It has not been a banner summer for the United States. The country is mired in a war with Iran with no graceful exit opportunities; a new round of tariffs threatens to further disrupt fragile global trade relations; and the domestic economy faces inflation combined with paltry growth. President Donald Trump has not been a positive force for the U.S. this year, and many of his administration’s policies don’t bode well for the future. But by weakening America, Trump may strengthen the rest of the world. That surely wasn’t the goal, but it may well be the outcome.

Take military alliances — Trump is forcing U.S. allies to become more self-reliant. The war in Iran was supposed to cement U.S. leadership in the Persian Gulf and hasten the expansion of the Abraham Accords between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Instead, the conflict has put distance between America and its regional partners, especially Saudi Arabia. In late July, the Trump administration signed a deal with the kingdom for civilian development of nuclear energy. Then, a day later, the administration said that the deal was actually contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, which it had no immediate intention of doing. Within weeks of the agreement falling apart, Saudi Arabia signed a NATO-like defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan that bypasses the U.S. and makes any agreement with Israel unlikely. Trump’s threat on Monday to bomb Oman if it interferes with negotiations with Iran is even more likely to hurt U.S. standing in the region.

Other countries are also pivoting away from the U.S. as it becomes a more inconsistent ally. Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to annex Greenland have led European nations to rely increasingly on their own defense capabilities and non-U.S. alliances. Although Europe still needs some U.S. support, popular opinion has flipped from seeing the U.S. as a valuable partner to viewing Europe as independent and responsible for its own defense.

Similar trends are evident among Asian nations hoping to counter China’s power. Instead of leaning on American defense, countries such as Japan and the Philippines are looking more to each other and enhancing their military capabilities. While this is not yet sufficient to replace reliance on the U.S., these countries are leagues ahead of where they were even a decade ago. Trump’s decision to reduce U.S. military cooperation with South Korea, citing his “very good” relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, could also accelerate this move away from the U.S.

And, of course, allies are becoming more independent from the U.S. economy. Countries around the world are finding new trading partners and trying to limit their dependence on the dollar as the sole vehicle of international commerce. The Trump administration’s willingness to use the dollar as a tool for political coercion has pushed European countries to look for new options. The dollar remains the most important currency for global transactions, and it doesn’t have one clear competitor. However, that could change. The share of foreign buyers of U.S. government debt has decreased over the past decade, and multiple alternatives to the dollar-denominated global payments system have launched.

It is too soon to write an obituary of U.S. military or economic leadership. But the “Trump effect” has accelerated the move away from Washington and Wall Street and toward a more decentralized, diversified set of alliances and agreements around the world.

That will reduce relative American power and influence in ways that could soon weigh on the U.S. domestically. A world that is less interested in buying American government debt could raise the cost of servicing the trillions of dollars the U.S. government already owes. A world less dependent on the U.S. militarily may become less interested in the U.S. economically, closing off opportunities for American businesses and investors. It also leaves America more vulnerable to China’s growing market presence.

But, while that will undoubtedly hurt the U.S., it could help other countries. More resilience, less dependence and new avenues for global cooperation will strengthen any country that adapts, whether it is Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Brazil or the Philippines. Could it also mean more chaos and war? Yes, but that risk seems understood, while the potential upsides are not.

This emerging system is, in some respects, what the post-1945 system of alliances was trying to create: sovereign, stable countries self-sufficient enough to meet their citizens’ needs and interconnected enough to prevent the worst conflicts from occurring. In its rush to cement the U.S. as the dominant global power, the Trump administration is instead creating a world order where America is less important.

What Could Go Right? S8 E19: The AI Future Isn’t Inevitable. So Why Are We Told It Is? | With Carissa Véliz

In this episode, I am joined by Carissa Véliz, philosopher and author of Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI. We discuss the ways tech executives and AI experts offer predictions for our society that are supposedly inevitable. But what if we refuse to accept these guesses as truth? What if leaning into ambiguity and our own vulnerability makes us better citizens and gives us a true chance to make a better world? | Listen now

Ronda Rousey has spent much of her life doing what people told her couldn’t be done. She was the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in judo and was instrumental in establishing women’s MMA as a major draw, becoming a global superstar in the process. Yet, this week’s What Could Go Right? episode was much less about those accomplishments than about what happened once she’d accomplished them.

One thing that happened is her upcoming graphic novel, Expecting the Unexpected, which grew out of Ronda’s own experience with pregnancy and motherhood. Its premise — a pregnant assassin fights her way through a hostile world — allowed her to explore the contradiction in someone programmed to both destroy and create. (Writing, she told me, has since become quite an outlet for her; a sequel and multiple screenplays are on the way.)

We did, of course, talk about combat sports — specifically, the societal polarization that increasingly fuels it. For the recent fightcard she staged independently, Ronda deliberately rejected that culture-war framing, leaning instead into a “fighters versus the machine” storyline. She said the crowd seemed relieved to see competitors working together rather than trying to rile each other up for a change.

We’d all do well to take note. What I found most striking, though, was her reflections on ambition. Not too long ago, realizing that winning didn’t hold the same power it once did for her, she decided she was done chasing. She is still wildly ambitious, but not to fill some void.

Hers is a too rare if admirable understanding of one crucial aspect of success: knowing when you have enough.

Here are some of the more intriguing bits of our conversation. You can listen to the podcast in its entirety here.

“I was just continuing to chase even though I’d already caught it.”

“I think a lot of people are tired of being angry.”

“John Wick never goes to the bathroom. You ever notice that?

Sometimes What Could Go Right? is about what’s possible; other times it’s about what we permit ourselves to imagine. This week’s discussion with Ben Lamm, founder of genetic-engineering company Colossal Biosciences, sits squarely at that intersection.

Ben has become the standard-bearer for the idea of “de-extinction,” leading a firm that taps biotechnology to bring back long-gone species like the woolly mammoth. But as our conversation unfolded, it became clear that it’s about way more than mammoths. The real story is about the extraordinary power of biotechnology and the difficult questions that surround it. Here are two big ones:

Just because we can rewrite genomes, should we?

And:

As we are responsible for transforming the natural world, do we have the obligation to repair it — or does thinking that we should deepen our hubris?

What I appreciated most about Ben’s defense of his work was that he didn’t present it as a cure-all. Instead, he argued that because innovations like his are inevitable, our challenge is to build regulatory frameworks that guide it responsibly. Whether we were talking about conservation, designer babies, or the uneasy relationship between academic science and private enterprise, we kept ending up at the same place: Progress shouldn’t simply be spurred by what science allows. It must also be governed by what society believes.

The technology is advancing rapidly. Will human rationality keep pace? Are we suitably prepared for a world in which biology is programmable? As it turns out, sometimes my podcast isn’t only about what could go right; it’s also about what we need to get right before the future arrives.

Here are some of the points made in our conversation. You can listen to the podcast in its entirety here.

“I’d much rather have a de-extinction system and not need it than need a de-extinction system and not have it.”

“We have already changed the balance of nature. The question is whether we can out-innovate the damage we’ve already done.”

“Technology is moving faster than our institutions. That’s not an argument against innovation — it’s an argument for taking governance seriously.”

For all the complex talk about “the economy,” it’s worth asking one simple question: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about the economy? Is it a specific and real thing, or just a story or collection of stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives? And when the numbers — exact figures, broad averages, directional indicators — suggest one reality while millions of Americans are feeling something very different, whose story should we trust?

This week on my What Could Go Right? podcast, I asked Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s and one of the country’s most respected economic forecasters, to help me unpack the growing disconnect between the economic data and our lived experiences. We explored why strong headline indicators can coexist with widespread pessimism, how inequality distorts our understanding of prosperity, and why global averages so often overshadow household finances.

Our conversation went well beyond inflation and interest rates, to debating the Federal Reserve’s role in shaping markets, whether political concerns about Fed independence are overstated, and why measuring the modern economy is increasingly difficult. We also asked what history can teach us about technological revolution, concluding that if AI follows in the footsteps of the personal computer and the Internet, disruption would be as inevitable as new opportunity. The most important challenge, we both agreed, is ensuring that the benefits of those opportunities are realized by more of us than a handful of innovators and investors.

As it has always been, any discussion of new economies comes down to how equipped society is to navigate profound change.

Here is a sampling from our wide-ranging conversation. You can listen to the podcast in its entirety here:

“The pandemic probably had some impact on the collective psyche. Sentiment surveys all have been depressed compared to pre-pandemic. So it feels like there’s something there.”

“We can solve problems if people can make money solving the problem.”

“A society that is affluent that fails to provide a sort of baseline security is gonna be perceived as a failure.”

“One of the ingredients of the American secret sauce is we adjust. Shocks occur, things happen. There’s financial pain. We adjust. We move to another part of the country, we take another job, we go back to school.”

“Individuals are so focused on possible risks that they miss possible upsides.”

David Epstein is a challenger of conventional wisdom, and on this week’s episode of What Could Go Right? he turned one more cliché on its head. His new book, Inside the Box, argues that creativity and innovation, not to mention happiness, often are sparked by constraints and not from the limitless freedom we imagine we want.

In fact, David believes that unlimited choice often leaves us less satisfied, not least because boundaries — whether in broom shopping or book writing — tend to sharpen focus rather than limit possibility. It’s a fascinating and counterintuitive observation, whether you agree with it or not.

Ironically, we didn’t constrain ourselves during our lively back and forth. We jumped from why Norway’s youth sports system consistently outperforms expectations to what the decline of Sports Illustrated (where David once worked) says about media today to how investigative journalism has evolved to whether AI offers genuine knowledge or just a feeling of learning. Along the way, we revisited one of David’s earlier books, Range, reconciling its embrace of generalism with his new work’s call for self-imposed constraint.

Ultimately, our conversation boiled down to a plea to live more intentionally. In a world of virtually infinite options, focusing on what actually deserves our attention and letting everything else go might be the most liberating act of all.

Three quotes to whet your appetite:

“We overlook limits as our potentially most powerful tools for driving creativity.”

“If you’re not structuring your attention, then it’s being structured for you.”

“It’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions — even when they’re good — less happy with their lives, and more prone to regret.”

“Sometimes ‘good enough’ leads to a better life.

You can listen to our entire conversation in its entirety here.

America’s criminal justice system is often seen as an intractable problem — too vast, too entrenched, too political to welcome meaningful change. But what if that assumption is wrong?

This week on my What Could Go Right? podcast, I sat down with Alex Duran, whose life embodies both the failures and possibilities of our justice system. While serving a 12-year sentence, Alex earned a liberal arts degree through the Bard Prison Initiative. Today, after stops at the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, he leads criminal justice philanthropy at Galaxy Gives. His journey challenges our more simplistic narratives about crime and punishment, accountability and redemption.

In our wide-ranging and sometimes free-wheeling conversation, we discussed the beginnings of America’s prison system, the struggles of corrections officers, and the tradeoffs we accept in search of safety. Most of the problems are without easy answers, even if you feel sure morally one way or another. The age-old tension between prison as punishment and prison as an incubator of rehabilitation shows no signs of resolution.

Alex, by the way, believes that though public conversation hasn’t caught up with the data, we’re closer to the end of the era of mass incarceration than the beginning. Whether or not you agree with his takes, they come from a perspective few others have. His story is one of possibility — and a reminder that meaningful reform often begins by imagining a future that looks different from the past.

Here are four excerpts that will give you a sense of our revealing conversation. I hope they encourage you to listen to it in its entirety:

• “One of the things that I find most striking is that since the very beginning of this country, there have existed criminal justice reformers who have looked at that system and said, ‘Oh, my god, this is a failure.’ ”

• “I bought a condo in Stamford three years after I was out, and I told my parole officer in the Bronx. She’s like, ‘You bought a place?’ It was nerve-wracking to her. She asked me if I was selling drugs. Like, how did I get the money for that? She couldn’t even picture that because she’s only used to seeing failure.”

• “If we were to care about creating a system that is actually keeping people safe, we would care about the wellness of the officers themselves. They have one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the country.”

• “One of my spiritual practices is to pick up trash, going around with a garbage grabber. You’d think I’m a weirdo, but I do that because I get my political philosophy from the Young Lords, who were the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. When they polled in the community, eight out of 10 residents were saying, ‘Actually, the No. 1 problem is the garbage. And they were like, ‘Damn, I don’t really wanna pick up garbage, but if that’s the No. 1 problem, I guess I gotta address it.’ I joke that if you give the police garbage grabbers instead of guns, that would do more to solve crimes than anything else.”

This week’s episode of What Could Go Right? is a little different. Rather than a traditional interview, I’m sharing a live conversation I moderated at the Aspen Ideas Festival with historian Greg Jackson and author Steven Johnson about a series of related questions at the heart of this podcast.

We explored why pessimism so often passes for wisdom, why progress rarely makes headlines, and how our distorted view of history shapes our expectations for the future. From democracy and AI to media, trust, and human ingenuity, we examined why acknowledging what’s working isn’t about ignoring real problems. It’s about recognizing that meaningful progress has always come through people who believed the future wasn’t predetermined.

Optimism, to me, isn’t blind faith that everything will work out. It’s the humility to admit we don’t know what comes next and the responsibility to act as though our choices still matter—because there’s no reason to believe they don’t or can’t. I hope this conversation leaves you feeling as energized and hopeful as it did me.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is, as you know, my podcast, What Could Go Right?

In this episode, we are doing something unique. We are using a panel that I was recently on at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado, where three people, myself included, delved into the question of what could go right.

This was a really motivating panel. It certainly excited me. It was me, Greg Jackson, who is a professor at Utah Valley University, but more importantly for this, the host of a podcast called History That Doesn’t Suck, it is a great podcast, and I really encourage you all to go give it a listen or a watch, and the author of a recent book called Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome. And the other person was Steven Johnson, who has written like 14 books, most recently The Infernal Machine, about the invention of dynamite. He wrote a great book 20 years ago called Everything Bad Is Good for You. He wrote a book called Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, and he has also been at Google for the past several years as part of the NotebookLM team.

What I loved about this panel was we were all just animated by this view of a culture that is mired in its conviction of all that is wrong, and does not adequately look at what is going right, can easily consign itself to a doom loop, and that we need to have a more sanguine view of our past, a more measured view of our present, a more humble view of our future, and a willingness to step back, look at where we are, identify where we need to go, and work accordingly, without the constant pall of pessimism clouding everything. So I hope you enjoy the discussion, because I certainly did.

Zachary Karabell: I think, in general, the disconnect between individual attitudes and collective attitudes is pronounced and pronounced-er. This is a feature of our contemporary era, where we are very much in a disjuncture between things we feel locally, things we feel individually, and things we feel collectively. This has been true for a lot of time. It is acutely true now.

And I’m going to leave it at that as a level-set. I’m going to ask each of you to talk for a moment about your definition of optimism. Not that this panel is purely about that, but I think it’s a worthwhile thing. And also Steven, I know you have some views about the title of this session being, in and of itself, indicative of a contemporary problem.

Steven Johnson: The title of this session is “What Could Go Right in a World Gone Wrong?” And I think we are all here — this is supposed to be one of the optimistic panels, right? We are all here because we are going to have a little dose of optimism. All of us are —

Zachary Karabell: The optimistic panel?

Steven Johnson: Maybe the one optimistic panel. And the optimistic panel, in its title, assumes that the world has gone wrong. That is baked into the title of the panel here. So I think part of what we want to explore is, what do we mean by that, when we feel that the world has gone wrong? And are we focusing on the right things when we try to make that kind of assessment?

One of the things I was thinking about last night, we actually have not talked about this before, is that to come to the conclusion that the world has gone wrong, there are three inputs that have to get into your head for you to feel that way.

One of them is the actual state of the world: the facts of the world, what is happening right now, what is out there in reality. Then there is the news of that reality that gets to you, the information filters, whether that is watching the evening news or social media or whatever it is. And if that news is biased toward negativity, if it is sending you more bad news about the state of the world and less good news, even if the state of the world has not really changed, that will change your perception of it. Finally, there is the amount of contact that you have with those news sources. If you have a negative newsfeed and you are constantly interacting with that newsfeed 24/7, you are going to have an increasingly negative view of the world.

So I would submit to you that we can debate the state of the world, but what has happened over the past 15 or 20 years is that the negativity bias of the news sources and the frequency with which we encounter those news sources have definitely increased. And so we are all a little bit in this social experiment where we are being fed a lot of information about the state of the world, and I think it is skewing our judgment a little bit. And we need to figure out, as a society and as individuals, as news consumers, how we counteract that bias.

Zachary Karabell: Before we get to Greg, a question on this. And by the way, Greg Jackson, I mean, we know that Steve Johnson is a rock star, but Greg Jackson is a total rock star. Just watch some of his one-man podcast shows with a band. You are going to be like, I knew this guy before he became the most famous historian in the universe.

So there is the fact, historically, though, that human beings do gravitate toward dramatic news stories. “Remember the Maine” as a kind of yellow journalism moment. “Remember the Maine,” anyone? 1898. There is a human nature aspect to this that is not an algorithmic, technological one, no?

Steven Johnson: Yeah, I think that — well, first off, there is great stuff about yellow journalism in your new book. I think that, in fact, the algorithms are less about the nefarious economics of big social media companies and more about the intrinsic bias we have toward being interested in negative news.

There is kind of an understandable reason. Threats are important. You want to focus on threats if you feel that something bad has happened or something has challenged your expectations about what was going to happen in a negative way. There is a reason why your consciousness, your attention, is drawn toward those things. But in a world that is constantly reinforcing that interest, that kind of attentional focus that you naturally have on negative outcomes, that can get a little pathological, I think.

I had a thought experiment that I borrowed from somewhere else at the beginning of Extra Life, my second-to-last book, which is about the extension of human life expectancy over the last hundred years, the thought experiment was just to kind of ground yourself in history. Which is like, if a newspaper came out once every hundred years, what would the headline be? If we were looking back from 1926 to 2026, what would we look at and say was the most important thing that really happened? In my case, my argument is that you would look at it and say, we effectively doubled the amount of years that the average human being gets to live. What an incredible accomplishment that is.

But that accomplishment came out of a million small improvements. It did not come out of one miraculous doubling of life expectancy that would be a front-page story. It came out of a million incremental things that are happening all around us, but we don’t focus on it, because progress, the most important kind of progress, is slow and incremental, which is the least newsworthy kind of information there is.

Nobody really wants to see headlines about slow, incremental progress. That is the bias that I think gets us in trouble.

Greg Jackson: So first, let me do a little piggybacking there. Sensationalism as a framework for news fully developed in its absolute maturity in the 19th century. We taught the media that we love stories that are sensational. We want to hear about a big figure failing. We love gossip. We want stories about sex. We want stories about things collapsing. So when we buy those news stories, when we buy the newspapers that are pushing that narrative, guess what the other papers learn? That’s what they should produce more of.

So that’s what new journalism started doing. New journalism was then dubbed yellow journalism, and then other leaders of the era started calling it freak journalism. Of course, I like the term that was used in Puck magazine in the 1890s. They called it fake news.

Zachary Karabell: Huh. Go figure.

