Pod Insights Dwarkesh Podcast Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty About this episode I ask Charles Murray about Human Accomplishment https://www.amazon.com/Human-Accomplishment-Pursuit-Excellence-Sciences/dp/0060929642, By The People https://www.amazon.com/People-Rebuilding-Liberty-Without-Permission/dp/0385346530, and The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead https://www.amazon.com/Curmudgeons-Guide-Getting-Ahead-Behavior-ebook/dp/B00GL3PZ0K/.
Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/yYtyKmPZBto. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-charles-murray-human-accomplishment-and-the/id1516093381?i=1000496358744, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5d6p6Lpx5ALOlLvUDpbhWh?si=w03WDaK-QP-ZrQgTb8UflA, or any other podcast platform.
Read the full transcript here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/charles-murray.
Follow Charles on Twitter https://twitter.com/charlesmurray. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00) - Intro
(01:00) - Writing Human Accomplishment
(06:30) - The Lotka curve, age, and miracle years
(10:38) - Habits of the greats (hard work)
(15:22) - Focus and explore in your 20s
(19:57) - Living in Thailand
(23:02) - Peace, wealth, and golden ages
(26:02) - East, west, and religion
(30:38) - Christianity and the Enlightenment
(34:44) - Institutional sclerosis
(37:43) - Antonine Rome, decadence, and declining accomplishment
(42:13) - Crisis in social science
(45:40) - Can secular humanism win?
(55:00) - Future of Christianity
(1:03:30) - Liberty and accomplishment
(1:06:08) - By the People
(1:11:17) - American exceptionalism
(1:14:49) - Pessimism about reform
(1:18:43) - Can libertarianism be resuscitated?
(1:25:18) - Trump's deregulation and judicial nominations
(1:28:11) - Beating the federal government
(1:32:05) - Why don't big companies have a litigation fund?
(1:34:05) - Getting around the Halo effect
(1:36:07) - What happened to the Madison fund?
(1:37:00) - Future of liberty
(1:41:00) - Public sector unions
(1:43:43) - Andrew Yang and UBI
(1:44:36) - Groundhog Day
(1:47:05) - Getting noticed as a young person
(1:50:48) - Passage from Human Accomplishment
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Transcript 16,761 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I was not only convinced by that time that religiosity was extremely important to the particularly Christian religiosity, extremely important to Western civilization of what had gone on. I was also beginning to think that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs.
0:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Hey folks, I hope you enjoyed this interview. I just quickly wanted to say that this is a new and a small podcast, as you can see from the subscriber count below on YouTube. So I'd really appreciate it if you could share this on social media and with your friends. That that kind of stuff is really helpful. So if you can subscribe on YouTube, if you can leave a review on iTunes, and especially if you can tell people about this podcast, it helps out a lot, especially at this stage of the channel. And we got a lot of great interviews coming up. I think you're gonna really like them. So just stay tuned and I hope you enjoy this interview.
1:00 Dwarkesh Patel? Charles Murray needs own introduction, so let's begin with human accomplishment, the pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences. I first want to ask you, what motivated you to write this book?
1:10 Speaker 00 A lot of times while I was writing it, I wondered that myself. It was an incredibly difficult book to write. The short answer is that back in the 1980s, mid 1980s, I read a book by Daniel Boorstein called The Discoverers, I think it was. And Boorstein, you know, when I picked it up, I thought it was going to lay out this panorama of human accomplishment over the centuries. And it was really just a set of mini biographies of a lot of major sciences and so forth. And there wasn't anything wrong with that, but it's not what I wanted to read. I wanted to see the whole thing as a panorama. And as has been the case with other books I've written, I had a book I wanted to read,
1:53 Speaker 00 and the way to do that was to write it. And so I set off on writing this, and it was a five-year task altogether, very intense five years.
2:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Clearly, you can see that from the book itself. I've always had this question when I read books like this that seem to integrate every single domain of human knowledge. How does a human being write a book like this? Like, how do you consolidate so much information and integrate in these new explanations?
2:18 Speaker 00 Well.
2:20 Speaker 00 I don't do it the way a lot of people do. A lot of people, a lot of people pretty much map out the book ahead of time. And they know which chapters are gonna follow which chapters and so they go ahead and do a lot of their research and then they start to write.
2:36 Speaker 00 Human accomplishment was different for me because in one sense I couldn't start writing until I had done a lot of this historiometric research. People who have not read the book should know that I established inventories of events and inventories of people in the arts and sciences. And I use a technique that's quite well established, it's been around for a long time. Whereby you go to the index of a book. And you count up the number of pages that a given person is referenced. And the logic behind it is this, that if you are writing a history of music, you are gonna end up spending a lot more time on Beethoven
3:20 Speaker 00 than you do on Prokofiev. And the reason you're going to do it is to explain his music, Beethoven's music, takes more time. And he looms larger in the story of music. The same thing goes with science, that Einstein gets a lot of space. Same thing goes with the arts. Alright, so so in order to accumulate inventories, and I have something like sixteen or eighteen of them. I have one for Western literature. I have one for Indian literature too, and for Indian philosophy and for Chinese art and, you know, I just had a whole bunch of separate inventories. Well,
4:02 Speaker 00 I spent two years basically doing nothing but going through these indexes of books and writing down the data. There was a book called, you know, a set of books called The Dictionary of Scientific Biography. It's a wonderful resource in that it is supposed to be the definitive catalog of the important figures in in science. Took me seventeen ten-hour days at the Hood College Library, which is about twenty miles away from me, to do that one source. So, in one sense I had to do an awful lot of research beforehand. But then when I started out
4:44 Speaker 00 I did what I always do, which is I get interested in some particular aspect and I dig into that. And I write and then I go on to another topic and there's no particular rhyme or reason to it. It's very idiosyncratic and
5:03 Speaker 00 I for for a while I have a lot of stuff in my head. So my wife would say as I was finishing Human Accomplishment that for a few shining moments there you knew everything. But then, of course, you start to forget it all immediately. As I went back to the book today to remind myself, I found myself in the position of reading a passage and saying, that's really interesting. Because I completely forgotten it was. Anyway, the answer is I go about this stuff very, very personally and the analogy that comes to mind is a guy who was a fine sculpture. And he asked, how do you do it? How do you make a sculpture of a of a horse?
5:47 Speaker 00 And he says, you have this block of wood and you cut away everything that isn't a horse. And when I doing a book, I I have this idea in my head of what it ought to look like, a very vague idea. And I cut away everything that doesn't look like what I hoped it would be.
6:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Did you write it one chapter at a time or did you bounce around between them?
6:07 Speaker 00 Uh, pretty much one chapter at a time. Because one thing would lead to another. For example, I've I've realized that if I'm going to talk about this measure, this way of measuring stuff, using the historiometric method, that I need to describe to my readers what these distributions of things look like. And then I started to find out about the Lotka curve whereby with great accomplishment, it is not a bell curve at all. It is a very, very left skewed curve. Here's here's the example I ended up using in golf. In golf, you will have a lot of people who win one tournament.
6:52 Speaker 00 And the number of people who win two tournaments in professional golf just plunges. The number of people who win three, you're getting down toward the bottom. And when you get out to the greats, they are all by themselves at the end. That's true in almost every field of human excellence. Well, all of that was new to me. I didn't know that when I started writing the book. And it just was an obvious topic I had to take up. So I took it up, wrote it up, went on to the next chapter.
7:19 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, what I found most fascinating about that chapter on the locker curve is the inputs in those, you know, wins were actually bell curves. Whatever contributed to it. And the consequence was a locker curve. Um, I actually wanted to ask you about a related phenomenon of just excellent performance by one individual, which is excellent performance by one individual in one year. There's a phenomenon of the Anus Mirabellus. It seems like Einstein had one in 1905, where he did special relativity and Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect in one year. Uh, Noon had one, uh, optics, gravity, motion, calculus.
7:53 Speaker 00 Plague year.
7:54 Dwarkesh Patel? Huh?
7:55 Speaker 00 It was a year he was isolated because of the plague.
7:58 Dwarkesh Patel? Exactly, yeah, makes us, it makes me seem pretty lazy. But what is behind, uh, not just a locker curve, but its consolidation in short intervals like this?
8:10 Speaker 00 Part of it is if you are at a very productive part of your life, it spills over. And that productive part of your life is probably going to be. Well, if you're a hard scientist, if you're a mathematician, then maybe in your twenties. All right, there are an awful lot of great mathematicians and everything that they did that was important, they did by the age of 26. Because if you're operating at the far end of mathematics, you need every single neuron, you know, clicking at full, full force. And you start to lose them. And if you're in something like the soft sciences or policy like I am, the nice thing is that you actually.
8:51 Speaker 00 First place, you don't need that many brain cells to be a decent social scientist compared to being a mathematician. And and also the judgment and experience works into it. So whereas judgment and experience is of no help whatsoever to a mathematician. It's of great help if you're if you're dealing with issues of history and public policies. So you can be in the forties and fifties. But but it's in my own case, which I'm not comparing to Newton's miraculous year, but in my in my in in my forties, I was clearly doing my best stuff in terms of sort of a combination of of use and experience. And that fits in with what they have found with age distributions. So age is one thing.
9:36 Speaker 00 It's very unlikely you're going to have a miraculous year in your seventies.
9:43 Speaker 00 Also, if you think about Newton and about Einstein and their miraculous years, the different things they were doing did feed into each other in in a lot of ways. So you can see that if you had somebody at the peak of his powers and he was dealing with one important thing, which also required him to do another important thing or look at another important thing, you can see that there just be a burst there. Also, it's mysterious, and that's part of the answer. These things just come out of nowhere in some cases, and who knows how.
10:19 Dwarkesh Patel? Let me ask you about whether how mysterious are different patterns and habits of these a great accomplishment, the people who made these great accomplishments are, or if there's some some consistency between their lives and their habits. Have you noticed that these are people just it it doesn't seem to have a rhyme or reason to the way they love their lives or?
