Sam Koppelman on Voting Rights and Serving the Common Good | Accepting The Little Facts of Life

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Sam Koppelman about his new book Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, a Crisis, a Plan, serving the common good, the history of voting rights, and more. Sam Koppelman is a New York Times best-selling author. He is currently a Principal at Fenway Strategies, where he has spent half a decade telling the stories of leaders working to make the world a better place—and he’s written for publications including the New York Times, Time Magazine, and The Washington Post. The Daily Stoic is now available as a Shortcast on Blinkist. You can revisit past episodes or get through ones you missed—all with a fresh perspective and even a few updates in insight-packed listens of around 15 minutes. Check it out at blinkist.com80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that provides free research and support to help people have a positive impact with their career. To get started planning a career that works on one of the world’s most pressing problems, sign up now at 80000hours.org/stoic. InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

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• 1:26Speaker 00

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• 2:17Speaker 01

  Accepting the Little Facts of Life. In the late 1800s, Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Big Hole Basin in Montana. The trip did not get off to a good start. Upon getting off the train and searching for a wagon to transport them, Roosevelt and his party immediately ran into the first of many issues. The wagon they found was overpriced, the harnesses were rotting and falling apart, and the horses were spoiled and ill-trained. "There wasn't much use in complaining," Roosevelt later wrote in his wonderful hunting memoir, The Wilderness Hunter, "because, quote, 'on the frontier one soon grows to accept the little facts of life, this kind with bland indifference.'" Because what was the alternative? Let it ruin the trip? Yell at the horses?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Fix the harnesses with your anger? In fact, part of the appeal of the outdoors lifestyle is that it is a challenge and that it tests us in these little ways. Camping and hunting, the Stoics would have said, are both great metaphors and great training for the difficulties of life. Bad luck continued on the trip with mishap after mishap. The wagon got mired at various crossings, the horses were a constant struggle, and the weather was freezing. At one point, it looked like the weather was set to take an even more serious turn. Roosevelt turned to his partner and said casually that he would rather it didn't storm. His partner, even more stoic than Roosevelt, stopped his whistling, looked at him, and

• 3:44Speaker 01

  said, "We're not having our "rather's" on this trip," and then cheerfully resumed whistling. The truth is, we don't get our "rather's" in life either. All of us are pulled along by fate, or the logos, as the Stoics would call it, as well as by fortune. Sometimes, they line up with what we want, sometimes they don't. That's why amor fati is the right attitude. We have to embrace it. We have to accept the little facts of life. Bland indifference is a start, but cheerful whistling is even better. And check out the amor fati medallion, as well as the amor fati necklace we have in the Daily Stoic store. I carry the medallion on me everywhere that I go. Just this wonderful reminder, you can touch it and you can take that bland indifference

• 4:29Speaker 01

  to the kind of cheerful whistling that Roosevelt was talking about. We don't get our "rather's" in life, and so we might as well embrace the things that have happened to us. So go to dailystoic.com/store.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  I was in Graz, Austria, sort of in 2014, on The Obstacle's Way, it just came out, although I don't think it was out in Europe. And I was running along the Meere River, I'm sure I'm pronouncing this wrong, but I was running along this river in Graz because I was there to give a talk. And my wife's in the hotel room and I, when I got back, and suddenly my phone rang, I got a text, I don't remember what it was, but I got, someone I knew hit me up to go, "Hey, Brian Koppelman is talking about you on Twitter and your new book." And I was like, huh, that name sounds really familiar. And then I looked it up, and the reason the name sounded familiar is because Brian was the screenwriter of one of my favorite

• 5:29Speaker 00

  movies, Rounders, which I saw so many times in high school with my friends. It was, I went to high school right when that poker craze blew up. And I remember I told Brian this, I was like, my friends used to quote that movie, we knew it all by heart. And he's like, "That's, that's what I wrote the movie to do." I just remember liking that conversation. Brian was one of the first sort of really cool people to read Obstacle and talk about it. I would not have guessed that almost 10 years later, I would be interviewing his son on this podcast, as I talk about it in the podcast, because I remember him mentioning his son and him telling me that his son was like a junior in high school or something.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  I would not have expected that in the subsequent years, one, that my things would go into do what they do, but that Brian's son would go to Harvard, graduate from Harvard, write multiple bestselling books, write for the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Washington Post. He would be a very well sought after speaker.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Speechwriter and political advisor and also be a principal at Fenway Strategies, where he helps tell the stories of leaders trying to make the world a better place. He has a Texas connection. He lived in El Paso and he worked on Beto's campaign for president. In the 2018 midterms, Sammy Koppelman was also the speechwriter for Michael Bloomberg as he attempted to flip the House of Representatives. He also worked for Hillary Clinton as a digital strategist and circuit speechwriter. But I wanted to have him on after I listened to his episode with his dad on Brian's amazing podcast, The Moment, which I was on many years ago, because Sammy just worked on this book,

• 7:19Speaker 00

  not for, but with Attorney General Eric Holder. And that book, Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote, is a fascinating look at the fight for voter rights in America, arguably the most important right that we have. And I really wanted to have this conversation with Sammy, not just because the book is great and the issues it talks about are important, but I'm interested in young people who are doing things, young people who make me feel old, because they are clearly the sign that a new generation is ascendant and that I'm no longer the young kid whiz, like, older-than-my-years person

• 8:03Speaker 00

  that was so central to how other people saw me for a long time. And I just was really looking forward to this conversation. I think it went great. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, @sammykoppelman. You can check out his new book, Our Unfinished March. And I have another episode coming soon with Eric Holder, and I think these go well together. And I think you're really going to like it. Enjoy.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  I was, I've been meaning to tell you that you of all people have the unique ability to make me feel very old. Not because you're young specifically, but because I remember when I met your dad, he told me that his son was starting college. So for you now to have written two books, and that doesn't feel like a long time ago to me, because like, I'm sure you relate. It's like, like a long, when you're, when you're in your teens and then early twenties, like a year is a long time or whatever. Right? Like, so like, but now for me to, something that happened that I remember as not that long ago, to that person now be in their like,

