. You know, there's more forest in the Northern Hemisphere than there was a hundred years ago! I mean, so you said this thing about, about, you know, incremental change and it's another thing I've been thinking about a lot, which is when we walk in the door and say I'm for gun control or I'm pro-life in every circumstance or, or, um, you know, to come in with an absolute position. One of the things that's really tricky is if you're not willing to have a conversation, if you're not willing to see ground, there's no terms under which you feel that the negotiation or compromise can be satisfied.

And that gets really dangerous, and it's funny because it's something that I always advocate for when people talk about sort of a broad sweeping systemic problem or justice, the problem is it doesn't boil it down to a level of resolution that you can get traction from all the people that you need because people feel like, well what's the solution? If the solution is to throw everything away, positive and negative, and change everything, they're not going to do it.

And it's a problem we saw with Occupy Wall Street, um, and you know it sort of spread from generalized corruption, and incidentally they were targeting sort of the banks and the bigger systems almost more than they were the government who was allowing a lot of it. But then as it kept rolling into issue after issue after issue, it starts to get very complex of like, well if we concede and make changes, are there any terms under which you'll be satisfied?

And I think that's a—that's one of the aspects of coming in on positions of like thrower against universal healthcare, right? Pro or against the second amendment. There's no ground to be had there because everyone's just digging in their heels, and I feel like it's also a bit of a product of social media and the fact that we've all been sort of infantilized to sort of these likes and dopamine hits that keep driving virtue signaling. And that goes for both sides. It goes for both sides.

If you can get a real slam or dig in on your opponent, then good for you. And meanwhile, in the middle, there's a ton of Americans, there's a ton of kids in education systems that need real solutions, and it doesn't matter how much we're signaling what our beliefs are in our respective bubbles, it doesn't come down to the real solution."

"Well, it's also much more difficult to generate real solutions because it means you actually have to have some domain knowledge. And it isn't obvious, for example, that the classic forms of media that politicians have used to interact with the populace have rewarded high-resolution knowledge. You know, because it becomes—well, it's easy for it to get tangled up in the details for that kind of discussion to get tangled up in the details. But these longer form conversations might allow people to unpack some of that in a more intelligent way."

"Well, yeah. For instance, there was a great discussion between Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro at one point talking about abortion. And they're on opposite sides of it. And what was really interesting was it was civil and there was no denigration of the opposing side and also was saying look, I don't have an exact answer of when for me it becomes uncomfortable, like there is some point that that it moves from something that that is, um, into a point that he's not comfortable with abortion. There's a certain date that that would happen or a certain point in trimesters.

And so it's—and it's hard! There aren't super clear and easy answers. And you know, Ben has a different position obviously; he's much more conservative on that front. But that's a position. It's weird, I have a lot of friends who were born Christians and it's like that's a position you can't just dismiss. Like you have to talk about it like that's a human position for people who have that belief."

"I mean, so for me, what it really comes down to when there's these sort of different positions on stuff that's really fundamental for people is to say look, I don't—we I feel like Democrats have to talk about ways that are more humanizing, which is I don't actually know what I would do in that circumstance if my wife, um, you know, was pregnant or a girlfriend. Like it's a really hard choice. It's not something that's just flippant of like, oh, it's a cluster of cells and it carries no emotional weight. That's—I just don't find that to be true.

But for me there's a certain point where I don't think that's ever true for anyone who has an experience like that, right? I feel the right way to approach him? Well, I think that the answer is like look, I don't know what I would do. I don't claim to have all the answers morally. The one thing that I believe is I don't want the government coming into your house and into your bedroom and telling your wife or you what to do. Like that's something I feel like it's so deeply personal, and sometimes all you have are shitty choices and choices that aren't good.

