The Daily Stoic - Author Tom Nichols on the Assault on Modern Thinking | The Story We Tell Is Powerful

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Tom Nichols about his new book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy, how to bridge the gap between detailed knowledge and the public conversation, what it means to take your responsibilities as a citizen seriously, and more.Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs, US Naval War College, a columnist for USA Today, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Death of Expertise and is also an instructor at the Harvard Extension School and an adjunct professor at the US Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. He is a former aide in the US Senate and has been a Fellow of the International Security Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.AppSumo is the best way to automate all of the busywork that comes with running a business, so you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skillset, and focus on what matters most to you. AppSumo is the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs. Now with awesome tools for authors too. Just go to https://social.appsumo.com/ryan-holiday PLUS: Use code ryanholiday at checkout for $20 free credits (limit first 500, new accounts).Novo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. Novo makes banking easy and secure - you can manage your account in Novo’s customizable web, android, and iOS apps with built in profit first accounting and invoicing. Get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at https://banknovo.com/STOICTen Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Tom Nichols: Twitter, Facebook, InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcasts early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. As an author, as an entrepreneur, as a creative in this world, I wear like a lot of hats. And that's why I'm excited about today's sponsor actually from a dear friend of mine,

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And you'll get 20 bucks in free credits. That's social.appsuomo.com slash Ryan-holiday. The story we tell is powerful. Do you think Marcus really has believed he was living in the hopeless decline in fall of Rome that he was the last of the five good emperors? Or do you think he believed in the possibility

of a better future that he was part of a long chain of goodness that he could not disappoint? The story we tell ourselves about who we are is important. It determines what we're capable of being determines who we are. Thomas Jefferson was complicit in the pervasive sin of slavery. Did he write himself off as an evil, irredeemable hypocrite? Or did he believe that he could, even if he couldn't quite save himself, chart a better path for the future that might one day help his new nation escape the stain of chattel slavery? The story we tell ourselves is important. It can change the world. The same goes for you. Are you a person who fails at everything they do, or someone who has failed toward success?

Are you a flawed center without value or a good person trying to rise above their urges and circumstances? Do you believe that your country's history is one evil deed after another or has it been a valiant effort to march with progress and grow from the mistakes of the past? Stories matter, individually, collectively, historically.

So what story are you telling? Telling your kids, telling your employees, your constituents, your team, is it the one that has hope of getting better or one that destroys agency and a belief in a better tomorrow? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. My guest today is someone whose first book, I recommend all the time we sell it at the painted porch

and sadly, as I've seen from the comments on many Daily Stoic posts on Instagram, nasty emails I've gotten, even mean, trollish reviews on the podcast here on iTunes, clearly a necessary book for some of you. His first book is called The Death of Expertise, the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. As you know, the core discipline for the Stokes is wisdom, truth, capital T, truth, search for truth. You know, one of the things that Antoninus teaches Marcus Aurelius is when to defer to experts,

how to apply their knowledge, when not to listen to experts, and crucially, it's actually during the Antonin plague that Marcus Aurelius puts Galen, the top medical mind in the world, in charge of the pandemic response, although that wasn't quite what it was known. However, rudimentary his understanding was, I think it's illustrated that Marx realized, took this thing seriously and deferred to not experts outside of his domain of expertise. And even crucially, what I love about Marx's realist is we find that he's attending philosophy classes even as an old man, even as an emperor, even as clearly a brilliant philosopher. He's still focused

as an observer says, on learning that, which he does not yet know. So Tom's first book, The Death of Expertise, the Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. So what we talked about for the first half of today's episode, and then we transition because the first book is very related to the next book, our own worst enemy, the assault from within on modern democracy. I think what it comes down to what you find is talking about in the episode is, what does it mean to be a serious person who's responsible to themselves, responsible to some idea of the common good, who faces truth, uncomfortable truth when it's there, who makes hard decisions when they're there. And I think we have a really great conversation. We don't get too political, but I have very much admired Tom's work. And I follow him on social.

I've read many, many, many of his pieces at The Atlantic, which have been wonderful. He's got done some great pieces for the USA today as well. He's one of the thinkers that's helped me understand what's happening in the world, who I want to be in the world. So I love his stuff. And it's funny, just an inside baseball thing.

You're recording these interviews. It's really hard because like, first off, I don't know about you, but I don't get to talk to smart people like this, just like hanging out all the time. So it's an intimidating, difficult thing. And you kind of have a sense of where you want the conversation to go, you're writing stuff down, but you're going back and forth

and you have to say something and day or saying something and then you're like, oh, I want to come back to this. I know what I listen to podcast would always drives me nuts is when someone says like, okay, I had two questions for you. And then they forget or they go, and we'll come back to that or what they never do. And in the midst of this conversation, there was two things I wanted to get Tom's take on.

I only got to one and I seriously could not remember what the other one was. It slipped my brain, tired, second interview of the day, also writing, also have two young kids, as you remember. But anyways, the point is I forgot what this thing was and I'm going to tell you now, as a little teaser. We talk about what it means to be a serious adult. Like what it means to take not just adult. Like what it means to take, not just your responsibilities seriously, but take reality seriously.

There's this kind of viral video that's going around that I wanted to talk to Tom about, which unfortunately I forgot, but I'm gonna talk to you about it. It's like a mom speaking at a school board meeting or something in Florida and she goes, I want my daughter to be able to see her teacher's faces. She's like complaining about a potential mask mandate

in the school. And the response comes from a nurse who's like working at a hospital in Florida. And she's like, lady, let me tell you how serious it is. But and it's a very compelling video. But what struck me about it, and I wanted to get Tom's opinion on it,

but I think it connects to the death of expertise, but also the only worst enemy, and this idea of what it means to be an adult, to be a stoic in this world. There's a lot of things I want. I don't want to have had to spend the last 18 months of my life, you know, changing my behavior and my actions because of a pandemic. I didn't want to see my stock portfolio plummet at the beginning of it. I didn't want all my speaking gigs to be canceled. I don't want my kid not to be able to do X, Y, or Z. I wish I could go see my grandma every day. I wish there's a bunch of things, but here's the thing. I don't get to. I don't get to because it's not safe because it's not possible,

because those are the facts of reality. And the stokes would say, what you wish, what you want, how you would like things to be, is irrelevant. What matters is what they are. What matters is what your obligations are. What matters is what wisdom, facts, justice, et cetera, self-discipline dictates that one should do.

And so I think this is really important. There's a whole bunch of things I want to do. I wish we could do. I wish we're safe to do. I wish we're smart to do. I wish we're easy to do. But there's a great theater Roosevelt story where he's on a camping trip. Everything's going wrong. He says to the guy, oh, I'd rather it be X, Y, or Z. And the guy say, well, you don't get your rathers. And I think that's what I would say to that woman. That's what I'd say to a lot of the people who have complained to me over the pandemic or vaccines

or this or that or that. Your rathers are irrelevant. What matters to the stoic is what is unflinching take on reality, adult responsibilities. The responsibility is a response of a serious person. And that's what my interview with the wonderful Tom Nichols author of the Death of Expertise in our own worst enemy, pick up the death of expertise at the painted porch if you can.

We don't carry our own worst enemy yet at the painted porch. You can grab that on Amazon, audible, wherever you get books. And do follow Tom on social. He is great. I'm a big fan. Here's my interview. Tom Nichols. Well, I wanted to talk about your first book because it was the first one of yours that I read that really hit me. The death of expertise and was oddly prescient about where we are right now. Sadly. Yes, sadly, I feel that my first book was about the vulnerabilities of the media system

and it's not pleasant to be right about something terrible. Yeah, no, that's a fact. You know, you, yeah, that's really a way, good way to put it. It doesn't feel good to be right about something terrible. Like, I would trade all the copies that that book has sold to have been 20% less correct as I'm sure you would have loved to have been subsequently repudiated

for America's radical shift towards wisdom and the ability to understand and deal with complex topics and defer to expertise where appropriate. Well, somebody said to me, boy, you sold a lot of copies because of Donald Trump. And I said, I would be glad to give those copies back. Yes, yes. And then subsequently, obviously him proving a lot of the ideas in the book correct, it shows, I think it showed obviously the terrible cost of the death of expertise.