• 9:18Speaker 00

  mid twenties and having their career and not just, just like done with college blows my mind.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  This is good revenge for you because you've been making people feel old for a really long time. So that's glad to, you had it coming.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  I think so. That, that, that is, I think because I, because of that, and you probably get this a lot, people are always reminding you how young you are. So, so like, it's just always happening. And then, so for something to make me feel old, the, the other one that does it to me is I'll hear from athletes and they'll, they'll like, like, I was just hearing this guy, he just got drafted in, in the NFL. And he's like, oh yeah, I read it when I was like in high school. And it's like, I was like, what? When were you born? And then, and then it's like, oh, this guy was born like in the early 2000s. Like, like there's a number after 2000, you know? And I'm like, and you're now going to play in the NFL? That math works? That's fucking insane.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  For me, watching people who I remember getting drafted to the league, get old and watch their skills fade, that's always the most shocking one. I'm like, how are you struggling right now to play 40 minutes? You're a 17 year old with promise.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Well, LeBron James is, is that like sort of constant reminder for me because he's like the last of that generation, kind of. And like, I remember when that was like, all that, all the athletes that were, were of my generation are now old. And sports reminds you that generations come and go much faster than it seems in regular life.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yes, it's like a little microcosm for the thing that's happening everywhere else depressingly.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Yes, it's sped up. It's like they're in dog years. It's like you're like, that's the other thing I was talking to someone about this. All my friends' dogs are being put down like because they got, these are the dogs they got when they got together as a couple. And now they have kids, but like the dog is now 10 to 15 years old. Like my, my dog, the dog I got when I left college is 16 years old. So like, it's the end of a gener-, it's the same thing. The dog is reminding you that that's happening to you. It's just less perceptible.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Your dog is like on Chris Paul's same journey of greatness. They're both persisting through all expectations of folks at their age.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  That's, that's, that's exactly right. Well, dude, I'm really excited. I love the book. So we'll talk about the book and a bunch of other stuff. But I thought we'd start with, uh, what I think you and I both perceive in people our age and younger, which is a sort of kind of either an ironic detachment or, um, uh, cynicism about the world and what's happening in the world, which I relate to. But how do you, how do you think about that? There's a, there's a quote I like from General Mattis where he said cynicism is cowardice. I think it's underst-, it's an understandable cowardice, but I see it as, uh, rooted primarily in, in fear.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a similar quote from John Lovett, who was one of President Obama's speechwriters, that "It's not more cool to be pessimistic and right than it is to be optimistic and wrong." Something like that.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  But that there, there's no sort of extra sagacious wisdom in being the person who's always doomsaying and then there's doom. It's, it's worth it to actually have hope because, you know, I was actually just rereading your book, Obstacles Away, this morning and was thinking. Thinking through this exact question of how we have a generation of people, if you go on TikTok and watch Gen Z, which came right after me, and you hear the way that they talk about the world and politics and not wanting to have kids because of climate change and not wanting to vote or leave their homes or do anything or try to engage in a real long-term relationship

• 13:20Speaker 02

  because they're afraid that it's all futile. When you hear that, there's something that's seductive about it, where you can sort of just throw in the towel. Your expectations for yourself and your life are so low that it's pretty easy to overcome them. And then ultimately, there's just something so depressing about it. And I think my generation that just grew up a few years earlier and whatever you thought of the Obama presidency witnessed that moment where there was real hope in the country and a bunch of people came together and did this thing people said wouldn't happen of electing a black president. Having that perspective, followed by Trump and climate change and whatever else, makes it a much richer, more nuanced one

• 14:03Speaker 02

  than the generation that comes after. Though obviously every generation thinks that about the people who come later. But I do think that, you know, I'm one of those people who's happy to be optimistic and hold on to hope, even if I'll look like an idiot in the long run.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, yeah, and if we can, if we can put the politics of it aside for a second, I think there is this, like, when I, when I talk about people, when I hear people who are like, I'm not going to have kids because of climate change. I'm like, you're exactly who should have kids. When you're like, I don't want to vote because I don't like either candidate, you're exactly who should vote. Like, there's a Pericles quote where he says something like, um, "Your disengagement can only, is only feasible with someone else's engagement." Basically, that when you see the field, somebody else takes it. If you don't carry your share of the load, someone else carries it. But I think more specifically, if you decide that politics

• 15:00Speaker 00

  are sickening or gross, or you don't want to be involved, you're not like purifying them, you're giving it over precisely to the people or the things that you find to be so disgusting or alarming.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  100%. I mean, it is funny that you end up in asymmetric warfare with bad people who still think it's worth paying attention and good people who throw in the towel. And that's just not going to lead to outcomes that are positive. Like, there's just no way that that redounds to the benefit of the nihilistic people. And that's why I think that the fatalism becomes nihilism. Because to decide not to care is to say, none of this actually matters. Because once you recognize that it matters, that human lives matter, that making the future marginally better matters, that one degree less of climate change is millions, billions of lives in the long run, then your perspective would be fundamentally different.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  You couldn't actually excuse your own inaction. And so you'd end up just being stuck in this fatalistic, self-hating place. And the nihilism allows for like, self-apathy. Like, I'm all right, I'm no worse than everyone else.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Well, in the ancient world, the distinction between the Epicureans and the Stoics is actually, there's not a huge difference between them, like philosophically. One of Seneca's lines is that the Epicurean gets involved in politics only if they have to. And he says, "The Stoic gets involved in politics unless something prevents them." And I think they have a more expansive definition of politics. It's not simply running for office or voting or whatever. It's, I think it means being involved in public life to some degree, right? There's many ways to be politically engaged. But I think about that quote a lot because it's, there is a certain privilege.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  And then also, there's a hypocrisy. And it's like, if you really thought it was as bad as you say it was, you, as you were saying, you wouldn't give up because the stakes would be, it's that you actually believe things are pretty stable and normal, and you don't think you can or need to do anything about it.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yes. It's funny, like if you apply that, you know, giant boulder in the middle of town story to this generation, they'd basically be like, yeah, that boulder is really annoying. It's ruining everyone's life. No one wants to get across it, but it's a fucking heavy boulder. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go move it, which is just sort of the opposite of Stoicism.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think there is, I intellectually and historically agree with the, some of the more recent sort of things we're talking about with structural and systemic and intersection of different sort of forces. But I also wonder if part of the wholesale buy into those ideas is partly a justification of the, a preemptive justification of the apathy. Because like, if it is structural and if it is systemic and there is nothing an individual can do about it, then I as an individual don't have to do anything about it.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. You know, it's interesting, like, if you think about how people approach these questions, they're like, look at climate change. So the personal responsibility angle, the initial one was reduce, reuse, recycle. So people would decide, I'm gonna lower my own consumption. Then the systemic answer to that was, you're not gonna stop climate change. Exxon's gonna still be digging. People are gonna still be polluting. A lot more people are gonna be in India and China soon. It's gonna be a disaster. These are systems you can't actually make a difference. And then like, I don't know, the sort of obstacle is the way answer is like, okay, how do you actually affect those systems? And like,

• 18:56Speaker 02

  you actually, those systems are collections of people. You have agency over that. And so like, you know, how can you change the politicians who are elected, who can change the way we interact with China or India or the way we make it so that solar is cheaper than other forms of energy or electricity is cheaper? Like, there are ways to individually take some responsibility over fixing the structural. And I think that's the chasm where people lose themselves and end up resorted to just throwing their hands up.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Well, you talk about that in the book specifically about voting rights. You're saying you're sort of looking at all these people who got us to where we are as being a sort of a multiracial democracy. Your John Lewis's, your suffragettes, the founders, et cetera. And the sacrifices and the enormous systemic forces that they bucked in order to do that. And you sort of go, you know, what is the debt that we owe those people? Right. But I think that's a larger question because the world has always been ruled by systemic and structural and intersectional obstacles and forces. And the only reason it is where it is now is that individuals believed that they could