Greg Jackson: I wonder if it will catch on. Define optimism? Optimism, to me, is not Pollyanna. There seems to be this almost jaded, like all the cool kids can’t be optimistic because you’re dismissing reality, when to me, optimism is being able to see that there is a real risk, there is a real threat, but we are not going to let that stand in our way of trying to move forward. Where we can respect the data that tells us, as we look at our history, that systematically we have moved in the aggregate, to use Steven’s point, if you were to have a headline once every 100 years, it’s dramatic improvement. And in that same way, we absolutely backslide, and we have multiple times. Reconstruction is one of the most horrendous backsliding moments ever in the human experience, and it is for the United States. Nonetheless, can we hold on to these competing concepts: that bad things happen, mistakes are made, we do wrong, and that ultimately we still have the chance to do right?

We vote again and again, and we have the opportunity in a republic to hit reset. And even in a far more limited republic, going back to the early republic and pushing through the 19th century, even into the 20th century, which is where we have to get to to even reach the point where everyone who is an American citizen has the right to vote, even under those more limited situations, we had people without the right to vote who led the charge to improve this nation. If we could do that then, why on earth can we not do that today? So I am optimistic because the data leads me in that direction.

Zachary Karabell: I think we’re done. You got 40 minutes you didn’t think you were going to have.

So, I have thought a lot about this. Why is it okay to ask the question, what could go wrong, but asking the question, what could go right, just doesn’t occur to people? Why does every statement of things happening that are constructive in our contemporary culture have to be followed by a “yes, but,” but every statement of things that are bad and negative can stand on its own? Why is there not a headline of “18,000 planes landed safely yesterday”? Why do we fall so completely for a continual negativity bias?

I think the point — and I have spent years both in academia and in finance, which felt as schizophrenic as it sounds — is that in most rooms, if you are pessimistic, or if you are highlighting risks, or if you are talking about problems, most people will respond to that as a greater level of intelligence than if you talk about things going well, because it falls into the kind of Pollyannish, Voltaire, “this is the best of all possible worlds” trap.

I do not think optimism is the belief that tomorrow is going to be better than today. I think it is, as the theoretical physicist David Deutsch says, and I am going to paraphrase, it is the humility that we do not know future outcomes.

I have no idea whether the present portends a much worse future, whether democracy is collapsing, whether global autocracy is the new normal for the 21st century, whether the dollar is going to collapse, whether the financial system is overvalued, whether AI is going to take over the world, whether climate is going to boil and our children are going to suffer. I have no idea if any of those things are true or untrue. But I am 100% sure that no one else does either. And that the certainty of future outcomes is one of the greatest impediments to both acting on and envisioning better future outcomes. In the face of something that is unknown, it is incumbent upon all of us to believe that we are writing that future, that it is not preordained, it is not written, it is not known, and that it is our responsibility to act as if we can shape a future of our dreams rather than the future of our fears. We can not continue to, in financial terms, over-index for Armageddon and under-index for utopia.

Both of you have thought a lot about these things historically. One thing for me as well, and I think we all agree on this, and I will, I promise, in a few minutes avoid this kind of hosanna chorus of optimism and push all of us to question those beliefs as well — one of my optimisms about the American present is predicated on a much more negative reading of the American past. I know you think about this a lot, Greg.

Greg Jackson: It is my book.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. So, talk your book.

Greg Jackson: Sure. In my book, I basically take us into the deepest, darkest abyss of American history from the 1790s up to 1900: stories about contested elections, political violence, and early fake news.

And for me, staring into these very dark, ugly moments where the American experiment could absolutely fall apart, this is encouraging, not to say, oh, everything will be okay here in the present as a given. That’s the Pollyanna stuff, and that’s fake, and that’s not worth having.

But rather, to see that, over and over again, our institutions have held, even if we always, to paraphrase what Churchill is said to have said, that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. Our institutions hold, and enough of our better angels, to use Lincoln’s phrase, come to the fore. So we have a sufficient combination of the checks and balances, and separation of powers, and a very well thought through system that in my reading of James Madison’s Federalist No. 51, where he says if all men were angels, we wouldn’t need government — or as I like to read him, people suck — so they envisioned a government that assumed people are awful, even as they realized that there was this need for what they called public virtue to really push the thing forward.

What I see over and over again is that the institutions and the public virtue, even if it is not as much as we would like, the two meet well enough that we continue to choose union. We continue to choose a better future, even if it is two steps forward and sometimes one and a half steps back.

Steven Johnson: I’ll give you another example from history. So the book I wrote two books ago — no, the last book I wrote, The Infernal Machine — is a story about the invention of dynamite, and the anarchist movement, and the invention of modern policing techniques.

One of the things that drove me to write that book in the first place was that I was researching the early history of the NYPD at the turn of the century, 130 years ago. It turned out they had a chief bomb inspector, a guy named Owen Egan, who was in charge of, if there was a bomb that went off, he went and analyzed it. If there was a bomb that was found, he defused it. And between 1896 and 1920, when he died of natural causes on the job, surprisingly, he defused in that period 7,000 bombs in New York City alone. And about half of those were political, acts of political terrorism that were planted. There were also mob, kind of criminal bombs as well.

So just imagine what New York City would be like if you had that level of bombs being set off or planted every other day. If you go read through the Times archives, as I did for that book, it is just every other day there is another headline — a courthouse bombed, a bomb placed at the attorney general’s house. It happened again and again and again.

That was the political reality of the time, that there was bomb-level violence happening day in and day out in big cities like New York. And I think we have just forgotten that. We have no real sense of it. And that is what is so great about the work that you do, and also with The Progress Network, of just reminding ourselves of the progress that we have made.

So one example of this, I just looked up these stats yesterday, is that 2025 is the lowest homicide rate in the United States, we think in recorded history, but definitely in the last 100 years. And last year, we had the highest average life expectancy in the United States, 79 years.

So yes, complicated things are happening in Washington, and democracy is being challenged in some ways. But just ask yourself, have you been walking around in the back of your head being like, This is definitely the safest and healthiest the United States has ever been?

Greg Jackson: Steven, if I may, the thing that I think we are forgetting, this amnesia, is that democracy is always being challenged.

Steven Johnson: Yeah.

Greg Jackson: That is not new and unique. It is constant. Democracy itself, I would argue — I love it, I believe in it — and it’s about as natural as a curated lawn in front of your house. You like your lawn. You like the grass out here around us on this campus. But that is not the natural setting. If we are to leave things to nature, yeah, we get tyranny.

Zachary Karabell: The natural world is not a safe place. By the way, for those of you thinking about writing books as an act of profound narcissism, not only do you as an author sometimes forget your own books, but Greg came up to me after we had drinks last night, we had been talking, we were like new best friends, and he said, you know, I forgot I read one of your books. And I didn’t remember that you wrote it.

Greg Jackson: I remembered the book. I loved the book.

Zachary Karabell: I’m just saying, word to the wise. It’s not the best thing to do if you want recognition.

But these are not just American issues. There is a global tsunami of exactly this in multiple societies. It has different iterations, it has different tones. Certainly, anyone who has been paying attention to anything that’s going on in Western European politics, let alone, other than Hungary, Eastern European politics — and Hungary is now the other example of how things could go right in the face of everything going wrong — multiple parts of the world, even in China, where if you had done some sort of temperature test of public sentiment 10 years ago, it would have been very optimistic about the future. I know that seems odd given our views of China as a relatively surveillance-heavy autocratic state, which it is, but for a lot of its citizens, it also delivers certain basic things, like technology and ease.

But there is a world of negativity that is not confined to America or American history. I wonder exactly what’s going on in a world where those facts that you just said about the United States — I mean, every society’s metrics on material things are markedly better than they would have been 100 years ago. In fact, most societies are markedly better, dramatically better, than they would have been 30 or 40 years ago. Deaths in childbirth rates, nutrition levels, caloric abundance. Caloric abundance is fascinating. There was a really intense panel here before us about the food pyramid.

Greg Jackson: I think some people attended that.

Zachary Karabell: It was the most un-Aspen panel I have ever been in, which was great. I would like some of you to boo at some point during this, just to see how it feels.

Basically, never has there been more caloric abundance on the planet. The United States alone throws away 30% of all of our calories every day. There is no food quantity issue.

Now, saying that immediately makes everyone think you have to say that and then say, yeah, but we are not eating as well, or we’re eating bad food, unhealthy food that is creating obesity and insulin problems, and all the things. And that is a true statement, but it doesn’t have to be said immediately. It does not negate your point about the “and” rather than the “but.”

But I wonder why it is that we could spend the next 30 minutes rattling off statistics about how the world is better, including things like community. Community was great. We belonged. You were in a small town. People knew who you were. It’s the nostalgia of Cheers, right?

But in that small town, if you were gay, if you disagreed with whatever the social or political consensus was, if you wanted to leave, if you wanted to get a college education when nobody was doing that, if you wanted to not go into the family business — I mean, community was great, except if you didn’t like what the community was telling you. We kind of forget that downside.

Steven Johnson: Thinking about this, there was a really good — bringing together two things you just said about the global perspective on this, and then why we are steered toward this —

Zachary Karabell: And why facts don’t matter.

Steven Johnson: Why facts don’t matter. Fareed [Zakaria] did a great panel yesterday about the global energy situation. One of the first things that came up was that if you look at the actual magnitude of the supply shock of oil being withdrawn from the market in ’73 and ’79, what happened earlier this year was way bigger, both in absolute numbers and percentage of the overall market. But in fact, thus far — and it seems like maybe, hopefully, this will continue — the actual impact on the economies was much less severe than it was in ’73 and ’79.

The panel was discussing why that was, and it turns out that over those 40 years, a lot of quiet changes have happened that have enabled us, as a planet, to be more resilient to sudden supply shocks like that. And there are alternate pipelines and alternate energy sources and a whole host of other things that have happened, almost all of which did not get a lot of coverage.

And so we don’t have this catastrophic thing that happened in ‘73 and ‘79, even though the actual change in the supply of oil was much more dramatic than it was back then.

And what I think is interesting about that is like it’s another problem that is a fundamental problem about optimism, which is that a key measure of progress is bad things that no longer happen. The plane that doesn’t crash. The child who does not die of smallpox because of the smallpox vaccine. The car accident that didn’t kill you because seat belts were invented.

And so it’s not just that there is a bias toward negative news over good news. It’s understandable that social media and the news and in our own lives don’t emphasize things that didn’t happen. That is just not something that is natural to think about: all the possible things that could have gone wrong that would have gone wrong in the past. So it requires an extra amount of effort, I think — individual effort and social effort and media effort — to get around those blind spots, I think.

Greg Jackson: Amen. I agree with all of that.

Zachary Karabell: Why don’t facts work? You talk to students and audiences. Do facts work?

Greg Jackson: John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things,” and I will fall apart on the exact quotation at this point, but basically, whatever our disposition is, that doesn’t change what facts are. And he made this argument while defending the Redcoats in the Boston Massacre, and it’s noteworthy that the New England jury acquitted all but two of the soldiers, who were found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

I think facts do matter. Facts can permeate. Because in this heated moment in colonial American history, so many patriots, as the term was evolving, were mad at John. We’re on a first-name basis, by the way. They were mad at John for daring to represent the Redcoats, because the emotions were there: tribe, you stick with us. Forget these Redcoats.

And here is John going, “I am a lawyer. They have a right to counsel, and we’re going to do this the right way.”

So I think facts do matter. Our emotions absolutely surmount and can overcome our ability to listen to those facts. What I would say we need to do better at is demonstrating empathy and care for one another. That’s when people become open to those facts.

In fact, I would suggest that John Adams was able to uniquely defend those Redcoats because he was a patriot. So that jury was a little more ready and willing to listen when John spoke. Had they brought in a lawyer who was clearly pro-King George, the same arguments could have been made just as eloquently and I think they probably would have fallen flat.

Zachary Karabell: I want to do one other quick thought experiment. Not a thought experiment — seeing where people are. So how many of you here — and just demographically, it is a little skewed — have or have had children with student loans? How many of you are invested in equity markets, either through 401(k)s, retirement plans, you name it?

So first of all, on that question: How many of you are invested and have student loans? Okay, so almost everybody. By the way, 150 million-plus Americans own some form of 401(k) plan. It’s not purely an elite phenomenon.

How many of you are really worried about the financial system, think we might be in an AI bubble, and think that markets are overvalued?

Okay. The reality is, though, that every single person in this room believes that stocks are going to go up, is invested in the U.S. economy and owns NVIDIA. Irrespective of whether or not we feel those things, those things are true.

That’s not a gotcha statement. It’s just, we’re behaving in ways that fly in the face of what we feel. I think that is one of these global phenomena, where people around the world are living their lives and doing well and yet feeling as if things are really messed up.

I am going to say something that should not be controversial, but it is. This thing that we all carry around, that is increasingly perceived as a source of multiple social ills because of attention, because of news, because of algorithms — I absolutely love this.

I love the connectivity of information. I love the fact that I have the corpus of human knowledge at my fingertips. I love the fact that there are these weird LLM agents that seem to have a quirky take on that corpus, and answers that are often wrong but always counterintuitive. I love the fact that I can connect to everybody I have ever known in a heartbeat, and that they can ignore me just as easily. I love the fact that we can still create communities, even if they are dysfunctional, because communities have always been dysfunctional. And I think the connectivity of technology and the things we have created are absolutely astonishing. I am sure that those words are not often uttered, because I don’t often hear them.

Greg Jackson: Let me add to that. I think we live in one of the most robust eras of information. Yes, is there misinformation? Absolutely. But we’ve got to stop treating the algorithms like we have no choice but to read whatever happens to get fed to us while we are doomscrolling. When you are driving down the freeway, are you compelled, with no choice, to get off at every fast food joint you pass and eat fries?

Steven Johnson: Raise your hand. How many of you are compelled?

Greg Jackson: We know the fast food is there. We know it is tasty. And most of us make decent enough choices to say, I’m not going to always ingest that. We know what it is, and we treat it as such.

Well, these little supercomputers in our pockets give us access to the most rigorous journalism in the world. And let’s think about romanticizing the past before the algorithms. You may have been a rural American living in a place where you have access to one, maybe two newspapers. There is one pulpit in town. This is it. That’s the perspective you have to interpret the entire world. And now you have the capacity, the ability to bring in so many different voices. But we have to be proactive enough to curate and think through what we are consuming when it comes to our minds, just as we do with our bodies.

Steven Johnson: The other thing I’d build on, on the technology front — and I think this is one of the things that’s so good about the “what could go right” phrase, actually — is that, as you alluded to earlier, we don’t have to think about these as purely utopian futures that we’re imagining.

Greg Jackson: And I want to say, I reject the idea that we can achieve utopia. That’s never happening, period. Please.

Steven Johnson: So there’s this risk when you’re perceived as an optimist, that people think you don’t think there are any problems and you just think we’re headed toward this kind of nirvana. I’ve seen this firsthand with AI over the last three or four years.

When I first started looking at the space of large language models, I wrote a long piece for The New York Times Magazine in early 2022, about six months before ChatGPT, which is the piece that brought me to Google in the first place.

I’d spent a bunch of time with these early models, and they were fascinating. I was intellectually incredibly interested in them. But they were flawed on so many different dimensions, and the critiques of them at the time were legitimate ones. They hallucinated wildly. They were very limited in the knowledge you could give them. They had all sorts of latent biases built into them. There were a million flaws that were there, but you could see the seeds of things that were really promising.

And it turns out that over the last three or four years, we have made amazing progress refining the models, refining how we produce the models, adding system instructions and other source-grounding techniques — all stuff that we don’t need to get into on this panel, that have not eliminated the problems altogether, and there are still lots of challenges with them, and there are certainly challenges about how we deploy them in society that we have to work through. But there were a bunch of people, and I got involved with this in part because I wanted to be one of those people, who thought: This is promising. What could go right if we released this technology into the world slowly, and thought about the flaws, and earnestly tried to fix those flaws over time? And we’ve seen, just in three or four years, amazing progress. If you went back to read that piece I wrote in April of 2022, almost all the major criticisms would no longer apply.

So I think it’s the mindset of, yes, there are problems, but if we apply ourselves, many of them are fixable. And they will not necessarily lead to some utopian future, because they will unleash new problems that we haven’t yet anticipated. And we will apply ourselves to those. But we should, as a society, remind ourselves — and again, progress is such a great word for that — that that is how we’ve always done it.

That’s what you should be inspired to do: thoughtful, incremental improvement on the state of things.

Zachary Karabell: It’s interesting. There is this kind of disjuncture of, technology is going to eat us, that AI is going to take over and destroy the world. And by the way, separate from whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, if there is a palpable reality of AI soon to take over the world, there is nothing we can do about it. So fearing it and worrying about it, is in the most genuinely stoic sense, a complete waste of energy, because we’re just cooked. So, if we’re not, then we can have a conversation about the rest, but there’s not much point, I feel, in the agitation around it.

So let’s ask the question: Given that these things might be materially true, but there is a world of discontent and a world of problems — one, how do we explain that? And I’m going to offer one quick one, which is, the flip side of global pessimism and discontent, and the beauty of what this information universe has provided, is that never have more people on the planet believed that more and better is possible, and that they have a right to it. Never have more people believed that being a human being on the planet means you get a doctor, a school, a home and a meal, and that those are human birthrights. Not constitutional, democratic, Declaration of Independence. Human, global. And there’s something, I think, palpably powerful about that collective belief that will, in fact, express itself as discontent in the face of those things not yet being true, and governments and societies and companies not yet doing everything humanly and inhumanly possible to make them true.

Steven Johnson: The expectations rise, and so when we don’t meet those expectations, we’re disappointed, even though the overall arc is increasing in success and progress.

The other long-term trend — and I was talking about this with my wife last night over dinner — that I think undergirds a lot of this, and I’m curious what your interpretation of it is, and it’s brought up a lot at places like Aspen, is the decline of trust in institutions. That is empirically happening in the world, and particularly in the United States.

We see almost every kind of institution — educational, religious, government, media — trust has declined dramatically. Interestingly, to your original question, people tend to like their particular institution. They like their school they went to, or they like their particular pastor at church, but they feel that overall, these institutions have declined, or they feel less trust in them.

And I think when you have a default defensive crouch to the world, where you feel like the big forces are not trustworthy, that leads to a sense that the world has gone wrong in some way. And honestly, I’m not sure I have a fully realized theory or explanation of why that came about.

Greg Jackson: I don’t know if I can speak to the why, but I will cite Mark Twain’s alleged quote, that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. We act like we are the first generation of Americans to doubt and have distrust in our institutions.

Thirty-second summary here: The election of 1876. By the time the dust was starting to settle on it, it had become clear that countless Black Americans had been murdered in the South in their attempts to vote, beyond being chased off from the polls. Attempted bribery. South Carolina cast 101% of its vote. I’m not great at math. I’m a history guy. I think something’s wrong there.

Election boards were demonstrably corrupt. Attempts at bribery. And then four states sent more than one set of electoral votes to Congress.