But walk me through what you mean when you talk about the death of expertise. Because what's weird is that the title of the book could almost in the same way that the phrase, do your research has been hijacked. It's a good concept that's been hijacked by people who are not interested in research. The death of expertise almost captures where we are, which is that certain people think that expertise has failed and no such thing exists and that's what empowers them. What has gotten us to this place where we seem to be categorically unable to understand

there is such a thing as objective reality facts information that doesn't give a crap about what you think. Well, you know, it's interesting because the death of expertise is a title you're right. Some people said, aha, seeing you mean the failure of expertise. And I met no, the death of the respect for expertise because it's expertise exists. I mean, we all use it every day, even though we talk about, you know, oh, I don't like experts, so I don't want to listen to the egg heads. And yet, you know, every time you get in a car or turn on your tap or open a can of food or something,

you're relying on experts. And people just don't like that. They don't like thinking of that because it's disempowering. And I think the way we got here, and this is what links the death of expertise to the book I just wrote about democracy. The way we got here was this rapid and unchecked growth of narcissism beginning sometime in the early 70s, where people simply said, you know, I don't have to listen to experts because I am to use Richard Hofstetter's wonderful world. I am omnicompetent. You know, I know everything about everything.

And that way I am totally powerful and fully independent. And I don't rely on anyone. And of course, that's a child's view of the world. You know, that is not an adult's view of the world where you recognize that, you know, that the baker provides your bread because the baker knows how to make bread and the person who works in a factory knows how to package the bread and the driver who knows how to drive a truck gets the bread to you. And instead, we're like, no, I know all this stuff. No one is the boss of me. And I think that was the underlying problem that I kept trying to wrestle with in the death of

expertise, which is not so much that people don't trust experts because let's face it. I mean, you know, college professors and egg heads are never popular. They're not your first thought for putting on a, you know, what's for a party. But it was this weird, narcissistic, childlike insistence that it's not just that I don't trust experts, but I am smarter than experts. Like, and I kept wondering, when did that happen? And I'll just end this part by saying, it happened with me. I'm a Russia expert. That was my training 35 years ago.

You know, I started learning Russian and doing all those things and have written many books about Russia and been there many times. And someone basically said to me because I disagreed with them about something. They said, well, you know, Tom, I don't think you really understand Russia.

Let me explain Russia to you. Right. And I'm like, when did people start thinking that was okay? Who does that? And apparently now everybody does it. Yeah, there's a great Richard Feynman quote where he's talking about how hard it is

to really know something. And the work that it goes into truly deeply understand an idea or a concept or a field of study. And when you see these people making sort of glib, glib assumptions or quips or remarks or sweeping sort of generalizations, you know, you're saying, I know it's that true because they couldn't have done the work to possibly have the certainty that they're having. Um, Scott, in the book, I quote, um, the utterly ridiculous human being, Scott Adams, who,

unfortunately, and I was really, I mean, I really like his cartooning and, you know, he's good at cartooning. I mean, his punchlines are funny and the drawings are amusing. But this is also a guy who said, give me an hour with, you know, any subject matter expert and I can become an expert on the thing. Well, so I know Scott a little bit and I've spent some time with him and like you I obviously everyone's familiar with Tilbert that's almost like the extreme end of the spectrum of this where you bait It's almost like you have narcissism and then you combine it with the feedback loop of social media Right, you get a person who's basically become untethered from reality

that I think any thinking person immediately goes like, what is wrong with this guy? And yet the irony is there's a huge percentage or a huge number of people, cumulatively who are not only like not suspicious, they're like, this guy fucking gets it. Yeah, well because again, it's being in the tree house with the cool kids saying, we're all the smart kids,

not those stupid nerds down in the lab. And it's reassuring, right? It's like this guy's very rich and he's famous and he's in the entertainment world. And obviously, he must really know what's what. Part of that too is that we have become obsessive about the idea that if you're good at one thing, you're good at anything.

Yeah. It's like, well, this guy's an award-winning cartoonist. He must know a lot about foreign policy, which is a name and silly. But I mean, you talk about the feedback loop of social media and that's a big part of it, of people saying, wow, I guess I kinda liked the fact that a lot of my Twitter presence is people telling me,

how much I'm wrong I am and how much they disagree. But it really is important to understand some of the limitations here. And I'll give you an example. I kind of surprised I was in Switzerland, done a graduate student who was just finished her dissertation on Russian politics, said, you know, I really want your opinion about this because I, you know, I, I'm curious about the better sources and did I use the right stuff?

And I said, look, I wrote my dissertation 33 years ago. You wrote yours yesterday and on this, you're the new expert. It's okay to turn it over. It's okay to say, look, I have a lot of accumulated knowledge and I can help you with some things. But it's also okay to say, you know, I'm not required to be this, this omnipresent and omniscient 24 hours a day. I, I love the fact that in some environments, I've been in, um, sub years ago, about 12 years ago, I went on a fellowship to the Kennedy School, and I was immediately the dumbest guy in the room, and it was invigorating. The problem is people don't like that feeling anymore.

Everybody has to say, well, you're not smarter than I am. I know all about nuclear weapons. I understand Iranian, you know, centrifuge inspections. You can't talk down to me. And all of that comes from, I mean, I have a pretty healthy ego about my, you know, the things I'm good at, about my writing, about the work I'm done. But it's almost a relief to be able to say,

wow, someone smarter than me is helping me out here. People don't feel that way anymore. They take it because they are narcissistic and childlike about this. Anytime someone says, let me explain something to you, they say, what are you saying I'm stupid? Yeah, I mean, maybe I am a little bit. Yeah, I think this goes back to Socrates that the essence of wisdom is what you don't know. And the so-cratic method is based on what? It's the asking of questions, not the making of statements.

And I think social media in particular prioritizes assertions of fact and opinion compared to questions or uncertainties. And it prioritizes negativity. Of course. Nobody comes on to Twitter or to Facebook to say, hey, I really liked this. And it's funny, you know, because people, they will even zero in on the negativity

and strain out the positivity. You know, every Saturday I get together with my friend Dennis Herring, who's a humble brag, my friend, the Grammy winning music producer. And we sit around and shoot the parries about bad 1970s music while we're listening to old KC K-SIM recordings, old KC K-SIM replays on next

on radio. And about half the time, I'll say, oh, I really remember this song and I really love this song and I, you know, I've found memories of this song. But the minute I say, man, this song is crap, people will zero and say, you're negative about everything. Because it's almost like our brains are wired now on social media only to see the negative comment. Because it's a challenge. No one takes a positive comment as a challenge. No one takes a comment that, hey, I really like, the Alman Brothers as a challenge to say,

oh yeah, well, what about, Marshall Tucker? But if you say, I don't like the Alman Brothers people say, aha, now I have something to fight about. And this is why you're wrong. And this is why you should do this. And I think it's just, you know, Facebook admitted this recently, and it's in the book, in my new book, Facebook admitted our algorithm appeals to a basic human

attraction to division and conflict. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny that you brought up that, you know, some people think that the book is about the failures of expertise because there, there have been failures of expertise, which is precisely what people seize upon to undermine expertise generally. I think about how many, in retrospect, ridiculous or incorrect takes, you're sort of dating

this back to the 70s. I think about what health or diet advice must have been like in the 70s, and then that we wonder like why people don't trust the medical establishment of the FDA. Now, it is problematic, but it's interesting that the failures of expertise have not have made us more likely to accept dubious information from even less credible people. Because they're an excuse, and this is the problem with the failures of expertise. And this is where experts, I think, have to own some of this, because the public has been so rough on them about the failures rather than the successes that experts now don't want to engage with the public, and don't want to own their failures.

Look at the beginning of the pandemic, where Fauci and CDC, they admit and they said, look, we didn't want to cause a run on masks. We screwed up the mask advice. We're owning that, we're sorry. And they're saying, aha, so you admit that you're just a bunch of lying charlatans that we should never listen to about anything.