• 20:06Speaker 00

  affect systemic or structural change, not usually as individuals, but as a collection of individuals. And so I think the question is, when you have studied history and you come to sort of see and understand who these heroes are, then that question is like, what am I going to do with the baton or the ball that they passed me?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  100%. I mean, you know, I've been thinking about where I was before writing this book. And I was in one of those places where I was a little bit apathetic to politics, wasn't paying much attention. Former Attorney General, first black Attorney General, asked me to write a book about voting rights. I'm like, of course, I gotta do this. Still kind of excited, but honestly, like, all right, you know what it's like to write a book. You gotta like, start the process from the beginning. It's pretty miserable.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  And then it is a whole other kind of animal too, because you're not in control.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  And the voice is not entirely yours and all those different considerations. And then I started, you know, looking into the first third of the book, which is the history of voting rights. And it quickly changed my mindset on all these issues. Because yeah, like you look at Our agency now, these people who are giving up and assuming we can't do anything. And you compare it to the agency of the folks at the beginning of our country. And it's not even close. Like, I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about how women won the right to vote. And when those first suffragists took up that fight, women didn't just not have the right to vote. They basically didn't have rights. They basically weren't citizens in the country.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  And if they were victims of domestic abuse, sexual violence, they, in most states, couldn't sue their partners in a marriage. And then in the few where they could, were met with all male juries. To change those laws, you need to elect new politicians. They didn't have the right to vote. So like, you just think about that starting place. Like, you've got basically nothing. You have your voice, you have your human ability to connect with other humans, and then you've got your will. And they basically decided systematically to partner with other folks, to speak out, to stop paying their taxes, to exercise whatever they could, to go show up in legislatures and just start speaking.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  There's this woman, Angela Grimke, she gave this speech, we talk about it in the book, at a legislature. And the men stopped her from speaking the next year because they said that they were worried about the structural integrity of the building because the clapping was so loud, they thought it would collapse. I mean, it was one of these wild moments when a woman, that was the first woman who had spoken in a legislature in the entire country. And obviously, her perspective and that wisdom that had never been seen there completely shook up the way things were. And also shook up the building, literally. And so you look at, in those moments, how those people channeled courage and decided to not give up and maintain some sense of agency and autonomy. And then you look at us now, and we have absolutely no excuse.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  And then, you know, just one other example of Frederick Douglass, just because this one is so remarkable, the second half of this, and it ties in with the first. So he, you know, is obviously enslaved.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Escapes slavery, helps lead the rebellion to the South's rebellion, wins the civil war, helps abolish slavery, could be done. Like, that's a pretty good, he'd be one of like the top 50 Americans anyway.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  All time.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Could have stopped there. And then he was like, no, I'm gonna go speak at the first Seneca Falls Women's Suffrage Convention. And he goes and does that because he just believes that that's right. That's someone who starts his life with literally no rights in captivity and ends up not just trying to secure rights for himself, but for others. And so you have that history in mind, and it's clear that what we have to do, what's asked of us, the debt we owe is far greater than any of us are accepting.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Have you read The Woman's Hour?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  About the passage of the 19th, it's incredible. You're just like, you think, you think about how long that took. It's like 100 years. I went, and I went to that hotel in Nashville, like, right before the pandemic, and you're just sort of standing in this lobby, and you're just like, these people fought for it. It's not just they fought for a thing that, like, was hard, but they fought for a thing that was literally inconceivable, right? Not that long ago. Like, it's not, like, I was, I was just reading about John Stuart Mill, and he, you know, he's this brilliant philosopher. He ends up running for, like, Parliament or the House of Commons. I don't really know how the British system works. But anyways, he's, they're, they're passing some bill, and he stands up, this

• 24:52Speaker 00

  is like in the mid 1800s, he stands up, and he goes, "I motion that man in this law be changed to person," right? That it should apply to everyone. And he's literally, just like, the entire place just erupts in laughter. Like, it's just, not, not just like, hey, should these people be able to vote? But like, we should think about half the population as we're passing law. It was, and, and it was met with, you know, profound laughter. And it's the first time that this concept of, like, women having personhood is introduced into British politics, like, in the legislative system. And so, yeah, that, like, it's not

• 25:34Speaker 00

  just like, a person can affect structural change, but a person can utterly redefine the structure itself. And that this takes both a lot longer and also happens faster than you think.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yes. And you know, it's worth thinking about the people on the periphery of that who exercised their agency in this, you know, with Mill, I think his wife actually wrote with him a lot about these feminist thoughts. Hard to imagine he'd have been taking that stand and writing purse. I'm not sure about the exact chronology, but without that influence. And then I think the best moment in Women's Hour, which we talk about in this book, is, you know, all of these women leave this movement and the vote keeps being like 82 to 82 or something. And there's this one guy.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  It's the one guy.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  The one.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  And his mom.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  That's the one.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yes, but his mom then comes and says, like, you should, you should, like, do the right thing today. And like, gives him a rose. And then he ends up doing it.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  And like, her agency is mass. I mean, that's like, the mother of a legislator who potentially radically changed the history of America.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  No, I mean, he absolutely, he absolutely did. You think about, yeah, it's an individual can't make a difference. One mom writing a letter to a son who is the deciding vote in a state legislature, which immediately makes it the law of the land in the United States. If he had gone the other direction, I believe Tennessee was the last state.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  It was.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  So if Tennessee hadn't passed it, it would have been, it would have been effectively dead. And I think, obviously, the woman who writes the letter obviously deserves a huge amount of credit. But like, also, both of them, if I remember correctly from the book, and this is where I think courage and sacrifice are so interrelated, is that he was the sole supporter of his mother, who was elderly and ill. And he wrecks his political career to make this vote.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  So he's not just voting against his party, or in an potentially unpopular thing, but he's also cutting, so he's cutting his political throat, but also his financial throat at the same time. But he makes the decision. And then we go, oh, a democracy is too big and unwieldy. An individual cannot make a difference.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yes. No, it's. Part of what's so inspiring, looking at the history and even the present, is the folks who just keep doing the work. I mean, one of my favorite stories in the book is there was this college student in North Carolina A and T named Love Caesar, and her campus had been gerrymandered, split down the middle. So essentially meant that all of these black students and teachers, their votes didn't matter because they were split between two districts, not in large enough numbers to make a difference in either district. And she came and drew chalk down the middle of campus. Gerrymandering is this niche issue people don't understand. She draws, brings, draws, you know, this huge line down campus to say, you know, you could lit, your dorm could be in District Three and your class could be in District Four. How does this make any sense? You're supposed to have congressional