And the flip side for me is I don't know what the alternative is when we're really talking with specifics. I don't know what government mandated pregnancy looks like. So if a daughter or a niece, who's, you know, 18, is pregnant and doesn't want to have a child, I don't know what the solution is to that. Like how does the government then mandate that and oversee that and so these are conversations that, um, that you know, I think are legitimate conversations to be had, but but from a position of respect rather than, you know, sort of slogans or the fact that the people who are pro-life are anti-women because there's a lot of women who I know who have, you know, deeply held pro-life positions.

I think it has to be a bit of a conversation that for me, I feel like these are really personal choices. I have a strong libertarian reaction to it and I also don't understand what the solution is going to be if that does become something that somebody doesn't want to have a child. I don't understand how the government mandates that and what that looks like for those nine months. And so, you know, it's not an approach that's dismissive, that's all or nothing. It's an approach of having a conversation about, you know, differing values and we have different values and we have to figure out how to how to talk about them in ways that aren't dehumanizing."

"So what do you think? What's a good plan for the next few months? What are you going to try to do?"

"Well, I have a number of plans. I mean, one of them is to keep Democrats focused on nuts and bolts issues. I also really, um, there's a lot of republican voices that I think are really important. I mean, I really like Evan McMullin, I really like Rick Wilson—there's a number of commentators who have been really interesting and compelling. I listen to the broad spectrum of everything. I wake up every morning and and also read the Drudge Report and watch Fox News to have an understanding of what opposing narratives are so that I can understand the full sort of spectrum on what's bothering people, what isn't."

"And Hero Shapiro is a really good voice as far as I'm concerned because he's as intelligent an articulator of the social conservative position as you could hope for and so he's a great whetstone against which Democrats could sharpen their knives."

"Well because if they can confront him in a reasonable argument successfully, then they've already got the argument down because—and here's the thing with Ben, he's got a great brain. I actually would like it if he was playing less defense and actually could be engaged the way that Eric has to be. Like look, what is your—what are your solutions and thoughts on this front? There are some things he said that I deeply disagree with. Like I don't believe that all trans people are mentally ill. He has some positions, but nothing that I've seen indicates to me that he's someone who can't conceivably be reasoned with.

He's also pointed out in places where he believes he's screwed up. He's written a whole articles about reversing his position on things or stuff he said that was dumb and—well that’s—that’s his words, not mine. But, you know, it’s like the Ralph Waldo Emerson—a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. It’s like how many of us have a completely consistent set of ideas? And so I feel like with Ben, and there was that big issue where Mark Duplass came out and sort of said, well why don’t we listen to him? And there was a big uproar and then he apologized.

And I think that's an interesting thing to discuss because from my perspective you have three views. If you're liberal on venture hero, one is that he's an alt-right Nazi, which I don't believe. I don't believe, um, that he's so far alt-right, I should say fascist—not Nazi, because he's old.

"Yeah, and that's—we need to define what the hell the alt-right is too. You know, the alt-right is basically a cover story for white supremacy and for an ethno-nationalist state. And to target everybody who's conservative as an alt-right figure, which is something that's happened to me repeatedly, is absolutely counterproductive."

"Right! Because especially right now, you have all these lectures on your opposition, it’s all right."

"I mean, it's very easily disprovable, but with Ben, like let's say for the sake of argument that that's who he is, which I don't believe why would you not want to pay attention or follow him or keep an eye on him or know what he's saying? It's not like he's some crackpot, you know? He's someone who's very influential and has a lot of followers. So even if it's the case—which I don't believe it is—I don't understand how not paying any attention to what's going on with him is helpful."

"You know, I gotta say one of the highlights of the era that I think Apple and Facebook and Spotify and so forth just made with Alex Jones, you know, because they think they banned Alex Jones, but that isn't what happened. What happened was they pushed his millions of followers underground. That was a very bad idea, and they're making a martyr out of him in a certain way."

"Oh, and they're justifying. You know, he's a little on the paranoid side, let's say. He's a real conspiracy theorist. And the best—the worst thing you can possibly do to someone who's paranoid is to generate a conspiracy to take him out."