Right. And that makes experts gunshot to say, if we ever admit a mistake, that means we have that makes experts gunshy to say, if we ever admit a mistake, that means we have to just, like everything else we ever say, becomes irrelevant. I had someone say to me, for example, when I was doing a book talk in person on the death of expertise, and I pointed out how I'd given my own doctor hell

about eggs, right? I said, yeah, you told me not to eat eggs and and he started shrugging, and he said, yeah, we got that wrong. Okay, well, first of all, who figured out that eggs were okay for you? Other doctors, other studies that fact checked, you know, this is called peer review and science, which is a process. But a guy in the audience said, well, I think it's very clear that this shows that doctors don't know anything about heart disease. In other words, I want to drink a bottle

of scotch and eat a cheeseburger for breakfast. And now I can, because I caught you out on this one thing that now invalidates that you don't know anything about anything. And this is really a problem of, again, I keep coming back to this description of childlike, but adults understand that other well-meaning adults will occasionally make mistakes and get things wrong. What children do is say, aha, I caught you, and now I'm gonna dunk on you, and you never, I never have to listen to you again,

because this one time, you were wrong about something. And people extend that even to cases where experts were not wrong. Someone pointed out the other day that when talking about the vaccine, you know, the anti-vaxxers saying, well, this is the same FDA that approved the litamide, the drug that caused birth defects. And of course, the FDA, in fact, the drug that caused birth defects. And of course, the FDA in fact, did not approve the litamide and saved millions of Americans from potentially deadly effects because the FDA said, we looked at this and we don't think it's safe.

And yet people have gotten it into their head because an expert somewhere in Europe failed, all experts failed. Interesting. Yeah. And that this thing that happened over 60 years ago, like, is a meat, you know, if you say, look, you should really trust experts. They say, oh, yeah, well, what about the litamide in the space shuttle? Well, it's funny too because there's this weird kind of double standard where like there's this great graphic.

It was like Joe Rogan, and I know that actually know the owners of this company. So it was extra funny to me, but it was like, Joe Rogan questioning a bunch of pure of all this data, like let's say about vaccines or whatever. And then it was like, meanwhile, Joe Rogan endorsing on an alpha brain product, which has one study with 60 participants that found a minor bit of positive correlation, and that's sufficient. So, I think your point about being childlike, what we see in this, is actually not a rejection of expertise at all, but a cherry picking of expertise that fits what one wants. And then, ironically, holding those experts to the most preposterously loose standards,

I've ever to go back to Scott Adams, that Scott Adams really only credibility is that this guy makes a newspaper cartoon that's been popular and is wealthy because of it. But his predictions are like overwhelmingly incorrect and wrong all the time, objectively so. If this is gonna happen, that doesn't happen If this is gonna happen, that doesn't happen,

this is gonna happen, that doesn't happen. And of course, Gene McArthur in the anti-vax movement, what are your qualifications? Well, I'm beautiful. And I was in playboy and I'm an actress. And I did, she literally said at one point, I went to Google University.

Right, no, and that's what I think is interesting about Scott Adams is like, if he were to be held to the skepticism or scrutiny that the things that are being tossed out were held to, I mean, he would crumble like a house of cards, right? So it's this weird picking and choosing of expertise and then a moving of the goal post or the standards by which one judges the experts and it really all comes back down to, well, here's what I want to do and I'm looking or what I'm afraid to do or not do or whatever it is and how can I pick and choose information that either allows me to do this, absolves me of responsibility or blame, and then therefore I can be whoever I want to be.

So it's this weird not rejection of expertise, but a misuse of expertise, so one does not have to be changed or challenged. And this is why when people say, well, you know, I did my research. I always come back at them and say, no, you didn't do research. You surfed around the internet until you found the thing that agreed with what you wanted to think in the first place. Right. You know, did you do your own peer reviewed study? You went to medical school? No, you googled around and you looked at, you know, healthinfomindbody.com and you found

that first. Even worse than that, you started by saying, I think vaccines are unsafe. So you went and typed in vaccines are unsafe. And of course, it brought up, you know, 100 sludgy websites that will, that are run by, you know, Cooke's and Charlottes,

and we'll tell you the vaccines are unsafe. Well, okay, you found what you were looking for. And then after you've spent all afternoon going down that rabbit hole and watching YouTube videos and looking at Facebook memes, you start walking around and saying, well, you know, I'm very informed on this. I did my research.

A guy asked a question during one of my talks about this where he said, why should I have to listen to these experts when the journals, like the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine are online and I can read them anyway. And I said, and he got very, you know, I mean, I won't say upset, but he was offended. I said, they're not written for you. You don't even know what you're looking at. I said, that's like reading architectural digest thing. You're going to build a house. They're written by experts, for experts, based on foundational knowledge

that all of them already have. They are not there to peruse the back issues. I mean, you know, I was like medical students and researchers spend years trolling through these, trolling, I shouldn't say trolling, trolling through these articles to assemble them so that then they can be judged and tested against each other and then a new paper. This is, again, this is called science. This is how it's done. But again, I had that weird feeling of how did this happen that the ordinary citizen, and when it comes to medical stuff, I'm as ordinary as it gets, but I don't even think that they could just just like say well I'll just go read the Lancet. That'll battle you know and I'll be up to snuff on this stuff.

It is interesting to think that most of the Stokes were financially successful. They were leaders, they were entrepreneurs, they were politicians, they were artists. So there's really nothing in Stoicism that's anti-money or success. I think all the four virtues of the Stoics Courage, Temperance Justice, Wisdom apply well to the idea of investing in money management. And that is why I love today's sponsor.

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Get your free business banking account in 10 minutes at banknovo.com slash dogg. That's bank and OVO.com slash dogg, to sign up for free right now and get a free copy of Novo's small business starter guide banknovo.com slash stoic. I think it's because they know if they claim that they got it from the Lancet, or I think it's like, well, I'll go read the T-leas myself knowing that they can interpret the T-leas however they want to serve whatever agenda or sort of presupposition they already have, right?

It's not like an open-minded, I'm gonna go read the medical journal to learn. It's a, I'm gonna find one out of a thousand articles that possibly doesn't disconfirm what I'm saying, and therefore I have the proof. Or without context, I'll grab that one sentence that is the normal caveat of uncertainty in a scientific article and say, aha, yes.

And again, I take in the book, I take experts to task for this and to say, listen, you're gonna have to, the expert communities need more public intellectuals. They need more people who can bridge the gap from, you know, super detailed knowledge to talking with the public, because a lot of experts, and I had, I talked to many of them in many fields

when I was writing the book. We said, look, I don't like engaging with the public. They're just spoiling for a fight. They don't really want to hear what I have to say. They're there to play Gacha, and to see if, you know, that I can get tripped up. And so I just do my work. A lot of my colleagues in the academic fields say, you know, they just don't even do book

promotion. They're like, look, I wrote my book if you read it, if you don't agree with it, that's your problem. I take a different view. I think public intellectuals, scholars and public intellectuals really need to get out there and to engage the public and take their lumps even when it's unpleasant. Well, I talked about this with Malcolm Gladwell, because he and I both get this idea of being sort of accused sneeringly by academics as being popularizers, as if one, that would be a bad thing. If the idea is good, it should be popularized.

But two, the only reason the role of a popularizer exists is by definition a failure of the creator of the idea to figure out how to communicate it in a way that makes it palatable to people. And so I think you're right. Part of the problem is that experts not only do a bad job communicating their ideas, but also being unaware or uninterested in how misinformation and disinformation spreads don't do a good job thinking about what they're presenting in the conversations they're having and how that can be twisted and abused and used for exactly the opposite purpose. Like you're saying they put in the caveat, not thinking about, okay, how could a person who is deliberately trying to deceive the public takes the

process? How could a person of bad faith use these words? You can't write like that. You can't write articles and books and scientific research and papers saying, now, have I fireproof this against the dumbest or most bad faith interpretation? There is. And I think a lot of experts just say, you know, my colleagues will understand it. And if other people want to crap on it, that's just bad faith. I'm going to take a little bit of a zinger here at Gladwell because there are limits to popularizing.