• 28:41Speaker 02

  districts that represent communities. And with that chalk, helps draw the attention of the country to North Carolina's gerrymander. Big lawsuit comes in, those maps are thrown out. That's a random college student at an arbitrary school in North Carolina, making a difference for millions and millions and millions of people. And so the idea that you don't still have the power to do that is completely incorrect. And it's just about finding that will and deciding to do it.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Well, I'm glad we're talking about the women's suffrage movement because it's a lot less loaded and controversial, which is what the point I want to make, right? So as we talk about, you know, like, I think, for instance, some people go, oh, obviously, women, some women wanted the right to vote. And then it was probably that either people didn't think it was that important, or some men were opposed to the idea. Of course, when you zoom in, you find out actually, a lot of women were opposed to getting the right to vote. And it was this bitter, nasty fight for like decades. But the, the, the idea to me, and I talked about this, I had Kate Fagan on the podcast, who I love. If you haven't read her book, What Makes Matty Run, you should, it's incredible. But, but

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I was talking about, I was sort of riffing on it, and now I, it's something I haven't written about, but I want to. I have this idea that history, there's this kind of dark energy. Energy in in history, in America, but in all countries is sort of, there's this kind of fearful, dark race, it's, it could, it takes a number of labels, but it's, it's effectively just a dark energy that's opposed to usually new things, or the expansion of rights, or inclusion, whatever. So like, I think about that dark energy. There's like, in retrospect, obviously, women should have the right to vote, and all women more or less agree with this idea. But at the time, there was a dark energy there that was vehemently opposed to this idea. Like, in the book,

• 30:44Speaker 00

  she talks about this moment where like, this, this mother on her, on her deathbed says to her daughter, I need you to dedicate your life to fighting against the suffragette movement. So you think, you think about that dark energy, that a woman is, is, her death wish is that her daughter, like, something is taking a hold of this person, right? So there's this dark energy. So, and it's this bitter fight, and it goes down, splits down the middle, one guy defeat, when one guy makes his vote, it defeats the dark energy. And then where does that dark energy go? Shortly thereafter, you know, maybe that's the dark energy that is the resistance to the expansion of the administrative state in the Great Depression, right?

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Or it's the dark energy that then goes into fighting and attempting to secure and fight for Jim Crow, right? And, and then, and then that's the Civil Rights Movement. Except, there's this kind of dark energy that's always there. And we're like, fighting against it, and we feel like we vanquish it. And then it goes away, and then it regroups, and it identifies another issue that you wouldn't think people would care that much about. But they do, right? And, and I'm curious what you think of that theory, because when I think of voting rights, and the fight, like, that there is an opposition to the idea of voting rights, is to me, a sense

• 32:10Speaker 00

  of how insane and unpredictable this dark energy is, because like, why would a person be opposed to such a thing, right? Like, it seems so odd, and yet, here we are.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But one interesting wrinkle is how seductive the dark energy is to those fighting for the right things, you know, just to, because we're on the suffragists. I mean, the initial batch of suffragists, the people who organized the Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and them, they were stops on the Underground Railroad. So when folks were escaping from slavery, they could take safe harbor in their homes. They understood that people of different races were equal, which makes sense. They understood that people of different genders are equal as well. Then, as they're fighting for the right to vote, they make this strategic decision where they appeal to those who are in power and say, you know, if you give white women the

• 33:07Speaker 02

  right to vote, we're going to act as a force to stop A vote against the encroachment of black Americans in our democracy. And they sort of co-opt that dark energy a little bit in an act of self-preservation. But what it means is that when that big moment happens in 1918 and they get the right to vote, well, it's a kind of, it's kind of colored or not colored. It's kind of white. And so they have to figure out like, okay, what are we gonna, like, what are we gonna do, the black women who are left out? And so they go and fight against this other dark energy, which is Jim Crow. But it's really a continuation of the energy that was trying to stop women from voting in the first place.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  It just survives in this sort of like more refined racist strain. And that then, you know, we then get to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black women, black men, Native Americans, everyone else can vote. But the darkness doesn't really go anywhere. And it's how you end up in the current crisis, which most of the book's about. But, you know, for a bunch of decades there, the darkness went to other issues. They weren't focused on voting rights specifically because that just seemed like it was consensus. Yet three Republican presidents in a row reauthorized the Voting Rights Act when George W. Bush reauthorized it for the final time, 2006. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Mitch McConnell, Hillary Clinton, everyone came together and said, let's do more Voting Rights Act. But then 2013, there's this big Supreme Court case Shelby County versus Holder. My co-author Eric Holder prefers to just call it the Shelby County case for obvious reasons. And what that case does is it guts a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act and nullifies it. And what happens is the darkness realizes like, oh, we can take advantage of this moment. And once again, people across the country decide that they can engage in insidious forms of voter suppression. And it's worth noting that that darkness masks itself during, you know, if at any given time it were obvious which side the darkness was, it'd be pretty easy for people to just go to the side of the light. But you look at Jim Crow laws, you

• 35:16Speaker 02

  know, we're talking about literacy tests. That wasn't on its face, a bill that had to do with race. But if you recognize that they weren't going to be administered the same way to black Americans and white Americans, you'd understand it wasn't fair. If you recognize that black Americans weren't allowed to read at all for most of American history till that point, you understand it wasn't fair. But it's hard always in the present, this is one of the themes of the book, to recognize, you know, who the baddies are, as the internet meme says. And like, you know, the project is identifying where that darkness lies at different periods of time and finding ways to root it out.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  All the Stoics were active in life, trying to make a difference, trying to have a positive impact on the world. They were suspicious of the pen and ink philosophers and people who just wrote about stuff who didn't do it. But we've talked before about how you're only on this planet for like 4,000 weeks. Let's say you work for 40 years of that time. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years, that's 80,000 hours. Your career is roughly 80,000 hours. It's a lot of time, but it's also not a lot of time. You really can't afford to waste it. But if you dedicate yourself and end that time productively and effectively, you can have a huge positive impact on the world. You can serve the common good, as the Stoics talk about. There's actually an awesome nonprofit

• 36:39Speaker 00

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• 37:18Speaker 00

  80, the number 80, thousandhours.org/stoic. 8-0-thousand-hours.org/stoic. And just to be clear, they're a nonprofit, and everything they provide is free always. They're fully philanthropically funded. Their only goal is to help you have more impact in your career with those 80,000 hours that you have on this planet. To get started planning a career that works, well, sign up at 80,000hours.org/stoic. No, I think about that a lot. It's not a perfect test because politics is complicated. Sometimes what feels right is actually not supported by data or information, right? It's

• 38:02Speaker 00

  can be complicated. But as a general rule, this is how I try to think about what side of an issue I'm at. My first primary test is I sit down and it's not like, what do the Democrats think about this? What do the Republicans? I go, what does the dark energy think about this? Like, I was, I'm on this WhatsApp group with someone, and they were saying like, you know, what, what do you think of the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp thing? And I was like, it's not a perfect rule, but here's, whatever the side that angry guys on the internet are on, I think very carefully about what, like, about not being on that side, right? Like, I think about, like, what is the, what is that sort of dark, fearful

• 38:43Speaker 00

  energy? And I think, when I think about the response to, like, trans children, when I think about the response to voting stuff, at the, there is this kind of dark, it's not, it's It's not coming from a logical fact based thing. It's coming from a kind of a repulsion or a fear. Like I talked about this in another podcast, but I was listening to Patrick Deenin on Ezra Klein's podcast. And he was talking, Patrick Deenin being conservative in the, in the sort of moral philosophical sense, not the political sense. His book, Why Liberalism Failed, is actually very good. But he kept, he kept talking about this sort of radical changes that are happening in the family

• 39:26Speaker 00

  and in, in the, the structured unit of society and how that's what he's really resistant to. And Ezra Klein kept going like, well, what, what specifically alarms you? You know, like give it like, what is the thing that happened?