10:39 Speaker 00 They're all over the lot in terms of personality. You you have lots of stories about the mad genius, and you have lots of people who are under the impression that when you've got a really super high IQ, for example, you become pretty odd and don't have many interpersonal skills and so forth. That's actually an illusion. You notice the brilliant people who are also also oddballs. You don't notice the people who are brilliant but but aren't oddballs. And so in music, you have the contrast between Beethoven and Bach.
11:16 Speaker 00 Beethoven, who was phenomenal, he's tied with Mozart in the music inventory, not surprisingly. But he also acted as if he were God's gift to the world. In his case, he was right. He was God's gift. But not very many people are, and he sort of set the standard of the artist genius who has no time for ordinary people and don't get in his way because he has to express himself, okay? In his case, it was justified. Unfortunately, everybody who came after him thought, oh, this is the way you're supposed to act. Contrast that with Bach.
11:55 Speaker 00 Bach, number three, right after Mozart and Beethoven, and I have lots of people who say that's ridiculous. He should be number one. He created not just spectacularly wonderful music. He created an incredible oeuvre of it. And he was writing a cantata every week for the church in which he played. And he also signed something like 22 children. He was this German family man with one woman, with his wife. And, and he was this classic German burger, you know, uh, who, you know, very staid. Looked like a prosperous, German, middle-class person. He was a genius.
12:39 Speaker 00 So you've got, you've got all of these ranges of personalities.
12:45 Speaker 00 Hard work is the common theme.
12:50 Speaker 00 You know, there's
12:53 Speaker 00 there is no such thing as the person who was really great in their field, who sort of did it with their left hand while they were, or waited for the muse. The, the thing that ties everybody together, I'm not the first person to observe this, who, other historians who've looked at genius have noted the same thing. Incredibly hard work over very long periods of time, their whole lives, six, seven days a week. And that includes, by the way, Mozart. Mozart is, is one of the people that a lot of
13:29 Speaker 00 He has the reputation of having tossed off these things.
13:34 Speaker 00 While he was writing one piece of music while he was playing another. The stories about Mozart and his incredible facility of music are legendary. But he also worked fanatically hard.
13:51 Speaker 00 So are there any other common themes in these people?
13:56 Speaker 00 It's, I guess that.
14:01 Speaker 00 No, is I'm thinking about art, about literature and the great writers. And you have everything from the very state, you know, Trollope. Writing his 2,500 words every morning and then stopping. And starting a new book the same day he finished a previous one. And then you have Tolstoy, who was as weird as they get in his old age. They're all, they're all over the lot. You can't, you can't say much as a generalization.
14:29 Dwarkesh Patel? What do you think contributes to the common narrative that these are people who are just. It's also true of, as well as Mozart, of Feynman. Physics that this was just an incredibly playful person. He just, whenever curiosity struck him, he would just go there. But in fact, when you look at his life, there's incredible amounts of hard work and tediousness. What do you think contributes to the narrative that it's not hard work, but just kind of innate skill paired with just. With tepid curiosity?
15:01 Speaker 00 I'm trying to think of.
15:05 Speaker 00 Well, first place, you'd have to give me an example of who did it that way.
15:11 Speaker 00 So that I could react to it because anybody that comes to mind.
15:16 Speaker 00 Did work really, really, really hard. And, and I have to say that this is one of the things that I think is way underrated right now. Where there is a tendency for people to want to have a balanced life. And I'm always struck when.
15:37 Speaker 00 I am talking to people your age. You're what? Your twenties?
15:41 Dwarkesh Patel? Twenty.
15:42 Speaker 00 You are twenty, two zero. Okay, I've been, I'm thinking about when people are looking for jobs at the American Enterprise Institute or other places and and the people are interviewing, they'll come back and report to me and then, you know, they say he's, this person's really worried about, you know, the vacation days and then are they going to be asked to work late and so forth? And part of what I go into in the curmudgeon's guide, which we may be talking about later is
16:14 Speaker 00 you're twenty years old, what do you want a balanced life for?
16:19 Speaker 00 In your twenties is the time you should be going, you know, flat out in pursuit of what you love to do and finding out what you love to do. But you shouldn't be looking to have balance. And if you want to be at the top of your field.
16:35 Speaker 00 E. O. Wilson, the biologist, has a striking paragraph in this regard. He says, if you want to be a top scientist, not a, not a, just a good one, but a top scientist. If you've got forty hours a week that you will spend on your teaching and ordinary university duties, and then you will have another fifteen hours that you will spend on this, he said, and then you'll have another fifteen hours you spend on that. And at the end of the paragraph, he's outlined basically an eighty hour a week. And he said, this is just sort of basic. You aren't going to get there from here unless you're willing to do that. And in my experience, that's the answer. The people who rise to the top work their asses off. And hardly anybody knows.
17:20 Dwarkesh Patel? I was gonna ask you this when we talk about curmudgeon's guide, but I'll bring it up now. This seems to contradict your other advice of spending your twenties either in the military or in some far off country and place. Should you focus in your twenties on your pursuit and vocation, or should you spend it doing these other things?
17:37 Speaker 00 Well, I, you've caught me in a way, in a contradiction there. I did say pursuing the thing you love and learning what you love. So in your twenties, what you don't want to do is to go directly to law school. Above all else, from undergraduate. Actually, you don't want to go to graduate school at all because you are twenty years old, twenty-two years old if you're graduating perhaps. You've proved one thing in life. You're good in the classroom. That's your comfort zone. Not only have you proved already you can deal with that environment, it's quite possible that you have never dealt with any other environment in your life. You've gone to good elementary and secondary schools. You've gone to a good college.
18:21 Speaker 00 All your life, you've been one of the smart people. You haven't the least idea what's out there in terms of the different options in life. And you've got to be proactive in jerking yourself away from your comfort zone. And the two best ways to do that are to go into the military if you're a new graduate, or for that matter, to get on an airplane with a one-way ticket, get off the other end and make a living in that strange country for a couple of years. Don't be a backpacker, hanging out with the expats. Get a job teaching English or tending bar or whatever, and get to know another
19:05 Speaker 00 really alien country. You can't go to London and Paris and do this. You can go to Bangladesh. You can go to Thailand the way I did. You can go to Nigeria, but you've got to, you've got to see what's out there before you can decide how you want to spend your life. Once you start, once you find something you want to do, that's the point at which you go into high gear and pursue that. Thank you for asking for that clarification.
19:34 Dwarkesh Patel? Let me ask you about your time in Thailand, and we'll get back to human accomplishment eventually. But in Thailand, other than contributing to your political sensibility, as you explained in Pursuit, how did it contribute in a way that you could not have gotten it? Or in an American town? Or that it was especially efficient to get it in Thailand, in a different country?
19:58 Speaker 00 Well, let me illustrate it with the early days in Thailand.
20:05 Speaker 00 I was assigned when I first got there to a town called Lhampang, which is in the northern part of the country. And I didn't know at the time I was being assigned to one of the most wonderful assignments I could get. It's just gorgeous up there. I was the only male foreigner in the entire province, except for an elderly French priest.
20:28 Speaker 00 And I had culture shock.
20:31 Speaker 00 Just like the classic case, I was miserable. I would be walking down the street of Lhampang. And I would just be exhausted because I spoke the language sort of. They gave pretty good training and peace corps training. But the social cues. The social cues are such that if you walk down a street in the United States, you know what's going on around you. You walk down a street in Mural, Thailand.
21:00 Speaker 00 In your first days there, you have the least idea what's going on. And it's very tiring. And I prided myself on loving every kind of cuisine, didn't like Thai food. And it just, the list went on. I was miserable. But I still remember the day. Maybe three months in. And I was in the back of a pickup truck. And we were heading out to a village. We were doing building wells and privies. This was the project. And the sun was rising and the mist was coming up over the patties. And the I said, you know, this isn't so bad. And, and I had
21:44 Speaker 00 I had become comfortable in an environment where I had been utterly convinced I could never be comfortable. And an environment in which I eagerly sought to escape. I couldn't without losing my pride, go home. But I really wanted to. Okay, so what's, what good is that? Subsequently, anytime I've been thrown into a really strange environment, I've been able to look back on my own life experience and say, that's okay, you can deal with this. And that's what I mean by having, three years later, I stayed in Thailand six years altogether. But by three years later, I'd be going down a street in Bangkok.
22:28 Speaker 00 And I was just absolutely cocky at that point. I understood everything that was going on around me. I was completely at home. And that kind of accomplishment translates, it generalizes. That's why I want more people to do it. Also, that's where I learned what I love to do. It turns out I love to play with data, to try to make sense of patterns in numbers. And I didn't know that when I went to Thailand. I did know it by the time I came back.
23:02 Dwarkesh Patel? Well, let's talk about the patterns then of human accomplishment and the causes of it.
23:08 Dwarkesh Patel? You mentioned in the book that there are very few golden ages of human accomplishment in times of peace. Why do you think that is?
23:17 Speaker 00 Partly it's an artifact. Because the world has usually been at war. It's been much more common to have periods of war than periods of peace.
23:30 Speaker 00 Well, I'm in danger here of speculating in a way that I didn't in the book as far as I can remember.
23:38 Speaker 00 It's possible that you have a relationship between a country that is fighting a certain kind of war. Wars of expansion, wars of which is part of a culture which is very vital and alive and oppressive and confident.
24:01 Speaker 00 Which is the way that, you know, Twainbe characterizes a society on the rise. A civilization that is in the full flush of, of, of growing is also likely to be an up her good neighbor to, to the countries around it. That goes under the category of speculation that you should not take to the bank. But there's probably some relationship.
24:24 Dwarkesh Patel? Hmm. Um, and let's talk about wealth here. Um, you write in the book, uh, whether wealth was a direct cause of Florence's artistic accomplishments, or whether the wealth and the artistic accomplishments were both effects of some other cause is difficult to entangle. What would this other cause be?
24:47 Speaker 00 Here's where you're asking me a question I could have answered a lot better 15 years ago when I was working on the book than, than I can now. Um, human capital can't, here's, here's some things that can't be very easily. It can't be human capital because the human capital in Florence, uh, 50 years before the Renaissance was basically the same as the human capital in Florence during the Renaissance. Models make a huge difference. So that you get Socrates and, but Socrates begets Plato and Plato begets Aristotle. And he's got great models.