And I think that is, I think his book on, um, it's the last thing we were on strategic bombing. Yes. The bomber mob. Yeah, it wasn't, there were, there were, there were stuff in it that just was like, he was out over his skis. And I appreciated what he did, but, you know, that is a case of sometimes you're trying to explain complex stuff. And I think some, the book on book on something like strategic bombing needs to be written by an expert on strategic bombing who has glad wells touch for communication. I think it can go the other way too to say, look, I'm a popularizer. Tell me about a complex subject and I will break it down for the average person. That doesn't work either because then you don't have the foundational knowledge to do it. I'm normally, you normally, I liked a lot of the earlier stuff

that Gladwell wrote, but of course, I've been teaching in a war college for 26 years. And so when I read the strategic bombing thing, I might, oh, maybe this is a case where, you know, you kind of don't go in that direction. Well, I would agree. You need to know. You need, the popularizer needs to have rigor and basis.

And then also the academic needs to understand that you can't, your ideas are, can't just be in a language that is read by 28 people. Right. I go after the experts for this and say, you know, the experts, what experts love to do is talk to other experts. Because then they can just talk in that kind of abby w language of jargon and shorthand that, you know, we all love so much. I even fall into it sometimes when I'm talking,

you know, I'm, or listening to my military colleagues talk and it's all full of acronyms and J-Flapp and BluPloop and Ab-Dib and, you know, all of a sudden it's like, even I'm like, wait, what were we talking about again? Yes. Because that ends up obscuring a lot. But I think there is this problem that expert failures, the experts don't want to have a reason to discussion about their failures because the public is completely irrational about it in terms of, again, this bad faith interpretation.

And things like, well, I don't trust big pharma. I hear that all the time. I don't trust big pharma. Really, the American public takes 300,000. This was the best guest I could make, work with my research assistant. Something like 300,000 over the counter drugs every day. Different, different, different, stuff that was all prescription stuff years ago. And so I don't try, you know, that's all just, you know, I would never take this vaccine or prescription. I'll just take this over the counter thing that I don't realize was in fact,

an incredibly expensive prescription 20 years ago. And it's just this constant drum beat of bad faith that is meant to say, I am empowered and you're not the boss of me. And you can understand why experts just say, you know, I don't want to have a conversation about this because it's not a conversation. And there's no upside in it for us. No, I think that's right. It's like, look, it's a battle for ideas. And if only the crazy people are willing to go to war over, over an idea, they end up winning because they care the most.

I think that's really dangerous. And then to go to our point about sort of picking and choosing, that is the irony of, again, the sort of rejection of science or medicine or this political, it's like, I'm not gonna take the vaccine. I don't trust it even though my doctor is telling me to take it. But as soon as I get sick, I'm willing to hand my life over to the medical

establishment. And I'm going to be really upset if they don't save my life. So it's insane. I think I have a moment in the book where I say something like, it's easy to be skeptical of medical advice until you have a fever of 104. And they're all of a sudden it's like, okay, you know, use all your, you know, use all your training and art to save me. And again, we do it because it's empowering. I think one thing that is different in the modern era that social media and maybe cable television, I mean, there's a lot of different possibilities for this. People didn't used to be able to derive a lot of psychic income from being naysayers about expertise.

You know, it was like, you would go to your doctor and the doctor says, well, I'm gonna have to, you know, sire like off or whatever, take your, you know, gallbladder out. And if you were really concerned about that, you said, well, I'd like a second opinion. I'd like to talk to another doctor. Now, but of course, there was nothing in it for you.

Other, in fact, it took a more time. You had to make another appointment. You had to go through this. Now you can just go home or you can pull out your phone and say, hey, get a load of this quack telling me he's got to take my gallbladder out. And suddenly there's all this energizing psychic income that comes from people saying, don't want anybody to push you around.

Don't want them to tell you what to do. You know, be your own man. And you know, in the end, you still have a doctor standing there saying, I have to take your gallbladder out or you're going to be very sick. And I think that ability to generate psychic income and suddenly feel important also is a way of dealing with news you don't like. You know, you're overweight, you're diabetic, you're not getting enough exercise. You know, you can go and say, well,

here's a hundred other people now who will tell me that you're wrong. And it's totally okay for me to smoke, you know, order, you know, to drink a box of wine for breakfast or something. Because we've just become kind of spoiled that way. We don't think of ourselves as having control. And it's when you don't think of yourself having control, you look for scapegoats. When you talk to me, you talk about this, I think it was an Atlantic piece, but you talked about, you've been talking about childlike, and I think

some people, some people sort of instinctively feel like, oh, this is picking on people who are not very bright or who are blaming the victim. Yeah, and there is a degree of that, I guess. But what I really like is your piece about serious people versus un-serious people. And what's ironic is, like, basically, if I remember the argument correctly, that a lot of what we're talking about is just not serious.

This isn't stuff that the stakes are very high. That's not what it's saying. But these people, it's not even bad faith. This is not what a serious person would say. This isn't how they would comport themselves. And it strikes me that people just plain sort of don't know how to argue, don't know how to act, and they just don't know how to be an adult person in the world.

Yeah, and let me add, by the way, for anybody listening that doesn't know me or hasn't followed me on social media, I am in many ways a completely unserious person in a lot of parts of my life. I mean, I'm a 60 year old guy who has long discussions with other people on Twitter about the best weapon in Fallout 4 and whether it's a sniper, plasma rifle or a cryogenic grenade because I play, I'm 60 years old and I play video games. Life can be full of playful goofy moments. I mean, everyone knows who my cat is. Everybody knows that I am completely ridiculous about my cat.

But that's different than knowing when to put all that aside and say, now look, we have to have a serious discussion about the alternatives in Afghanistan. We have to have a serious discussion about mandating vaccines or public health regulations. And I think we've kind of lost the adulting ability to kind of put down your game console or set your bloody marry to the side and to say, look, you know, as you say, how does a serious person who believes that things matter? Would talk about this. And unfortunately, in addition to the national motto of, you're not the boss of me, one of the corollaries of that is law, whatever.

You know, we've just become a, we've become a society where we think, well, nothing really has consequences and nothing really matters. And, you know, every day is just like every other day. And, you know, and this is actually, I think, when you look back, for example, at the 2016 election, there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump simply because they thought it would be hilarious that I just wanna see what happens. I just wanna see what happens.

Because what could go wrong if the chief executive of the United States and the guy holding the nuclear codes to enough firepower to destroy the entire Northern hemisphere, you know, what could go wrong? It'll be funny. It'll be a laugh riot. It'll be interesting. It'll be like reality TV. And you know, we just didn't use to vote that way.

I mean, we didn't used to be the kind of country that just says, you know, let's just see what happens for shits and giggles. Well, I've got a lot of pushback. I mean, Neil Postman wrote about this 35 years ago when he wrote, amusing ourselves to death, where he said, you know, how do we take up arms against the sea of troubles when everything dissolves into giggles? I've gotten in trouble with my audience about this because I've pushed back on one of the things that really gets me, and I know it's supposed to be still

a cabaret, but people will say something like, and they've said this since the beginning of COVID, they said something like, why are we so concerned about a virus with a 1%, or a 2%, or a 0.1% fatality rate, right? Like this is the sort of the law, whatever response. And why I have pushed back on that and made a big deal out of it is because I'm taking it seriously,

right? Let's actually, not the virus, let's just take that comment seriously, right? What that comment is is effectively saying, I'm cool with somewhere between six million and a million Americans dying, right? If you're saying a 99% or whatever percentage you choose, if you're saying, why do we care about a thing

that has a low percentage rate? Well, let's just take a remark seriously and do the math on what that means, right? And so where I think it's problematic and why people are sort of not being serious is, if your remarks is taken seriously, the implications are monstrous. You are saying something like,

and Holocaust comparisons are always fraught. But you're saying, like, not that many people died in the Holocaust. Why are we making such a big deal out of this, right? You're affected. You're being, you're being George C. Scott and Dr. Strangelove. Yeah. I was surprised, you know, 10, 20 million dead tops. I'm not saying we won't get our hairmust. Right. You know, I mean, it's horrible. It's a name. That's an inane thing to say. Well, you know, 5 million people die. I won't be one of them.

You know, shit happens. That's the way it goes. No, it's so much worse than a name, though. It's monstrous. I mean, like it's monstrous. Yeah, it really is. And, you know, think of how selectively we are serious because I don't know what your audiences' feelings on this are.