"Well, and my revival is the best thing you can do when Alex Jones has said virtually nothing that I agree with on any front is to give him as much air time and as much rope as possible, or to at least allow him access to that in the same way that everyone else has access to it. You know, because like I don’t watch Alex Jones but there are a number of people on the right that I keep an eye on, or the farther right, because I want to see what they’re up to. And as soon as that becomes impossible, then you have no idea what those people are up to and how the hell are you supposed to be able to deal with it if you can't figure out what it is?”

"Well, we're not watching it! Like I'm a big fan, like I'm a big fan of the aspect of the ACLU that was the Skokie aspect, which was we show up if Nazis want to march, right? And we will protect their right to peacefully march. And it's like I have people who I despise, it's like get out there! At a point, you'll be crushed by the free marketplace of ideas. I have that belief at a point, but you have to allow for it.

And the more that we murder and shut down, we don't know how many people were watching Alex Jones to keep an eye on him, right? You know, I don't imagine it was a tremendous number of people, but it wasn't none.”

“Right! Well, look, you and I have talked about this—one of the highlights of my undergraduate years, was when The Bell Curve came out and there was a debate at the Kennedy Center and Dick Hernstein, who I had as a professor, had passed away and Charles Murray was sort of left to defend it against Stephen J. Gould. And it was a very high level of discourse.

And Henry Louis Gates gave the introduction. Things were very, very heated on campus because of the claims about racial differences in IQ. It was a very flashpoint issue. And Skip Gates gave a spectacular introduction and he said, look, there's a lot of sentiments roiling around this issue and the best possible thing that we can do is to dispute and defend and dismiss the aspects of this that aren't correct here openly and publicly.

And there was a big debate. A lot of the student groups stood up and walked out after that entry from one of the, you know, amazing intellectual minds of the country. And so I just went down and sat in the front row because people—it piled out. It's like I wanted to hear the debate. I wanted to hear the sites from all different arenas and it was totally, totally captivating. But his point was once—if someone's a crackpot and they don't have any followers and it’s a stupid racist bellowing things, it's fine to ignore people.

There's a certain point where when it's Dick Hernstein and Charles Murray, there's a point where that needs to be debated publicly and openly. And the fact that the chair of the African American Studies Department was advocating for that—to me, I thought was really important and should be heeded. That we need these things, these debates to be had, and the aspects that are that are incorrect need to be disproved in an enlightenment way—in a very intense and public way. And so that's something that I've always sort of held to is I don't, you know...

And I'm look, I mean there's also part of this about, it's sort of a toughness argument. My grandfather went down during the civil rights movement. He was a Jewish lawyer from Manhattan and went down in the deep south to stick up for—to represent African Americans who'd been convicted of crimes against white women. There's one case in particular that was totally ridiculous and he went down and people tried to run his car off a cliff and kill him.

And so part of it for me too is like I'm from that mindset of like tough liberals who want to, who actually can stand up. We need—we need people to be toughened on all sides of discourse and I feel like, you know, when people were burning copies of Ulysses, I feel like we're supposed to be the ones with the fire hoses putting out the fires. We're supposed to be the ones who can be really tough and stand our ground, and if we can't do that, if we're gonna duck from those fights, then that hardening of a sort of intense, positive, really tough version of what the points are that we're arguing, then it's not—it’s not a legitimate case. We need to be—

"That’s who we need! It's a tough time when we need tough discourse!"

"Yeah! Well, and that is exactly why you should seek out the most articulate exponents of your of your opponent's position. You know, I just had that experience talking with Sam Harris and we talked for 10 hours. And you know, there are things we agree about. One of the most fundamental things is that both Sam and I are concerned that our ethical structures—it would be better if our ethical structures were grounded in something that was self-evidently solid.

And so he wants to do that. He wants to ground ethics in the realm of fact, and I can I can understand that. It's a perfectly valid desire. I don't believe it's possible in the way that he sees it as possible, and we talked about that a lot. But I learned a tremendous amount as a consequence of discussing things with him over a 10-hour period because he really pushed me."