25:26 Speaker 00 You have, you have in music, uh, Bach and some of the other great composers, the Baroque. And they established this very rich, uh, musical structure, theory of harmony, that others could, could feast on for the next hundred years. And that's true both in the sciences and in the arts. Uh, you have a great novelist in the country, that novelist inspires other novelists. That's an important feature. You've read the book more recently than I have. What else did I say is important? Oh, there's the, the thing about purpose and autonomy, which, uh, we haven't gone into, but.
26:09 Speaker 00 And here's where it's interesting
26:13 Speaker 00 to compare East Asia
26:17 Speaker 00 and Europe. And I say East Asia instead of South Asia because I don't know as much about South Asia as I know about East Asia, but I think probably
26:29 Speaker 00 a lot of what applies to East Asia applies to South Asia. You had in China this incredibly stable society throughout all the invasions and the Manchurians and this and that and the other thing. It was an incredibly long-lived civilization and it functioned at a very high level for a very long time. Even though at the top in the politics, things were unsettled, they were extremely stable within the country. One of the costs of that
27:06 Speaker 00 is that people were more willing to subordinate their own interests to others in the family especially. The family ties were very tight and that
27:20 Speaker 00 was a huge contrast to the West. To the modern West where individualism became very strong. And it was okay to walk away from your family and to devote yourself to your passion. When you have that kind of autonomy, you are more
27:45 Speaker 00 you have better chance of pursuing excellence in a field. You aren't tied down in any way. And the other thing that the West had that East Asia did not have in the same form was a sense of purpose in life. And here I think Christianity's role in the West is just crucial. In a time of secularization.
28:13 Speaker 00 I don't think that the generations today studying history have any idea what a huge cultural force Christianity was in the West and in Europe. And one of the ways in which it it fostered so much accomplishment was not the Protestant Reformation, which played a role. I mean, the Protestant Reformation emphasized the individualism even more. But it goes back to Thomas Aquinas. And Thomas Aquinas said very powerfully in his theology, drawing a lot from Aristotle as well as Christianity, that it is pleasing to God
28:55 Speaker 00 to have his creations understood. So that to explore the universe and the workings of the universe is a way of expressing your love of God, and God himself is enthusiastic about this. Contrast that with Islam in its, certainly its earlier forms whereby it is blasphemous to explore mysteries of the universe. And at this point, whenever I start to talk about Islam, then people say, yes, but you had the center of scientific development was in Baghdad
29:37 Speaker 00 and in the Middle East for centuries and in Spain when Spain was under Islam. And I do discuss that somewhat in in Human Accomplishment, the short story being that basically the theological leaders sort of looked the other way. But it was never enthusiastically embraced by the theology, and they just allowed a lot of more freedom at some points in history than they did at others. But it's a very different environment for fostering individual accomplishment.
30:16 Speaker 00 Islamic and Taoist and Buddhist outlooks on life versus Christian. And I'm not saying this in as a believer in a religious tradition. I'm talking about its consequences culturally for certain kinds of accomplishment.
30:39 Dwarkesh Patel? So I mean, the Islamic Golden Age was only golden in comparison to the Dark Ages that Europe was going through. But then this adds a wrinkle to both of the arguments. The one you were defending and the one that that claims that Islam had a similar Golden Age. Which is that, why did Europe have a Dark Age following the rise of Christianity that caused the fall of the Roman Empire or contributed to it?
31:05 Dwarkesh Patel? What took so long between that and the Enlightenment? And you know, the counter narrative is of course that the Enlightenment resuscitated Europe from Christianity to promote future excellence. What's wrong with this narrative?
31:18 Speaker 00 I think you have to distinguish between two periods of Christianity. Christianity started out as a very communal, almost communistic religion. People living together in common, sharing things in common. And also it had put huge emphasis on the world to come and for centuries. And this is why you had, it was so popular to have hermits and monasteries and so forth. This life is the preparation for the next. And it's unimportant in a way.
31:57 Speaker 00 And that's where Aquinas was so important because he flipped that and said, no.
32:06 Speaker 00 Using this life to accomplish these great things is pleasing to God. That was a huge change. And it, it probably was a major factor in changing the cultural setting for the Renaissance. Why did it last so long? Well, Aquinas didn't come around along until what? Now, I used to know this, it's around the end of the first millennium, all right? So until then, you had a collapse of all sorts of civilized apparatus. The Roman roads, the aqueducts, the functioning cities, a lot of that went away.
32:47 Speaker 00 So you had a life that was very fragmented, very, not many universities, except a few in Italy. And they were very rudimentary and they didn't come along until. The Middle Ages. So there wasn't really any foundation on which to build. Uh, the universities started to find, provide a little place to stand for some kinds of things to get started.
33:22 Speaker 00 You had specific inventions that had a huge effect. Why did you get this outpouring of art, great art in 14th century?
33:35 Speaker 00 Oil paints made a difference. Oil paints made things possible that weren't possible before, but ma- mainly perspective. You know, three dimensional, re- recreation of three dimensional spaces on a two dimensional canvas was a huge new thing on which people could build. And the other thing was a gradual development of the scientific method, which took a long time. But every step in that just opened up a new increment to start, to start building that foundation. And that as a foundation got built, it could became easier to build upon that. And you, you had the outpouring in the Renaissance. The Enlightenment did not rescue Europe from Christianity.
34:21 Speaker 00 Uh, I remind you, the Enlightenment didn't come along until the 18th century.
34:26 Speaker 00 An awful lot had happened before the 18th century. Things were really, you know, at a very high velocity at the time that the Enlightenment occurred.
34:38 Speaker 00 I admire Steve Pinker. I think that his infatuation with the Enlightenment is a little overstated.
34:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Hmm. Uh, it occurred to me while you were talking, uh, that there's, there's an interesting pattern here that you talk about more in the by the people, which is, um, the institutional sclerosis is only evaded when there's something that just causes a downfall of everything that came before. Um, and it seems like that's what happened in Europe where you had nothing to start off with, and that just caused immense rates of accomplishment after.
35:07 Speaker 00 For, for people who are not familiar with, uh, uh, institutional sclerosis, this is the contribution of Manfred Olson, an economist, uh, who wrote a couple of seminal books back in the 1960s and 70s. Which said, look, what's that, what happens with any society is that over time you have sclerotic institutions, because it's like barnacles in a boat to slow it down. In the case of institutions, it is that special interests get things worked out to their advantage where
35:46 Speaker 00 so they want to keep it that way. And then another special interest gets another you know, twist in the law or whatever. And over time, you get hundreds of these, these
35:57 Speaker 00 inefficiencies, these barriers that get put up. It's very, very hard to get rid of them. I'll, I'll give you the classic example is the sugar subsidy in the United States. That we still have a subsidy for sugar farmers in the United States, which leads Americans into a situation where they're paying twice the world price for sugar.
36:21 Speaker 00 This benefits a very small number of sugar farmers. Why can't you get rid of it? Because you can't get the entire nation excited about paying twice the world price for sugar. But the sugar farmers are really, really excited about keeping their sugar subsidy. And so every time Congress tries to repeal it, you have this very effective, powerful lobbying thing go into
36:45 Speaker 00 operation in Washington, and they manage to convince enough people to keep it, that it never, never goes away. Okay, take the sugar subsidy, multiply that 500 times, 1,000 times, and you have institutions that really can't get much done. And does that remind you of any institutions in the United States today, such as the CDC and so forth?
37:08 Speaker 00 And, and Nancy Olson said, well, there is one way.
37:13 Speaker 00 And that's to lose a total world war. And so he, he contrasted the economic recovery of Japan and Germany with the economic recoveries of England and France after World War Two. And he says, what's the difference? Germany and Japan had no choice but to start over from scratch. And the French and the British were not required to do the same thing. And Germany and Japan just cruised right on past them within a few years.
37:43 Dwarkesh Patel? Hmm, uh, this kind of sclerosis also sounds like not just contemporary US, but also your account of Antonine Rome, where you talk about civilization that had accomplished a great deal already, but was now stagnant, sclerotic, secular. Am I reading too much into this, or are you in part describing the US as it is today?
38:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, uh, Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, wrote a book called, I guess the title is The Decadent Society. And
38:15 Speaker 00 he's basically making the point that that's where we are now. And he, he makes the point as well that you can have a society that is decadent. That is still a very pleasant place to live. And Rome in the Antonine period was still, at least if you had money, it was still a very pleasant place to live. Uh, and you can even have
38:40 Speaker 00 certain kinds of accomplishment go on, but they tend to be more derivative. And
38:48 Speaker 00 well, the, the case that, uh, the example that Ross Huthit gives is actually going to the moon, which the United States did a long time ago. As opposed to having movies that spend vast sums of money in creating an utterly wonderful simulation of going to the moon. Uh, the, this, it's a, it's a real, you know, the genius of the, uh, the people who create these special effects is real. The artistry of what they do is real. It's a very different accomplishment from actually taking the Saturn V out on the launch pad and lighting that mother up and, and sending it to the moon.
39:30 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, you, you're in a especially good position to talk about this because you wrote, um, with your wife, the book on Apollo. Um, oh, to what, to what extent has the decline in the rate of accomplishment, accomplishment contributed to our society being decadent? Or is it the other way around that because our society became decadent, the rate of accomplishment declined?
39:51 Speaker 00 I think that it's, um,
39:55 Speaker 00 The decline in the rate of accomplishment is in the sciences partly a function of maybe inevitable decline in certain fields. So that anatomy used to be a scientific subfield that had a lot going on with it, lots of learning. There's nothing to learn about human anatomy anymore. Contrast that with genetics where we are in a golden age and there's all sorts of things being discovered all the time. And so you have different fields at different stages of development. In the sciences, there's a number of fields that are extremely well-developed.