But we are having this, you know, gut-wrenching debate about Afghanistan. Now, over the course of 20 years, 2600 Americans have died. And, you know, that's any American service person lays down their life. You know, this is the saddest thing in the world, right? I mean, this is someone who died for their country and in the service of their nation. The people you're talking to don't seem to be equal. And I'm sure there are many of these people who say this is an outrage. Afghanistan was a crime. We were lied to. This is horrible. This was preventable. 2600 people died. You know, in other words, you know, about 130 people died over the every year for the course of 20 years. 600,000 deaths in 18 months

doesn't seem to move the same needle, including the fact that probably about 300 or 400,000 of those were completely preventable. A disaster, a taking of human life among fellow American citizens that dwarfs the total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and World War II and World War I and Korea all put together. But because it would be inconvenient and affect your life and make it so that you can't go to a restaurant or that you have to cancel a concert or you couldn't fly to Orlando, people adopt, as you say, this kind of monstrously loose kind of pose to say, well, you know,

I need to go to Orlando anyway and if some people die, some people die. I mean, it is remarkably selfish and silly. And it shows the hypocrisy of it that the same people who would be outraged over a fraction of those deaths when it doesn't involve them because then the outrage is easy. Decide to shelve that outrage

because it would affect their life in some way. Yeah, and that's a definition of unsuriusness. I live an active life, take my walk or my run in the morning, I sit in right in my office, and then I come home, I jump in the pool with the kids, we take an evening walk or an evening bike ride, I work out in the evenings as well. I'm always working out and that's why I was so excited to discover today's sponsor, 10,000. Actually, I didn't even discover them.

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Not the number.cc. Not. go to 10,000.cc, that's 10,000 spelled out, not the number, dot cc, not dot com, 10,000, dot cc and enter code stoke to receive 15% off your purchase. That's 10,000, dot cc, enter code stoke. Right. No, I would argue like a good litmus test for seriousness is, what is the actual, like, let's follow what you're saying. Let's extend out, track out what you're saying, on what that would actually mean in the real world. You know, cons moral imperative of like,

what would it look like if everyone acted this way, right? And I think a serious person thinks about the consequences of their beliefs, of their actions, of an idea throughout society, or an unserious person, again, thinks this is all happening on the internet, or it remains in the YouTube, like, you know, in the YouTube comments section, as opposed to being a small drip in a tidal wave of misinformation, or, you know, bad bad thinking or whatever it is, these things have consequences and a serious person takes their role, even if we all have a minuscule role in the Republic or in the human species.

Obviously, each of our individual actions are relatively minor, but the core of stoicism is like, well, what I control is me and what I do and what I believe and what I think. And so I'm going to take that very seriously. I think it was Solja Nitsen who said, you know, let evil come in the world, but not through me, right? And I think people have lost the ability, a good chunk of the people have lost the ability to comprehend that line of thinking at all. In fact, they think the exact opposite.

Well, but that's the problem of narcissism that you don't think of other people as people. You think about what sort of amuses you in the immediate moment. You don't see yourself, I mean, we really, in addition to narcissism, we are really captured by presentism where you don't see yourself as part of a continuity with things that came before you, and you know, care about what's gonna come after you.

Right. You know, it's like we're all like the guy in Memento in the movie Memento, where we get up every morning and we start all over again with new memories. And we don't really care about it that much, because anything that would inconvenience us is therefore morally wrong in some way, because we then reverse engineer it to why this thing that I don't like is wrong in some larger way. And we're not resilient about these things enough to say, it's gonna inconvenience me to wear a mask or,

you know, I got to go get a vaccine because, you know, even though I got to take time out of my day and I don't want to get vaccinated and it's pain in the ass, we then reverse engineer all of that to why no one should ever have to do that. Right. Well, I think I think two examples of this unsuriusness that I'd love to take on. So one, there's a barbershop across the street from from my office and my bookstore here in Texas. And they interviewed him. He was not vaccinated. You know, there's people.

I can't think of a job you'd need. You'd want to be vaccinated more than a barbershop, right? A small windowless room with people coming in all day that you're right next to. And he said something like, well, I can't afford to miss work from a negative reaction to the vaccine, which is a reality of our system that there's not enough slack in people's lives that they could afford to miss or day or two of work. But it's also a fundamentally illogical and unserious thing to say, because how much work can you

afford to miss when you're sick with COVID or you're on a ventilator or you're dead, right? And so there's this thing where, because I think this is more on the left, but people are, you immediately feel sympathy for the remark because the circumstances are largely true, but the statement is on itself preposterous and illogical, and that's not even getting into the elements of it that are selfish and a sort of abdication

of one's responsibility to other people. But you know, one thing I think of when people say that, and there are people who literally, you know, like I can't, you know, afford to miss a day of work. Okay. Right. You know, but you, first of all, you can't afford to die of COVID either. You can't afford to die of COVID, but also it is by no means, I mean, to say, you know, that again is looking for an excuse. I don't want to do this. So I'm going to assume that a, you know, drop me into bed reaction, which is not what most people experience anyway is going to be the thing that happens to me. And therefore, that's my reason. I'm

going to, you know, worst case it to say this will happen to me. But here's a better test of the of this kind of hypocrisy because I've known people like this in my life say, I can't do this thing because, you know, work. I have two tickets to the Super Bowl. You'll have to take two days off of work. Do you want them? Whoa, wait a minute. All of a sudden, you know, that missing a couple of days of work. Jeez, I don't know, you know, I mean, it's amazing how we will find the time to do the things that we want to do. When people say to me, for example, how can I be a better citizen? How do I deal with this death of expertise thing since you're criticizing so many of us say, read a paper, read a newspaper, just one a day.

They say, they will literally say, I don't have time for that. And I say, you have time to spend hours falling down the YouTube rabbit hole or looking at stupid tick tocks or, you know, a million other things in your day. What you mean is this would not be a priority among all the other things you want to do. And that inability to prioritize, again, one of the things that makes an adult an adult is the ability to set priorities even when they are unpleasant, you know, is a fundamentally un-serious thing. So I mean, I take it as a real thing that, you know, there are people who say, look, I work two jobs, I have two small kids, you know, I can't get away to get vaccinated, I work two jobs, I have two small kids.

You know, I can't get away to get vaccinated, I can't get away to vote, I can't get away to register to vote, I think that a good society should say, okay, you know what, we're gonna reach out and help you somehow. But I think a lot of this is just cherry picking and excuse making to say, you know, I just don't wanna do it. And interestingly enough, when you see in places that was reading a piece in the New York Times the other day, about younger people saying,

oh, I'm too busy, I didn't want to do it, I can't get vaccinated, I'm not sure. And then a mandate went through. You know, a lot of New York City restaurants and other places saying, well, we're just not going to serve you. And they went, okay, I guess I have time. I mean, it's amazing how fat this evaporates when you say, I'm going to take it out of the to serve you. And they went, oh, OK, I guess I have time. I mean, it's amazing how fast this evaporates when you say, I'm going to take it out of the realm of choice. And people say, OK, fine, I'm going to do it. I have the time. And I just think it's not an adult conversation.

So what do you do? How does this society function? It struck me as sort of the problem of our time. And I think this goes to the new book, My Own Wars Denemy or Our Own Wars Denemy. Because it's not that it's not even even the majority of people think this way. I mean, the numbers, I think you could decide to look at it two ways, right? It's that there's a lot of people that are feeling this way or that they're a minority

to some degree. But how does a society continue to function when a significant chunk, whether it's 15 or 40% of the population, just sort of rejects out of hand the idea that we owe an obligation to the common good or that each other. Yeah. Yeah. Or that facts matter. Like what do you do when a significant chunk of the population is just decided, we're obstinate, we only care about dunking on the other people, we don't actually have any of our own ideas, but we're very clear that we would like to stop you from doing whatever it is that you think society should be doing.

Yeah, and, you know, on top of it, it's a sliding scale, right? I mean, it's not a yes or no thing that there are people who are civic and good, and then there are people who are un-sivic and think facts don't matter and are just in it for the laughs. There's also just a kind of, there are a lot of good people who think facts matter, who nonetheless say, eh, voting, whatever, I'll get to it. You know. And in the most, I think the most dangerous election of modern American history, which was 2020. And in the new book, I tell people stop catastrophizing elections, stop with the existential,

oh my god, this is it. I tell a story about my dad and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and my dad who was very partisan right-wing guy. Nonetheless, even my dad was able to say, you know what, they're both good guys. They're good men. We're going to be fine no matter how this works out. But in 2020, I didn't have that feeling. I said, you know, this guy is going to upend democracy and do everything he can to destroy

the Constitution and pull the pillars of the temple down if he doesn't get his way. And even in that election, only 66% of us voted and only about half of the people under 30 voted. That's abysmal. That's embarrassing. That's to a superpower, the exemplar of democracy to the rest of the world.