• 39:38Speaker 02

  He was like, do you want everyone to have a mandatory year of marriage counseling?

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Before they get divorced?

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, which, which is like, okay, sure. But the big thing, the big thing he was clearly upset about was the legalization of gay marriage. The dark energy was a repulsion from that thing. He doesn't like that and he can't admit that. So it becomes a larger philosophical issue. And he does a really good job laundering the objection, like couching it in this larger cultural and societal critique. But really at the core of it is just like magnets, like the dark energy is repulsing them. And he's just like, I don't like that and therefore it. And, and so I just try to think about, why am I like, where is my take on this?

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Is it dark energy or good energy? Or are we the baddies? Why do we have skull and crossbones on our epaulettes? You know, and as the skit goes like, oh yeah, it's because we're the Nazis. That's why.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, I think this is one of the interesting things studying history is. People have pretty broad consensus around certain labels being poison. Like, no one's gonna say they're a racist now. Basically, no one's gonna say that. You could ask Richard Spencer, you know, neo-Nazi, if he's a racist.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  I'm a nationalist, he would say.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Why, he's a nationalist.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Caucasian nationalist.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  There's all sorts of different ways, as you said, launder these terms or to abstract your ideas from their true motivations. And it makes this stuff difficult.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Especially absent real data and evidence on either side of any political question. And so also, as you said, another difficulty is that sometimes something will feel really right and then will end up being an issue. Like, I don't know, there's all this ban the box legislation. Do you remember this? So when people were coming out of prison, we wanted to make it so there were lower recidivism rates.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Makes sense. And when they would go to job interviews, a big fight from the left, which I supported, was to ban the box that you had to check saying you've never been incarcerated. Of course, then there was a study. And when places banned the box, what happened is employers just started making assumptions about who might have been incarcerated or not.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  And like, in fact, it ended up being worse for black Americans writ large and for formerly incarcerated people.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  The second stimulus is a great example of this, too. Of course, we should go bigger. We should, you know, take the risk. We should give more people money. People are struggling, etc. It turns out economics doesn't really care about what's right or what your feeling is or your debts are. It cares about whether the economy's running too high, too hot. And Larry Summers was pretty much right, you know? And so that's, that is, those are good examples where if you're just trusting your gut, you may end up doing what feels like the right thing, but is actually the wrong thing.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  And that's why voting rights is actually a fun issue to write a book about because... I don't know. It's kind of simple. Like, do you want to make it easier to vote or harder to vote? Do you want to expand access to the ballot or take it away? And because we have this reservoir of history and all of this evidence and philosophy and all sorts of different things that made us decide we want to live in a representative government, it makes it so these are actually one of the few issues where there's clear good and bad. And you want to just basically be on the side that wants more people to vote and wants to make it easier. Again, an interesting nuance, though, is that these issues don't actually turn out the way that the partisans think that they do.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Like, a great example of this to me is mail-in voting, where Democrats are like now hugely in favor of mail-in voting, and Republicans are hugely opposed to mail-in voting. And like, you think about it, like, and by the way, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, Democrats want more people to vote, Republicans want fewer people to vote, it feels like a black and white issue. Like, who needs to mail in their ballot? Like, basically, like, old people are people who live far away from ballot boxes. Those people tend to be disproportionately Republicans. You still got to support mail-in ballots, because, like, you want greater access to the polls, you want more people voting, that's what democracy is. And so, if you go back to those first principles, these are actually pretty easy questions to answer who the baddies are.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. It's, it's, I thought, a critique of Biden is like, Biden is trying to radically reshape America. He's talking about adding new states to the Union. And it's like, yes, that would be good. For, I actually, I don't think anyone can accurately say, if you added Puerto Rico and DC, let's say, to this, to, we now had 52 states. I'm not sure, maybe in the short term, you could predict where those states are going to be, but over the long term, I think it's a toss-up, how they vote. Those are millions of people who would have agency over their own decisions. Your resistance to it, your resistance to

• 44:35Speaker 00

  it is rooted, again, I think, in the dark energy of like, I don't want more people having a say in what's happening. And I think you're saying, I don't want to have to persuade those people. And you could argue, you know, Democrats make this similar assumption where there's like, demographic change is on our side. It's like you're making a lot of assumptions about a very diverse group of people with a very diverse set of needs and expectations and beliefs. But if your general thing is, hey, America is better when there's more people in it. And I feel like I've got a fighting chance to convince them to vote my way. That's very different than the reflexive sort of dark energy reservation of like,

• 45:20Speaker 00

  no, I want to keep things exactly as they are, or worse, take them back to how they were before certain people could do certain things.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Yes, and you know, the DC and Puerto Rico stuff, it's funny, it goes back to that first principle, the founding of America, no taxation without representation. Such a like obvious phrase. And then you realize that our founders themselves totally didn't then follow that building their own countries. They're like, to the British, they're like, no taxation without representation. And then George Washington wins in that election. 6% of Americans were eligible to vote, 6% white landowning males. And their votes didn't even really matter because the Electoral College could vote however it wanted. So you basically had almost everyone in America being taxed without representation. And one of the stories of this country, like one narrative you could tell is just us getting closer and closer and closer to realizing that promise of no taxation without representation.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  And DC and Puerto Rico are clear examples of how we got to continue that fight and get more people into the country. And I agree with you, I think people have no idea how certain demographics of voters are going to end up voting in five, 10, 20 years. Puerto Rico will often vote in a Republican elected official. And the way our country's moving among different demographics and when you look historically at different groups that sort of end up assuming whiteness and how all kinds of different stuff happens. I think like anyone who's making that guess in any direction is just totally doing just that, guessing. And that's why you got to get back to the first principles.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Well, here's the tricky thing about the dark energy thing. So if we take that as there is this force of dark energy, and most people are not consciously acting on it, but they are in its sway, right? This would be, you know, Americans resisting women having the right to vote. This would be the civil rights movement. I was just reading this fascinating book about the history of the bald eagle. And he was saying that even though the bald eagle has always been America's symbol, it was also the case that for most of the last 200 years, states would pay you a bounty for killing a bald eagle. And so the dark energy, and why was that? Was people thought that bald eagles killed livestock, which they didn't. And they also thought that they were taking babies, like that they would pick like, you

• 47:37Speaker 00

  just think of the almost medieval dark energy of like, I'm afraid that an eagle is going to pick up and fly away with my baby, right? That's not coming from a rational place. Where I think we struggle politically, and then also I think people struggle in all forms of leadership is realizing, I'm trying to convince someone rationally of a thing that they came to irrationally. Like, you know, the expression, you can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, that we, I see time and time again, people on, again, because both parties are guilty of this, but people are trying to persuade