So you talk about Congress having to weigh out, do we accept these votes? Congress has no choice but to ask that question, because they had to figure out which set of votes to count from four different states. And Florida sent three sets, because Florida.

By the time all of this was said and done, Jeremiah Black, who was the Democratic lawyer representing the party and pushing their candidate in the electoral commission that was established to sort this all out, his closing statement was that we will never have such a thing as an honest election again. That was it. He believed it 100%. The republic was essentially dead. This election was so corrupt, it demonstrated that the system was broken and things were effectively over.

Now I tell you that story, and the vast majority of you probably weren’t familiar with any of it, and a few of you maybe had an inkling of some of it, because we so fully — I want to say, even as I say that fully, I’m not dismissing the compromise that then ended Reconstruction and cast us into the abysmal state of Jim Crow for generations. And, statement, the republic bounced back to be something better, thanks in part to Americans who, even in that Jim Crow status — W.E.B. Du Bois and others — continued to fight to make this place better.

Zachary Karabell: There’s a corollary to the Mark Twain line that I was told in grad school, which is that history doesn’t repeat itself, but historians repeat each other. I want to take three more minutes and then open it up for questions.

I think the trust question is fascinating. Again, I do put the cup-half-full gloss on it, in that I think the presence of all this information at the ready does make people legitimately think that they can question expertise. Historically, expertise wasn’t just the monopoly on the interpretation of information; it was the monopoly on information.

And while I think there’s too much of a bleed of expertise, as the interpretation still should be honored — there’s real expertise in making a semiconductor chip, in making a jet engine — a lot of these tools are allowing far more of us to legitimately go, you know, maybe that methodology wasn’t right, or maybe there are some facts here you didn’t look at.

So let’s each take 30 seconds, because then I want questions. What does alarm you about the world? What is going on that you find is genuinely worth concern, if not pessimism?

Steven Johnson: The two most impressive trend lines of the 20th century and early 21st century, if you zoom out to that 100-year view, were life extension and the reduction in extreme poverty. Unbelievable story of progress there.

And while life expectancy has continued to increase, extreme poverty has stalled and actually started to tick up again in the last 10 or 15 years. A lot of factors going into that, but you could tell a story until about 10 or 15 years ago that the fundamental things — are you on the verge of starvation, and are you dying at the age of 42, or are your children dying in childbirth? — that story was just getting better and better every year. And the economic side of it has stalled. So that’s probably the biggest thing I’m focused on.

Greg Jackson: For me, it’s cynicism. Lincoln, as a very young politician back in 1838, I’ll paraphrase here, effectively said, as a nation of free men, it is our destiny to live forever or die by suicide.

There are plenty of things that I’m concerned about. The thing that concerns me the most is this sense of defeatism that permeates through America and seems to convince so many that their vote doesn’t matter, that their voice doesn’t matter, that they shouldn’t bother writing their representatives, their senators because there’s nothing they can do, when we are replete with examples of Americans, generation after generation, who had such weaker tools to reach these sorts of figures, and yet had the audacity to continue pushing. They’re the ones that delivered us the state that we have today, and we owe it to ourselves and future generations to continue that same tradition. And if that holds, we’ll be okay.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and that is actually what I was going to say, or some version —

Greg Jackson: I’m sorry.

Zachary Karabell: No, some version thereof.

Greg Jackson: Historians repeating.

Zachary Karabell: Historians repeating each other. It’s just happening here. The sort of stultifying pessimism — I do think societies can talk themselves into doom loops. And when you lose that precious gossamer thread, not just of hope, but of conviction, that you are collectively able to write a better future, you start believing that you can’t, then the behaviors that follow from that are collectively, and often individually, self-destructive.

I’m going to get what I can while I can get it. There is no such thing as the common good. Why bother investing in anything? Because that’s the future. Hold it and hoard it, or spend it and use it. And I think there is a risk of that, not just here, but in multiple parts of the world.

Questions! And there are mics that will go around. The lady in the hat right back there, and then next to you after that. You’ve got to wait for the mic. Sorry.

Audience Member 1: On that note, how much do you think the press has to do with that negativity and that vicious cycle, that that’s what people actually think sells papers and sells books and gets people to watch television?

To me, I see there’s a major factor with how the press communicates information to us as citizens and the angles that they take. Sorry, I know you’re a journalist.

Steven Johnson: No, no. I think it’s — to Greg’s point, this has a deep history. Yellow journalism took us back to that. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a cliché about news that exists for a reason.

I think it has been amplified by social media in the sense that people then also tend to engage with content that triggers that same sense of anxiety. It seems clear that people want to share things that they are outraged by. That seems to be another mechanism, or part of our psyche, that we’re uncovering through this great experiment with technology.

And again, to the point that Zachary was saying, it’s not necessarily the nefarious economic incentives of the algorithm. It’s just making the choice of what gets recommended more democratic actually tends to steer people to recommending things that they were outraged by, which means that whatever seed news was there that was negative to begin with gets louder because people have amplified it.

Zachary Karabell: And the lady right — yes.

Audience Member 2: Hi, reflecting on your comment about AI futures happening, and your comment about human agency, where do you see that nexus in this collaborative future that we are looking at, and the ability of human agency to actually craft it in a way that’s beneficial?

Zachary Karabell: Look, I think one of the fascinating things about AI is that at some point, we may indeed be creating a different form of consciousness. But of course, we will have created it.

The fear is that it’s the Frankenstein monster, as opposed to an incredibly powerful adjunct consciousness and tool. We’re going to figure this out and find this out. I have no idea. I’m also struck by the fact that even the deepest minds of DeepMind have no idea.

But I do have a great deal of faith in the human capacity to create. I also have a great deal of faith in the human capacity to destroy. And every new technology has opened up a wider and wider hope-and-fear juncture, because our capacity to do both — nuclear weapons, bioweapons, Internet — all these things augment our capacity to destroy and to create. Right now, it is a temperament question. Like do you believe that’s going to work itself out?

Greg Jackson: I’ll add that, yes, we’ve seen — obviously with AI, we can’t say exactly. And us historians, we are better at predicting the past than the future, I have found.

But these same fears, with the Industrial Revolution going all the way back to the 1790s, they’ve played out again and again. I remember watching an old Twilight Zone episode that predates my birth that explored machines taking over. So it’s always been there.

But I’m willing to bet that if we did another thought experiment, raised hands, most of us would not choose to give up our current technology to go back to a different generation. What we’ve found is that we seem to be able to adapt and grow and meet the new challenges that come with new technology.

Steven Johnson: Very quickly, one other thing that I think is worth pointing out. There’s a wonderful artist who does a lot with AI named Holly Herndon, who has probably been at Aspen in the past. She has this great point, which is that we misnamed AI, at least for the language models. We should have called it collective intelligence. Because it is truly the first technology to come along that is the sum total of human knowledge embodied in this machine. It is made of us in a good sense — not in the Soylent Green kind of sense.

And I think that If we remind ourselves of that, that this is something we are actually collectively making and that we can steer, I think that that frames it in a slightly better way.

Zachary Karabell: Over in the front, please, and then we’ll go over here.

Audience Member 3: Hi, thank you so much. I so appreciated your point about cynicism and voting and how that’s something that we need to be concerned about. I run a nonprofit for high school civic engagement, and I started it when I was 16, and now we’re in around 1,000 high schools across the country.

Zachary Karabell: Cool.

Greg Jackson: Nice.

Steven Johnson: Thank you.

Audience Member 3: Thank you. I’m 26, and I find that the worry about something happening is what drives the optimism, right? I guess my question is: I find there’s a distinction between when you guys were talking about optimism for something possible in the future, and then feeling grateful, maybe, for things that are happening right now.

I find when my generation brings up something is wrong, like I’m not going to have Social Security, we’re told, oh, it’s worse in other countries, or this is what we have in our country.

So I guess my question is, why is it important to be cognizant of the things that are good right now? I take it as a way to learn and understand what’s happening in the future. But I really struggle with the idea that we need to be optimistic about a better future being possible, but also that future is never going to happen if we don’t reckon with the things that are going wrong right now.

Zachary Karabell: I totally agree with that as a flat-out statement.

Greg Jackson: I almost take that as a statement.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Greg Jackson: Super agree.

Zachary Karabell: I do think, though, that if you believe that things were better, that’s a huge impediment to making them better, because rarely were they. A lot of people’s discontent in the present, in every culture, is predicated on a false read of the past.

It’s one thing to say, we’ve got a lot of work to do, and there are a lot of problems in the present that if we don’t address will get worse in the future, with an acknowledgement of, hey, look, there’s a whole corpus of people grappling with things that we have, in fact, solved. And that is a hopeful statement.

As opposed to, there used to be a formula. It used to work. We’ve messed up. We’re in the darkness. We’re struggling in the wilderness.

Greg Jackson: It’s broken and we’re destroyed. For me, my mind goes to the idea of a Sisyphean task. We often use that in a very negative way, right? Like we’re never going to accomplish it. I actually see that as a positive thing.

Democracy, the United States — this is a Sisyphean undertaking, where we are constantly trying to leave a more perfect union for the next generation, even as we can acknowledge at the same time we can’t make it perfect. We will not get there.

So we can hold on to that tension of accepting that, yes, we are an imperfect and flawed species, ergo, what we make will be imperfect and flawed. But at the same time, we can burn our energy to its fullest extent in trying to deliver the best that we can. That, to me, is the sweet spot.

Zachary Karabell: Yep. One more question. Final question.

Audience Member 4: Just so I can help you out: boo, you suck. Now you know how it feels.

I’m not a historian, so I don’t know if I’m right or wrong in what I’m feeling from what you’re saying. I feel like society has been shaped by the few — the few who push against and the few who push forward, and that contention.

I get worried more about the people in the middle who just don’t care at all, who kind of just say, I’m protecting my own. I don’t really care what happens. I find a lot of people in my life like that, and it annoys me. I’m trying not to be annoyed by them not having a position, but just living.

So what does history say about that, or what do you all think about that? And I love NotebookLM. Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, look, we’re almost done here. I totally agree. I think apathy is actually a far more dangerous public stance than angry engagement, as long as that angry engagement doesn’t tip into antinomian rage and revolutionary fervor.

So I totally agree with you. I think one of the things that you see a lot, and that I think is very positive in the United States and throughout the world, is that a lot of people are just not content. They are not apathetic. They are actively expressing their voices and demanding things to be different, à la your point.

It’s not, hey, things are fine. It’s things aren’t, and let’s do something about it. And I think that’s magnificent.

I hope you enjoyed that as much as the three of us clearly did.

For those of you who have been listening to episodes, I want to encourage you to go listen to other episodes. You can do that on Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, Castbox, anything you get your podcasts on, or YouTube, for that matter, if you’re watching. Because there’s a whole corpus back there, including what we’re doing recently.

Please subscribe on any one of those places. Please subscribe to my Edgy Optimist on Substack or/and the What Could Go Right? newsletter, which The Progress Network does.

And on that, I want to thank the team at The Progress Network for all the work that they do weekly, daily, finding stories, finding ideas, and the team at Kaleidoscope for producing What Could Go Right?

And to all of you for your time, which I certainly honor, do not take for granted, and feel humbled that you have taken 57 minutes of your time and devoted it to this. So we’ll be back with you next week.

Bayer and the ordinary consumer won. The Make America Healthy Again movement and trial lawyers lost. That’s a simple heuristic for understanding the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision last week in Monsanto v. Durnell. The upshot is that plaintiffs can’t sue the biotech company for not putting a cancer warning on the label of Roundup, the popular weed killer.

The decision resolves a question that has long plagued the agricultural industry. Bayer, which owns Monsanto, had been dragged into thousands of lawsuits claiming that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, is carcinogenic. Those cases can no longer proceed. The government has consistently said the product is safe, and federal law preempts state attempts to say otherwise. Good thing, too. If the company had to endure costly litigation, it might’ve pulled the product from the market, leaving farmers without a plan B.

That’s cold comfort to the portion of the president’s coalition that disdains the herbicide, and the case is sure to strain its relationship with the White House. “MAHA Moms” rallied outside the court during oral argument in April, holding signs that read “Stop poisoning us!” When the decision was handed down, one prominent influencer called it “sickening.”

It is impossible to understand that animus without a little history. The visceral opposition to glyphosate is the product of decades of questions about Roundup, a product Monsanto developed in the 1970s, and the Roundup Ready system of farming it inaugurated in the 1990s.

The idea was revolutionary: Scientists could genetically alter crops to withstand contact with herbicides. Rather than spray a field before planting, farmers could thus do so all at once, killing weeds, saving time and maximizing output. The scale of the chemical’s use is now immense. Approximately 90 percent of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States are genetically modified to be used with glyphosate-based herbicides.

That Monsanto was one of the first developers of that system made it suspect. It didn’t help that much of the public already reviled the company for manufacturing Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant used during the Vietnam War, and pesticides such as DDT. Roundup and genetically modified crops at the turn of the century were a natural next target.

Yet the criticism, then as now, is mostly lacking in evidence of the products’ harm. Monsanto’s detractors think the company should be held liable for the adverse health effects of using Roundup. Never mind that since 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly affirmed that “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label.” In its view, the chemical is unlikely to be a human carcinogen. The majority of international regulatory bodies have come to the same conclusion. That doesn’t mean that subsequent evidence won’t change the analysis, only that for now, conclusive evidence is lacking as to the potential harms.

More problematic is the assumption that there’s another way to do modern agriculture. The movement against glyphosate is predicated on the belief that there are healthier and safer ways of growing food. Maybe. But not on an industrial scale. Farmers have yet to find a way to feed 8 billion mouths without science and technology’s help.

What they have learned is that Roundup is a great aid: Prior to the product’s introduction, they were using considerably more toxic chemicals in their quest for higher yields. Glyphosate is safer and more efficient. Corn yields, for example, have risen more than 50 percent since the late 1990s.

If Bayer had pulled Roundup from the market, the result wouldn’t have been a tsunami of organic harvesting. Farmers would have desperately sought out less-tested alternatives, each with its own health risks. Even more dire would be the likelihood of lower yields, a problem not because farmers would make less money but because people would go hungry.

There is no perfectly safe or easy way to meet our global demand for food, ethanol and animal feed. There is no agriculture without chemicals and, as yet, none of them is harmless. Glyphosate, however, is by all accounts superior to anything else on the market. It isn’t as natural as many would like, and it’s worth striving for better, healthier methods. Yet banning it — a product for which we have no ready substitute and whose benefits are clear — wouldn’t make us healthier or safer. It would throw the food system into disarray.

Kudos to the court for sparing us that unsavory result.

This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post on July 1, 2026.

America’s 250th anniversary has arrived at a moment when our country feels deeply divided over the story we want to tell about ourselves: Are we a nation defined by its extraordinary ideals or by the ways we’ve failed to live up to them? Too many of us believe we have to choose one narrative or the other, that we are either the best of all possible worlds or among the worst. My guest this week on What Could Go Right? begs to differ.

Historian Alexis Coe has a unique take on the American past; she is also a keen observer of the American present. In our conversation, we asked why Americans — and to be fair, humans everywhere and always — seem to dislike historical complexity, instead preferring simple, clean narratives. Why do people gravitate towards “either-or” rather than “yes, and”? As we considered the challenge of celebrating America’s achievements without ignoring its shortcomings, we also explored the question of historical memory: Are we all so selective in what we individually and collectively remember that common narratives have become impossible? Should we even aim for a common narrative?

The simple conclusion Alexis and I arrived at is ... there are no simple conclusions. But embracing a more realistic—and ultimately more hopeful—understanding of who we are, well, that at least is a good place to start as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

Zachary Karabell: I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is What Could Go Right?, my weekly podcast.

We are on the verge of America celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776. We’ve had these celebrations before. Of course, if we’re 250, we’ve had 249 of them. Well, not really, because we didn’t celebrate those first 10 or so. You get the drift.

One of the things that continues to animate the United States every time we have one of these birthdays is: Who are we? Are we raking ourselves over the coals, or are we triumphing in our glories?

And I thought about this a lot. I taught American history for years to a lot of different students at different levels, and there was always a tension — and I certainly felt it, too — of: Do you want to tell a redemptive narrative, or do you want to tell a narrative that is both true but also uplifting because you want to believe in who you are collectively in order to continue to be the better angels of your nature, but you also don’t want to whitewash all the things that have been negative. It’s incredibly difficult for a teacher to find the right balance between looking at all these things we’ve done that are incredible while also acknowledging many of the things we’ve done that are not.

And I’m going to talk today with someone who is also in the business, literally, of trying to unpack American history as an historian, who’s written a couple of books so far, one of which is about George Washington, and is also working on a book about the young John F. Kennedy — Alexis Coe, who is a fellow at New America, and comments a lot on our past with an eye toward finding the right balance.

Alexis, it’s great to have you on the show.

By the way, you have one of the best titles of any first book ever — which is, oddly enough, You Never Forget Your First, which is about George Washington, of course. Of course it’s about George Washington. What else would it be about?

Alexis Coe: My second book. The title You Never Forget Your First —

Zachary Karabell: Your second book. I’m sorry. I forgot. Alice is your first book.

Alexis Coe: Yeah, it’s Alice + Freda Forever.

Zachary Karabell: How did it happen, that title?

Alexis Coe: It was a joke. It was the subject line to my agent because I wanted to discuss my second book, and I knew that he would immediately say — you know, he is a fancy agent. He represents Ken Burns and many other luminaries, and he’s good at saying no. For example, a book that you were able to write, I am forever trying to get him to allow me to do, which is a book on Chester A. Arthur. He’s like, don’t even mention it.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, he may be right on that one. Just saying.

Alexis Coe: So it was the subject line to my agent because I knew that he would resist this idea. Why do we need another book on George Washington?

Zachary Karabell: And you said?

Alexis Coe: I said something like, you can’t tell me he was the great general. You can’t tell me that he married Martha Washington. I don’t want to hear about the presidency. I don’t think I said at the time the peaceful transition of power because it wasn’t quite a to-do. But what else can you tell me about him? And the cherry tree, obviously not.

He just wrote back, all right. Let’s have lunch.

Zachary Karabell: We’ve all been thinking a lot — and you’ve been thinking a lot — about America at 250, its birthday. Jill Lepore had an amusing piece in The New York Review of Books a little while back about how Americans prepared for the centennial, how they prepared for the... whatever you call the 150th. The sesquicentennial? No ... I forget all the names.

Alexis Coe: Yes. Yes.

Zachary Karabell: And of course the bicentennial, which I happen to remember. I was a little kid, and I was really excited to see the tall ships in the harbor.

In retrospect, that whole period of tall ships going down the Hudson, and a lot of the celebrations were derided as over-budgeted, under-appreciated, but at least from one kid’s vantage point, it was incredibly exciting to see all those ships come in this regatta.

So what are we to make of this? You did a tour, right, of America, and asked people what they thought. What do people think?

Alexis Coe: So usually Presidents’ Day is a really big bender for me. You know, it goes on for like a week. This has been years now, in which I have been... I’m concerned about my mental health come July.