"Yeah! You need to be pushed, man! Because absolutely, you need people to pick all kinds of holes and you need to go in understanding that you might not have all the answers."

"Well, that you don't have all the answers and so for you with that, what I think is interesting is your approach to that is to ground things in an evolutionary model, which I think is a pretty good bedrock. Right? I mean that's been your sort of approach to this is to talk about like a sort of archetypal and evolutionary underlay. But Sam's unbelievably articulate and sharp. I mean, I had a pleasure having dinner with you and him and Douglas Murray in London, and it's it's a vibrant, respectful, sometimes disagreeable mode of conversation that's incredibly fruitful. It's awesome!"

"It's also, um, stressful as hell! You know, because you can definitely get put on the spot and have your cherished assumptions undermined and as well as look like a fool because, right, you know, some of the time even if you have an argument well thought through in that kind of discourse, you don't have it immediately at hand, you forget about it, and then, you know, you—it doesn't appear as if you're a fool.

And so you put a lot on the line in the discussion like that. But what you do is at least no one's paying attention to any of this, Jordan, so...

"Yeah! For you to have a moment where Sam Harris goes "Ha! Gotcha!"

"Right? Right? So well, so there's a lot of proposals that I'll get or that are that are floated, let's say. There's an economic idea that somebody has in my group that wants to be passed on. The first thing that I do with it is I send it to—I have a friend who's a really sharp libertarian; I have a friend who's a hardcore kind of Wall Street Republican, um, and I have another friend who's kind of a big money person.

So they represent sort of the different polls of economic policy from the things that some of the policies that might be interesting to me. The first thing I do is send it to all them and go poke as many holes in this as you possibly can and tell me what all the blind spots are. And that's not only for me to cover all those arguments, it's also for me to be able to learn and see if there's a better approach to it, if it's fundamentally flawed.

And then certainly if I'm going to advocate something that's a new policy, I'm not strong on economics. I mean, it's probably my spot, but it's to sort of know if we're going to advocate it, what are all the pitfalls we're falling into and what are we potentially missing? And I find very few people are taking an approach like this and it's one of the things that's I think is exciting.

It's funny with the IDW, has this sort of fear of an alt-right overlay, but the majority of you guys skew pretty liberal. I mean if you look at Joe, if you look at Dave, certainly. If you look at Eric and Brett, I mean it's got more of a skew. But what's nice is ideas can be parsed in a way where as much as it is embarrassing when you're put on the spot and you're wrong, no one's looking to twist the knife. You know what I mean?

Everyone's kind of saying, yeah, I disagree with this. It's disagreeable, it's high disagreeableness, but it's respectful."

"Well, it's also based at least to some degree on trust, you know? If I can assume that you're different than me temperamentally but that you're actually striving towards the truth, then we can have a discussion. And I certainly feel that with Sam."

"Yes! I mean I believe that—I believe I believe that he's an honest person and you know, or I believe that he's as honest as me, let's say, which is more to the point, right? Because well maybe an honest person is too high a barrier for anyone to actually achieve, given all of our faults, but I don't believe there's any evidence that he's striving with less intensity towards the truth than I am."

"Well, to get back to, I think, the furthest right in the group is clearly Ben, you know? And to get back to that point, it's like there’s sort of three approaches. Either he's a horrible human and he's a hardcore alt-righter, in which case if you believe that why, from a Sun Tzu perspective, Art of War, would you not want to know your enemy and figure it out?

"Yeah! Or he's somebody who has views and ideologies I disagree with him on on a number of fronts, you know? But he's somebody who is who is interested in the truth and is willing to admit when he has gone too far or not gone too far—that's the wrong phrase. He's willing to admit missteps that he perceives that he's made and has also taken new information. And it's like I'd love to actually have a discussion with him about something—discussion, not a debate, because he's a world-class debater. He would probably obliterate me, but—but an actual meaningful discussion about some of the stuff where I see there to be differences."