40:36 Speaker 00 And there's only so many fundamental discoveries that you can make. You know, once you once you've discovered Newton's laws, yeah, you can then get quantum mechanics, but it's getting harder and harder to have basic new discoveries of things that have already been done. So to some extent, you've gotten the sciences an inevitable decline. In the arts, it's a different thing. There is no reason why we still couldn't be composing great music in C major. There's no, it's not as if Beethoven and Brahms and Haydn and so forth wrote all the great music there was to be written there.
41:20 Speaker 00 But it's not going to happen. And it's not going to happen because the cultural milieu simply is not going to produce that kind of accomplishment. And certainly, you are not going to have
41:35 Speaker 00 certain kinds of great literature written anymore because again of the cultural milieu. The, the, the kind of
41:46 Speaker 00 Culture that produces the English novel of the 19th century requires a fundamentally different sensibility from the cultural milieu in which writers of today live. So there, I think you've got a case that a society that has become decadent in some ways changes the milieu which impedes artistic accomplishment.
42:13 Speaker 00 I'm not sure I can say the same thing about scientific accomplishment, but I could certainly say it about social science accomplishment. Whereby what we are witnessing now in the social sciences is a collapse of the principles that my generation of social scientists grew up believing were absolutely inviolate. Such as I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Such as that there's that if there is science you don't agree with, the answer to that is to have better science that refutes the bad science. And the idea of safe spaces
42:58 Speaker 00 of getting triggered, of being cancelled because you say things which are factually true, but are hateful or whatever. That is a sign in the social science of not just evidence, but
43:13 Speaker 00 pervasive corruption.
43:16 Speaker 00 That's a case of a culture having enormous effects, not in the hard sciences, but in the soft sciences.
43:25 Speaker 00 Although there are people working in the Google who will tell you that it's having effects on the hard sciences as well.
43:32 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. Um, I, I, and it's not only just culture of responding to arguments, but of actually engaging and try to understand what you disagree with in the first place. Um, you, you're going through an episode right now with Harvard, uh, inviting you. There, you, um, you shared an op ed from the Harvard Crimson, uh, Crimson that explained why you shouldn't be invited, and it implied that you think that innocent people should be shot down, or that you don't think people are created equally in a moral sense. And the idea that anything you have ever written even implies anything like that is so absurd. It, it just does not engage with who you are as a person.
44:12 Speaker 00 Well, this has been happening to so many people for so long. I mean,
44:19 Speaker 00 it was going on when the bell curve came out, and that was twenty six years ago that the bell curve came out. Wasn't at the same level of betrayal. It wasn't at the same level of sort of completely quilling anybody standing up for academic freedom. The time the bell curve came out, you still had people who said, this is legitimate scientific inquiry.
44:42 Speaker 00 Now, it's, it's a, I don't even think I'm the most egregious example of being misrepresented. What's even scarier is examples of people who have made factually accurate statements about something involving race or gender. Nobody is saying that the, the fact was wrong. They are saying that it shouldn't be said, that it's wrong to say it. Whereas in my case, they're saying that Dick Hurnstein and I said things in a bell curve we never said. Uh, or subsequent to Dick's death, that I've said things that I just simply never said.
45:25 Speaker 00 And the idea of white supremacy or that it's okay for certain people to die is just nutty.
45:33 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. Uh, I'm sorry to joke about it, but it's so absurd that you have to laugh at it.
45:40 Dwarkesh Patel? I, I want to ask you though, why do certain mules contribute, are innately better at contributing to human accomplishment? Uh, you write in the book, devotion to a human cause, whether social justice, the environment, the search for truth, or abstract humanism is by its nature less compelling than devotion to God. Now you have people, as you mentioned, like Pinker, who have written books about how this narrative of human progress can promote um, a, a future of growth in science and reason and everything good. Do you suspect that this narrative will not be strong enough to withstand the counter, that the sort of counter enlightened forces?
46:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, um, I've, I've undergone an evolution, by the way, uh, since.
46:27 Speaker 00 Over the last twenty years, and I was kind of at the beginning of it when I finished Human Accomplishment in two thousand four, two thousand five, where I was not only convinced by that time that religiosity was extremely important to the, particularly Christian religiosity, extremely important to Western civilization and what had gone on. I was also beginning to think
46:55 Speaker 00 that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs.
47:04 Speaker 00 And this is my, this is my question for the Steve Pinkers of the world.
47:16 Speaker 00 What is your ground for your moral beliefs? What, that's a question that is very hard to answer if you do not think that they are in no way given by God.
47:35 Speaker 00 And by God, I don't mean a little old man sitting on this mountain top in the clouds. I'm talking about a much more realistic concept of whatever a God, the God might be.
47:48 Speaker 00 But the notion that rape is wrong, murder is wrong. They will always be wrong. They are irredeemably wrong. They can, they can never be justified as human, you know, the Ten Commandments, basically. What is the basis for that belief? If it is the nature of the universe, that's one thing. If you're saying we have reached this through human racionation, that's a much weaker.
48:28 Speaker 00 A much weaker force to prop it up when times get tough.
48:34 Speaker 00 And I think that in all sorts of ways right now,
48:40 Speaker 00 I hope you don't ask me for a lot of specific examples because I'm not sure I can give them. But you see people backing off of what used to be very firm moral principles because it's increasingly unpopular or inconvenient or unfashionable to believe them. And the examples of backing off the principles in moral and social science of the search for truth, of the importance of the truth as trumping everything else, the importance of civil discourse and all that, all sorts of things which you have professors who 25 years ago would have said, "This is the foundation,
49:25 Speaker 00 my moral foundation for the way I conduct my life and my profession," who now have backed away from that big time when it comes to their professional obligations. And I'm saying to myself,
49:37 Speaker 00 doesn't this also spill over into your the firmness, the persistence of your moral principles in other ways? So I think a secular society
49:51 Speaker 00 is not just that it's likely to be much less productive than
49:58 Speaker 00 than the West was previously.
50:01 Speaker 00 I think that it has a false sense of security that it can never fall back into the bad old days, the totalitarianism and barbarity of all kinds. We can fall back into the bad old days very easily.
50:20 Dwarkesh Patel? So I could ask you philosophical questions about how, you know, which philosophy better grounds its morals, but let me ask you instead a practical question, which is, we do see declining rates of religious adherence in America and across the world. And it doesn't seem, I mean, it could be the case, but it doesn't seem like a huge resurgence of Christianity is coming anytime soon. If secular humanism isn't strong enough to stay in the face of these other totalitarian trends, is there any sort of other philosophy that doesn't require Christianity that is?
51:02 Speaker 00 Excuse me, I'm gonna have to cough for a second.
51:08 Speaker 00 First place, don't write off Christianity quite yet, and don't, don't write off the other great religions quite yet either.
51:18 Speaker 00 I use the analogy, I think the first time I ever used it was in Human Accomplishment, that the 20th century was kind of the adolescence of mankind.
51:30 Speaker 00 That the Enlightenment had delivered some body blows to some very old ways of looking at the world. You had the Enlightenment and the primacy of reason. Then you had Darwin, who dealt a body blow to the understanding about the biblical description of how the universe and the world were created. You had relativism in all sorts of forms psychologically. You had the discovery of the subconscious, the unconscious. You had relativity in physics, which spills over into the way you look about it, at objective truth and all sorts of other things.
52:15 Speaker 00 And I call it the adolescence because I think intellectuals in the 20th century were sort of like adolescents who have decided that their parents have made mistakes, that they didn't, hadn't realized their parents aren't perfect, and they decide their parents are wrong about everything. And the rejection of religion, I think, was of that order. So it was not the case that in the 20th century intellectuals carefully considered religion and rejected it. Religion became something that nobody smart believed in that anymore. And that, that progressed throughout the century. So that by the time I went to Harvard in 1960, 1961,
52:59 Speaker 00 um, it was just taken for granted. It was in the air. If you're smart, you don't believe that stuff anymore. And the fact is that these are ultimate issues that human beings really want to grapple with. Starting with the ultimate question, why is there something rather than nothing? Uh, and then going on into other questions about what are the foundations of human morality? Are we making all of this up? Is this all a matter of evolved tendencies that had survival value over the course of hundreds of millions of years of the evolution of species? Or is there something else at work?
53:43 Speaker 00 My sense is that there is a resurgence of interest in those questions. I have some friends who teach courses at places like Harvard uh, that, that raise them, that are talking about religion specifically. They are jammed. Or if there is a public lecture on, on one of these issues, people are standing at the back of the hall. There is sort of a, I think, a real, I don't know about the University of Texas. I suppose you have, the University of Texas, you probably have some kids who are straight from the Bible, well, and uh, uh, other kids who are your overeducated intellectuals who think it's all nonsense. Probably something in between.
54:23 Speaker 00 But, but certainly in the elite schools, I think that there is a real sense of here are all these important subjects we haven't been allowed to think about seriously. So I am not, I'm kind of optimistic about, uh,
54:41 Speaker 00 The resurgence of a more thoughtful way of thinking about religion. Whether that takes the form of Christianity as we've known in the past, I don't know. But I think it's vitality is is out there.
54:55 Dwarkesh Patel? Uh, but if I can express some skepticism about that optimism. Uh, you yourself, uh, have in the past called yourself an agnostic despite being convinced of the historical role of Christianity and promoting human accomplishment. And you, you, I, I, I don't see how, even if I did agree with the arguments that Christianity was and continues to be uniquely powerful for, um, you know, promoting a free society. I, I don't see how I could bring myself to agreeing with the actual theological basis of Christianity. Uh, how, how do you reconcile the fact that you yourself are an agnostic with the idea that in the future, other people who aren't even convinced of the value of Christianity will turn to Christianity?