I launched in 2023, I think, in preparation, so literally three years ago. I did a cross-country tour — 13 stops for the 13 colonies — and I wanted it to be a discussion rather than where I’m the one answering all the questions. I wanted it to be an engaging conversation, and I also wanted to get out of my echo chamber.

So New America sponsored this tour, along with other places, and I felt like what I was reading and what I was studying, and what people were saying they wanted in a president on the news, in those silly New York Times articles, “man on the street,” person in a diner, those sorts of things, I couldn’t reconcile it with what I was seeing the electorate actually doing when they got to the polls.

And so I asked these open-ended questions: How should a president be? And I got some of the answers you always expect. A president should be a great listener. Okay.

This was right before Trump was elected, and it was after the first Trump presidency. And they would go on and on, but one thing that kept coming up that needled me, and it took me a minute to accept, I must say, was the idea that authenticity was really important to voters and that they saw Trump as more authentic than Biden.

Zachary Karabell: There’s something to that, right?

Alexis Coe: Absolutely. And I actually think there’s a through line between Trump and Mamdani. It’s not that you believe they’re going to achieve everything they say they’re going to do. In fact, you know that they’re not, the same way you know that’s true with every politician who opens their mouth. But you do think they’re going to try their hardest to make it happen.

They feel like, I think it’s a general problem with the Democrats, and it’s true with the Republicans, too, they just lean more into religion, where you can sort of talk about being forgiven, and there are all these things that sort of help them out. But Democrats, in general, tend to virtue signal. They tend to use a lot of moralizing language and a lot of shaming.

And when someone like President Biden … I learned this on this tour, that he had a grandchild that he had never met and didn’t speak to. So when you see him as someone who’s really about family values and calls his grandchildren every day, there’s a certain subset of the population that thinks that. But he doesn’t talk to one of them. He’s never even met them. She’s just a child.

And then Gaza came up a lot, and those things were sort of ricocheting in my brain for sure during the first presidential debate.

Zachary Karabell: What about how people see the American past? Is there a theme, a throughline there?

Alexis Coe: At New America, we had wanted it to be about three things, and I don’t think it was. I think they were these three things separately and not together, which is essential: pride in the founding, a reckoning and acknowledgment of the ways we’ve fallen short, and aspiration towards a better future.

What you have instead is — and I have to really be quick when I say “pride in the founding,” and then I have to go really quickly to, “a reckoning for the ways we’ve fallen short.” But what you have is these extremes. There’s the pride-in-the-founding section. There’s the people who think we’ve just fallen short. And then there are the people who think we need to tear it all down in order to move forward.

And so those things didn’t happen. I would say, not to be dramatic, that I have been looking forward to our 250th, I wouldn’t say since I was a little kid, but since I became a historian.

Zachary Karabell: So what were you looking forward to? What does that even mean, in the sense of, what’s that feeling of anticipation, what this moment will mean, and therefore now what does it mean?

Alexis Coe: I knew there would be a certain amount of, you know, I don’t want to say mindless celebration, but mindless celebration. I could never have envisioned it would be like WWE wrestlers and all of that.

Zachary Karabell: That would’ve been on very few people’s bingo cards. The octagon on the South Lawn was not, I think, in your top 10 things that you expected for the 250th.

Alexis Coe: No. I don’t often deal in message-in-a-bottle situations. It’s against my ethos, one might say.

At the same time, I thought that, for better or worse, the commander-in-chief is our historian-in-chief, and I had hoped that this would be a situation in which we would get to talk about the founding. Obviously, there are a lot of historical moments in which we have not really reckoned with the past, and that we would be able to talk about slavery and Japanese internment and hold all these things at once.

I mean, maybe you could just call me Pollyanna. But I thought maybe, just maybe, that there could also be an educational factor and that we might engage with materials and show people, you know, particularly coming, even if almost anyone else had been president, we’ve come out of this era of misinformation. We’re still in it, not just because of a person, but because of the emergence of AI and a lot of other factors. So I wanted this moment, kind of like when yellow journalism died, in which we all learned how to sort of agree on facts. I wanted a lot, and I got very little.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I share that kind of romantic notion of, we can sit down, confront our warts and weaknesses, integrate them into a story that’s more nuanced, more complicated, maybe a little more like what we need to do with our own personal narratives, which is accept the shadow side and embrace everything else.

That clearly is a tall order for a society, and most societies never fully get there. I mean, maybe Germany got there in its own way, in the 1950s.

Alexis Coe: South Africa.

Zachary Karabell: South Africa, for a brief period. And then that tends to also fade. Once the generation that experienced this kind of collectively really ugly moment dies, the next tend to forget. Same thing happened in Japan to some degree. Same thing happening, obviously, in the United States. So that probably is a tall order, even though I share it.

There is this issue, and I wonder what you think about it, that I confront when I think about the challenge of talking about something in more positive terms in the world today. It’s the “yes, but” problem.

You just said we get to talk about celebrating the founding, but we’ve got to reckon with our issues. Why can’t we just do what some of the Republicans and MAGA people say we should do, which is just take a moment and celebrate?

Alexis Coe: I mean, we are. We have been doing that all the time. I mean, how much do you get out of the Fourth of July?

Zachary Karabell: Not nearly as much as you do.

Alexis Coe: Well, my Fourth of July is spent trying to be a human with friends and family and then running back in front of this. So I’m wearing, like, jean shorts underneath a blazer, kind of thing.

I agree. But for me, complexity has never been a liability. Life would be so much easier if it was, so I don’t recommend it.

Zachary Karabell: Don’t do as I do.

Alexis Coe: No. I would like to take a vacation from my own brain, so I get it. But I don’t find it difficult to hold these things at once, or else I couldn’t possibly spend years with someone like George Washington.

Zachary Karabell: So what do we do about the fact that human beings don’t like complexity? I mean, many of the biographies that sell best are elegiac, heroic, glowing. Every now and then there’s kind of a takedown biography that people love because it’s salacious or catty. Kitty Kelley writing about royals and Reagans in the ‘80s was hardly a paragon of hagiography, but everyone loved it because she just dug up the dirt.

But in general, there is a tendency, particularly when writing biography, to like the person, admire the person. There’s also a commercial constraint there, right? You’re someone writing books for an audience that buys books, and often that audience doesn’t want the complexity that you just talked about, doesn’t want the nuance. So, like, what do you do about that?

Alexis Coe: It’s so hard because … okay, by the way, as an aside with Kitty Kelley, she’s part of this organization I’m a part of called Biographers International. Except every year I let my membership lapse intentionally because I know I’m going to get an email from Kitty Kelley, and it’s just like, you know, I get my kicks where I can, kind of thing.

Zachary Karabell: Okay. Note to people listening, this was not a setup question. That was a totally serendipitous connection. Hilarious, but serendipitous.

Alexis Coe: And I think those books sell well, and certainly if I was genuflecting in the direction of one of these great men, I would probably be higher up on the bestseller list, and let’s say Mount Vernon wouldn’t be boycotting my book.

Zachary Karabell: Seriously? They don’t carry your book at Mount Vernon?

Alexis Coe: Not anymore. They did. I had my launch there. It was their bestseller. And then, during the summer of George Floyd, I did the unspeakable, which is point out publicly available information, which is that they don’t have a single Black person on staff who doesn’t play an enslaved person or work on the grounds. The entire senior leadership, the library, they didn’t even start giving fellowships to Black people until, like, three years ago. And it’s really hard to miss unless you never notice that sort of thing.

Zachary Karabell: Did they make a point of yanking your book from the bookstore?

Alexis Coe: Yeah. And people call all the time and ask, and they’ll report back. They’ll say, I can’t believe I went to Mount Vernon and they didn’t have your book.

Zachary Karabell: Wow. I didn’t know that.

Alexis Coe: Their two bestsellers, myself and Erica Dunbar, we won’t associate with them until they, like, hire someone. And they’re fine with it because they love to talk about how they don’t receive government funding. It’s because the government, in other times, would not give them funding.

But my point is, I also really like those guys. If those guys didn’t do what they did, I would not have half as many jokes to make. Like the “thigh men,” which unexpectedly became a thing.

The thigh men, for people who wouldn’t naturally know what that is, was a nickname I gave Washington biographers, and it was not intended to be in the final book. I had the term in brackets, and I thought I was going to come up with a more serious phrase, the kind that we studied in graduate school. One aspires to create something that other historians use and reference. Particularly because you will spend, as I speak from experience, the rest of your life with people coming up to you and saying it. So my life is spent with people saying, “thigh men,” or, usually, they get it wrong, they say, “thigh guys,” which is maybe better. It rolls off the tongue.

Zachary Karabell: Okay, explain for us. What is it a reference to?

Alexis Coe: Washington biographers like Ron Chernow go hard on his body in a way that’s completely unnecessary and sounds a lot like a romance novel.

If I had written something like that, they would’ve said, this isn’t a serious presidential biography. This is for ladies. And so they talk about how the muscles ripple through his jaw, and how his thighs really, the way they grip the flanks of a horse. It’s like borderline inappropriate.

Because of the way they all obsessed about his thighs, which are, like, fine. They’re, as far as founding thighs, they’re nice enough, you know? I wouldn’t say that they were any better or worse.

Zachary Karabell: Given a choice between a series of thighs, his were just fine.

Alexis Coe: Yeah. I have other opinions on the founders. It’s not top 10 where I’m going to be like, I don’t know, but he had really nice thighs.

Zachary Karabell: Fair. Totally fair.

Alexis Coe: I’m more of a calf person myself. I appreciate their work, but I think I wouldn’t study someone that I liked that much, and I wouldn’t study someone I didn’t like that much.

Zachary Karabell: It’s interesting, the United States’ sort of fetishizing reverence for the founders is unusual in most countries. You get that a little bit in communist countries. You certainly had that about Lenin. You have that a bit in China about Mao and the Long March. There are countries that have a kind of reverential, never-ending obsession with the set of individuals, men, who create this new country.

The Washington part has always fascinated me because he seems the most cipher-like. I know he doesn’t seem that way to you because you’ve really looked into it, but optically he’s somebody who you can project a lot onto, depending on what you think and what you believe.

And then there are a couple of great speeches, and the no entangling alliances, and the Farewell Address about parties, and there’s a certain wisdom that echoes down through the ages. I feel like “echoes down through the ages” is really a cliché we ought to stop, even though I just did it.

But is your fascination with him the same, you feel, as a kind of general fascination of who are we, how did we get here, what was our founding DNA? Or were you also motivated by something, I don’t know, other?

Alexis Coe: It takes me years to write a book and years to decide I need to write that book. Every subject has needled me for a while. My first book was based on a story I found in graduate school, and I didn’t write it until, I don’t know, five, 10 years later. Washington, I visited Mount Vernon when I was in grad school. I did not leave thinking I would write a book about George Washington. I thought, well, that was a Sunday somewhat well spent.

But at the same time, to answer that, I have to say that the reason I’m interested in the founding is the same reason I think people are too invested in the founding in America.

We have such a young country that I am able to look at our founding and trace it to the present. And then we have such a young country that some people only want to look at the founding and then have a direct sort of jump over everything that comes between to the present.

And that causes people to romance it. There are some hard truths that somehow people feel really invested in, as if they are the heirs to the founding sins as well. I don’t feel that way. I feel as if this is a part of our shared collective history, and so I’m very interested in it, but I don’t feel the same connection.

I don’t know if that’s because I didn’t have family here at that point. I mean, I’m sure we can trace it and find someone somewhere. But I just think there is this sort of personalization that happens, and that’s where it gets a little bit touchy, if you will. And I just don’t have that. It just doesn’t bother me, which is not to say, I am otherwise the world’s most sensitive person. But in a few different ways, particularly historically speaking, I’ve got no feelings, I guess, of that nature.

Zachary Karabell: So how does this segue to writing your next book about a young John F. Kennedy, the pre-presidency John F. Kennedy? In fact, even the pre-Senate John F. Kennedy, right? You sort of end, or just as he gets elected.

Alexis Coe: Yes, 1957. So he’s entering the Senate.

It’s interesting. I am the child of boomers, and I grew up thinking of him defined by his death because I got to hear about when and in what period this happened, and not a lot else. So that was very much fixed in my mind.

I was never as interested in him as I was in other presidents because I just felt like he’d been done. But then, when I would read books about him, they would race through his early life and go straight to the presidency, which is fair enough for most people.

But when Trump was elected the first time, I kept thinking about how it didn’t totally make sense. I was still finishing the Washington book, so I wasn’t touching it yet. This is sort of years ahead of time.

Zachary Karabell: The gestation.

Alexis Coe: Yeah.

These are the second sons who were then the first sons because something happened with their older brothers. They were born to these men who were not quite self-made but got their way, and then their sons became even more successful. There’s a good amount of, well, of course, there’s womanizing and other things. These are not perfect people. But they go very different directions.

The thing I came to think about, and this is also related to the founding era, is the reason there is the 35 age limit, that that’s the floor and there’s no ceiling, is that in order to get people to sign the Constitution, one man who didn’t even end up signing it was like, we need it to be 35 so that people can go through Congress. Obviously, no one’s going to come out of nowhere, like from the private sector, and just become president. Who would do that? Congress will be their college. It’ll be their training ground.

I reread Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth, which was sort of, you know, lambasted and dragged by Doris Kearns Goodwin. There’s this great, like, if you want to get into ‘80s or ‘90s fights between historians, read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s letters to the editor in The New York Times in reference to Nigel Hamilton’s book, which was very good, but it’s in the British way, and so once in a while it just completely goes off the rails. But otherwise it’s very good, and so it’s kind of frustrating.

So I was reading that, and I was thinking, oh, this is good, but it’s not, again, totally hewn to the landscape. It’s not rooted here. And it was 11 years in Congress, a Purple Heart, service in World War II, a Pulitzer. And I thought, why do we treat that like a flyover state? He had these moments. He was in Congress at the same time as McCarthy. As McCarthy’s star fell, Kennedy’s rose, and the way they went about things was totally different.

Zachary Karabell: With all this in mind, as we kind of look to this neat bow of 250 years, I think it’s pretty common now for most Americans to think that we were better in the past, we’re worse now, and the future is going to be even worse than our present, more or less.

I mean, there are some partisan differentials there, but in general this is not a period of time where Americans are thinking, hey, we’ve got this. We’re great. We’re doing it. Much more like 1776 than 1876, for instance.

What do you feel about all this? I mean, do you look at this and go, oh my God. You just referenced Trump versus Washington, Trump versus JFK. There is a set of Americans who think Trump is the greatest president ever and embodies something that has never heretofore been embodied in the presidency. I think we can all agree on that neutral statement.

But, you know, in general, most people are not looking to our present as an icon of America, as a moment in time where we can celebrate, like, this is our apex. We’ve reached the mountaintop. Glory, glory, hallelujah. What do you feel about all this?

Alexis Coe: I don’t want to inflate a letter from Thomas Jefferson, but I do think it’s worth noting that after 1800, he pretty consistently seemed to believe that we should rewrite our Constitution every 20 years. So the fact that we’ve had so few amendments, that our country has not grown and changed with the population, is very much against the founding logic.

So I think the problem with today is not that we need to go back to the past, but rather that we haven’t progressed toward a better future as we should.

Zachary Karabell: Nicely put.

Alexis Coe: Oh, thank you.

I think there hasn’t been an accountability for the presidency, and with that I’m going to pass the buck to Congress because Congress is, I think we can also all agree, is kind of the worst.

If they would hold the presidency accountable and limit it in the way that they should, no matter who is in charge, because neither party does that. And also themselves. Whenever they do that, like with the Presidential Records Act, they then exempt themselves. They said the president has to keep everything, has to turn everything over, and then they shoehorn this little bit in that says, but Congress only has to turn over papers they mark as professional, not personal. But they have the power to decide what’s personal and what’s professional. So this is not a trustworthy entity.

There are no rules. There have been times where people have said, we’re having another civil war. This is a national divorce. And in some ways it does seem that way because we’re stuck in the same conversation, the same arguments constantly. And rules are really good at solving that kind of thing.

Zachary Karabell: So this is not a trick question. It’s an honest question. Would you rather live in any other moment in American history than America at 250?

Alexis Coe: No. I’m a woman. I wouldn’t be here for a lot of situations. I wouldn’t be allowed to speak to you face to face. I think no. Although I had more rights in recent history than I have now, so that would be a good time. So, no. I never want to time travel. It’s too risky for me. That’s some white male privilege.

Zachary Karabell: Maybe America 240.

Alexis Coe: I love that question, by the way.

Zachary Karabell: You’ll take 240, but maybe that’s about it.

Alexis Coe: No matter who asks me it, they’re setting themselves up for that. There’s very rarely been a time when I haven’t been able to toss that back.

Zachary Karabell: But what does that then say about our kind of current dyspepsia, which is very much predicated on, things suck?

Alexis Coe: I like that you used a fancy word, and you ended the sentence with “things suck.”

It takes about a second to dissuade anyone of that. There’s not a person alive who I can’t point out how their life would’ve been much worse.

So I think that there’s a real resistance to reality, and I would say that’s our greatest problem. I don’t know if this is a part of our attention span, because I think there were always people who were nostalgic for the past. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, kind of thing. But I think that what plagues us about our nation is the same thing that plagues us about ourselves, which is an inability to see ourselves from a different perspective.

We are also so isolated as a country compared to others that we don’t tend to see how we affect the world.

My last column was on empire, and I was thinking so much about how we call something national security, and other empires would call it imperial interests. We say we’re securing a region. They’re invading. They have colonies. We have bases. We’re not that different. And I think that doesn’t mean that we are inherently bad or that we need to implode or stop being ourselves or be absorbed into Canada. But I do think that we need to take a good look at ourselves in general, personally and professionally and patriotically.

Zachary Karabell: And do you feel that this period of time will be a crucible whereby we will then do that retrospectively? We are living through a 10-year Trumplandia, first and second season of The Trump Show. He is clearly the dominant figure in American politics since 2016. That is unequivocally true. And he has created a version of America that I think you and I would agree has always been there, just hasn’t been there quite this way, with quite this flavor. Do you anticipate that we’re going to be looking back at all this quietly in our gulags, passing notes, going, well, that happened?

Alexis Coe: I mean, are we going to be fighting some sort of resistance? I was in Amsterdam and went to the Resistance Museum and was like, I’m not cut out for this.

Zachary Karabell: I am not doing Anne Frank for four years. Forget it. I am not living in an attic.

Alexis Coe: No. I mean, that would be a great situation. I could live in an attic. I could do that for sure. Not the other stuff.

But I think we have examples of this from other countries. When people say McCarthyism ended, I always like to think, for who?

Because the people… it didn’t. The tools of the trade were there, and they had been popularized stateside. But more importantly, the people who had lost their jobs, who had lost their homes, whose marriages had been destroyed, often they had to leave the country to find work, and it just happened to be in a country like China or Mexico or someplace where there was, like, oh, guess it was true after all. These people, their lives were ruined. So that didn’t end.

And so when Trump is gone, however he is gone, however he goes, he will never actually be gone. The ripple effects will be there forever. Our institutions are certainly enervated. The issue going forward is what happens next. If this was the reaction to Obama, then what will happen if we get, like, a Mamdani in the other direction? Will we just swing back and forth like a lot of other countries, this pendulum?