"Well, I think he's—I think he might be in for that, like you and I have discussed the possibility of finding high-resolution, intelligent centrist Democrats and getting some of these IDW people to interact with them. Yeah, and so, you know, that looks like it's a real possibility and it'd be interesting to see what that would do to the political discourse. And I guess this is a step on that—a step in that direction."

"I talked to Bannon, to Dave Rubin, and to Joe, or to, um, to Sam, and, uh, you know, hypothetically they’re they’re at least willing to look into this as a possibility. And it would be very interesting as well."

"Go ahead, go ahead."

"Oh, well it would also be very interesting to see how this would play out with regards to long-form discourse because we need to find politicians. You know, one of the things Joe told me when I was talking to him about—Joe Rogan, when I was talking to him about his three-hour interviews, I said, well does that ever not work out for people?

And he says, well yeah, I've had guests on who just run out of steam at about 45 minutes. They don't have anything else to say. And we don't need politicians who run out of steam at 45 minutes. We need people who can engage in intense discussion for three hours without running out of detail, without running out of ideas."

"Right! A detailed grasp of the political realm and we need to be able to see that so we could move away from these like six-minute CNN interviews."

"Well yeah, it's moving away from the tweets and the nonsense, which to my mind is inherently polarizing. It's like, look at what this, you know, hardcore lefty did on a college campus or look at this most egregious example of something that's over here. And I'm not saying those things aren't important or that we don't have to pay attention to them, but the vast majority of people in America right now need real nuts and bolts solutions and they're sick of corruption."

"Maybe there's a technological rule here. So imagine that this is like we could call this the Peterson principle, let's say."

"I think it's great, but I think we should call it the Hurwitz principle. You'll have to come up with a more elegant formulation then."

"But it seems to me that that's highly probable because if you have to compress complex information into a very narrow channel—and and broadcast TV would would certainly qualify and Twitter of course even worse—is that you have to you have to radically oversimplify it."

"Right! Well, and I'm always I'm always torn between this because like I said I've a lot of friends—I mean across the gamut of political orientations. I read a lot of news and follow a lot of people across the political orientation, like all the way left to right—not far right or very far left, but I'm talking about within the reasonable polls. And it's it's just—it’s amazing to me how skewed it is. If you turn on MSNBC and then Fox News, we're in two different worlds.

If you're the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report, and so it's very easy to get like I think I have more of awareness of what the triggers are for conservatives and what the triggers are for liberals, but also the fact that these triggers are getting this outsized air time constantly by this condensed means of information. And I think that's where like the IDW, like there’s—there's way more listeners to you guys than makes any sense.

Like the fact that you had ten two and a half-hour lectures on the psychological underpinnings of the Bible and that more than two people watch that makes no sense. And so there’s a ton of people who are really curious for more in-depth analysis—it's not being met elsewhere. And I think that that's where the polls have been missing.

I think that's proverbial—proverbially the group of people who are who are being missed and who aren't being who aren't being discounted."

"And you know, it's really important that we have this more in-depth conversations about it. So that's our little conspiracy plan so to speak then."

"Right! Is to t—to inquire if the people who've been loosely grouped together as the IDW are willing to engage in serious discourse with—to begin with— with centrist democrats. Doesn't have to be limited to that, but I think that's a nice counter-play too because for me, it can even be democrats who aren't centrists who are tilting even left of that who are willing to engage in finding reasonable discourse,"

"And might even have like different districts and states have different notions and it might really make sense for an aspect of the party that's further left to test something in San Francisco or New York and see what new ideas come out of it."

"Right! It's just for me it can't be with moral condescension and it can't be a purity test. You know you and I talk so much about how the left and the right get off track in different ways. Yeah, the right gets very fascistic and you see them coming, and it's, you know, fascistic overlay. We know what that is historically. It will go heavily towards voter suppression. There's a lot of issues that are very highly problematic on that side of the fence.

"And when they like, it gets—it gets ethnocentric in the superior sense."