• 48:18Speaker 00

  with facts and figures against a person or a group that has taken a fundamentally emotional point of view on things. And then they go, it's not working. Those people are evil or awful or irredeemable.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm kind of curious because you spend so much time studying this stuff. How do you go about in yourself identifying your emotional pre-programmed responses to certain things and getting back to a more intellectual reasoned place of decision making?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, oftentimes I try to go like, why do I care about this? Like, like, why, like, I had this instinctive negative opinion, probably because I read an article, I heard someone talking about it, and then I'm like backing up and I'm like, does this affect me in any way? Or am I like getting up in somebody else's shit? You know what I mean? So a lot of times it's, it's like Marx really says this great line about how you don't have to have an opinion about this. Like, I feel like a lot of my negative opinions, or my, my political opinions that I try to work on, are things that I, um, I'll give you a great example. Uh, cause I grew up in California, but a large swath of California are very conservative. So I grew up in the most conservative county in California. And I was just reading Nomadland.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Have you read Nomadland? I haven't. You should. I think it's better than Hillbilly Elegy as far as understanding what's happening in the world, and the author is not a piece of shit. So she, basically she, she goes around and she follow, like, there's this whole, like, millions of boomers mostly, who in the financial crisis, lost their house, lost their jobs, aged out of the workforce, and now like live not in trailer parks, but in RV parks, and they travel around and they work seasonally at like theme parks, or Amazon warehouses, or in national parks. And so it's this kind of like lost generation of people who the American dream failed. Right?

• 50:17Speaker 00

  And reading the book, um, you know, it like, you know, when you hear someone who's just like, they're like, well, and then this happened to me, and then this happened to me, and then this happened to me. There's a part of you, a very human part that's just like, I can't deal with this. Right? And as I was reading it, there was a voice in my head of like my dad, that I got from like listening to conservative talk radio as a kid, that I could feel actively trying to convince me that what had, like, looking for a way that what had happened to this individual person was their fault. Right? It was like, oh, it's because you drank, or oh, you didn't save your money, or oh, you should have gone to college, or oh, like, I was, there was a part of me that was just like, trying to find, I realized what I was trying to do is find a way that it was their fault.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  And then I wouldn't have to care and this wouldn't make me sad. Right. And, and so I think about that. A lot of the political opinions I try to work on are that instinctive reaction of the mind trying to like detangle you from a depressing, complicated, potentially no easy solution problem. So I can just go back to my very comfortable, nice life.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  That makes a ton of sense. I find that in myself as well. If I look at any horrific news event, I don't know. I was just looking at this, yeah, terrifying and just debilitating shooting in Texas.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  And there are these articles about this woman who was texting the shooter and he texted her in the morning saying he was gonna go shoot up a school and she didn't report him to the authorities. And like my gut instinct was like, oh, it's her fault. Like, yes, like, of course, I didn't think that. But I was like, oh, this could have been stopped. And like, you know, you want to find some explanation. That's not some people are evil and they have too easy access to guns and we need to pass a whole bunch of policy. Like what I wanted was a simple answer of like, oh, you just gotta like, call the authorities if someone texts you that they're gonna shoot up a school. And that's not generalizable, but it's kind of a way to cope with tragedy. I think about all the different ways in which my beliefs are preprogrammed. Have you ever read that Jonathan Haidt book, The Righteous Mind?

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Yes, I've seen him talk about it like a bazillion times.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the one thing sticks with me from that book, which may say more about me than him. But there's this example where, you know, he talks a lot about how people form their moral beliefs and how there's all these sort of like arbitrary ways that people form their moral beliefs. And he gives a bunch of examples where he asks folks to explain why something's wrong. And he finds a few where they can't actually get back to first principles. And like one. Graphic one, kind of, because he talks about someone who likes to go to the grocery store, buy a chicken, and then instead of, uh, instead of eating the chicken or cooking it, he uses it for whatever kind of sexual whatever, and then throws it out in the trash. And he asks people to be like, all right, like, what's immoral about having sex with

• 53:12Speaker 02

  this already dead chicken? He asks people who eat meat, he controls for people to think that killing animals is bad. It's like, what's morally worse about that? And like, no one really can answer. You're like, it's gross. Like, plenty of things are gross. Like, you're like, it's wrong. It's like, it's not treating the chicken in like, with any dignity. It's like, I don't know. Like, you're defowing a chicken. I just don't like it. Anyways, you just don't like it. And like, humans fundamentally, just like, our beliefs are largely like, I don't like it. And then you build, and then you build intellectual apparatuses around it, so that you're like, I don't like it, but that's because I'm smart. And like, when you look at the people who like, are suppressing voting rights, or doing

• 53:54Speaker 02

  anything else that's bad, it's like, something about it, just like, is all, like, they just, whether it's their parenting, whether it's the environment, the milieu that they grew up in, whether it's something their, you know, friends said, their community said, their religion said, whatever it is, they have this like visceral belief, like it's wrong to have sex with a dead chicken, which I believe too. And then, and then they build intellect, intellect on top of it. And so that's what's so useful to me as an exercise, looking back on history and trying to figure out, like, all right, how do we figure out how to not be the people who are committing atrocities in the present? I don't think I'm always going to be right. Like, I actually do think that factory farming and mass slaughter

• 54:33Speaker 02

  of animals is going to be just seen as ridiculously heinous. And I eat meat all the time, and I know that. And so there's, there's sacrifices I make that are not intellectually based, but it is useful to go back to those first principles and then just try to understand how to act morally from there down.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, it's a... And then realizing though, as you, if your goal is to persuade other people that you're not dealing with someone who has thought about it at all, they're just still in that sort of immediate emotional reaction. And therefore, if you want to convince them out of it, you're not going to guilt them out of it. You have to make a kind, and I think certain politicians have done this well, and certain politicians have done it quite terribly. You have to make an equally appealing appeal to emotion. This is what rhetoric is there for, and why it's existed as a medium for 2,000 years, is you have to, if someone is stuck in the muck or the mire of this dark energy, what

• 55:38Speaker 00

  is needed is soaring, aspiring, beautiful rhetoric. If you think about the contrast of the ugliness of, say, Bull Connor and the German Shepherds and the fire hoses, that the contrast of the beautiful soaring language of Martin Luther King, that's not just like his personal style. That was the only way to, you know what, that's the only way to balance out the darkness is with light and beauty and hope and story.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, the way that they convinced America to give them the vote wasn't saying, like, you know, intellectually, you agree that the vote, the franchise is important because democracy leads to representative government that acts in the interests of the people. Everyone on their TV screens had John Lewis getting his head bashed in by police officers for walking. And that just upsets something in your core. You just know that that's wrong. And Republicans are so much better than Democrats at that in current politics. I mean, I always thought, you know, a lot of my backgrounds in speech writing and politics, how brilliant, in a horrible way, it was President Trump in 2016. People don't remember this aspect of his campaign, but at every event, he would

• 56:49Speaker 02

  try to bring mothers of people whose kids were killed by immigrants. So he would have them at every single event, and TV would air these speeches, and it'd be a mother. And you just, as a human, you feel horrible for her. And his indictment is of immigration. You look at the stats, immigrants are less violent than native born citizens on the whole, which also just like stands for reason. They have more to lose, be kicked out of a country, particularly undocumented immigrants, tend to act as much as they can within the bounds of the law, so that they're not going to be punished for it. But tell that to that mom. And you can't tell that to that mom. And then you can't tell it to the person watching the mom who never feels on the other side. And then you look at the stats. Where did Hillary do better against Trump?