That is shameful. And so, that's not all composed of people saying, I'm an anti-vax, anti-fact, you know, nut case. That's just a lot of people who went and can't be bothered. I can't be bothered. And at the end of our own worst enemy, the, I present some scenarios, but the one that worries me the most

is the one that I think is already happening, which is kind of a mildly technocratic semi-democracy where most of us just say, you know what? As long as the wife is on and there's enough cable channels and the beer's cold, whatever. And that's how you lose a democracy. It doesn't happen with like a, you know, a second Russian revolution or a civil war, the French Revolution or any of that.

It just happens because we just decide not to care about it anymore. And that really worries me. Yeah, is it a collapse of meaning? Is it a collapse in the belief in our own agency? Is it, you know, is it that one doesn't think that an individual can make a difference? Or is it that one just is too busy and can't be bothered and doesn't really think about it? To go from the death of expertise to our own worst enemy, I actually argue that it's a side effect of prosperity and peace and affluence.

I mean, we just don't, there's a great quote from a British writer who said recently, said, last year, he said, the problem with modernity is not that it's too hard, but that it's too easy. And, you know, we don't, we don't, we're not faced with an alternative model like the Soviet Union, where we could see every day what it looks like if we lose, if we lose our democracy. We're not faced with the Great Depression or even the ongoing misery of the 1970s. Even though you hear people saying, now, oh, the worst time's ever, and you know, look at housing prices in San Francisco, how can anybody call this a democracy, you know?

And I think it's just we've got used to a very high standard of living. And we think, you know what, good enough is good enough. And at some point, when things slide backwards, and you suddenly realize that you don't have the same influence over your government that you might have had 20 years ago, it's too late. I keep saying that people are going to end up ruling you not by takeover, but by default, because you just decided not to do it. You just said, look, make sure that I'm not inconvenienced and bothered too much and I'll keep sending you to Washington.

I mean, you really see this in the incredibly cynical behavior, particularly of the Republicans. I mean, the Republicans really elevated this to an art form of, look, I'll make you feel good about all of your choices and all of your biases and all of your bigotry. Just keep sending me to Washington because I like living in Washington and you like it when I say inflammatory things and let's just keep this deal going for a while. And that's not government.

That's just a game of musical chairs that the citizens decide to keep playing because it's better than actually going back to work and thinking hard about things that required difficult decisions. Yeah, it's almost with the politicians too, it's this idea that this is pretend it doesn't really matter.

There was kind of a brief moment like on January 6th, and maybe it continues all the way to January 8th before we revert back to the old thing. You didn't even continue to the next morning of January 7th for, I mean, yeah, I know, I'm sorry, I didn't mean interrupt, but I know where you're going about this for like these first few hours after the insurrection, even the most, even Lindsey Graham, one of the most unserious people there is is saying, you know, I'm off this train, we've got to

start thinking about these things real. And by the next day, it's like, yeah, I don't know what I was saying. Everything's fine. Yeah, there was a Republican congressman that I know that texted me on January 6th, as he was locked in his office, I texted him and said, hey, are you okay? And he said, oh my god, this is worse than you could possibly

imagine, you were right about everything. This is literally what he said to me. I've this is worse than you could possibly imagine. You were right about everything. This is literally what he said to be. I've been remembered for the rest of my life. And then, you know, a few days later, he voted against impeachment, right? Like, you're, you're just like, oh, okay, this is, if this doesn't wake one up, I'm not sure anything really can't, like if a pandemic can't do it, how can anything wake some of these people up from the insane rabbit hole they've gotten themselves down into? But it did, and they've painted themselves in the corner.

I think it did wake them up, but they said, hmm, okay, so this is, I mean, God, Ryan, what a great email to get from a congressman. You were right about everything You know you you don't get many of those in your life. Yeah, of course a couple of days later whoever this is is thinking Now if I say this and do the principal thing I have to go home right I Can't live in the Emerald City anymore. I don't get to you know, I don't get to eat it You know, I don't know it in my day. It was law-coleing. You know, I don't get to eat you know, I don't get to eat it, you know, I don't know, in my day, it was low-colonial. I don't get to eat it to swishy restaurants.

I don't get to, you know, wear the cool pin. I don't get to go be in Congress. I mean, one thing I respected about, and Adam Kinzinger, when all this happened, he said, look, if I get defeated because of this, I'll go do something else. Yes. You know, like I can do something else, but you have a lot of this, I'll go do something else. Yes. You know, like I can do something else, but you have a lot

of people, I always say that it's that I think that the foundational motto of everything at least to panic says always boils down to, I'm not going back to upstate New York. Like that's that's that's her overriding government philosophy. Right. I didn't go to Harvard so that I can end up living in upstate New York and you people,, you little people are gonna keep sending me here so that I can keep pumping you up and pissing you off. And you'll, you know, this rage will keep me in office. You know, but these are fundamentally unseries people. I'm like, Josh Holly.

This is, this man is the embodiment of unseriousness, but that's what makes him dangerous. Because people that are that cynical will say anything to keep living in in Oz. JD Vance. I mean, look, JD Vance, whoever once said finally, a serious person, talking to his own community, thinking about the hard things, JD Vance has become a complete clown because he wants to go live in the Emerald City.

You know, Seneca talks about how we waste our most valuable resource, which is time, right? I think as far as an entrepreneur, someone runs a company, where do you find yourself wasting the most amount of time? It's in hiring people. Not only is hiring people a pain and not only does it take a lot of time, but if you hire the wrong person, oh man, it is going to cost you so much more time. And that's why when we hire people here at Daily Steak or when I'm looking for researches or any kind of job, we always post on LinkedIn jobs. You can focus on candidates with the skills and experience you need and that they have. You screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people and then use the simple tools on LinkedIn

jobs to quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. LinkedIn jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster, more than 40 million jobs seekers visited LinkedIn in the last week. So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash doughock that's LinkedIn.com slash dough. So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash. That's LinkedIn.com slash.com to post your job for free, terms and conditions apply. What is that though?

It's so interesting. I was talking to a friend about this. I was like, okay, let's say you make millions of dollars, you're famous, you have an enormous platform. What is it that you think you can do in Washington that is worth the debasement that you don't have access to now? I mean, this is one of the things I said to the Congressman

I was telling you about as he was sort of hemming and hawing sort of, you know, not wanting to cut his own political throat. I was like, you know, it's worth pointing out here because you've told me many times, you hate your job. Like, you don't like it. So why would you debase yourself to keep it if you don't actually like it? To me, that's the most inexplicable thing about the cowardice. Is it's not cowardice or it's not even sort of like opportunism for the aim of doing X, Y, or Z. There's a moment in, I was just reading about theater Roosevelt's life where he

sort of sticks with the Republican Party when he probably should have walked away and ends up, he wouldn't have been president had he do you, he done it, there are reasons to do it. But it's, it's, the people they hate their job, you know, like what is it that you are holding your fire for? I just don't understand. I think, I, and you know, this is my guess about a lot of people. It is this terror of simply being an ordinary person.

You know, I mean, I look at Josh Holley and you can practically see him saying, look, I didn't go to Stanford and Harvard so that I could come back to Missouri and move to the city. And I was sitting out a shingle and probate wills. I was slated for great things. You know, at least the fanick. I didn't go to preps school and Harvard so that I could, you know, be a city counselor

in Potstam. I'm more important than that. I may hate my job, but I'm at the center of the universe. When I was in my 20s, there was a bank in Washington, when I was working in DC, there was a bank then called Riggs Bank.