We see this in other countries, like Hungary. Will we just have one extreme to another, and that will be our reality, which doesn’t offer us the kind of lives that our parents and our grandparents had? Or will we actually improve? Will we embrace who we are in all of our complexity? And I think that will determine the future.

Zachary Karabell: Love that. Totally agree.

Will we be able to integrate ourselves, which requires integrating a lot of what Trump has exposed as unresolved issues — class issues, geographical fissures that never really closed, they just were papered over as if they were closed. I think that remains an open question.

I have more faith that we will be able to integrate that somewhat more. But it’s going to require a lot on the part of the left as well to recognize that simply using a lot of extreme language to describe the Trump years doesn’t get you to that integration. It just gets you to what you just talked about, the oscillation from one extreme to another, back and forth, back and forth.

That’s my focus because that’s the people I can talk to, right? I don’t have a lot to say to MAGA-land, and they don’t have a lot they’re going to listen to that I might have to say, even though that would be great for the podcast.

Alexis Coe: I don’t know if we will have a left versus right as much as we’ve had in the past. It does seem as if, and this is obviously true in New York, but this is true throughout the country, as people like James Talarico are... he’s also doing something that Democrats never do. He’s got a good slogan, and he repeats it over time. And so one of the things he keeps saying is, “It’s bottom versus top. It’s top versus bottom.” I think that is definitely true.

There was something Trump recently said. He was asked, are you concerned that a war with Iran, if it continues to go on, will really affect the pocketbook of average Americans? He said, no, that is not at all influencing me.

There are people who are having trouble because they’re clearly MAGA. I mean, they’re obviously horrified when they’re shown the clip. Again, this speaks to the top versus bottom, and we’ll see where this goes. But that does leave an opportunity for some Democrat, any Democrat, to seize, or any opposition party. I don’t care. We’ve had other parties.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Maybe we’ll have another one again. That’s a whole other issue and conversation.

So historians really don’t like historical adaptations. I can remember one of the biggest brouhahas, hullabaloos. I got to use “brouhaha” and “hullabaloo” in the same sentence.

Alexis Coe: In one sentence.

Zachary Karabell: Was when Oliver Stone’s JFK film came out.

Alexis Coe: Wow.

Zachary Karabell: And you’re doing a book about the young JFK as opposed to the dead JFK. But that was a huge film and a massive controversy because it clearly did play fast and loose with the facts and go into conspiracy theories. But it got a lot of people to think about JFK. No? Maybe?

Alexis Coe: No, I don’t think so. It just makes me angry.

So I testified before Congress, and he went right before me, and I was like, I should have been on the panel with him. I have some words for him.

That one is so bad because it just invents things for long periods of time. So there’s this monologue in which someone who’s supposed to protect the president describes the advance team, and he goes on for, like, 15 minutes, and literally nothing he says has ever happened in the history of presidential security. And because that gives so much weight to conspiracy theorists, I take issue with that.

But having said that, while my standard, as anyone who’s read one of my book reviews knows, is very high for literature, for books, for nonfiction. When it comes to other creative adaptations, I’m a Pride and Prejudice girlie. I love Poldark. I love the worst series. I love Turn.

Zachary Karabell: Bridgerton?

Alexis Coe: Yes. Not as much.

Zachary Karabell: There is a line there. Outlander, Bridgerton. I mean, somewhere in there.

Alexis Coe: If there are cousin suitors, if someone’s going to be ruined, if any of these things are going to happen, they’re going to the Continent, someone has to go to London — all these things are wonderful to me, even if they are not rooted in the landscape. So I’m okay with that.

There were some things with the Death by Lightning series that I didn’t love but had to forgive. But there are also choices that maybe some other people made in their books about Chester A. Arthur, like not to include a certain young woman who was buried in a grave.

Zachary Karabell: I didn’t include the letters. I mean, it was a strange elision. What can I say?

As for you, we’re just going to use, forever and anon, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Alexis Coe, in possession of spare time, is in search of a costume drama.

Alexis Coe: Anything. I won’t even waste a minute. Tha algorithm knows me. It says, you like this, so you’ll like this garbage, and I’m like, yes, I will.

Zachary Karabell: That, for people who otherwise were not aware, is a reference to the first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that I shamelessly cribbed from.

Alexis Coe: I once used that line as the introduction to a book review: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Kennedy author in possession of excess material must be in want of a new book deal.”

Zachary Karabell: That’s very good. I like that.

Alexis Coe: And I can’t use it again. So when you just casually used it, I was like, ugh, I spent it.

Zachary Karabell: I have wasted my opportunity to do this yet again.

I want to thank you, Alexis, for your time and insights. Everyone should read her two books, and her third, which is yet to be forthcoming, but will at some point, forthcome. Thank you, Alexis, and happy 250th birthday, America.

Alexis Coe: Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: So, as anticipated, we did not come to a simple, tied-up-neatly-in-a-bow answer to who are we, what are we, what are we going to be, but I hope we did come to a greater appreciation for that yin and yang I mentioned at the very beginning, for that need to hold two truths to be self-evident simultaneously.

I want to thank, as usual, the team at Kaleidoscope for producing these episodes. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for making all of it possible. Please, please, please send me your comments, send me your tired and your hungry, to theprogressnetwork.org, or to my email at info@rivertwice. Sign up for my Edgy Optimist column.

It’s free, unless you want to pay, in which case it’s not, at Substack. Happy 250th anniversary, America, birthday, whatever, and we will be back with you next week.

In this week’s episode of What Could Go Right?, I had the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics — why it’s counterproductive to think of the economy as a single number rather than a set of behaviors — with a uniquely qualified conversation partner: Alex Mayyasi, longtime contributor to NPR’s “Planet Money” and the author of Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life.

We delved into the facts and fictions of gig work, inequality, and weekends — and how all of it (mis)informs the current bleak narrative about the state of our economy. None of it shook us free of the belief that, in the end, spending reveals more than sentiment does.

These days, Americans everywhere say they are pessimistic about their personal finances and the price of things, yet many of us continue to buy homes, eat out, and invest. In that tension is where real life lies. The economy isn’t a mood; it’s what we do… with our money, our time, and each other.

That’s why I think we should be cautious in the face of end-times vibes and headlines regarding “the economy.” And why we should be more curious about whether and how people are spending. Our behavior tells the more subtle, and more honest, story.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is What Could Go Right?, my weekly podcast where we try to look at what could go right, given that everybody tends to be looking at what could go wrong. Think of this as your weekly dose of fresh air that will dispel the putrid stench of dystopic, dystopian miasma.

And one of the things that we are particularly dyspeptic and dystopian about is the state of our economy. Now, I’ve thought a lot about whether the economy even exists. It’s just a set of numbers that exist like a guide map or a star map in an otherwise chaotic world that gives us some sense that there’s a system there, rather than just an amazingly confusing jumble of stuff.

And I think demystifying what’s going on in, quote-unquote, the economy is the first step in dealing with what is actually going on in the economy. And there’s one show that I think many of us have listened to for years called “Planet Money,” which is on NPR, which does an amazing job of that kind of demystification.

It’s quirky, it’s interesting, it’s well-produced, and one of the longtime contributors to “Planet Money” is Alex Mayyasi, and he has a new book called Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life. And that is indeed what it is. It’s sort of a primer with stories about things one needs to know to grasp what’s going on economically.

Alex, great to have you on What Could Go Right? I’ve always admired “Planet Money.” In addition, I’ve admired it because you had me on for an episode, which immediately means that you’re the most amazing show in the world.

Alex Mayyasi: Of course.

Zachary Karabell: There is a certain upbeat tonality to it, even when you deal with negative things or challenging things.

It’s a quirky let’s-understand-the-world. Everything is complicated. Let’s try to make things a little more simplified, not in a dumbed-down way. But, I mean, you all do have a kind of non-dystopian, dyspeptic … it’s not a sour show, it’s not a hand-wringing show. It’s a show, I think, animated by a good deal of bubbly curiosity.

Alex Mayyasi: I think that’s fair, yeah. I think me and the “Planet Money” hosts are very much animated by curiosity. I think there is a general course of optimism that runs through “Planet Money,” but not because we think the state of the world is always great as it is, but we also think it’s empowering to both recognize things that do work really well and understand how the world works better.

But also when we note parts of our economy that are unfair or not working well, I think it’s also kind of empowering to better understand why they’re not working well, because that helps you understand how they could be better and not be resigned to our fate: Oh, everything’s always going to be unfair and terrible.

We can recognize all sorts of progress that’s happened, and that’s great, and also recognize things that aren’t going well, but do so with an eye toward they are things that could be changed and improved.

Zachary Karabell: So in that spirit, we try to ask everybody one question where they think of something that went really well within the topic we’re talking about. So what’s one thing that strikes you that went unexpectedly well for the U.S. economy?

Alex Mayyasi: One thing that comes immediately to mind is, you know, there was this moment just after the pandemic where inflation was starting to go up. For a lot of Americans like myself, it was really our first personal experience with high inflation, wondering what a dollar was going to be worth a few years from now.

And, do you remember this moment? It was very common to read editorials and even just straightforward news articles talking about how it was almost inevitable that a recession would be coming. And I think the reason that people were so confidently predicting a recession is because there’s this trade-off that’s widely documented in economics that usually if you have really high inflation, generally the only way to fight that is to do things that cause more unemployment or a recession.

That’s the central bank, the Federal Reserve, doing things like increasing interest rates, which is the cost of borrowing money. It makes mortgages more expensive. It makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow money to expand. Basically, all the things that power economic growth. The central bank often makes it more expensive to borrow money, and that kind of puts the brakes on the economy. So that can reduce inflation, but at the cost of lower employment rates, potentially a recession. And it’s this generally noted phenomenon that often, to really control inflation, comes at the cost of more unemployment and recession.

And this kind of unexpectedly positive development that people who were not pessimists were predicting this recession, and it never really came, that inflation really came down to a more manageable level without this huge amount of economic pain that was expected. And I think that’s a testament to a few things, but one in particular is that America has had a long history of the central bank being independent and not run by technocratic economists and bankers trying to think about how to control inflation and manage this trade-off between employment and inflation, and not influenced by politicians who are thinking about the short run and might be okay with a bunch of inflation happening later on as long as the economy looks hot and good right before the next election.

Zachary Karabell: I’m gonna agree with everything you’re saying. And then in the spirit of the episode we’re doing of trying to help people, try to help us all figure out what the hell is going on in the world as we know it, I’m now going to put on my devil’s advocate cap and disagree with everything you’re saying.

And that’s from the perspective that you get a lot, and I know that we all feel a lot, which is all these numbers may say whatever they say, but that clearly doesn’t accord with the lived experience of a lot of people. So even if you tell people that there was no recession in 2023 or into ‘24, one of the animating factors of the 2024 election was that everyone felt like inflation was really still high and their cost of living was untenable.

One of the things that’s going to happen in 2026 heading into the midterms is spiking energy prices, which start with gasoline and then kind of make their way into food and all these other things. So a lot of people feel like, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, economic statistics, GDP, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. My life is not economically good.”

Things are getting out of hand, and I’m being told these numbers, which I guess might be true, or maybe at worst, they’re complete fabrications, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics—you know, Trump fired the head, and maybe it’s all just the Trump economy or the Biden economy. So what do you say to people who legitimately say I’m calling bullshit?

Alex Mayyasi: Well, I think I’ll divide my answer in two parts. I think one, with the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, we’re seeing inflation going up strongly once again.

Zachary Karabell: And by the way, people, we may be listening to this when the strait’s open again. Yeah. But whatever the long-term effects are is not going to change between now and whenever you’re listening to this.

Alex Mayyasi: Right. And so I think that’s kind of a point that the central bank can do a lot, but at the end of the day, if there’s a war that blocks oil shipments and that causes inflation, the central bank can only do so much about that. There are kind of lots of fundamentals in the economy that shape inflation.

But to your second point about this kind of mismatch where, okay, sure, there was no recession, but people sure aren’t feeling buoyant and optimistic and confident in their finances. I mean, I think that’s real. I think my point is that it was an unexpectedly good phenomenon where there was just a lot of widespread expectation of a recession, and we did not have a recession where there are lots of layoffs and this economic malaise that stretches for years, and it takes years just to get back to the baseline beforehand.

But yeah, I mean, I think that is a big question in economics right now, that consumer sentiment, people’s feelings about the economy are about as low as they have ever been recorded. You have to go back to times like the 2008 recession, the darkest days, to find sentiment as low as it is recently, or periods like when we had actually had people in, during the Arab-Israeli war, lining up for gasoline, and you’re waiting for half an hour to try and get gas, and then you don’t even get it.

Like, those are kind of the moments where you see such a low level of confidence and sentiment about the economy. There’s definitely open questions about why exactly that is, but I do think it is still a very positive, unexpectedly positive outcome that this experience of very high inflation, we at least for a time got back to relatively modest levels of inflation without inflicting this kind of terrible economic harm that we’ve often seen, like in the ‘70s when inflation was super high, and the way we got back to it under control was just this very high levels of economic pain.

So much so that someone rushed the Federal Reserve building and tried to abduct a member of the Fed to get them to reduce interest rates and make it cheaper to get a mortgage …

Zachary Karabell: “I’m holding onto this banker till you lower rates.”

Alex Mayyasi: That was the level of pain in the economy. And so I don’t want to discount what people are feeling now. I feel my own sense of uncertainty, but I think that’s kind of the perspective that’s helpful to keep in mind about that piece of good economic news.

Zachary Karabell: All right, I’m going to take a quick Alex break here. So you’re used to doing all the interviews. You’re doing this book now. What does it feel like to be on the other side of the microphone here?

Alex Mayyasi: It’s been interesting. Yeah. I’m usually the one asking the questions. I mean, I think it feels a little bit different where I am talking about my reporting. That is something that journalists do with a fair amount. I think what was more unexpected to be on the other side of the microphone is that Planet Money likes doing stunt journalism or learning by doing.

Zachary Karabell: Just wait for later in this episode to see what we’ve got planned. I think there’s a water bucket over your doorway. I don’t know what the producers lined up for you.

Alex Mayyasi: But, you know, “Planet Money,” we made a—one of our reporters, Alexa Heratz Ghazi, made a whole series of episodes about the making of the book and as a way to better understand the publishing industry. And so that was a moment where the “Planet Money” gaze was focused on me instead of the other way around, which was an interesting experience, and I had that moment of, before an episode comes out, being like, “Oh, he recorded audio while I was getting news about whether we hit the bestseller list. I wonder what I sounded like during that moment? I hope I don’t sound like a total goon.”

Zachary Karabell: So what is the theory behind those… I think once you bottled a fake vodka. I mean, it wasn’t fake vodka, but it was a—you made up a label for the vodka and pretended it was a high-end one. You set up a business once?

Alex Mayyasi: “Planet Money” has bought a toxic asset and lost all their money by doing so. “Planet Money” has bought oil from a handshake deal with someone, like a small oil operation, and then followed the supply chain of oil by trying to sell it and following along the pipeline. I mean, it all kind of started actually when “Planet Money” first made a T-shirt many years ago and decided, “Oh, this is a business story,” and so we went to a cotton farm where the cotton came from and followed the whole supply chain.

Zachary Karabell: And the theory behind that is it makes it more relatable. It turns it from abstract numbers and concepts into real, tangible things that you think is a better story?

Alex Mayyasi: For sure. I mean, I think “Planet Money” has often tried to tell stories to explain the economy and to find people who are experiencing things themselves. And so sometimes it’s helpful, especially to be able to do this whole supply chain aspect. Okay, we can be the ones experiencing it ourselves. So that’s often been the reason for some of these. Another was sending a satellite into space. Often when there are many actors involved, it can be helpful to learn about the process by going through it ourselves.

Zachary Karabell: There is a powerful public education component of what “Planet Money” does, and it’s, I’ve always wondered. For years in the 20th century at least, Americans had civics, they had home ec. Home ec, of course, wasn’t really about economics, although it was a little bit about managing a home. Certainly all these things were kind of gender divided.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, but that’s the origin of economics. I think the original Greek for economics, you know, it originally referred to the management of the home. So home ec is kind of hearkening to the origins of the word.

Zachary Karabell: But if you wonder why we don’t teach that, meaning people have often talked about they can graduate high school, and if they’re lucky, they can do an algebraic equation. They might know when the Battle of Gettysburg was fought. If they’re lucky, they’ll have some idea of how a cell functions, but they won’t know how to balance a checkbook. Now granted, I guess no one quite balances a checkbook anymore. Isn’t it wild to live long enough so that something that seems so anodyne and simplistic as saying “balance a checkbook” has become completely anachronistic to the point where X number of people hearing that will go, “A what? Doing what to what?”

Why do you think people that are so mystified by — politics, I guess, have an intuitive sense to them, particularly in the horse race aspect of an election. You know, person A, person B, person that gets the most votes wins. Like, that’s a pretty straightforward proposition. But somehow money and how money works and how economies work, people get much more overwhelmed. They shut down. They find it boring. I guess it often is incredibly boring, a lot of jargon. But they also feel overwhelmed, that it’s too much, and I guess there’s a good deal of fear.

Alex Mayyasi: I think one piece of it is there are large classes of people who benefit from making money and finance and economics seem more complicated, and by using more jargon rather than less, right? There are people in Wall Street or the wider finance world who make a very good living by convincing people this is all really, really— you know, investing is really, really complicated and you need to pay me 2% per year of your assets so that I can invest for you, because I’m so good at it, I can invest for you.

And there are versions of that in other fields. So I think that’s a piece of it, where there’s an incentive for people to make things more complicated rather than more simple. Probably also a piece of where money is something that’s very, it can just be scary to think about. It’s something that matters so much to us. It’s our security, it’s our stability. It gets wrapped up in status as well, and self-worth. So I do think there’s a way where sometimes there can be some apprehension about diving into it. People might learn it’s less complicated than it seems, but we don’t always want to dive into things where we do have some nervousness around it.

But in some ways, I’m also the worst person to ask that question to—right—because I think I find money and economics so interesting and so fascinating. It is understanding how the world works. It’s understanding people. And so I hope with this book and other work I do that more people will share that sense.

I think a lot of really powerful ideas in finance, business, economics are quite simple but very powerful, and they can explain a lot. And change how you understand the world, and also give you this calming, empowering sense of having a better understanding of what’s going on in the world.

And yeah, “Planet Money”’s not the only ones to do this, but I think that was a big motivation for me, is to make this material really engaging and often delightful, even as it is at times frustrating or complicated.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, there’s that kind of canard of things not to talk about over a Thanksgiving table: money, politics, and sex. And increasingly it feels to me in the world that we live in, politics and sex are okay, but money still isn’t. I mean, there’s the old joke about someone sees their therapist and they’re going on and on about family life, and they’re going on and on about sexual fantasies or problems they have, and somehow money comes up, or the therapist asks, “Well, how much do you make?” And the person goes, “I’m not going to tell you that. That’s private.”