• 57:34Speaker 02

  She did better in places where there were a lot of immigrants. People who every day ate in restaurants with immigrants, interacted with immigrants, went to school with immigrants, who understood, oh, they actually enriched my community. Because they viscerally felt it.

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• 59:21Speaker 00

  Well, no, it's a good example. There's a J.D. Vance quote in this great, and I had him on the podcast, James Pogue, I think he wrote it in Vanity Fair about the new right. And he was talking, J.D. Vance was saying, "Look, I'm just saying that immigration has been bad for the people of Ohio," or whatever. And he goes to the factory worker. And the typical response to that is, "Well, it's actually not bad for all these reasons, right? This is what I'm saying." You're responding, he's saying, he's making an emotional appeal, that this thing at the border, this wave, this caravan, this heightening, all the elements of it, that it's been bad for this person. And those people do feel bad. So they're like, "Oh, you're telling me I feel bad because of X." And you're saying, "No, you

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  don't feel bad," right? Like, you're saying, "You don't feel bad," or "It's your fault that you feel bad," or whatever. The obvious, the way a good rhetorician would respond, the way that a good person trying to make an emotional appeal would go, is, would be to talk about the elephant in the room and that thing, which is that it was transformatively good for the immigrant also, right? Like, the immigrant left a war-torn place where death was certain, where wages were low, and they came here and they participated in this. You would make the emotional appeal that, by the way, he's arguing as a Catholic,

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  he should feel obligated to include in his calculus, right? And so we just do this. I think we do, not only do we do a bad job not knowing where the dark energy is, but then we do a bad job trying to persuade people because we don't use the most effective thing, which is light. That's what that note from Harry Burns's mother was a note about light. It was like, do the, you know, she was like, "Do it for me, do it for the..." She called him out of the depths of his individual political calculus and got him to think of larger, higher principles.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's Lincoln calling you your better angels. It's Obama saying, hope and change. That kind of positive rhetoric can be very powerful in counteracting negative rhetoric. It's also hard when people are just feeling down. Like, you know, you look at the Democrats in Ohio, you look at Tim Ryan, who's probably going to end up running against JD Vance. And he tells a story about his dad working in the factory and then coming back there and he saw it was ripped out of the ground, the machinery. I once played Tim Ryan in debate prep for presidential campaign, so I, I know this story very well. And he would just tell this story again and again and again of how the factory job was ripped out and it was sent to China. So he was then just scapegoating China. So it's another message of anger.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  He said, the reason he ran for president is his daughter's classmate, her dad was transferred out of a factory and she had to go to school somewhere else. And then she lost her friend. And he said, in that moment, I decided I was going to run for president, which is this like, kind of ridiculous moment. But you understand it because it appeals to people's visceral emotions in a similar way, using a different kind of darkness that the right is using. But it's darkness channeled at people who maybe deserve it more, in the case of the big corporations that are deciding to increase their profit margins. But the thing you don't see is in like, all of the Americans who benefit from the cheaper goods. And, you know, there's just people on both sides of all of these things, depending on like, what, where you decide to like, how far you decide to expand the aperture of your lens.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  And so it's, as, you know, I try as much as I can to separate the emotions as a person in making these decisions. And then as a political rhetorician, it's all about figuring out how to harness these animalistic human instincts and figure out the ways to do that in service of what my intellect tells me is actually good.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  Well, the Stoics have this idea that there's these sort of circles of concern. And there, you know, the first circle is yourself, and then there's your family, then there's your community, then there's your state, it gets bigger and bigger. But the idea was, how do you pull the outer circles towards the inner circle, right? And I think when I think about how I grew up, it was the exact Opposite, right? It was not thinking about that at all. And so it requires work. And then realizing that a lot of people don't have the time, energy, or incentives to do that work. And so as you try to persuade or convince, you have to, you have to spell that all out for them. And that seems to be, people just intuitively expect other people to do what is right.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  As if those people aren't busy, overloaded, struggling, pissed off, you know, have this grievance or that grievance. And then we're like, oh, they're hopeless or irredeemable or suck. And it's like, no, it's more complicated than that. They would be good, like, they would be good if they could.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yes. And it's hard, you know, once you expand how far out you want to go with those circles. If you accept that someone far away from you, their life has as much meaning as someone close to you. And if you accept that future humans are fundamentally worth as much as present humans, then you almost definitionally have to enter some kind of effective altruist way of living where, you know, if you can spend $2 on a malaria net, that will actually prevent someone from getting malaria on the other side of the world, it will work. And if you buy a bunch of those, you're going to save a life because a lot of people get malaria. Or you do it with deworming drugs, which is one that's even more, you know, viscerally

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  just like understandable, where, you know, you make it so a kid can go to school because they don't have worms in their stomach for $2.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  So like, guac is extra, like, or like, you don't get guac and there's like two kids who don't have worms in their stomach. It just, the moral stakes of that are so high that people are not willing.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Same, same trade off during the pandemic, right? That, that less distant shore, but like, hey, if I make this decision, it may prevent a person, a person I will never meet, who will never meet, who will never meet, it might prevent them from dying in a hospital away from their family.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  You remember that, you remember that movie, it's called like The Box or something with Jodie Foster? And it was like, would you open this box? You get a million dollars, but. Someone dies far away in the world. Like this whole movie was premised around it.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  And like, everyone was like, what would you do? And like, we all opened the box during COVID. Like, every single person was like, opening the box. And it wasn't for a million dollars. It was to like, go to the grocery store or whatever.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  And make it inside out of Chili's.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Like, that movie is outrageous if you go re-watch it. And like, yeah, it's because humans don't do that thing. And so then you think, as like, someone whose job is to persuade humans in politics, you kind of have to just appeal to people's own self-interest and hope that in doing that, you can link their self-interest with the interests of the people. You'd rather live in a country where everyone has freedom, where everyone has the right to vote. You'd rather live in a world that's welcoming of immigrants than a world that shuns them away. And you have to somehow link the selfishness with the collective good. It's an incredibly difficult project, but I think it's, that's the work of politics.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  But I think it's also the work of families, right? So that's, that's where I wanted to wrap up with you, which is like, how, as I'm fascinated with the Koppelmann family, what, what is the Koppelmann family's secret? Now that I have young kids, what do you think your parents did with you and your sister that not just allowed you to be successful in the world, because you're remarkably successful at a young age, but also sort of instilling a sense of sort of purpose and service that goes so against the grain that we were talking about earlier, generationally, it's easy to, you know, just scroll on TikTok