"Right, yeah. And you know or or you know, illegal or hardcore power grabbing in a way that's effective, let's say. And with the left, the left, you know, cannibalizes and it's purity tests and it goes kind of crazy that way. I think that we are seeing from the Democrats now an awareness that real solutions need to be offered again. Anti-corruption is a huge thing that I'm seeing Democrats start to tackle in a very serious way—healthcare, jobs, education—and it's really important that these things get brought out."

"And so for me it's like we can test things that are further left and see if workers don’t work. Yeah, but we also need to do that from a position that isn't morally condescending in a position that's also appreciative of different cultures in different places around the country. What's going to work in New York isn’t going to work in Alabama, and liberals are so good at I think in understanding and appreciating other cultures. You know, like it's one of the things that that is sort of a trademark.

"But it's interesting to me that that I think we have fallen down on our understanding of different cultures within the United States. And so it's this very interesting divide that like if it's foreign or perceived as exotic, it's all good. But like we need a better understanding of certain cultures also. Um, you know, like Alabama and Texas."

"Yeah, certainly is guilty of this too. I mean the right treats Chicago as if it's some like horrible, you know, no-man's land. I'm not saying this is a problem only of the left, but I'm saying we can really benefit with conversations and I'm talking a lot of candidates in Oklahoma, in Orange County, in Texas who have an understanding of their constituents and what they want to do is help them and to present a reasonable alternative of real solutions to them about real issues and not the sh*t that everybody is engaging in.

It's absolutely essential, and if we if we offer all that and lose, then tough luck, we got to make a better case. We got to make a better argument. Like we screwed up, we gotta try harder."

"Yeah, by the way, the other thing, Jordan, that's really heartening I'm seeing with a lot of the actual candidates as opposed to the noise is more of an emphasis on personal accountability. You know, it's about helping people and creating new opportunities for them economically, but in a way that empowers them with the freedom to sort of make their life or make their mark if that's a freedom that they can seize.

It's about sort of trying to level a baseline like we talked about how healthcare can be super helpful for business and for entrepreneurial ventures. We talked about why it's essential for the robustness of communities but it’s about setting the terms under which people can be free to make choices and to perform at a level that they want to build their whole future.

So it's not that it's a shift from sort of us running ahead and blocking for people to us trying to lift the constraints so that people can have better choices for their—for their families, for their kids in their education system, for their own work so that they can do better and make their own mark. And because a lot of what we're standing on, a lot of the successes that we're standing on as a country are on the shoulders of working men and women. That's a lot of what's accounted for the things that we've done well.

And in fact, a lot of the world, frankly, a lot of the world has benefited enormously from the working people of the United States. You know, in a way that I don't think gets nearly enough recognition, and so..."

"Yeah! Well, I see the accruing financial success of the poor around the world, which is happening at a very rapid rate, is in most part a consequence of the sacrifices made either willingly or unwillingly by the American working class over the last 30 years."

"Absolutely! Working class—that's it! It's competition with the world has been opened up at the level of the working class first, and that's been unbelievably beneficial to the rest of the world, and probably a pretty good medium to long-term strategy because—"

"Well, and the American working class, it's like they have—they’ve built affluence for people around the globe. Like, they're heroes! There's no infantilizing of them in a way that's derogatory, and it's like it's our job to make sure that they can have choices for their future that they— that they are free to compete at least with the same rules that everybody else competes to differentiate themselves because they've always kicked ass.

I mean it's an amazing amazing workforce, and they've always done well, and it's like if people are complaining about, you know, entitlements, it's like we can also look at corporate subsidies. It's like it’s not about one tilt or the other; it's about the same rules that people need to differentiate themselves and it's about creating more freedom for them to reach their accomplishments."

"Well, it seems to me that the Democrats would have a lot more success and and also be able to generate a counter-narrative to the radicals on the left if they made the assumption that there's all sorts of good things about free-market capitalism, but crony capitalism is not one of them."