And we still have this whole, I think, shrouded-in-mystery aspect of money. I mean, New York and some of these other states over the past years have created transparency rules where there’s some salary transparency. Because it used to be you really didn’t know what other people were making. You couldn’t line it up. I suppose to some degree the gig economy, which I want to talk about in a minute, has made some clarity about what people are making for any particular thing.

But have you found that, over the years in reporting all this, there’s still a degree of, like, money is Voldemort? You know, it is the thing whose name shall not be mentioned?

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, I think there can be hesitation to talk about it, for sure. But there’s so much power in overcoming that, because money gets so much at what is important to us and what’s valuable. I mean, anytime people choose to spend money on something, you are expressing your values because you are choosing to not spend that money on something else.

Similarly, when you spend your time—spending your time on one thing or another. And it’s not always the case that the things with the biggest price tags are the most important, but there’s certainly a lot of signal there. You know, when something is very expensive or a market is very, very large, that often indicates that it’s really important to us, whether in terms of being a resource that’s really badly needed for fundamental economic reasons, or just things that we really care about and therefore value really highly.

So I think, yeah, money does often reveal a lot, and that’s both sometimes why people are uncertain or hesitant to talk about it. That’s also why it’s so interesting and so important. And there’s a “Planet Money” episode some of my colleagues did that was about companies that started doing salary transparency, right?

So companies suddenly made it so that everyone could look up in a public spreadsheet—or public at least to members of that company—the salary of everyone else in that company, and it led to uncomfortable conversations.

I think in some cases it revealed things like women who were earning less than men for comparable jobs. It also revealed uncomfortable things where some people said, “Hey, why am I getting paid less?” And it led to a conversation with their boss or manager of, “You’re getting paid less because we don’t think you’re doing as good a job.” And, you know, maybe the boss or manager was wrong, maybe they were right. But that’s something that was surfaced very, very visibly with the salary transparency.

Zachary Karabell: So you have a chapter in the book about the gig economy, and it’s sort of a tale of two gigs. Where do you come out on this? There was the initial promise of gig work, and the positive part of it was going to be you get liberated, you get to set your own hours, you have autonomy.

The negative side has been you don’t get benefits, you have no job security, you have no pricing power, there’s no unions because that’s the antithesis of a gig economy, and therefore you’re constantly at the whim of whomever you’re gigging for, slicing, dicing, and you’re the last person to be on top of the priority list for money.

Where do you come out on this? I mean, has the gig economy been a mixed bag, a good thing, a raw deal?

Alex Mayyasi:I think you can go either way. I think actually my biggest takeaway from writing that chapter and doing that reporting was that the association of the gig economy with a few specific companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, TaskRabbit has made it seem like a smaller and less important phenomenon than it is.

I mean, a significant number of people work for Uber and DoorDash and TaskRabbit, but as a share of the overall workforce and economy, it seems like a little bit of a niche. But actually, if you broaden the lens a little bit to think about people who are working on a contract, people who are not doing a full-time job or even a part-time job, but living in this world of not employment, but contracts and gigs, that becomes a very significant part of the workforce and a very long-term trend that predates Uber and Lyft and TaskRabbit.

So something that’s been happening for years is that I think there’s been a lot of attention if, say, a Fortune 500 company closes a factory in Pittsburgh or Georgia or where have you, and moves that factory overseas, right?

People realize that offshoring has gotten a lot of visibility. What’s gotten a lot less visibility is this phenomenon that’s been happening a lot where companies basically just take some chunk of their employees and move it out of the walled garden of their company or full-time employment.

And so they might say, “Oh, the janitors, we don’t really need them to be full-time employees. We’ll save money if we instead go to the world of gig and contract work, and we outsource that work to a janitorial company.” And in some cases, it might be that those janitors are actually, in theory, contract workers running their own businesses, even if they’re contracted through this arrangement that is how you get janitors to clean your offices.

Similar things might happen for hotels. You go to a hotel, a lot of those people might not be employees of the hotel chain. They are provided by contracting services that provide the kitchen staff for the hotel or the concierges and cleaning staff.

So that’s a big phenomenon that’s also part of the story of gig work—if you think about moving away from employment and moving work outside of the walled garden of the company and toward contract work. And then similarly, for very educated workers, there are fractional chief financial officers. There’s increasing prevalence of workers—engineers, executives, marketers—who are hired on more of a contract basis.

So there are fundamental reasons, to do with technology, why this has been happening more and more, and it also necessitates rethinking a lot of laws, because labor laws in particular have been built around the assumption of a full-time job at a company. That’s where you get your healthcare benefits. That’s where you get overtime protection and labor protections.

I think there are upsides, too. There are people who have benefited as well. But I think that’s my biggest takeaway: how this is much bigger than an Uber driver or a DoorDash delivery person. It’s a big trend in the economy.

Zachary Karabell: And do you think it is part of the reason for this feeling of the disconnect between capital and labor, where capital’s doing really well and labor is flat-lining? That is a common perception narrative.

Alex Mayyasi: I think it can be part of it. Like companies have definitely—this is one of those moments where more efficiency cannot, can potentially be not a net social good, right? It’s like from the company’s perspective, it’s like, okay, you know, we’ll just focus on our core competencies, but these other parts of the business, they don’t need to be full-time employees who we treat with fairness and make sure they have health insurance, right? We can just pay them the minimal amount possible that the market will provide.

So I do think it’s for sure part of that story of labor-capital.

Zachary Karabell: So, you know, in that line, you write a little bit about in the book about comparative advantage and about trade. And it feels to me like there are some themes that have been recurring over the past years: that capital’s doing better than labor, that globalism or neoliberalism or whatever you’re going to call the forces that were arrayed ideologically and in practice from the 1990s after the end of the Cold War till the present led to a certain erosion of traditional manufacturing, traditional jobs in most developed countries, that that also accrued to capital and not to labor, that it’s created more economic insecurity, the erosion of unions.

Like that’s a powerful theme in politics. It’s a powerful popular sentiment in your reporting. And when you look at this, is it true? Is it partly true? Is it an emotional response to genuinely tectonic changes in a global economic system? Like what is going on here?

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple different directions I could go, and I think that’s one where the somewhat less satisfying answer is how hard it is to do economic research. And I think I’ve talked to economists who are like, “If you give me a narrative you want to tell about inequality in the United States, I can go find the statistics that will back up your narrative. And if you want to tell the exact opposite narrative, I can go get you the inequality statistics that will tell you the exact opposite.”

So I do think that’s part of what’s frustrating and hard about it, is that it can be hard to agree just on this one set of facts, even when people are very well-intentioned and want to come to an agreement on the objective facts and then have good debates and create good policy.

Zachary Karabell: The eye of the beholder problem, right? Yeah. Or a little bit, meaning you tell me what you think and I’ll prove it.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, yeah. You know, the kind of famous quotes about like “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I mean, it’s been interesting. I think one thing that I’ve encountered quite viscerally by the process of publishing this book and going on book tour and talking to lots of people about it is that there are often questions that contain the assumption that the middle class is dying and everything is becoming one big overlord class, and then the subclass of people in poverty.

And like statistics don’t really bear that out. The average worker hasn’t seen wage gains of the type we saw in, say, the ’50s and ’60s, some of this post-war boom, where the average worker really benefited a lot as the economy grew. But I think people are just really surprised if you bring up that the average worker salary has gone up over the past years, or that actually part of the reason that we have had inflation after the pandemic was because so many very low-wage working class workers did see wage gains.

And so that shows up for other people, especially middle and upper class people whose views are over-represented in media, as inflation for them—because that’s restaurant costs going up, that’s childcare costs going up. Working class people getting a raise often shows up as inflation.

It’s an odd place to be in, where I feel like things probably have gotten better for the average worker and for the economy more than the vibes feel like over the past number of years. But certainly when we look back at economic history, it doesn’t feel like the gains of increasing prosperity from economic growth have been as broadly and fairly shared as they have in the past. That indicates that we could be doing a lot better.

Zachary Karabell: And where do you think this leads in terms of the political manifestation that increasingly, both on the left and right, is a more populist version of whether it’s tax the rich, whether it’s there shouldn’t be billionaires, whether it’s there’s a system that’s skewed in favor of the few and against the many, us.

The most recent version was Occupy Wall Street. That was about the 1%. I think we’ve come some ways in the 15 years since that, and people are now focusing on the 0.1% less than they are on the 1%. Maybe that’s progress, maybe that’s regress. What does one do about that? Does that have a good ending?

I mean, there is a reading of America in the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century in response to the Gilded Age extremes of poverty and wealth that said there was good that came out of it. There was a more leveling factor. There was a taming of the excesses of unfettered free market capitalism.

Alex Mayyasi: What I hope one of the contributions from myself and other economic and business reporters can be is just an appreciation for nuance, where that energy can be turned into policy that is successful. Because I think sometimes, when I see people’s very justified rage, anger, frustration with the economy and with parts of the economy that have gotten more expensive like childcare and housing, and have made things really tough for people, even as wages have maybe still gone up but not by that much.

I think sometimes there can be a tendency to reject the whole system. You know, you see misbehavior by a company, you see wealth flowing to a small group of very, very wealthy people and not to the middle class and working class, and there might be this tendency to say, “Oh, capitalism is all terrible.”

And I think what I’ve tried to do with a number of stories in this book is point out how many different ways—it’s not all laissez-faire capitalism, largely a myth, right? There are always market designers, whether it’s a question of intentional or not or fair or not, who are designing the system to help control the outcomes we get: whether we get really efficient outcomes and lots of wealth, and then how that wealth and prosperity is or is not widely shared.

And so my hope is that that frustration can be channeled into people playing a more active role in making sure—there’s a lot of enthusiasm for wealth taxes. Senator Warren has her tax on ultra-millionaires, I believe that’s her phrasing.

You know, California talking about a billionaire tax. There are a lot of cases of European countries where they’ve started doing those kinds of wealth taxes and moved away from them, just because they haven’t been as effective as they’d like for technocratic reasons. The wealthy are very good at dodging taxes. Suddenly, okay, all my wealth is now in art. And that’s very hard to evaluate and tax effectively.

And I don’t think that means you say, “Okay, we won’t ever tax wealth,” because certainly, as Senator Warren often points out, there is a wealth tax in this country that’s paid by many middle-class people. You’re paying tax on property taxes. For most families, the biggest source of wealth is their home.

Sometimes I’m like, let’s just do the Manhattan Project, but for figuring out how to tax ultra-millionaires and billionaires who have $1 salaries but make incredible amounts of money through stock and all these other things that are hard to tax.

When people are like, “Oh, it’s really hard to do a wealth tax,” it’s like, well, let’s figure it out. Like, this is—we put a man on the moon. We put people on the moon. Okay, now let’s figure out how to tax people fairly so that billionaires pay their fair share too, and it’s done in a way that makes sense.

That seems achievable to me. Let’s do that.

Zachary Karabell: Well, that’s the kind of stuff like Emmanuel Saez and Piketty have been trying to do for years. By the way, look, I’m asking a lot of these questions because one, I get a lot of these questions, so now I get the opportunity—yeah—to ask you the questions that I get.

Two, I think I’m—there is something to be said for people understanding, all of us understanding with more nuance, as you just alluded to, what is actually going on as a constructive or even imperative injection into the debate over what do we do? Because if “what do we do” is predicated on an overly simplistic view of things, then whatever we do won’t work. Hence the—you know—you just alluded to the wealth tax.

France tried this for a while. Huge popular support for a wealth tax in France. The government, which to some degree reflects popular will, tried to do this, and it just didn’t work. They didn’t collect enough. There were a lot of hurdles. That wasn’t for a lack of buy-in. It was for lack of it just isn’t the right tool necessarily.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah. And I think I like your move to history, because I also think a lot of what might be phrased as populist rage has led to New Deal programs, but also things you maybe wouldn’t have expected as much before doing so much research for this book and other reporting, like the history of deposit insurance, right?

So the idea that we’ll try to prevent runs on the bank during the Great Depression by the government being the ultimate bank backstop. That was something that there was a lot of populist support for. There’s this kind of great paper that“the man in the street is for it,” which was this idea that banks—many bankers were lukewarm on deposit insurance, and it was a lot of ordinary people who saw the way they would be wiped out during recessions, depressions, bank runs, and thought, “Yes, this is something the government should be doing.”

So I think there are a lot of really constructive ways, yeah.

Zachary Karabell: I used to say this thing in some of my talks, they were called them bank runs because people ran to the bank. I mean, it was not a metaphor. When there was a panic that all the deposits were going to be called, you ran to the bank. You write about fractional banking in the Planet Money book. Basically, banks lent more than they had in deposits. When suddenly something happened and people thought, “Oh my god, the bank isn’t going to be able to meet its commitments,” you ran to the bank. And you ran to the bank because the first 100 people in line got their money, and then their bank was out of money.

And when it was out of money, without federal deposit insurance, you were out of money. There was no recourse. You couldn’t sue a bankrupt bank. I mean, you could, but it wouldn’t do you any good. So it’s really important people remember that these things happen to prevent those things from happening—and have in fact somewhat prevented them from happening. I guess there was a fear in 2008, right? We both remember there was that brief moment where we’re like, “Oh my god, you’re gonna go up to an ATM and it’s gonna read out on a screen, ‘We’re sorry. Come back later. There’s no cash.’”

You know, on the cynical side of things, you write in the book about the invention of leisure and the invention of weekends as serving a lot of really potent capitalist aims to sell products toward leisure. Cynical people would say you’ve manufactured leisure as a consumer commodity rather than given people actual free time. Where do you come out on this? And I guess explain how you wrote that chapter, what that chapter says.

Alex Mayyasi: I compared the weekend to technology, right? Because it is this kind of not inevitability. There are a lot of ways we structure our time that are based on natural things— the sun rising and setting, the month coming from the moon, the year, and so on. But a weekend, that’s just a human invention.

It has certainly a religious background to it. But if you look at it, there’s a long history for this kind of seven-day week outside of religious context as well. And so it’s interesting—you can find examples of actors pushing the weekend, like Henry Ford, who had this view, right? He wants workers to have free time so they’ll buy the products—and enough money so they’ll buy cars and go on road trips.

And there was also a way that the standardized work week and shorter work weeks was pushed just so there would be fewer layoffs during the Great Depression. But then of course you also have socialists advocating for this as humane treatment for workers. So it’s this interesting way it was pushed almost both—you can find people working for capitalist aims as well as for socialist or pro-worker aims, thinking about what kind of world we want to live in.

But I think part of what’s fascinating for me there is that the weekend, the invention of the weekend, almost creates—it’s like a platform, almost the same way the App Store and the iPhone creates this whole ecosystem that others can build on.

You know, only when you have the weekend and so many people having time off at same time can you really imagine a world so full of like giant stadiums where 50,000 people can gather at the same time to watch a game or like bottomless mimosa, mimosa brunches on, on Sunday.

Zachary Karabell: Those are not naturally recurring phenomena, the mimosa thing.

Alex Mayyasi: I don’t know. We can’t do the natural experiment. But you need enough people who can do bottomless mimosa brunches on Sunday at the same time.

My take on that isn’t very cynical. I think the weekend, there’s some people who love having a weekday free when everyone else is working. But to a large extent, it’s a way that we’ve made the scarce resource of time more valuable, right? A lot of people, it’s more valuable to have a Saturday free when your family and friends are also all free, so you can do things together.

And that’s why I think it’s particularly dangerous—or something people should particularly resist—this kind of encroachment on our collective free time on the weekend of always being on, always checking work email, always being a little bit somewhere else. Because I think in some ways, if people’s weekends are no longer free for leisure, an hour of your time that was once worth $20 is now worth $5, because there aren’t the people around to enjoy it in the same way.

Zachary Karabell: So what are three things—and if you don’t want to do three things, you could do two, you can do four. This is not a Monty Python test where you’re going to go, “Ah.” Um—look up that reference if …

Alex Mayyasi: I got it. I got it.

Zachary Karabell: … No, no, I’m sure you know it. This is an injunction to the listeners. What are three things people should know about “the economy”?

Alex Mayyasi: I mean, I think one is the power of compound interest, right? Which is the idea that, the most famous example is if you invest money in the stock market or you save money for retirement, over the long run it’s not just that the initial money you invest will grow, but the money you earn from that investment will then grow as well.

So it kind of has this snowball effect that’s so big that over long time horizons it kind of breaks our brain. But I’d deepen that a little bit to say to also think about where else you could see this kind of compounding growth in other parts of your life or career, right?

I think there might be examples like in my field in journalism, when people start getting a newsletter following. That’s something that if your newsletter following grows a little bit every month, it will feel small at first, but in the same way that you’re saving for retirement from that money you put away years ago, that can grow and grow and grow through compounding growth and become huge and really valuable to you.

I think for many people there might be something comparable in your professional network. If you start growing the number of people in your field and career that you’re connected to, and if that grows 5% every month or year or what have you, that compounding growth rate can become really powerful.

So at first you just have a small circle of people you know maybe through your first job, school, university. But if that grows and all the people you meet have their own networks, that can become over time an incredibly powerful tool for those times when you need to tap your network for finding valuable information, to find a new job, to make a hire if you’re the hiring manager, to get valuable advice. That’s another place we could see compounding be really valuable beyond the classic saving and investment.

Zachary Karabell: Okay, so one is compound interest and/or network effect.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, network effects is a good way to put it. Another one I think about, especially for people who are younger, maybe earlier in their careers, is the superstar effect.

So this is the idea that a singer 500 years ago could entertain one room full of people. So if you’re a really good singer, maybe you’d get paid by that room full of people pretty well and you could make a living as a singer and do pretty well. But because of technology, the best singers nowadays and the best entertainers can entertain not just one room full of people, they can entertain almost the entire world.

You know, everyone can be listening to Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar. And so you now have a world where the very best singers and entertainers make vastly, vastly more money. There’s this winner-take-all phenomenon in industries like singers and bands.

Whereas for someone who’s kind of a good singer, suddenly you’re competing directly with Taylor Swift. It’s much harder to make a living. You probably have a full-time job and you do some concerts and gigs on the side.

And so I think it’s very helpful to think about your own career: is your career one that has this kind of winner-take-all effect from the superstar effect? Because if you want to work really, really hard and be the best at what you do, maybe you do want to work in a field like Hollywood or—I think in our case, like in media, this absolutely happens, where some journalists can be read by people all over the world, but it’s made it harder to live as kind of like, you know, but like local newspaper reporter, that’s become very, very tough.

You know, do you want to be the very best, work super hard, and then reap the gains from being in this kind of winner-take-all field? Or, you know, if you value work-life balance more, don’t want your job to kind of be your entire life, you might prefer to be in a field that hasn’t really been affected by the superstar effect.

You know, maybe something like sales or nursing, where you can be good at your job and you don’t have to be the very best, and being good or even just average at your job can still lead to a good paycheck and a good life. So that’s the superstar effect.

Zachary Karabell: And what’s the third thing?

Alex Mayyasi: One other idea that’s really powerful is this idea that over time in successful economies, goods get cheaper but services get more expensive. This is often called “cost disease,” because it’s this idea that if you divide the economy into two parts, you can think about it this way.