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  or to talk, sort of talk superficially about things than to actually sort of be in the arena on these issues.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think,

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  yeah, it's very kind what you said about the family. Obviously, a lot of this, in terms of like, how I'm able to be someone who can write like this at this age, is that my writing was edited from the age of like 10 by two professional writers.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Like, you just, you just can't possibly capture how big a leg up that is to have like, some of the best, even theoretical editors in the world, read your stupid essays in fifth and sixth grade. In terms of like how they tried to imbue some sense of purpose, they were very clear about what was and wasn't important. Like, I remember my, I was in trouble at school because like I was allowed to watch South Park in third grade. Like, all my classmates weren't.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  My parents were Muslim for that decision. They didn't shelter me, but then that meant that when they said something was important, I listened because they just didn't put up many guardrails. So then when they said, you know, you gotta treat people nicely, or like, you can't be an asshole. I was like, oh, that must be important because like, they let me watch this crazy South Park episode where like Saddam Hussein and Satan are having an affair. And like, I don't even know what that means, but like, okay, I guess I gotta be a good person. And I think by giving me that long leash and that real freedom to shape my interests, my focus, what I did every day, it made it so when they said that the moral stuff was important, I listened.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  But, you know, I still eat factory farmed chickens. So I'm not sure they did their jobs perfectly.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  But I mean, on, on paper, it's like your grandfather is like the head of one of the biggest record labels in the world. Your dad's a, you know, A-list movie producer and TV show producer, writer, like you went to Harvard. There's, there's an argument where you are, that, that story is also a HBO drama where you're a real piece of shit. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  So, so how?

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  How, how, like, in, in some ways, it's, it's much easier than like, you know, the single parent raising their kid in the middle of the projects. But at the same time, the odds are stacked against raising a well-adjusted, precocious, hardworking, and, you know, like, you know, public-minded individual.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of these things where I had these two huge things going for me, which is this like ridiculous amount of privilege. And then having the fact that I had this ridiculous amount of privilege, like told to me again and again and again and again. So like, I wasn't someone who like went to Harvard without any student loans. And like, just took that for granted. My parents were like, you don't have student loans. Like, do you know how big a leg up that is? Like, if I'd have told my parents, no offense to anyone who goes and works at McKinsey or Goldman, but if that I was gonna go work at McKinsey and Goldman without student loans, they'd have been like, what are you doing? Like, I don't understand. Like, they worked really hard. I mean, you mentioned my grandpa.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  He used to have to steal, he worked at a clothing store and would steal suits. And would wear them over the other suits. And would walk out for interviews to go get his first job. He didn't have pizza until he was 22, because he like, couldn't afford to eat out. And so like, that stuff was like, told to me all the time. Not as a way of like, you know, he earned his keep or whatever, like, that was worthy success. But like, a lot of people sacrificed a lot for you to graduate from college with no student loans, for me to be able to go to private school for a bunch of years. I mean, like, the layers and layers and layers of privilege in my education are ridiculous. And then it was told to me in that way, and it was like, you better make something of this.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  And by the way, to that end, and maybe this is a problem for therapy, but like, you say all these great things about where I am now. And like, obviously, I feel like coasting and complacent and need to be doing much more and need to be making a much bigger difference and need to be making more sacrifices. So there's a pathological problem with this approach, probably. But at the very least, what it did is instill in me a sense that I think, and we try to get at this idea in the book, that the country should have of the people who made the sacrifices for us to all live in the world we live in today, which in many ways, flawed as it is, is obscenely privileged beyond the imagination of those generations. Sure.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  A world where most people have, you know, the median American is way richer than Marie Antoinette was at her time.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Like, we have that same obligation to pay it forward as a country and to build on the legacy of the sacrifices made by past generations. And so personally, and as a citizen, I feel like, you know, the work's just beginning.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  No, that is what we were talking about earlier. It's in the, it's in the book. What is the debt? What's the debt we owe the people who sacrificed to get us here? And then the more effective altruism thing is interesting because I'm working on William McAskill's new book, and the title is What We Owe the Future. So it's sort of like, what do you owe the past? And then what is the contribution you are going to make in the future? That sort of passing of torches, maybe that sort of, despite the unrealness of your individual circumstances, actually ends up rooting someone in a somewhat grounded place?

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And by the way, McAskill in his last book, one of my all time favorites, Doing Good Better.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  I did the marketing for that book.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  No way. So I'm like completely on board and completely agree. And I think that that question of how we set the future up to be better than the present, just as the people in the past set us up, I think, you know, it's the fundamental question for all of us to answer.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Yes. The idea that your kids are going to look at where they're gonna, this is how we made it through the pandemic as parents. We just thought, how are we going to explain what we did to our kids when they're 15 years old and they're looking at us quite critically? And they're going to be like, oh, so you just sent us back to school and whatever. And they were like, why did you have to work? And we're like, well, no, not really. And we just, you know, we just needed our me time, you know, or like, we would make our decisions based on how are we going to explain this to a person who in the future is going to ask what we did? You know, they're going to ask what were your contributions? What

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  did you do? You know, how did you make a positive difference? We thought a lot about that. And it's not a perfect thing. Like, will history judge me kindly? But I do think, you know, we go, oh, I wish I lived during the civil rights movement. I would have, I would have done something. And it's like, But what are you doing now? Because that's what you would have done in 1963.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  There's usually nothing.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, history is nebulous. What will history think of me? Who cares? But what will your kids think of you? What will your grandkids? What will the people who live far away think of you? That's the question that should really kick your ass and motivate you to go do something.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And also, what do people who, what would someone who never met you think of you? If they were, it described, you know, sort of what, what side of this or that you were on? And then I think, again, it makes the dark energy thing a little, you know, most people, it's like, well, most people in California in 2008 were opposed to gay marriage. So I was just on that side, you know, whatever it was, right? Like that, that doesn't, when I look back at the things that I'm most ashamed by, my reasons that I had at the time do not age, did not age well.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Right, 100%. You told yourself a story that enabled you to keep acting the way you wanted to keep acting.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  And you fit it to that visceral belief that you just should keep doing it because you like doing it. And once you intellectualize it and actually look at these moral judgments as you would if someone else were making the same decision, that's the, that's like the thing I always try to do. It's like, all right, if someone else was in my shoes, would I be like, all right, that's kind of a sketchy way of making a decision. And then I try to adjust. But I like thinking about someone, generations and generations and generations of, ahead of us, looking back and they're answering the question, were you the baddies? And like, that's it. Like, like what, what side were you on? And I actually think that all these different topics, lots of different sides, kaleidoscopic

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  interests, but when it comes to the right to vote at least, it's pretty clear which is the right side. And so hopefully, you know, you'll read this book and come to the same conclusion that we did.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  I hope so. I love the book and I'm a big fan and we'll, we'll talk soon.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoke to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in,

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.