They had the perfect ad for people who lived in DC. Their ad used to say Riggs Bank, the most important bank in the most important city in the world. And it was really meant to appeal to people who live in DC to say, where you live is the center of the universe. And this bank is the only bank for you. And I think that a lot of these folks, but they may say, look, I hate my job, but I'm a senator and people open doors for me. and I get picked up and dropped off and I have an aid that I can yell at and tell them to go get me a sandwich and chew

them out if there's not enough mayonnaise. And unfortunately, I have to deal with my constituents. And that actually leads to this very cynical behavior of saying the way I don't have to deal with my constituents is just feed the primary audience, the base that will always keep me in every year, just feed them the worst kind of bullshit, you know, treat them like the robes they are and tell them to keep sending me back to Washington. It's a fundamentally disrespectful relationship between dishonest and manipulative political

entrepreneurs and a public that doesn't really want to think about hard stuff, that thinks that slogans and owning the limbs and getting over on the other guy is the same thing as governing because they don't really care about it because there are no real consequences. I would be curious to talk, I've seen it happen and I've seen the denial that sets in. But the people who five years ago said, you know what, Donald Trump's going to take care of us. This is really going to change things. Is there anybody in the Ohio River Valley who thinks that somehow things got better? But you can't admit you've been conned.

That's the hardest thing. You can't admit you've been conned. That's that's that's I keep saying look my taxes. You know, I'm not a particularly wealthy person, but I'm a, you know, I have a I do a lot of speaking and writing and stuff like that. So I said, Donald Trump build a tax code that worked for me. Right. So he somehow helped me out. What did you get out of selling out the country? And they're like, well, I made you mad for a while. That's pretty much it.

That's okay, but you also lowered my taxes. And it's all over. And what's left now, what's left that we can work on together now? And the answer is pretty much nothing. And I don't know how to return to that without some sense. I wrote a piece a while back saying, you know, the first step to civic peace here is going to be the people are going to have to admit

they were wrong. And that they work on because, you know, that, and that didn't happen. And that's why here we are eight months into the Biden administration, with people still trying to overturn the Arizona vote and invalidate ballots in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Georgia. Because if you can't just say, this thing was a con, then you're going to go to extreme links, including violence and all these crazy legal challenges, rather than just accept as adults and stoic adults might say, you know, I made a bad call here. Well, this is the fundamental corner that DeSantis and Abbott, I live in Texas, have backed themselves, backed themselves into, which is by not taking the thing seriously,

they can't take it seriously now or else they feel they're admitting guilt or blame. And so they have to escalate the stupidity, the unsuriusness over and over and over again. And I think again, I see Abbott as a fundamentally unserious person. You're like, what are you even doing this for? You're fundamentally unelectable as the president of the United States. So what are you even doing it for?

Like what are you even getting out of it? That's what I find to be so psychologically fascinating. I think, I think with some of these guys, the inability to confront cognitive dissonance is, you know, just rules them completely. The idea that you would just, you know, be, that you would do a George Wallace, right, and say, hey, I was a racist in segregationist for a lot of years, and I really screwed that up, and I was wrong,

and I'm, you know, asked for forgiveness, and then actually Wallace becomes governor again, right? But I think the other part of it is, they, again, if you're governor of Texas, you like being governor of Texas. And they have drawn a lesson from watching five years of Donald Trump, which is you can power through anything. Shailess Nessu. You do deserve it. Yes.

And if you don't admit you're wrong, then people will take that in itself as a sign of strength. I mean, you know, Texas and Florida are going to stack bodies to the rafters in morgues, which is already happening. But you know, there are going to be people who say, that's my guy. He didn't back down because backing down or admitting nuance or possibly admitting a mistake is simply, you know, is the work, in American life now, that's become the worst of all possible things.

And that just for the sake of honesty, you know, I'm sure there are people listening saying, well, you know, Tom, if you ever had to do it and in the death of expertise, I talk about it very distinctly. I made a huge mistake thinking that Vladimir Putin 20 years ago, and he came to power, I talk about it very distinctly. I made a huge mistake thinking that Vladimir Putin 20 years ago when he came to power, I said, I don't, this might not be so bad. I mean, maybe he's not as bad as he looks. And I kind of staked out a position for a few years where I said, give me a guy, you know, let's see what happens. You know, he seems

to be just kind of a bureaucrat. And I finally just had to kind of one day stand up and say, look, I made a call. It was based on the evidence I had at the time. And I was wrong. And for me to get that wrong in my profession, that's not trivial. That's not a mere footnoting error. That's me making a series or error of judgment. And it's liberating to be able to do that.

Nobody's gonna be right all the time, but this is no longer what American life is about. American life now is, I was wrong. Fine, I'll show you how wrong I am. I'll quadruple down. Right. And it doesn't, and it just doesn't matter because again, that's what children do. Adults own things and think about them and do better. Children say, I'm never going to admit I was wrong. I'm never gonna admit I was wrong, I'm not gonna admit I cheated, I'm not gonna admit I made the wrong move, and if you keep pushing me about it, I'm gonna throw my soda all over the board

and block the game. No, it's interesting, because we tend to, oh, this person's a psychopath, or this person's a sociopath, I'd argue that, you know, those things, a sociopath is usually aware that they're not having the emotion. I think you're sort of pointing that it's childlike is really important because it's actually, it's actually that, right? It's not like this calculating sort of weighing of the,

it's the sort of emotional instinctual of, well, almost like an honor culture thing. Well, I can't admit this. So this is the only option available to me, especially if I want to keep being governor. Yes. And in the case of Ron DeSantis, where he has practically been anointed, I mean, we've seen this in his emails with Fox News, right? Fox is like, you're our guy. We think you're going to save the party from Trump. You know, people in the conservative blogosphere and media world are saying, okay,

DeSantis is the punitive non-Trump front runner. And he's like, okay, and that's that, you know, if you're that thirsty and insecure, you say admitting that I'm wrong about anything is the end of that ride. That means that I've, that I have to get off this marry and go around and I can't get back on. When in fact, in an earlier time, we respected politicians who kind of, you know, had second thoughts or who were nuanced or were willing to debate things without, you know, this, again, this kind of childlike I am always right. And if I'm not right, this game sucks approach. But these are unsurius politicians being put in power by unsurius people who are all about tribal winning. And I, you know, we're picking a lot on the right here. But there's a lot of that going on, on the left as well. I mean, you know, when there are people saying, well, I'm going to vote for Rashida Tleib

because she drops F-bombs and, you know, she makes me feel good about, you know, about being a partisan warrior. That's not serious. That's not a serious, this is not a serious person in politics. And there are plenty of un-serious politicians. The only difference right now, I think, is that And there are plenty of unserious politicians. The only difference right now I think is that the Republicans are both unserious and dangerous at the same time.

Yeah, well, it's unseriousness is not limited to one movement. No, definitely not. Although it is interesting, if you want to talk about sort of childlike traits, what aboutism is the ultimate childlike trait? I've told people, I was like, if I was in an argument,

if I was in an argument with my wife, she was mad at me about something. And I was spot, like, trade, I tell people, I was like, if I was in an argument, if I was in an argument with my wife, she was mad at me about something. And I was spot, like the idea that she would just accept me pointing out things that she's done wrong as if they cancel each other out. That's just not how adult life works. And so the fact that there are unserious politicians sort of making sort of overt power grabs and constitutional and democratic threats

just is not canceled out by the fact that, there's a first term congresswoman from this state or that state who's also crazy. You know, it's a problem, but they don't cancel each other out. You know, when I, when I am first time in my life, I voted straight democratic ticket because I just feel like the

Republicans would become a dangerous... I mean, for people that don't know me, I mean, I was a Republican, I worked for a Republican Senator in the 90s for John Heinz in Pennsylvania. And so for me to just kind of vote a Democratic ticket was difficult. And a lot of times the dunk culture of social media is I would then criticize... I think it's an American right to criticize the people you voted for. Sure.

I'm not a teen guy. I mean, I think, you know, we are better when we criticize our own. And yet people would say to me, well, you voted for this. This was your choice. And I'm like, yes. And I would again, you know, saying that I think Joe Biden has done a poor job with the pull out plan for Afghanistan does not mean that therefore it was okay that Donald Trump tried to destroy the Constitution.