There’s one half of the economy that gets more and more efficient thanks to technology. You know, we used to have something like 70% of the American workforce working on farms. Now a tiny fraction of people work on farms …

Zachary Karabell: Right now it’s 2%.

Alex Mayyasi: … but those farms are way, way, way more productive. Factories over time often get more and more productive.

But there’s this other part of the economy that’s very labor-intensive. It doesn’t really change that much over time because of technology. These might be things like barber shops. Barbers are not doing 10 beard trims in the time it used to take to do one beard trim. You can’t really have two people perform a quartet. Childcare is a great example—you can only have, generally, still very labor-intensive work. You’re not going to have one person watching 1,000 kids, whereas they used to only watch 10.

And so what cost disease is, is that because of this mismatch, the part of the economy that’s always growing more productive will offer higher salaries to attract workers.

So then, you know, people in this other part of the economy, no matter how much you love being a teacher or working on Broadway, working in childcare, being a barber, at some point you might say, “Hey, look, if I don’t ever get a raise, I’m gonna go to that other part of the economy where the salaries and wages are so much better.”

And so then you have childcare centers, Broadway theaters and so on raising their prices, and so those very labor-intensive parts of the economy get more expensive. And I think that’s just very powerful for understanding all sorts of parts of our economy. It’s why even people in the U.S. who are very well off struggle to afford childcare. It’s why everything is a fast-casual restaurant where you order yourself, and sitting down and having a waiter come by—that’s very labor-intensive, that’s cost disease, that’s very expensive. It’s a very powerful lens for understanding the economy and our world.

I want to know your choice for unexpectedly positive development.

Zachary Karabell: I think the stability of financial markets over the past—well, certainly since 2008, and that’s, as scarring as that was, that was now going on 18 years ago. I mean, if you only have one major hiccup every 20 years, that’s pretty good—as long as that hiccup is not a permanent rupture.

And to some degree, that was the story of the 19th century. You could metronomically say every 20 years there was some sort of panic or crisis, but it also wasn’t nearly as stable in between those. Before then, you were in the 1970s before there was a real—you know, there was a brief moment in 1987, there was another brief moment in 1999.

But for the most part, the promise of financial market stability—and I think one of the great problems of the way globally the crisis of 2008-2009 was internalized was the bankers and the rich people got bailed out, and everybody else suffered. Now, it’s certainly true that everybody else suffered and there wasn’t enough cushion, which people learned from COVID, but if you hadn’t bailed out the financial system, the real-world effects would have been exponentially more damaging than the actual real-world effects were.

And it’s always problematic to make these statements because you always worry you’re going to be that guy in 1929 who said that the markets have reached a permanent plateau of stability. So I feel like I’m saying this, and by the time the podcast comes out, everything will have collapsed. But it does seem like there’s just a degree of financial system stability, and that doesn’t just benefit the rich.

I mean, 52% of Americans have their savings in the markets. The Comptroller of New York, very to the left, Mark Levine, a guy I like a lot, talked about using New York City’s $80 billion in index funds for its retirement plans to have shareholder activism to protest the way Elon Musk is going to structure SpaceX’s IPO, right?

That’s a good sign that a lot of us are literally invested in markets—and therefore invested in their stability—and there’s been a lot of stability. And I think that is an underrated aspect of why however bad things are, they’re just not nearly as bad as they feel, or they’re not nearly as bad as they should be given how bad people think they feel.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, and it is a kind of heartening amount of learning that there are people learning the lessons of the Great Depression to try and make sure the pain of 2008 did not become as big as it did during the Great Depression. And then you had people during the start of the pandemic thinking about how, in 2008, there were ways that it was the rich comforted more than the poor.

And I think, you know, I remember talking to a friend who seemed very sage and wise, saying, “Everyone’s about to be really, really poor because of the pandemic,” and how many people would be out of work.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Alex Mayyasi: It’s pretty remarkable the way that American families were supported, and certainly gave people a taste of what the government could do when vast resources were deployed to help ordinary families.

Zachary Karabell: And that was true in Western Europe. It was true in lots of Asia. Yeah. I mean, it was extraordinary. Like, people got a lot of money in their pockets, which is one of the reasons why there was the kind of inflation there was, and part of that was there was another bill in 2021, which may have been overkill, meaning after all the money that was spent in 2020 to make sure that people didn’t panic, that they could afford food and their rents and their mortgages.

And we managed to have this global economic shutdown with remarkably few economic consequences in real time, commensurate with just how extreme that was economically. And I think, of all the things that happened during the pandemic, the degree to which the economic pain of it was mitigated was pretty extraordinary.

I’ve just used the word extraordinary twice, but it’s because I feel so strongly—about how extraordinary it actually was.

Alex Mayyasi: I have another question for you. You wrote a book called The Leading Indicators that talked, for example, about the history of GDP. You were looking at some of these numbers that are very important that you’ll hear on the news, see in newspapers very regularly.

I would love to know what are some maybe more unexpected or fun indicators that you follow or think about for understanding the economy?

Zachary Karabell: That’s great, and I’ve thought about those a lot. And I’ve also tried to help people understand that these big economic numbers, including the unemployment rate, are really not meant to be a gauge of whether your life, my life, our peer group, our community’s life is doing well or badly.

They’re big systemic numbers that collapse a lot of variety into one statistic, and they’re not meant to be a gauge of your economic health. It’s like if the average temperature of 335 million people is 98.6—you go, no one has a temperature, but a lot of people could be dying, and a lot of people could have 102, and that average wouldn’t tell you. Those numbers are like that.

I do think consumer spending is often a gauge—spending on non-healthcare and non-essential categories—is like a gauge of what people are doing rather than what they’re saying they’re doing or what they’re feeling. And yeah, you’ve got to discount debt from that, but if a lot of people are eating out at Cheesecake Factory, it means a lot of people have enough money to eat out at Cheesecake Factory.

Now, they could feel like crap doing it, they could feel like crap because of the food they’re eating, but those numbers are really useful because they tell you something tangible. Sentiment doesn’t tell you anything other than what people feel. Spending on certain things—and a lot of that comes from companies, actually—tells you what people are doing, and I think that’s really useful when you try to think about what’s actually going on in the economy.

Leisure spending, right? Right.

Alex Mayyasi: It’s a put your money where your mouth is moment, because if the pollster says, “How do you feel about the economy? Do you think there’ll be a recession coming up?” and you say, “Oh, I think it’s terrible and rubbish and there’s probably a recession coming,”

Zachary Karabell: And you’re like, “Oh, I gotta go. I got a dinner reservation.”

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, yeah. You’re about to go out for a nice dinner. You’ve put down a down payment on a new house. You’re gonna move into your dream house and do a bunch of renovations. Then yeah, it’s like, are you really feeling a recession, do you really think the economy is rubbish?

Zachary Karabell: Right. And of course, I say that and I realize that is one of these moments where everyone’s going to say, “Yes, but,” and we probably should say yes, but, because it doesn’t mean there aren’t tens of millions of people who can’t do any of that at any given time.

But that’s also always been true. We have never lived in a world where everybody’s doing okay. Full stop. And back to your nuance point, these things can be true and many people can be doing not well, so that’s kind of what I think about.

Alex, I want to thank you for writing the book. It’s a great primer. It’s lovely production, meaning the way the book is done is it kind of embodies the “Planet Money” quirky spirit with some illustrations and some charts.

Alex Mayyasi: I’m a particular fan of the illustration of the gambling ducks at the start of the banking chapter. I’m not the illustrator, so I’m not bragging about my own work. But I love them very much. And I think this looks very different from any other business or economics book you’ll …

Zachary Karabell: It absolutely does.

Alex Mayyasi: … see at the airport or the bookstore.

Zachary Karabell: It matches the spirit of the show.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: So, which I think is great, and it’s very readable, which was your point and your intent. So thank you for your work. Thank you for all you’ve done, and I’m sure we will keep talking.

Alex Mayyasi: That sounds great. Thanks so much for having me.

Zachary Karabell: Well, there you have it. Listen to the episode, read the book, listen to “Planet Money,” and that’s all you’ll need to know to know about what’s going on in the economy, which is your answer right there.

No more civics classes, no year of struggle, no weird elliptical material on whatever financial website. Just continually replay this episode and read his book, and then check out “Planet Money” every now and then.

So thank you very much for listening. Thank you to the people at Kaleidoscope for producing.Thank you to my team at The Progress Network for being my team at The Progress Network. And please send me your suggestions and your ideas to info@rivertwice.com. Check out my weekly free newsletter, The Edgy Optimist on Substack. Check out What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network newsletter on Substack, and we will be back with you next week.

Free expression is one of those ideals that Americans love to claim as foundational, if not sacred. Yet it seems every generation convinces itself that its version is uniquely under assault. In this week’s episode of What Could Go Right?, I wrestled with novelist, MacArthur fellow, and PEN America president Dinaw Mengestu over whether maybe this time it is actually the case. That is: Are we living through an unprecedented crisis of free expression, or are we just writing the latest chapter of a longer, messier story?

Our conversation moved through campus protests, social media moderation, and the very tight space between protecting speech and limiting harm. Dinaw argued that fear and government pressure have created a silencing effect unlike anything that has come before. I argued that our present anxieties are at least in part informed by a romanticized view of the old days.

In the end, our friendly debate may have had no winner, but it was a compelling exploration of what it takes to defend creative freedoms in a deeply divided, pluralistic society.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? Where we try to look at, yes, what could go right instead of everything that is always going wrong. One of the things about American society that is notable is a commitment, first, to free speech, enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment, and even more broadly, to free expression.

And we’re going to have a conversation today about whether or not we are in a time where that heralded, vaunted free expression, free speech that is such a hallmark of American society — is it in peril? Is it under threat? Or more importantly, are the threats and perils that are evident any different than any other threats and perils in the past, in form, in substance, in amplitude, or is this just one of those moments where there are challenges to something that remains foundational?

And I’m going to talk today to Dinaw Mengestu, who is a professor at Bard. He’s written four incredibly acclaimed novels. Obama put his most recent one on his must-read list. He’s won a MacArthur “genius grant,” therefore he is a genius, and he is somebody who thinks very deeply about this, as you will see. Dinaw, it is such a pleasure talking to you today, particularly because of the hair thing. I think we’ve both got the sort of early-onset Einstein syndrome going on here.

Dinaw Mengestu: That’s why people keep telling me on the street as I’m walking, “You look smart.”

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Dinaw Mengestu: And I think it’s just that.

Zachary Karabell: It’s just the hair. And if you do the glasses right to here, you do that every now and then —

Dinaw Mengestu: I do that a lot. Just to impress them.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I think that would absolutely do it. So let’s just jump into one thing that we share in common. We’re both on the board of PEN America. You’re now the illustrious president of PEN America, and one of the things PEN America is devoted to, and has always been, for those of you who don’t know, a longtime writers’ organization, I guess 100 years.

Dinaw Mengestu: 103 years and counting.

Zachary Karabell: 103 years, but who’s counting? And free speech, right?

Dinaw Mengestu: Free expression.

Zachary Karabell: Free expression. Ooh, good, good catch.

Dinaw Mengestu: Important distinction, yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. What’s the distinction?

Dinaw Mengestu: Free speech is protected by the First Amendment, and that’s a very broad category. Free expression is even broader in that it’s not only forms of censorship, but private institutions, for example, are allowed to choose who does and does not speak in their spaces. But free expression sort of suggests that they should hold themselves to standards that are as broad and as vast as possible. You can also impact somebody’s free expression by censoring them, by intimidating them, by refusing to allow them to enter a room. All of those become strikes to free expression, and those aren’t protected by the First Amendment. So we cover, in a very sort of necessary and also problematic and difficult way, a much broader range of things.

Zachary Karabell: You and I are largely, I think, aligned on the imperative of free expression for a thriving democratic liberal society. We live in a time where it is common, I think, to say free expression is under massive assault in places where it has been largely protected. The United States, all these issues about Western Europe, and sort of coming down on forms of hate speech that cast a very wide net.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: I don’t necessarily feel that we are living in a time where free expression is comparatively under assault. In that, there is a way of looking at the world today where we’re like, more people are saying more stuff —

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: In more venues —

Dinaw Mengestu: Globally.

Zachary Karabell: In more parts of the world, globally, than ever before. And including in these areas where the ideas themselves get contested, and occasionally they get contested by inappropriate use of laws, by coercion of private institutions, higher education institutions. But at least from my vantage point, that’s never not been true. There’s never been some halcyon moment where everybody got to just have their free expression honored in a kind of a Marquess of Queensberry, I deeply respect your difference with me, and I hear it, but I dissent, good sir. Like, I don’t think that’s ever happened.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. And I mean, I agree with you to some degree. I think there are more venues and places and ways for people to express themselves, and that is true globally, right? There are larger platforms, there are more ways that you can make your experience and your perspective heard. There are also more ways that you can be surveilled at the same time. And I think the way we understand the threats to free expression, or free speech, perhaps they need to be as expansive as the new forms and ways that we have of communicating.

So to think of it only as, yes, there are more people who are able to speak, is certainly sort of true, but I think there are more targeted and more sort of specific threats, and I’ll focus just on the U.S., that to me are sort of particularly alarming and are at a scale that I’ve never seen and that I don’t think we’ve actually had before in the country.

So if you look at speech for anybody who is basically not a U.S. citizen, right? There’s not an explicit law that says you cannot say certain things. There is, however, an enormous pressure by the government to make sure that if you are an immigrant, you are afraid of saying certain things, and you will restrict your speech as a result.

I don’t know anybody here in this country who is on a green card or on a visa who feels like they can express themselves honestly, thoughtfully on social media. And this includes a large number of writers. Every writer that I know who is here on an O visa, which are exceptional visas for artists, which cover a whole range of really phenomenal individuals, none of them feel like they can go around expressing their ideas and beliefs the same way that they would have before this administration. So I think that category alone, I mean, that is to me a sort of remarkably repressive place to be in.

Zachary Karabell: I think that’s true generationally, meaning not in our lifetimes have we, dot dot dot. Although, and look, I am pushing back simply for the sake of, a lot of our concerns in the present are framed, I feel, by a reading of the past as a better point that we have now fallen from, and that that whole framework clouds our ability to kind of deal with, at least in the United States, longstanding oscillations and longstanding issues.

So in the wake of 9/11, if you’d been an immigrant, or an American, or an American Muslim, or anybody saying anything that in any way smacked of either sympathy for, or exculpatory language about, Islamic fundamentalism or Al-Qaeda, you risked the FBI seizing your communications. There was a whole series of suits brought, let alone the fact that there was a lot of vigilante justice.

So I mean, that’s a more recent one, let alone, you know, think about McCarthyism as a period of time where, not only was free expression not defended, but you had almost no recourse because it was so insinuated into every single institution, higher education, companies, individual life. There was no court you could go to because there was hardly anything you could prove in a way that would establish it.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, completely. I agree with you. I don’t want to ever be nostalgic about the past. I think the past is sort of riddled with a whole bunch of terrible things, and when we look backward, it’s oftentimes with a rose-colored perspective that obscures lots of difficult things, including something like McCarthyism. And the fact that more people are obviously able to express themselves loudly than they were during McCarthyism is important. But at the same time, I think McCarthyism — I don’t want to get into trying to scale these things. If you were expressing communist beliefs during McCarthyism, obviously you were going to face repercussions for that.

The categories of spaces that I think we’re in now, one, I think the impact of a broader population, right? That’s basically anybody who is not a U.S. citizen in this country, which puts us at, roughly maybe 60 million. It’s a pretty significant size of the population.

And that range of speech covers a whole number of things, and it also means people coming into the United States, right? The fact that they might be able to search your social media when you are entering the U.S. is a terrible, alarming thing, and I know a number of people who are like, I’m not coming to your country because of that.

Post-9/11 certainly, but we actually understood the limits of what the government’s interventions might be, and they were threatening. The vigilante things certainly, I remember Susan Sontag published her piece post-9/11 in The New Yorker, and she was assaulted with a lot of vitriolic speech.

That is different because now we actually have a kind of clear government enforcement strategy, right? Which is where we’ll actually pick you up off the street, we’ll put you in the back of a car, and we’ll send you to a prison in Louisiana for as long as we possibly can. And even if you are released, we will have made your life hell for that period of time.

So that awareness, that’s how speech is chilled the most, oftentimes not because the government gets away with it, but because we have a clear sense of what the enforcement strategies might be.

Zachary Karabell: The response to those actions which the Trump administration took in the early few episodes of the second season of The Trump Show were almost entirely in the first few months of 2025, faced massive legal blowback.

Now, you wouldn’t want to be one of the people who was the person — the Columbia grad student, there was a Tufts grad student. A few of those people have since left. All of them were ordered released. All of them were kind of ordered released with prejudice. And while there have been some things that have gone on that haven’t gotten news coverage, there was a pretty powerful pushback against that that found purchase in the courts and some purchase culturally, to the degree that some of the most intensive efforts have receded. Now, the chilling effect exists anyway, right?

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. Which is why I think they did that so quickly. I mean, it was important to do that right away, and I think they targeted, obviously, a vulnerable population that I actually didn’t think of as being vulnerable, like green card holders, right? Permanent residents, which you sort of imagine have a fair amount of stability.

That happened within the first 60 days of this administration, and the targeting of that was very particular, I think, because you go after an immigrant community now and obviously, 1) you impact everybody around them. And 2) I think the consequences of that, they did exactly what they needed to do. They have impacted that speech across a wide range of spaces.

Go on a college campus today and tell me how many students you see sitting outside protesting, right? You don’t. It doesn’t happen. A lot of the students who would be protesting oftentimes were students on visas. They’re not going to go out there protesting any time in the next two or three years, and that is, I think, a very clear and deliberate strategy.

So I think they got exactly what they wanted. They knew there would be blowback from the courts. They knew this would not probably stand. But these cases aren’t over, and the courts might order your release, but again, the damage is done, and that’s what they care about most. That’s what the impact on our speech is. It’s about damage, and you can inflict a lot of damage right away, and the recovery from that damage is hard.

Zachary Karabell: So, you know, we live in a world of imperfect humans, eight and a half billion of them at most recent count. I mean this question actually openly, because it’s an interesting one. If you were going to live somewhere credibly, where would you live in the world today where the widest aperture of free expression existed?

Dinaw Mengestu: Say, like, liberal democracies in Europe, right? They actually have more restrictions on speech than we do, right? There are clear hate speech laws in France and Germany, et cetera, a lot of them created post-World War II. Whether I agree with them or not, what’s important for us is, we have a very large and diverse population. Not to say that European countries aren’t comprised of the same, but we need to hold together so many different cultural identities in this space, and the idea that we will be able to understand and measure lines between hate speech and non-hate speech across all of these different cultural identities I think would be absurd and foolish.