55:40 Speaker 00 I suppose the simple answer is I'm becoming a closeted believer, but, uh, but apart from that,
55:47 Speaker 00 the, I, I'd say, don't give up on a thoughtful consideration of these issues. You don't have to do it in the Christian framework. Um, you can do it in a variety of frameworks. It would be, one of the things I did not realize until I, uh, just a little background here is that my wife is, uh, is a, uh, Quaker. A Quaker by conviction. She came to this as an adult as well. She was like me. She was an agnostic in college and so forth. And, um,
56:21 Speaker 00 I, through her, I've been exposed to a lot of really brilliant writing about a lot of really difficult issues that that doesn't require you to, uh,
56:33 Speaker 00 Read chapters about the resurrection or things like that, but you're talking about broader theological issues. And sometimes not even in a Christian framework at all. And the thing about this literature is that it's really smart. It's really subtle and thoughtful and smart. And so you ought to expose yourself to that. And then I can't give you a reading list right now. But I think it would be perfect to to pick up readings in a variety of traditions. That are the sort of the best that has been said and thought into those traditions. Just so that you can be sure that when you reject religion.
57:14 Speaker 00 You are doing it on the basis basis not of saying, I don't believe Bible stories anymore.
57:21 Speaker 00 Or whatever the equivalent is in Buddhism and Islam and the rest of that. It is you are saying, no, I I have given consideration to the reasons why some very thoughtful, smart people do believe this. And with respect, I simply disagree with them that. You've got to give yourself the basis for coming to that conclusion.
57:42 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
57:43 Speaker 00 I predict that if you expose yourself to a fair amount of that material.
57:49 Speaker 00 You will have planted. A different sensibility that. Will do you good in in years to come.
57:59 Dwarkesh Patel? And I should say you have you have given a reading list in the Kermesens Guide of such literature.
58:07 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, and. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Jordan Peterson. When he was doing his tour, explaining his version of what he thinks God is and how that relates to Christian theology.
58:19 Speaker 00 I'm not, no.
58:20 Dwarkesh Patel? Okay.
58:23 Dwarkesh Patel? Well, do you suspect that if Christianity turned to research, it would be through somebody who isn't.
58:30 Dwarkesh Patel? Isn't bringing back the old version of theology that required. You know, beliefs and actual metaphysical.
58:38 Dwarkesh Patel? Existence of God, but something like Jordan Peterson where it's not clear what he believes, but it is motivating enough. There's there's does seem to be a purpose and some transcendental good that is being promoted.
58:49 Speaker 00 Well, again, since I don't know directly what he's. Said, I can't comment on it. I can. I can describe my own.
58:59 Speaker 00 Sense. Um. Well, just a couple of observations. One is that. I have a much greater sense of mystery than I used to have about the universe. And I don't think that's made up. I think that contemplating. All sorts of things that we see around us and that that all it wants to say that ah.
59:27 Speaker 00 Everything that can be known. Can be known by the human minds.
59:34 Speaker 00 That becomes a little more implausible. Because.
59:40 Speaker 00 Let's stipulate that there is a God. It is absolutely impossible for us to avoid anthropomorphizing that God. Uh, we, we have to think in terms of the frame of reference that we have. And a God that lives outside of time, outside of history. That permeates everything is not possible for us to understand. Uh, we are, if, if there is a God, we are like. My dog. Trying to figure out what I'm doing when I'm running a regression equation. Okay? The dog can look at me and he can try to, try to. Relate that to something he can understand. He has the slightest idea.
1:00:25 Speaker 00 And similarly, when people say, well, how can there be a God? Because if there were a God, they would never allow all the suffering. I mean, that's sort of the level of, of just a lack of. Appreciation. For the intellectual challenge of trying to get your head around some of these questions. Though I will also make one other observation, and this comes through my wife and, and the people I have been exposed to. Uh, over the years through her. I think that, that there is. In religion, uh, something equivalent to being tone deaf. Uh.
1:01:01 Speaker 00 Some people cannot hear a melody.
1:01:07 Speaker 00 Doesn't mean the melody doesn't exist, it means that they are impaired in trying to hear that. Some people are colorblind. Doesn't mean color doesn't exist, it means that they can't see it. I think there are differences in human beings in their ability to
1:01:28 Speaker 00 sense other ways of knowing besides the hyper rational ways in which I try to know things. And I have become convinced it is not that they're making stuff up.
1:01:43 Speaker 00 It is that they aren't making it up and the fact I can't see it is because I'm the equivalent of tone deaf or colorblind. And it's not my fault, but it is incumbent on me to do the best I can to understand what the melody is like and understand what the color red is like.
1:02:03 Dwarkesh Patel? I suspect this might be the hubris and naivety of my youth, but I have read C.S. Lewis and a few other people. And obviously, I haven't engaged with the literature in any serious way, but it seems to me when statements like "God is beyond time and place" are made, they're not even wrong. I'm not even sure what is being said, but like you said, it might be just me not understanding the way in which it's being said.
1:02:27 Speaker 00 On the other hand, if you start with the stipulated truth that there is a God, then in what sense would that God be time bound?
1:02:41 Speaker 00 Or space bound?
1:02:43 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. But what does it mean to not be time bound?
1:02:46 Speaker 00 That's, remember what I said, it's hard to get your head around this stuff, that's exactly what I mean.
1:02:52 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah.
1:02:54 Dwarkesh Patel? I will go back and try to educate myself on these things.
1:02:57 Speaker 00 C.S. Lewis is better than nothing. I mean, I'm glad you've read C.S. Lewis. Did you find him interesting?
1:03:04 Dwarkesh Patel? I did, and it was actually in the context of a debate I was having with a friend in high school, and she convinced me to read, I was making the same arguments about the problem of evil, and she convinced me to read one of those books. And I mean, he has a way, he has a prose that's really captivating, but I just didn't find the arguments that persuasive.
1:03:23 Speaker 00 Okay, well, you've exposed yourself.
1:03:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I'll expose myself some more on your recommendation. But let me ask you now about the link between liberty and human accomplishment. China not only, of course, had the differences in worldview and milieu that contributed to lower purpose and autonomy, but it was to go to some more physical differences. It had, it was easier to govern geographically than Europe. Maybe that contributed to the fact that it was also easier to thwart innovation and new ideas. And now we're coming in a time when, as you're describing by the people, there are just a tremendous burden on the average individual from the government. To what extent do you suspect that this has dampened the rate of human accomplishment?
1:04:12 Speaker 00 You know, in working on human accomplishment, I had to come to grips with the fact that so much, basically, liberty as conceived by the founders, by Locke and the 18th century tradition, is very young, it's very new. And all of this vast array of human accomplishment that I'm writing about came before that.
1:04:37 Speaker 00 So I had to sort of accept to myself that you don't have to live in a libertarian world in order for great things to happen, because they've happened in the past. But I reconciled that to some degree by saying, but the people who accomplished those great things had a lot of de facto liberty.
1:04:56 Speaker 00 So that they might have been living under an absolute monarchy. They might have been, in fact, they might have been living in France, where, which was much more authoritarian than Britain was. But you could still, if you were one of the French intellectuals, be given a lot of personal freedom to go ahead and pursue what you wanted to pursue. And that was true elsewhere in Europe as well. Having said that.
1:05:27 Speaker 00 There's gotta be a link between the freedom to do what you feel this passion to do and being able to do it. I mean, it's just simply gotta be, it's, you've got to have more potential for great human accomplishment when in some ways you have created de facto freedom for people to pursue it. And if you're going to have de facto freedom for a few, this is the point at which I become a good constitutional Madisonian and say the great thing about the United States was, the United States said was, everybody should have that freedom, not just the people that the state will leave alone.
1:06:09 Dwarkesh Patel? So let's talk about your plan then about setting up these various defense funds to create this de facto autonomy.
1:06:16 Speaker 00 Okay, this is a book that hardly anybody who's listening to us will have read. It's called By the People. And it spends the first four chapters detailing all the ways in which this society is becoming moribund. In terms of the Constitution, which is now bears no resemblance to the Constitution as it existed up until about 1937, to the sclerosis in the federal government.
1:06:47 Speaker 00 Here's, I'll just give people a quick sense of how much things have changed. In 1960, hardly any corporations even had an office in Washington DC. Maybe the airlines did because they were regulated and the trains, but most American corporations, Washington just wasn't important. Now, not only does every corporation have a major presence in Washington, both directly and in employing lawyers and lobbyists and all the rest of that, they
1:07:25 Speaker 00 Run their businesses in large part by trying to get a competitive advantage the way a regulation is written or a piece of legislation that's passed whereby the state is providing them with an edge over their competition, just in complete opposition to what the free market economy is supposed to be like. Then you've got the regulatory burdens which are the main focus of by the people whereby I'm not worried about JP Morgan and all the regulations
1:08:00 Speaker 00 that have been foisted on it by by the post 2008 recession. JP Morgan can afford to have, you know, 500 lawyers jumping through all the hoops the government wants it to jump through. And in fact, by the way, since I'm mentioning JP Morgan, it is the CEO of Chase who said that it gives us a bigger moat, referring to the legislative regulatory regulation. It gives them a better protection against competition. I'm worried about the guy who wants to open up a corner store and can't open up a corner store because of all the
1:08:41 Speaker 00 regulatory hoops he has to go through. I'm worried about the person who a bureaucrat can come to them and say, oh, you're in violation such and such. And if you try to fight this, I'll put you out of business because you can't you can't resist the amount of pressure we can bring on you. And so I suggested, why not have legal defense funds for systematic civil disobedience? And the proposition is federal government cannot possibly enforce these tens of thousands of regulations that it has piled up. Can't possibly do it.
1:09:20 Speaker 00 They can only get away with all that if people voluntarily comply, even with idiotic regulations. And so why don't we not comply with idiotic regulations? Let's go ahead and run our business the way it should be run. And then if the government comes after us, we have defense funds, perhaps funded by the profession, perhaps funded by philanthropists, which say to the government, we're going to fight this. And we understand that we are technically in violation of this stupid regulation. And that sooner or later, you will probably win. You're going to have to invest a lot of resources in this. You're going to have to invest the time of your, your staff and your lawyers and the rest of that.
1:10:05 Speaker 00 Do you really want to do that? And I think that you have the potential in this for getting the entire federal government to behave the way that the highway patrol does. Which is, you know, I don't know about the part of the country you live in, Texas is. Okay, Texas, you can still do lots of things in Texas. But in the part of the country I live in, which is Maryland, the speed limit is 65. And you go 75 and you're fine. Because on the major highways, 75 is kind of the flow of traffic. And those highways were designed for those speeds and they don't stop you. We're violating the law. There's no way the cops can start picking up everybody.