You know, and again, it's just a child like reasoning of like, you know, he hit me or he also does that. Well, I stole a car, you know, well, you know, but I knew a, that, you know, hit his girlfriend once. Well, that, okay, but, and that's terrible. And thank you for pointing it out. But you're still under arrest for Grand Theft. Right. You get pulled over speeding. The cop doesn't care when you say, but other people were also going fast. Right. Right. What about the guy in the red car that was ahead of me? You know what cop's always say to that? I, I didn't catch him. I caught you. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's a fun. It's a, and Democrats just just a kind of, yeah, T's not that fun. But Democrats will obviously, well, how come we have to be the one held to rules? Well, my answer is, if you want to be the adult governing party, then part of being the adult governing party is sucking that up and accepting that your opponents live by a double standard, but that you will not, that you will hold yourself to a consistent standard rather than play the what aboutism game. And it does not help when when you have people on the left saying, well, the Republicans did all these terrible things. How come I have to be the

good one? Because you want to be the governing party. That's why. Yes, people will say that, well, what about Andrew Cuomo? And it's like, well, I don't give it, I don't live in New York, number one. And number two, I don't give a shit if he sucks, and he did horrible things.

Like, what do I want to keep him around for? You know, it's not that kind of reasonable. Reasonable adult change in our mind. I mean, I remember saying about Cuomo, you know, it's nice to see a non-sociopath dealing with the pandemic because of course Trump was on television talking about, you know, sticking bleach up your nose and swallowing, you know, black lights and whatever. And you know, Cuomo was saying, here's what we're doing today. This is think, no, when it came out that Cuomo covered up a lot of deaths and tried to kick

a killer over it and turned out to be a serial sexual harasser, I said, this is new information. He should resign. I think that's also the sign of a reasonable adult say, okay, new information. This guy resigned, but that does not mean that therefore I hope Ron DeSantis becomes president. guy resign, but that does not mean that, therefore, I hope, Rondis Santos becomes president. Right. Well, I had two different issues. I had Mike Duncan on who brought this great book, The Storm Before the Storm, one of my favorite sort of history books.

It sort of explains where we are now through the lens of Rome. It's a great book. And he was saying, look, the other thing is like, when you have sort of this faction, like when we're sort're being cut up into these factions, he's like, really, all you can do is police your own side of the street, because that's where you have sweat. And so the what about is something,

it's actually, it's not just, oh, this bad person is trying to excuse their bad stuff because what is the other party doing. But it's also like, actually, you have to be stricter about norms, about ethics, about how you hold people to account inside your own party. If you want to have any credibility or sway when you say it matters that my opponent is doing X, Y, or Z. And so plus it's just how can you look yourself in the mirror if you don't hold your, like, it's not just, oh, we have to be the responsible party. Yes, because you are a responsible person.

That's what it means. And consistency is its own reward. I mean, it is not, you know, to say, well, I need to cut a break for my guy because he's my guy. Well, then all you've done is set up to cut a break for my guy because he's my guy, well, then all you've done is set up the precondition for the next time when someone says, well, I'm going to cut a break for my guy because he's my guy and you're not going to like it. You lose the ability to hold anyone to account if you don't hold yourself to account. That's right. And I think that is, you know, the really, one of the ways that people, you know, again, that one of the fuselains I used to take from people on the left, they'd say,

I'd say, look, here, as a former Republican and a never-trumper, here is my advice about how to beat my old party. And they'd say, don't tell us what to do. Go fix your own party. And I'm like, you know, that's, that's not, I mean, I am now part of your coalition and I am trying to help you understand the battle plan that people on my side used to use and just turtling up and saying, well, I just want to do what I want to do. That's not a serious response.

That's not a serious approach to winning these battles and to doing it in a way that you want to be able to live with down the line. And a lot of times the answer was, well, we don't need your advice. We're going to fight dirty and do nasty things, just like you guys did. And I'm like, the reason we're here now is because my side made those excuses for itself. And you're going to end up in the same place sooner than you want to be. So, I think so far, I'm encouraged. I mean, when Joe Biden won the nomination, to me, there was a huge, I took a huge sigh of relief because I said, this is a lot, this is millions of people saying, no, no, this isn't a joke. You know, this isn't just a lot. We really do need to nominate somebody who can actually win this election, has experience

governing. If someone we've known, you know, known quantity, someone we've seen in public life before, but I'm just not sure how long that's going to hold out. I mean, we're facing one of the greatest crises of government since the Civil War. And once again, in a very unserious way, we're all bickering about, you know, Democrats are all bickering about the infrastructure bill and then going on August recess.

That feels fundamentally unserious to me. But I think it goes back to your point earlier about people saying, eh, how bad can it be, you know? Really bad. It can be real. It can be a better and, you know, how much, how bad can it really be now? And yeah, the answer is really bad. It can be real better. And you know, how much how bad can it really be now? And yeah, the answer is really bad.

Yeah. And it really really I mean, it could be worse, but it's hard to imagine it being worse. Well, and things could get worse. And then that's not the time to suddenly become serious. Yeah, you know, And then that's not the time to suddenly become serious. Yeah. You know, when you're at the gates of Leningrad, or the tank traps of Moscow, you don't say, hey, you know, maybe you should have taken these guys a little more seriously in 1939. I mean, there are, you know, the sense that we can just fix it

all tomorrow is, again, that kind of like procrastinating child-like, un-seriousness of, you know, it's too hard, it's too complicated. Let somebody else fix it. We won the presidential election and that fixes everything. And actually, you know, the Republicans did the same thing when Trump was elected. They said, well, now everything's going to get fixed. You know, now everything's really going to change. And, you know, and thank God that they were unsearing us about changing and didn't know what they were doing, because that's why so much, that's why Trump's damage was limited.

And wasn't as bad as it could have been. Why don't you think there's, there's this also this idea of like the rhetoric is always like it's an emergency It's the most important thing ever. We're all gonna die the constitutional crisis Everything's about to fall in part and then as you said, but August recess is coming up or but this this or that right? So I see this with some of my friends who are like I can't believe Abbott is doing this You know like I can't like he's making us send our kids To school and it's going to be dangerous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, but we still did it, of course,

because we don't have the actual say over our lives. It's like if you actually thought what you're saying, then the decision you need to make here is very obvious. But so it's sort of we're running around as if, you know, everything is on fire and then sort of acting as if, you know, someone's coming to put it out right away or so that analogy sucks. But you get my point. No, it's actually a key point. And you're making a key point, which is the big delta between say and do. Yes.

And part of it is we've all been crying wolf, you know, for so long. I mean, the Republicans burned themselves with this on Obama. Oh, Obama, Black Socialist, you know, not born here, African, Yenny, Yenny, Yenny, Yenny, Yenny, Yenny, Yenny, Yenny, we're going to be Communists in four years. We're going to have concentration camps and death panels. And of course, you know, by 2012, people are going, this turns out that wasn't really true. And the same, I've had this argument many times with people on the left of saying, you know, it's not, not these fascists. I'm like, look, you've gone to that well so many times that you've burned people out on that terminology. The way that you show seriousness now that all that rhetoric has simply become crime wolf so many times is if you genuinely believe that we're facing an existential threat from an authoritarian movement as I do by the way,

then act like it. Then take the measures that you don't go off on August precess. You don't Dicker over whether the infrastructure bill is serving your, you know, cherished constituency and hold it up until late September. You do go great guns on a congressional investigation of one six, even bigger than you're going now. You do keep Congress in session. You do expel members of Congress who are openly advocating for violence in sedition. But, you know, this is how you become an unserious nation. Is it on the one hand, you know, you rant about socialism, but say, but as long as my Medicare keeps coming and my Social Security checks, then I guess it's not really socialism, or you talk about Nazis and fascists, and you say, but, eh, August recess and whatever, we'll figure it out in September. We are just not a serious people.

Right. We talk very seriously, but then when it comes down to the actions, we're not very serious. Well, because that requires us to be inconvenienced. Yeah, it's it's it's crazy. Well, I've appreciated your writing through the the last four or five years. I'm so glad I found it. I'd love the first book and the new one is very good as well. Not not too particularly hopeful books, but I think that that goes to our point is a serious person can digest facts that are not pleasant and get, you know, a negative diagnosis from your doctor and go, okay, I have to do something about this, not, well, that's not fun, so I'm going to pretend you didn't say that. Well, thank you very much, Ryan, and thanks for having me.

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