"Yeah! No! And—and that's part of your emphasis on let's call it, uh, um, regulation of corruption. It's like the free enterprise system works real well except when it gets warped and twisted and so we have to remove the warping and twisting so that people do have the opportunity to compete and to cooperate as freely as possible.

And that's in everyone's interests, including radical capitalists, because to the degree that the system is corrupt, then that reflects badly on the system and produces a tremendous amount of opposition towards it."

"Absolutely! And you want to be—it’s like if you can't win fairly, what are you doing in the game? Like that's it. It's to me it's a very tough argument that's like if you can't sign a pledge which has been put forth. It's called the Disclose Act; there's a number of variations of it. That's no dark money, you know? No for—it's a strong stance against interference by hostile actors, it's no voter suppression, it's getting universal healthcare, universal, um, voter registration.

There's a lot of stuff of like let's get everybody out voting. Let's lift the suppression and voter intimidation, and then win fair and square. And it’s like for me it's like I want the right to win fairly and I want the right to lose fairly. If we make a better argument, then let's do it, but you know, it's also anti-gerrymandering, which is a really big problem, and there's a lot of people who vow to not participate in gerrymandering and to also have it be either bipartisan committees or judges who determine the boundaries."

"Yeah, well, it's really—it's really quite an outrage that it's not bipartisan committees. It's ridiculous. You know, into a boxing ring and telling someone that you're gonna fight him but they can only step in certain areas and you can go anywhere and they can only hit you with a jab but you get to use your full battery shots. It's like man up! Right? Step into the arena if you think you can win and win fair and square.

And there's a big emphasis I think that's not getting enough press and democrats cleaning up our side of the aisle in a way that is accountable and that is going to be clear and this is disagree with that I believe if you're a heart you're a republican and you want to win, you should be aware that you can win fairly and under the same rules and that, I mean we can all agree on that I think."

"Yeah! Yeah!"

"Well it would be nice if the Democrats too could help everyone figuring out, figure out what the problems actually are because right now mostly what we see in the media is a discussion of pseudo problems."

"Exactly! And so I'd like to see what, what are their, what are the real challenges that confront us at the moment and what are the proper solutions to those challenges?"

"Yeah! It’s so funny because I feel like the racial discourse or discourse around racism has gotten so loaded and so complicated since President Trump is his run or has taken office. And it's—I feel like all sides of the issue are like there's nowhere you can step without being a landline.

And for me it's really important to boil down to I went with a program called the FI that goes and runs an entrepreneurial program in the prison system. And it's absolutely unbelievable how, you know, what I call the prison industrial complex works. The privatization of prison—you can sidestep all the arguments about who's doing what and who's responsible, African Americans, you know, who are up for drug charges, the exact same drug charges as as whites are 600% more likely to get put in prison.

Like that's a straight stat, that's not, well they’re doing more crime; there's no argument to be had about that. There are certain unbelievable biases of how, you know, African Americans and people of color are put into a prison system which profits from them and which they're doing a lot of work and basically, you know, no wages—it's a very problematic.

Anybody would agree with that across the spectrum I think if you look at those numbers and it's patently unfair. If there's one thing we need to have an intelligent discussion about drug policy, that would be a real start about the prison system and who it steered towards and the ways in which it is unfairly implemented."

"And that's a no major problem! And if you discuss the actual hardcore facts and if you can boil it down to those things—no one's going to disagree with that."

"So you know what Bjorn Lomborg did? This is really interesting. He's a, he's a Scandinavian—he used to be an environmentalist, he still is, but he calls himself the skeptical environmentalist now. I really like Bjorn Lomborg. He wrote a great book called How to Spend 50 Billion, and then a few years later, 75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place. A book I would highly recommend.

This is what he did. This is really nice procedural achievement. He looked at the UN—I hope I got this story right. It's a while since I read it—over the UN puts out a lot of development goals. Say like I think they have 150 development goals, something like that. And that's too many goals. You can't do 150 things. And I worked on a UN committee for a while and we were trying to prioritize the goals because you have to prioritize things in order to accomplish them.