1:10:50 Speaker 00 And, and so why not have a regulatory, de facto regulatory regime in which we have discouraged the government from enforcing the stupid regulations and encouraged it to, to focus on the important ones. And I have more specific suggestions for how, how to do that. But that's, that's the, that's the premise for developing the, the defense funds.
1:11:17 Dwarkesh Patel? It's a fascinating idea, and I want to ask you first about the circumstances which make, it is a radical proposal, and the circumstances which make civil disobedience seem necessary. And part of it goes back to if we lose, or if we continue losing the sort of liberty sensibility that America has had, that a unique way of life will be surrendered. Can you describe what it was about the American founding that made it unique in charting a nation that was, that prioritized maximizing the liberty of its citizens? Why has this not happened in other places and in other times?
1:11:56 Speaker 00 The British made progress toward it, so that at the time of the founding, you already had a lot of
1:12:05 Speaker 00 de facto freedom there, and you had a certain amount of constitutional freedom, even though they had an unwritten constitution, but coming under the common law.
1:12:15 Speaker 00 But you also had, and that encumbered with an aristocracy, you had that encumbered with all sorts of class lines and so forth. And the genius of the Americans was that it said that all people should be free to pursue happiness, and that all people are capable of pursuing happiness. That was a break with history. No other government had ever been established on the premise that
1:12:49 Speaker 00 the individual human being should be allowed to live his life as he sees fit, as long as he accords the same freedom to everyone else.
1:13:03 Speaker 00 Nothing else remotely like that had happened, and subsequently, and subsequent revolutions, including the French Revolution, it didn't happen again. The United States was the only, the only one which, which had not only a statement of the freedom of people to pursue their own happiness, they set up the government with explicit tortuous ways of constraining that government from ever.
1:13:32 Speaker 00 Sliding down the slippery slope into an ordinary authoritarian government. Now, the fact that it lasts, two, two comments about that.
1:13:44 Speaker 00 Because I know the reaction out there, but they were slaveholders. You had, you had a large chunk of the American population that was enslaved. It was the fatal flaw in the founding. It's sort of guaranteed that it would collapse eventually. Uh, because the evil was so great. You can't, you could not have this, this expression of wow, human beings should be allowed to live in contradiction to this reality of slavery. Uh, that was just never going to last forever. But it was kind of amazing it lasted as long as it did.
1:14:24 Speaker 00 Of the, so that you had from seventeen eighty-nine, when the constitution was passed to nineteen thirty-seven. The federal government was still incredibly highly constrained from interfering with the lives of its citizens. Uh, and
1:14:42 Speaker 00 that's not a bad track record for, for such an ambitious experiment.
1:14:48 Dwarkesh Patel? What, what is the cause of your pessimism that this basic idea um, will, will not originate again? Uh, that of, you know, founding a nation based on this kind of charter?
1:15:06 Speaker 00 Well,
1:15:08 Speaker 00 I'm hesitating because I have been so surprised by the last four years.
1:15:17 Speaker 00 In, the, the answer I would have given you in two thousand twelve, when I was writing Coming Apart.
1:15:25 Speaker 00 Was that we have reached a modus vivendi. Whereby the elites have established a society that really works just fine for them. But they are passing off enough benefits to the rest that you sort of buy them off. And you aren't going to have any principled demands for get the government off our back. Uh, because the working class, which in the past was so central to to this, uh, the strength of the American experiment. Uh, has essentially been going down the tubes in terms of its own commitment to this way of life.
1:16:11 Speaker 00 And so I I saw in two thousand twelve, the antagonism toward the elites that existed even then. I didn't, I way underestimated the depth of the anger. The breadth of the anger. Um.
1:16:29 Speaker 00 That produced Trump.
1:16:33 Speaker 00 And in one sense, that seems to indicate a potential for the resuscitation of an older way of looking at how American society should function. But
1:16:48 Speaker 00 the last four years have also been a case where what was formerly known as the right has proved itself to be every bit as authoritarian in its own way as the left is. And just as willing to engage in all sorts of practices, which uh, in, you know, would ordinarily be considered and just antithetical to a conservative perspective in the world. Let alone a libertarian perspective in the world. So we are now in a situation where there's way more energy in the middle class and the working class for radical change than I ever would have suspected existed. I'm not happy about the kind of radical change that they're in favor of too.
1:17:34 Speaker 00 Basically, at this moment in history. As I reach my seventy seventh year, no, I'm in my seventy eighth year.
1:17:44 Speaker 00 A movement that I thought had enormous vitality and potential just ten years ago. Namely, a practical libertarian form of politics. Practical libertarian means small l libertarian, really, it's Madisonian. I'm really thinking about Madison's conception of the rule of government. Whereas I thought that really had a chance of regathering some strength. I'm an oddball now. What I'm, I'm. All sorts of people on the right now think people like me are
1:18:22 Speaker 00 cucks, were, you know.
1:18:26 Speaker 00 Were useless, they're, they're going to go beyond that. So basically, if you can give me any reason not to be pessimistic, I will grasp better.
1:18:34 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I, I don't think that.
1:18:37 Speaker 00 So strategically, I think there's certain degree of optimism, but not tactically, not within the next couple of decades.
1:18:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Do you think that the coalition that Trump assembled could be recaptured to a more libertarian sensibility? Because right now you have what could be seen as the voice of that coalition on TV Tucker Carlson. Sometimes using the word libertarian as an epithet. You have the Tea Party's wing in the Congress, the Freedom Caucus. Being the strongest supporters of Trump and high deficits and whatever else. Can this movement be reconsolidated with a more libertarian sensibility?
1:19:18 Speaker 00 Gee, if Tucker Carlson just could channel his former self. He would have a potential for being a very effective political figure. And by getting in touch with his former self, I'll tell you my reaction as I listen to Tucker, which I don't do very often. But I used to know, you know, I used to know Tucker. Not close friends, but and admired his work.
1:19:46 Speaker 00 And sometimes when I have listened to him in recent years, I still agree with him. And he is saying things with passion which, which needed to be said. And in a way Tucker has had the same kind of experience I've had. Where I've, I've decided I was way too cavalier about low scale immigration.
1:20:06 Speaker 00 That, you know, the economists say, hey, low scale immigration is a net win-win. And they're not taking away jobs from, from Americans and all the rest of that. And I just bought into that too clibly. And didn't think hard enough about how it feels not to be an economist. Going through the numbers and saying, hey, it's a win-win. And instead being a carpenter who used to get nineteen dollars an hour. And I've been undercut by low scale immigrants who are working for twelve dollars an hour with no benefits and no social security and all that. And, and I'm saying, how would I feel if I were in that situation? I would be angry as could be if I were in that situation.
1:20:47 Speaker 00 And so I think Tucker has hold of some, some growth that he has done. Where he has augmented his former positions, which I was very close to about liberty. With some other truths that need to be taken into account.
1:21:08 Speaker 00 What's happened is though, you're right, he uses libertarian as an epithet and
1:21:14 Speaker 00 he has gone too far in defending the indefensible with a lot of the things that Trump has done. But I would like to think that when Trump is gone.
1:21:25 Speaker 00 Which I assume will happen after this election, could be wrong. That you might have people like him who have a synthesis of some aspects of the populism that deserve to be part of the synthesis. But a core that goes back to individual freedom and limited government.
1:21:45 Speaker 00 And the one thing that you can be too dismissive of when you're being a pessimist like me is that you discount the effect that an individual can have. So if you had a Ronald Reagan type of personality or an FDR kind of personality that were holding these views this time, that person could be a successful politician. Problem is you can't manufacture that kind of person. So I don't know what one's going to come along.
1:22:19 Dwarkesh Patel? But you have manufactured for them, I think, a worldview that would be incredibly helpful in shaping their policy agenda and their communication. I think you could be analogous to what Hayek was, to Ronald Reagan, to whoever comes in the future. But do you have in that position advice for people who want to preserve a remnant of the libertarian sensibility and mold this worldview in a way that could be applicable and persuasive to current and future circumstances?
1:22:51 Speaker 00 Do I have, let me go back to the beginning of your question. Do I have any ideas about what?
1:22:57 Dwarkesh Patel? Advice for keeping this remnant?
1:23:03 Speaker 00 I guess at this point I'd hunker down and wait for the storm to pass.
1:23:11 Speaker 00 Now, you're 20 years old, so you're gonna be hunkering down for a while anyway, just as a matter of biographical necessity in the sense of, I certainly hope you don't hit your peak at the age of 23 or 24. That would be a disaster.
1:23:27 Speaker 00 But suppose I were 30 years old, 35 years old, and interested in being engaged in this sort of thing again.
1:23:35 Speaker 00 I think I'd just accept that probably not much that I want to do is going to be possible to do for a while. And that...
1:23:48 Speaker 00 You could possibly do something like, you could join a think tank, you could, you could run for office at local levels,
1:23:57 Speaker 00 campaigning on your principles and probably get elected, but
1:24:04 Speaker 00 you're not going to be in a position to run against the milieu in a big way. The milieu is really strong and it's really hostile to the kinds of things that I think and you probably think right now. And to sit back and wait for things to be less hostile, I guess is what I would do.
1:24:31 Speaker 00 I don't have time to sit back and wait for things to get less hostile, but.
1:24:36 Dwarkesh Patel? I have all the time in the world. I, I want to ask you about the methods of this civil disobedience. What has come of the Madison Fund since you wrote this book?
1:24:47 Speaker 00 Nothing. What, what happened is the, there were some people who were interested in starting one.
1:24:55 Speaker 00 But remember the book came out, I think in 2014 or 15. And it hadn't been out very long until we were in the 2016 election cycle. And all of this kind of stuff, just nobody was paying any attention at all to it anymore.