And one of the things we discovered was that you couldn't prioritize the goals because every goal had its constituents and they were outraged if any other goal was prioritized over theirs. And that was a terrible thing because, well, that's like tragedy of the commons. Because the goals couldn't be prioritized, and they couldn't be then they couldn't be accomplished, essentially.

So Lomborg figured out a way around this. So his idea was this: okay, so there's a bunch of things that need to be done because there's a bunch of problems out there in the world and, but there's too many to simultaneously address, so we have to figure out where we're going to start. So what we're going to do is a cost-benefit analysis.

So we're going to concentrate on doing as much good for the least amount of money as we can. That's going to be our initial strategy because why not? Right? Um, because money is a scarce resource and it involves human labor and human intelligence and all of that, and so you don't want to waste it. But he didn't believe that he would be capable of doing the prioritization. So what he did was get 10 teams of economists together, some of which were headed by world-class economists, people who won Nobel prizes, and he had them organized teams, and then he had them go through the development goals and prioritize them and make an economic case.

And so then you had 10 separate cases that said, here's the rule: you've got 50 billion dollars, you can spend it on whatever you want, but you have to justify it in terms of cost-benefit analysis, and you have to choose from this list. And so then he got each economist to generate a list of their priorities, then he averaged across the lists and came up with a final list of both problems, which is a big deal, right? Because the first issue is what are the problems that we need to solve?

Like, you know, you might think, well what politicians should be generating is answers. It's like no, no, that's not right! If you're trying to solve a complex problem—a set of complex problems—the first thing you want to do is formulate the problems properly and then you work towards defining what the solutions might be. So be really interesting to see if we could have an intelligent political conversation that would concentrate on defining what the actual problems are!

And it’s not capitalism versus socialism, right? That's not a problem! What's fun is everyone gets to scream at each other and then be superior and get in zingers and get in retweets without having to know anything about anything! Right? And there's no actual motivation towards trying to come up with solutions to the vast majority of people who have—who are dealing with real problems. And that's the part that pisses me off!

It's like it’s this masturbatory venture of discussing the overall culture and you know if you turn on the news, it’s these little sound bites of the most, you know, sort of tabloid nature of the furthest extremes versus nuts and bolts discussions of what actually makes sense!

"Okay, so what we need to do let's say generally speaking is we've got to figure out what the problems are. Like what are the pro—what are the most serious problems that currently confront us as a society? That'd be a nice start! Like what are the 15 most crucial problems that confront us as we move farther into the 21st century?"

"That's a hard—that's a hard question. And then I think the first—"

"Okay, don't go ahead."

"Well, I mean the first thing for me looking at the system is political corruption. And I'm not meaning that at either party. I mean I have my opinions about which party does that more, but neither one is perfect. And the average rating of Congress right now is 15%. I'm sorry, it's 18%. It's the approval rating of Congress, which is better or worse, says, is slightly above syphilis.

Um, it ain't good! And if you don't believe that the people in government are serving your needs and are instead, you know, more interested in furthering the big money donors over the interests of people, which is proven out time and time again, that's a huge problem. When trust is eroded, that the people representing you are representing rich donors rather than average Americans, than seem to your needs, you can't get anywhere!

And I think that's part of what's so important about this pledge that a lot of Democrats are working on. It's not a pledge to say here’s what we—we're going to disclose and here's ways that we will clean up our side of the aisle, and I think if it’s—it's essential that you start with your own reflection of fixing the things that you need to fix in order to make a better argument. For me, corruption in government’s the top of the list here, but go ahead!"

"Well, I was thinking more of it procedurally. Not—not so much in terms of what the problems might be. I mean one of the problems I see emerging—well, one of them would be this increase in political polarization, which I think is very, very dangerous. I think another potential problem on the horizon is something like as our society becomes more cognitively complex, which is happening very, very rapidly, the number of people—the proportion of people who are likely to be dispossessed as a consequence of of of lesser ability to deal with that kind of complexity—that problem is