1:25:16 Dwarkesh Patel? You express skepticism that these issues could be resolved at the political process. But somebody who's trying to make the case for Trump might say he has done some amount of deregulation. We're about to have six to three conservative majority on the court. To what extent has the political system been able to solve these issues?
1:25:38 Speaker 00 Well, I wish I knew what the story was with regard to deregulation. I've heard people say that there have really been some quite significant things that have been done. I've also heard that actually there's more smoke than fire there. But, but are we better off regarding regulatory regime than we were four years ago? The answer is probably yes. A six to three majority on the Supreme Court, does that make it conceivable?
1:26:10 Speaker 00 That that the court would modify what's called Chevron deference. And sorry to introduce the legal jargon, but Chevron deference comes from a case involving the Chevron company. And the Supreme Court held then, and by the way, Anthony Scalia was
1:26:28 Speaker 00 in favor of this. The the government, the Supreme Court has said that the court should defer to what the regulatory agency has said in its regulation in cases where there is any doubt whatsoever. In other words, the court is not going to try to second guess the regulators. Well,
1:26:52 Speaker 00 I sympathize with the notion that the court should not try to become expert in these very arcane issues that a lot of regulations involve. But there should be some modification of that whereby if the administration of this regulation is clearly, obviously idiotic, translating that into some more acceptable legal language, the court ought to be able to overthrow regulations without having to get into the minutia of all the technical things that that led to Chevron deference. Well, if that were overturned, what you would basically be be doing is putting a rein on the regulatory state, which it has not experienced for the last twenty three years, at least.
1:27:36 Speaker 00 So is that possible, the sixty three court?
1:27:40 Speaker 00 I guess it's not impossible. That's better than nothing.
1:27:46 Dwarkesh Patel? I i- i- if that doesn't happen and we have to stay with this bizarre system of regulations we have. And by by the way, the first part of that was such a it was a great description, but it was incredibly frustrating to read that you have this. Everything, if you want to appeal the regulation that the regulators are imposing on you, you have to go to the regulators themselves. But if you were trying to battle them in this sort of legal war of attrition with the Madison Fund, people will say, how do you expect to beat the federal government? What kind of resources could you possibly assemble that would be enough to combat their resources?
1:28:26 Speaker 00 Oh, it's much easier than people think because you just take a look at the budget of, let's say, the regulatory agency for workplaces. I'm blocking on the name of it right now.
1:28:40 Speaker 00 They're responsible for regulating every workplace in the country and enforcing regulations on, and you're talking about thousands of regulations, and they don't have that many inspectors. So you will have companies that won't get inspected, particularly small companies, won't get inspected for years at a time. And they, at the level of the, let me back off. They have taken on so much regulatory responsibility that there's no way that they can staff up to respond to that. And when you appeal, or let's say that you have, let's say that you have knowingly violated a regulation. They've come and they want to fine you for it.
1:29:24 Speaker 00 And you say, okay, we're going to fight that. You are not fighting the entire federal government. You're fighting the local office of that government agency, which has maybe, what, 10, 20 people in it max? And you have bureaucrats who are not that eager to get deluged with a lot of work that they can avoid. And you are saying to a specific bureaucrat who wants to bring you to book for this violation, okay, how do you feel about spending 100 hours, 150 hours this next month, dealing with all this stuff I'm going to load on to you? Because one of the things about the regulatory state, which is you can,
1:30:08 Speaker 00 you don't have to prove things, you just, you can set things in motion, which will cause an enormous amount of work just to deal with the process that you've set in motion. And that's what the lawyers would be doing for the Madison Fund. The lawyers for the Madison Fund would be saying, you know what? We're just going to take this intricate legal system that you have developed, and we are going to exploit it. Um, not with an eye to getting justice, but with an eye to making life difficult for you. And guess what? We can do that. So you're dealing with individual human beings who are given a choice. Do I want to pursue this? Or shall maybe I pick on an easier target? And a lot of them are just going to pick an easier target.
1:30:53 Speaker 00 Particularly if they know they're willing. By the way, here's what Donald Trump has shown us.
1:30:58 Speaker 00 Donald Trump got a reputation for litigating anything.
1:31:03 Speaker 00 And so when, when he said to the subcontractors that he stiffed.
1:31:10 Speaker 00 You know about this practice of Donald Trump's? But when he, when he had subcontractors, you know, who have, who were supposed to do the plumbing or whatever in one of the buildings. And when they're done, he says, oh, well, you didn't do the work correctly. I'm just going to pay you three quarters of what I, the contract says. And when they say, we're going to fight this, Trump would say, you fight this and we will keep you in court forever. And he made good on it. And so he actually could make that into a business model whereby he could systematically underpay his subcontract. Because he'd established the threat of that makes it not worth their while. Now, why people still did subcontracting work with him, I don't know. That's another question. But uh, the fact is you can just, a credible threat of litigation.
1:31:55 Speaker 00 In defense of, against the regulatory state could have an enormous impact.
1:32:00 Dwarkesh Patel? I actually didn't know about that. That's astonishing. Um, but my, I was talking to one of my friends about this idea and he said, if this strategy could work. You would be expecting big corporations to be working together to innovate the government in regards to the regulations that affect them. And the fact that you don't see them doing this should be evidence for the fact that it's not workable. What do you say to that?
1:32:22 Speaker 00 Well, the big corporations don't have much incentive to do it. The big corporations like the regulatory state. Because they, they can afford it and they have the competitive advantage that I talked about earlier. So it's, I'll tell you, the kind of place it would work is in the professions, like dentists.
1:32:47 Speaker 00 By the way, I raised this with my own dentist and he said, yes. Dentists are subject to all kinds of picky things. My dentist had once been fined because he had inadequately instructed his staff in the use of the fire extinguishers in the office and he paid a fine.
1:33:11 Speaker 00 So you have the dental, the dentist's legal fund and he contributes a hundred bucks a year to it. And in return for that, there are a set of specified regulations that you can just go ahead and ignore. And we'll defend you if, if the government comes after you on those. Each of the little dentist's office would have a lot of incentive to, to be part of that. The same could go for physicians, other small companies. There could be lots of different organizational groups that would have an interest in combining because together they could pose a response to the government that no individual dentist could.
1:33:46 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. And the added benefit there would be that there would be a number figure on the cost of regulation of dentist. If, if a dentist is willing to contribute a hundred dollars a year, then you know, you can say that this is actually the cost of the regulation you're imposing on dentist offices. If they're willing to pay that, yeah. But so here are some other issues that somebody might bring up with this scheme. You say in the book that regulations that have a halo effect should be avoided because even though they might be insensible, you're not going to get a majority of the people to back that cause. Aren't most regulations probably ones that have a halo effect behind them?
1:34:24 Speaker 00 By halo effect, I mean the purpose of the regulation is to protect the environment or an endangered species.
1:34:35 Speaker 00 It's very hard to get, if you, if you are resisting regulations that people say will create dirty air, if you resist those regulations, it's going to be a public relations disaster.
1:34:49 Speaker 00 You'll be amazed how many don't have that halo effect.
1:34:54 Speaker 00 I give some examples in the book about getting fined for not having a sign saying poison on a storage place of beach sand. And the reason is this is a brick making factory that in some conditions, under some grinding operations, beach sand can produce a.
1:35:16 Speaker 00 Now, when you can't remember respiratory problem, so you're supposed to label the the room in which the beach sand is being kept with poison, you know, that kind of you have no idea if you have not been directly involved in this, how picky you so many of these regulations are, and they don't have a halo effect, they cannot stand the light of day.
1:35:38 Dwarkesh Patel? Hmm, I'm glad I went to computer science, I don't know how to deal with the.
1:35:42 Speaker 00 Oh, you're in one of you're in one of the areas which has the least regulation of anybody.
1:35:47 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, and not if not if Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson have something to say about it.
1:35:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:35:52 Dwarkesh Patel? Um, yeah, but so then this brings out the question, if this method works, why hasn't the Madison Fund taken off? Why have these defense funds taken off?
1:36:03 Speaker 00 Um, first place, the answer I gave you before.
1:36:07 Dwarkesh Patel? Mm hmm.
1:36:08 Speaker 00 Donald Trump came along a few months after the book came out. Now, even if Donald Trump hadn't come along, the fact is not that many people
1:36:19 Speaker 00 read books like that. You would have to have a couple of people who read the book that have big bucks and would start a trial fund all on their own. Actually, if you had one guy, I mean, suppose that Jeff Bezos decided this this was something to try, you have a variety of people in this country who are so wealthy, they can undertake significant innovations like this all on their own. They don't have to get a bunch of other donors. But it would have to be that kind of effect, I think. Um, has to be somebody else who who is as crazy about the idea as I am, but who has lots more money than I have. I haven't talked to that person yet.
1:37:02 Dwarkesh Patel? Um, let's talk about the future of liberty. You in the last part of the book, you talk about your optimism that in 200 years, when we've grown much wealthier, we'll find this sort of interference in the government unnecessary and even absurd. But we were much wealthier than we ever 100 years ago, and yet we're still impinging on the lives of other Americans. What makes you optimistic that as you grow wealthier, we'll see lesser need of these regulations?
1:37:29 Speaker 00 A part of the driving thing is increasing wealth. One of the things that makes you wonder about the importance of public policy is if you plot per capita GDP in constant dollars over the last century.
1:37:46 Speaker 00 It basically goes up like this. And you can see that you can see the the depression of 1929, but it's a little tiny blip in terms of this this longer term curve. You take a look at 2008, it's a little blip and then we go back up. So unless you have policy of, you know, Stalinist stupidity, of Soviet stupidity, presumably we're going to continue to get richer. And it might be lower growth rates than we've had before. But even if you have a growth rate of one or 2%
1:38:21 Speaker 00 from the base we have now, you're still getting richer reasonably rapidly. At some point, when
1:38:30 Speaker 00 per capita GDP is $100,000 per person,
1:38:35 Speaker 00 the idea that we need this vast elaborate bureaucratic apparatus to, let's say, deal with poverty.
1:38:44 Speaker 00 It's really silly.
1:38:47 Speaker 00 I mean, for a long time, a lot of us have been saying, look, if you just took the money and gave out the money, you'll get rid of poverty and it's a lot easier.
1:38:56 Speaker 00 But but we've never been at a point of national wealth where it is so obviously idiotic that we are using this complex machinery. So I think that time will come, that that wealth wealth will be enough that we can afford free riders. You know, that we can have some people who will take a guaranteed basic income, which I've written a book in favor of. And they will use it to live their lives off the backs of their fellow citizens. But by that time, the backs of their fellow citizens won't feel the burden anymore. And we already have a lot of people behaving that way anyway. And so who cares? It would free up the rest of us from all of this stuff we have to put up with with public policy.
1:39:41 Speaker 00 And in terms of other kinds of technological changes, however.
1:39:46 Speaker 00 Actually policing, which is such a big deal now with the Black Lives Matter thing. In many ways policing is being transformed by technology. And so is our vulnerability to crime. So that you're much more invulnerable to property crime than you used to be. And the police with the body cameras and so forth. Do we expose terrible behavior in the part of the police? Sometimes, yeah, we do. That's a good thing in terms of a deterrent effect in the future. And it's also much a way that you need far fewer governmental oversights. If you have more transparency without the government oversight.
1:40:30 Speaker 00 And an awful lot of the transparency on policing is coming not from anything the government is doing to oversee the police. It's the public overseeing the police with video cameras. So you take all of these things, even ones which are in the sectors like crime, which are the subject of so much angst and so forth.
1:40:52 Speaker 00 Probably technology over time is going to make the central government's powerful presence less important rather than more.
1:41:00 Dwarkesh Patel? Hmm, I hope so. By the way, you were absolutely right in the last chapter when you said that even liberals will have to recognize that local, that public unions in their local governments are causing problems. And of course, this is happening in police unions. And you know, the, the claim, which is true, is that they protect people from accountability. They don't reward good behavior and prevent punishment of bad behavior. And this raises the question, what about the other public sector unions? Should they be given the same treatment? So hopefully that lesson will permeate. Do you think that's gonna happen?
1:41:36 Speaker 00 Well, two things. At the local level, a lot of these unions behave differently than they do at the national level. Or I should say in small cities and towns, they behave differently. So then let's take the public schools, for example, and the teachers' union. The teachers' unions are incredibly destructive in big cities. In terms of the ways in which they protect themselves at the expense of students. In Valley Elementary School, six miles from here, where my kids went to elementary school. I think the teachers are members of a union, but they don't behave that way. They behave as teachers have traditionally behaved. And they are nurturing and very concerned about the children.
1:42:17 Speaker 00 And so, a lot of the de facto evils of public unions are concentrated in big cities. But that's true of so many other things. I think it's also in one of the final chapters of By the People. That I make the argument, which I'm more and more convinced of. That this divide between daily life in the big cities, and Austin is a big city in this regard. But Chicago and Dallas and Houston and Los Angeles are even more like this. It's just so different. All of your relationships are way different.
1:42:59 Speaker 00 If you are dealing with a plumber in New York City.
1:43:05 Speaker 00 And you're dealing with a plumber in a town of fifteen thousand people. The ways in which the problems of daily life are utterly different in big cities and small cities and towns.
1:43:20 Speaker 00 I think is behind an awful lot of the political polarization that's taken place. The people in the big cities look at problems of public unions. They look at the problems of the police. They look at these and they have one set of characteristics. When you look at the police and the unions and the rest of it in small cities have completely different characteristics.
1:43:44 Dwarkesh Patel? By the way, you mentioned the universal basic income. What did you think of Andrew Yang's candidacy in 2020?
1:43:50 Speaker 00 Well, I gotta tell you, I don't pay much attention to day-to-day politics. So people would tell me that Andrew Yang had to propose for a basic income and I really should learn about it. I was busy with other things, so I don't know much about what he said. Sorry. I'm probably, for example, I did not listen to a word of the debate last week between Biden and Trump. The degree to which I isolate myself from politics is hard to, etc.
1:44:18 Dwarkesh Patel? Trust me, you're better off for it.
1:44:21 Speaker 00 I know that I have better mental health than a lot of my friends who did watch the debate.
1:44:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, that's almost a guarantee. So usually I end interviews by asking for what advice you would give to a 20-year-old. Now, you've written a book on this topic, so I'll just ask you about that book and said, the last chapter of that book is about the movie Groundhog Day. What, in your view, makes such a profound moral fable?
1:44:49 Speaker 00 For people who've never seen Groundhog Day, it's kind of hard to explain, but let's assume we're talking to people that have watched Groundhog Day. If you watch, and let's say you watched it once. I imagine that your impression, if you watched it once, was mine. It was funny. There was great chemistry between Andy McDowell and Bill Murray. It was a rom-com with a happy ending. Really enjoyed it. If you go back and watch it a second time, you start to see the ways in which his character changes over the movie that are more subtle than you realize at the beginning. And the things that were just mostly funny at the beginning begin to take on a different cast,
1:45:34 Speaker 00 such as when Bill Murray tries to commit suicide by every known means and fails because he wakes up the next morning. Well, it was funny, but then all at once you start to realize the degree to which this guy who initially reacted by saying, well, you know, I'm immortal and I'm gonna have the same, I will eat whatever I want to eat. I will have whatever kind of sex I want to do. There's no consequences to anything I do. And that is deeply unsatisfying to him to the point that he tries to commit suicide.
1:46:08 Speaker 00 And can't. And then you start to see the ways in which he is changing. And it's very gradual, it's very subtle, and you will see more the third time than you saw the second, more the fourth, you saw the third. You are watching this guy transform from a jerk into a good human being, good in the Aristotelian sense of being good. And it's done without preaching. But the evolution he goes through
1:46:38 Speaker 00 is one of deeper and deeper moral insight. That's my argument. And you will never have a less painful lesson in how you evolve moral insight than by watching that movie again and again.
1:46:51 Dwarkesh Patel? I'm looking forward to watching it the second time and then a couple more times after that. I only watched the first time. It didn't occur to me at that point you made. Uh, that the suicide is a consequence of that lifestyle he was living in the beginning.
1:47:04 Dwarkesh Patel? Let me ask you another question. You say in the book that getting noticed is easier than you think because good help is hard to find. And what do you think explains the fact that there are young people with talent who are trying to get noticed, who are trying to get opportunities. At the same time, there are curmudgeons who are looking to hire people who are qualified and talented. And yet both of them are frustrated.
1:47:30 Speaker 00 Why are the young people who are looking for, what, how are they frustrated? Are they not able to get jobs where they think they can do that?
1:47:39 Dwarkesh Patel? I'm not sure, but I, I, I think that's the common perception that it's harder to get noticed and get a, your first break and your opportunity.
1:47:47 Speaker 00 Well, I guess that you're just gonna have to take it on trust. That, because I felt exactly the same way. When I was 20 years old and I was thinking, I was thinking, gee, how will I get ahead? Am I gonna go work for a company and sort of hope that somebody will notice me? And I, I really can't overemphasize the degree to which, if you look at it from that point of view, it just looks like
1:48:14 Speaker 00 the luck of the draw. And if you look at it from my end of it now, which is you, you're hiring people, or I used to hire people.
1:48:26 Speaker 00 You want something really simple.
1:48:31 Speaker 00 I used to, when I, when I used to interview people to hire back in the late 1970s, that's a long time ago. But I was looking for a hint that they were anal compulsive.
1:48:44 Speaker 00 What I wanted was some sort of, in the course of the questions, some sort of a sense that they weren't just making it up, they weren't saying it to make me happy, but they just cannot rest if there is an imperfection in something they're supposed to do. They just, they, they can't stand of not doing a good job on things. Some hint that they won't even roll their eyes if you said, oh, we're all gonna work till 10 o'clock tonight because we gotta get this thing out. That they'll, that they will jump in on that.
1:49:20 Speaker 00 It is so hard to find someone who says, I'm gonna work my ass off if you hire me. No holds barred. If you can convey that, the number of people who will hire you like this instantly is very high. But not only that, look, I've had lots of research assistants over, well, they are research assistants. I haven't, I gave up on using those a long time ago.
1:49:46 Speaker 00 But I have had some administrative assistants. And they're doing mostly very simple things. And a couple of them stand out enormously. And the simple reason they stand out is that if they are asked to do something, it happens. That's really simple. And, and, and unless you've hired people and had coworkers that are people working for you, you don't realize how rare it is to find somebody who will do it. You know, the Nike slogan, just do it.
1:50:22 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah.
1:50:23 Speaker 00 I know exactly where that comes from. Don't tell me about the storms at sea, don't tell me about the traffic, don't tell me about your dog being sick, just get it done, you know? And that is really a rare quality.
1:50:39 Dwarkesh Patel? Hmm.
1:50:40 Speaker 00 So you're gonna do fine if you have that attitude.
1:50:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I'll, if I don't, I'll try to cultivate it and I'll try to make sure I do. Uh, this, by the way, reminds me of the final paragraph of human accomplishment. And it, if you happen to have the book around you, I would uh, love to hear you read that final passage. It's incredibly beautiful.
1:51:02 Speaker 00 Well, thank you, because I enjoyed writing that final best.
1:51:05 Dwarkesh Patel? The last paragraph, yeah.
1:51:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, the last one. One of the things about uh, going back to reread books. Is that I have friends of mine who write books and say they hate it. Uh, that.
1:51:24 Speaker 00 They say, oh, I could have written this better. I gotta say, I go back and I rewrite my books and I say, this is really great. Okay, here is the last paragraph of human accomplishment. A story is told about the medieval stone masons who carved the gargoyles that adorn the great Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes their creations were positioned high upon the cathedral, hidden behind cornices or otherwise blocked from view, invisible from any vantage point in the ground. They sculpted these gargoyles as carefully as any of the others, even knowing that once the cathedral was completed and the scaffolding was taken down, their work would remain forever unseen by any human eye. It was said that they carved for the eye of God.
1:52:08 Speaker 00 That written in a thousand variations is the story of human accomplishment.
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