We might know how we might feel about it, how the general idea might feel, but I think to some degree, part of what sustains this really kind of impressive plurality is this kind of general and very generous and broad understanding of what is protected by the First Amendment in ways that don’t happen in Europe. There’s a much more solidified cultural, historical identity. I think here, we still are, and I think what happens now isn’t permanent, but I also don’t want to undersell the scale of threat that we’re under, because I also don’t think it’s finished. I think everything that started with one population is about expanding and obviously increasing and alarming that threat. The use of the FCC powers, it’s all intertwined in a certain way.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, yeah, it’s government harassment designed to silence ideas or voices that are otherwise unpleasant, unwelcome, annoying.

What do you make of the social media bans that are now happening? Australia passed a very explicit one. You have young children, and the reason why I’m asking this in the context of a free expression question is, clearly it is a way of limiting the free expression of people under the age of 18.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: And there’s always this question that we have as parents of, okay, what’s exactly the right time to loosen some of those restrictions?

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. I think that’s, under minors, I think the Supreme Court’s always said they’re not protected.

But I think the social media thing is a really important one and something that I sort of wrestle with. And I’d ask, this is where I would certainly ask you, what degree of content moderation is necessary for, say, YouTube? And what are, because we are both on the board of PEN America, we try not to set standards, because that is the only sort of way to protect all standards, I guess, and so, yeah, YouTube has de-platformed lots of people who are accused of hate speech.

Zachary Karabell: I guess my issue with these things tends toward the more libertarian, both governmentally and institutionally, which is, the basic principle of, don’t give institutions or governments power that you don’t want them to use against you. So that’s where I start with some of these things.

Then the other one is, if you’re going to give them that power around things like content, exactly how do you draw those lines in a way that protects the most and restricts the least?

It’s that question of, if you say to somebody, would you rather one innocent human be sentenced to death or life in jail wrongly, or would you rather one terrible murderer be set free wrongly?

You’ll usually find there’s kind of a parallel in these questions, too, which is, where are you weighing the harms? Are the harms in if you allow too much content, somebody’s going to get harmed? Or are the harms in if you restrict too much content, our expression is going to get harmed? I will go with the wider latitude, and not the less. But that’s with a full awareness of, therefore, you’re basically saying, there will be harm.

Dinaw Mengestu: There will be harm. And I sort of agree with you on that, but it also means having to put ourselves in uncomfortable positions, right? When YouTube bans hate speech, to be able to say, actually, you shouldn’t do that.

Google, Nick Fuentes being everyone’s sort of favorite horrendous thing out there in the world, which I think is very strategic on their part, obviously. He just keeps creating and getting banned, and creating and getting banned.

Zachary Karabell: Although Nick Fuentes is now looking almost quaint relative to an entire other ecosystem that has emerged that has gone even more extreme.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: It’s fascinating how quickly what was outrageous before feels fine in the face of what’s even more outrageous.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, the first iterations already pushed the bar farther than I would’ve thought we would’ve been comfortable with in society, and then it just keeps getting pushed further and further. And it’s not something that I would want to get up and defend and say, yeah, you really need to let Nick Fuentes have a broader platform, right? Because it’s also about the reach of these platforms. And so the social media content in this space is not just about the ability to say, but how broad of an impact that speech might be able to have, and our ability to counter that. And whether or not these platforms are institutions, government entities, or just editors, right? They have the right to editorialize, and that seems to be the place that they’ve taken, that they are a large Random House, right? They can decide what does and doesn’t, which they make profits on, which is also a uniquely kind of legitimate argument, right? We also believe that private institutions, private venues, have the right to not, they don’t have to follow the First Amendment. Even private universities that we hold to pretty high standards, there are all sorts of exceptions in those standards, right? There are all sorts of ways of getting around what’s clearly uncomfortable, difficult speech. So yeah, we wouldn’t say that a publisher has to —

Zachary Karabell: Right. A publisher doesn’t have to publish any particular book.

Dinaw Mengestu: No.

Zachary Karabell: A newspaper doesn’t have to publish any particular article. Newspapers are these things that used to be printed and show up. Anyway —

Dinaw Mengestu: I’m not sure if that’s true.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I’ve heard, I think.

Dinaw Mengestu: You know, in Italy they still have, newspapers are declining a little bit, but everyone still has their local newspaper. The newspaper stands are full. It’s kind of fantastic.

Zachary Karabell: You gotta do something while you’re drinking the coffee and having the cigarette.

Dinaw Mengestu: I think that’s the thing. We don’t have —

Zachary Karabell: Well, there’s plenty of coffee. Not enough cigarettes.

Dinaw Mengestu: No.

Zachary Karabell: So your own background, right? You came with your parents from Ethiopia in the mid-’80s.

Dinaw Mengestu: Early ‘80s, yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Early ‘80s, during a period of intense repression in Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s gotten somewhat better, but is still not —

Dinaw Mengestu: We’ve managed to take a step backwards these days.

Zachary Karabell: Well, it’s either two steps forward or one step back, or two steps back and one step forward. How much did this frame your whole, well, I mean, obviously it framed your worldview, but in this particular way, how does it frame your worldview?

Dinaw Mengestu: When I was growing up, I remember my father and I having a debate once where we were talking about America falling into having a coup or something like that happening in the United States, and I was like, well, that can’t happen here. Big country, lots of money, everyone’s educated.

Zachary Karabell: That was Sinclair Lewis, right? It Can’t Happen Here.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. And my father said, well, you’re crazy. And my argument to some degree was sort of predicated upon history. Like, look how long we’ve been around, et cetera. And he’s like, well, Ethiopia, we had a monarchy for about 2,000 years, and that managed to go away pretty quickly as well. So you can’t think that just because it hasn’t happened, obviously it won’t. Don’t be comfortable thinking that these things — there’s a much longer history that everyone thought was really, really fundamentally inviolable, could never be altered, and yet obviously it was, pretty quickly. And obviously other countries in the world have the same history.

And I think that impacted me later as I grew up because I did think, oh yeah, our perspective, the American-centered orientation of things, can kind of occlude a certain possibility. And so I think that has always been there, certainly.

Zachary Karabell: A lot of your novels have an undercurrent of alienation, or at least when I’ve read them, they have that feeling of people not really being of a place, or being in this liminal space between places trying to find one. I mean, is that your experience of being an immigrant to this country, now a citizen?

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. Yeah, certainly. I think growing up, when you’re young, you understood that there was some, your parents have an accent, you’re in the Midwest, it’s a little bit like, okay. But then as your identity gets a little bit more realized, you’re contending with things that don’t cohere, right? What it means to be Ethiopian, and my parents’ conception of understanding that. What it means to be an American. What it means to be Black in America. What it means to be a Black male in America.

All of these things suddenly kind of enter into a really tense debate, and there are certainly periods of my life where I didn’t want to be an American. I really found it very unpleasant because I was in a very private Catholic school that sort of thrived on a certain amount of racist discourse. And for me, the alternative to that was to think, well, I don’t belong here anyway, so you can have it. And I held that position for a really long time. I didn’t become a citizen until I was 22.

Zachary Karabell: Did you think of leaving?

Dinaw Mengestu: You know, I didn’t have a passport. I never actually went abroad until I was 25 or 26, and then I’ve spent many years abroad since then.

I think the desire to get away and abroad was there for a really long time. And I would’ve stayed living in France for even longer, not because I necessarily wanted to get out of America, but because I also felt like we had a country and a culture and a home, and we lost it once. And once you’ve gone through that, it’s easier to lose it again.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Dinaw Mengestu: My feeling of attachment was, I’m attached to the country. I love the country. But I could do it again.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny. I used to joke that all American intellectuals basically want to be French intellectuals because it’s the one culture where they’re on TV. They have celebrities. It’s seen as sexy and cool to talk about Kierkegaard, have long discussions about existentialism, get really into the meaning of life in this kind of gravitas way, and then people think you’re amazing and you’re written about and celebrated. And of course, that just doesn’t exist in the United States. It hasn’t ever really. I mean, there was a period of time where public intellectuals, maybe in the ‘60s and ‘70s, were cooler.

Dinaw Mengestu: Oh, certainly. I mean, they were on TV.

Zachary Karabell: Right. Reinhold Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine twice in the late ‘40s and late ‘50s. He was a Catholic theologian but also a big thinker about things. But in general, right, we don’t celebrate ideas culturally. And we don’t celebrate people of ideas culturally. I mean, maybe that adds to some of the feeling of disconnect, no?

Dinaw Mengestu: I think that adds to some of the appeal of other places. Certainly the first time I was in Paris for a book and realizing there was a whole culture that really valued this thing that you also deeply care about and do. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is pretty great. So there’s an appeal, certainly, but I think the sense of dislocation precedes that. And I think to some degree it precedes that because at the same time that I’ve felt frustrated, like I couldn’t become — it was also because I wanted to be. And that was the sort of tension inside of America, was that when I was younger, I just imagined that I was. And then you get to a point where you feel like actually that is not what the rest of the culture always allows you to feel.

And that tension is, I think, what creates that dislocation because you would imagine that you were naturally as much a citizen and an equal human being as the rest of the people around you, and once that begins to become fraught, you either figure out how you want to fight inside of it. But because I had parents who were like, oh, you don’t have to be impacted by that. We’re not. Because for them, American racism was just this thing that people did, and they’re like, I don’t understand, because it didn’t feel substantial or real to them. For me, it was. And wanting to step away and outside of that, I think, was very much a response to that.

Zachary Karabell: And you’re teaching now, and you have a position at a college, university, Bard. But you’re also not an academic, meaning, you are a writer who teaches.

Dinaw Mengestu: You’re saying I’m not serious.

Zachary Karabell: You’re not serious, no. But you’re now much more aware of academic culture, being in the midst of it, certainly from the perspective of being a professor, also from the perspective of seeing the academic ecosystem.

I left academia in the late ‘90s, got a PhD, decided I wouldn’t be able to write books that would get me tenure.

Dinaw Mengestu: But you did a lot of other things, too.

Zachary Karabell: I did. But my academic point was, I felt even then that academia was a very conservative place, small-c conservative place. Not Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal. A place that rewarded orthodoxies within the guild of academia. And it didn’t really feel to me even then that students felt free to express their views because they were always trying to calibrate what the views of the professor were or what the views of their classmates were. And I’m saying this as a way of —

Dinaw Mengestu: Isn’t that like kindergarten, too, though?

Zachary Karabell: It is, like, every stage of life.

Dinaw Mengestu: So when people sort of sing aloud, I’m always like, I don’t know any place in the world in which that, when I get dressed up to go to a dinner, I’m calibrating my standards based on my host and what the rest of the guests will do.

Zachary Karabell: But I’m raising this because there seems to be a narrative out there of, whether it was the “woke” culture — we’re just going to use that as a sloppy umbrella term for everything before 2024 — and the kind of anti-woke culture, the anti-woke pogrom of the second season of The Trump Show. Again, all sort of assume that there was a point where students were debating and they were open and they were delving into these ideas without fear, fear of reprisal, fear of ostracism, fear of how their friends were going to react. That there’s always been this kind of — as you said, human nature, stultifying mob conformity.

How does it feel now? Does it feel different in 2026 than it felt in 2024, than it felt in 2019?

Dinaw Mengestu: Yes, because I think the difference is that now the thing to be afraid of is real. I never bought into that, if you were a professor and you were afraid of teaching something because of your students, the failure is on the institution and you, right?

Students, as you said, have always, it’s always been their job to challenge, to yell back, to demand certain things. So I think the idea that there’s not an orthodoxy is not true because it’s already contradictory to what’s happened. People say, well, universities are all the same and they’re all too liberal, but at the same time, these students are canceling everything. So which one is it? Either everyone is homogeneous in their thought, or there actually is a real pushback against the dominant strains of intellectual thinking that happens on a campus. Because if there wasn’t, what would the students be protesting? There’s a sort of impossible incoherence in this position.

If you are an institution and a classroom of people might say, I don’t want to read Homer, great. If you choose not to teach Homer because of that demand, that is on you. At Bard, we have had a very long history of, you just have all the autonomy you need as a faculty member.

I had a white professor who’s from Ireland who taught a course on race and isn’t Black, obviously, and not a single student said anything about it because they trusted him. And I think this idea that students were so terrible and that they demanded a certain type of orthodoxy, I think what they demanded was a questioning of authority, as they’ve always done, right, at any period in our history. And if they don’t do that, something’s problematic, because what the hell else are they there for if not to question authority and ideas? And I think what they wanted was to see if we had a response to that. Did you actually really think about this text and its consequences on me as X person? And if you didn’t have an answer to that, maybe you should. Doesn’t mean you have to give it.

So for me, nothing’s actually changed, except that they are quiet now. And they are quiet because of what is real censorship, and that is what the government is able to deploy, and what institutions have deployed in advance of the government’s position.

So we have already been doing this for a while now, right? We’ve been using Title VI funding to censor and limit certain debates for a long time. We’ve done this for, I’d say, a good decade now already, maybe a little bit more.

Zachary Karabell: What about amongst faculty? Because the other argument, which I think is much harder to dismiss, is that you couldn’t ever be a faculty member, you couldn’t ever be a junior faculty member, writing or saying a set of things that the senior faculty members who were going to determine your tenure path didn’t like, didn’t accept, didn’t want.

And that was often methodological. If you were a scientist trying to do X, you wouldn’t get funding. If you were a political scientist trying to argue Y, you wouldn’t get published. So again, it’s less ideological. I have a lot of friends who went in and out of academia and found that that kind of free expression was not open.

Dinaw Mengestu: How long did you spend in academia?

Zachary Karabell: I mean, like two years. I taught as a lecturer and as a visiting professor. I taught at UMass, I taught at Dartmouth, I taught at Harvard. I actually taught Middle East history at Dartmouth in 1996 as a visiting professor. I taught the Arab-Israeli conflict, which I wouldn’t touch, you couldn’t pay me enough money to teach that course in a university today. And then it was almost like, ah, because there was this weird moment in the ‘90s where we thought history was heading in a good direction. And that the Arab-Israeli conflict was history.

Dinaw Mengestu: It’s not.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, it’s not. Apparently that was a brief moment in time. I wouldn’t do that now. I wouldn’t even know how to do it now in a way that wouldn’t touch like 14 lightning rods or 12 third rails.

Dinaw Mengestu: You know, I have colleagues, and I think you’re right about the restrictions on ideas to a certain degree being embedded in the academic structure of tenure. Every person I know who comes up for tenure feels, depending on the structure of that particular department, even before the ideas, you go to that person’s house for dinner when they invite you, right? It’s a really weird system. And kind of insane. And it creates a power imbalance that’s so profound.

I mean, I guess I’ve never really worked in… You’ve worked in finance, you’ve worked in business. But the power imbalance is quite profound in academia. I don’t know if it’s the same in corporate America in the same way.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely. Maybe even more because you’re not supposed to express any ideas publicly in a corporation, right? Just like you don’t get to speak if you’re in government. I mean, the trade-off of all those is you get your job, you get your career, you don’t get to speak.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Which is fascinating, right? In a world of free speech, we have structures that are inherently hierarchical and non-democratic, right?

The corporation and government, internally, are not democratic at all.

Dinaw Mengestu: Not in the least.

Zachary Karabell: You do what you’re told, or you are told not to do it. And there is no free expression if you work for GE. There’s no free expression if you work for JP Morgan. There’s no free expression if you’re in the army, if you’re in the Department of Labor. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Democrat or Republican.

And I’ve often wondered, that’s an odd juxtaposition. We’re in an ecosystem that trumpets the First Amendment and, as you said, even more broadly, free expression, but most of us are daily embedded in institutions where none of that exists.

Dinaw Mengestu: It’s really just so you and I can say what we’re going to say.

Zachary Karabell: We get to talk, and you don’t.

Dinaw Mengestu: I mean, but that’s also maybe why the campus is such a contested space, right?

Sometimes I’m always amazed at how much attention we pay to what happens in these spaces, right? Both because there are so many people who are certainly the sources of power in many ways, in this country, but also the fact of the amount of attention we pay when things happen, in protests. I’m so gratified by the fact that we care and we understand that there’s power inside of those places, and that actually what students think and do matters.

The question we were talking about with teaching the Palestine-Israel conflict, I have two colleagues at Bard, a political scientist and a scholar of Middle Eastern history, and post-October 7th they taught a course together around words, right? How do you enter this really contested space while thinking first, maybe people actually are using terms and words that they don’t fully understand, or people understand differently?

And so maybe one way to think about it is through, we have these very large keywords that we talk about and sometimes around. So what would happen if we brought a group of students together and we brought scholars in, people who really were sensitive to them, studied them, wrote about them, to talk about each one of them?

So we’re going to talk about Zionism, so we’re going to have a professor of Hebrew studies come in and talk about Zionism. We’re going to talk about colonialism, so we’re going to have a scholar on that. We’re going to talk about the Holocaust, and we’re fortunate we have Ken Stern, who’s going to talk about that. And that created a really interesting possibility of dialogue because you’re not trying to take everything in at once.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Dinaw Mengestu: And you’re trying to at least get to a place where the relationship to the words feels somewhat understood.

Zachary Karabell: They only taught it that one term? It’s not been an ongoing course?

Dinaw Mengestu: No, but I’ve talked with them about actually trying to scale it up with PEN and wondering what that might look like, to actually have a series of conversations with people.

Like, say you and I are here, and we’re going to talk about a word, but we’re going to talk not about the definition of the word, but about our relationship to it, right? What is your history with this particular term?

If you ask me what my relationship is to racism, I’ll tell you my relationship and my experiences with that. And it doesn’t ask you to agree with that because I’m not trying to say my experience versus yours. It’s just about my dialogue with that term and for you to hear it, and that’s it. You don’t have to respond to it. You don’t have to agree to it. It’s not about a debate because that’s not ever going to get anywhere.

Zachary Karabell: So where do you see this going? There is this question of cultural turns of the wheel, and we go through periods where things feel much more fraught, and we go into periods where things feel much less fraught. I alluded to the late 1990s, where, look, it did feel for a moment that things were going the world’s way.

Dinaw Mengestu: When was that again?

Zachary Karabell: The late 1990s. But of course, it wasn’t going that way for everybody. But it did feel like the Cold War was over. The European Union was firing on all cylinders. There was increased prosperity globally. China was about to enter the WTO. There was a kind of sense that the perils of the 20th century were going to give way to the promises of the 21st. And that was widely shared. Now, like every other thing, that narrative elided a lot of negative things going on underneath.

Dinaw Mengestu: Of course. But did you believe that in the moment, or is that something that you attach to now in retrospect?

Zachary Karabell: I believed it in the moment.

Dinaw Mengestu: Okay.

Zachary Karabell: I believed it in a flawed sense. Meaning, I didn’t think our problems were solved and things were great. I wrote a book right before 9/11 called A Visionary Nation where I looked at American dreams of a better world, from the Puritans to the New Deal to the whole fusion of markets and internet in the ‘90s, and basically said that we are always overpromising and underdelivering. That all these utopian visions present a world that just doesn’t exist.

And so I certainly felt in the ‘90s that there was an excess of euphoria not commensurate to just how many people were being left out, left behind, not included.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Even so, it felt like there was forward momentum in a very positive way, and who knows what would’ve happened if 9/11 hadn’t happened, if the hanging chad election, if, if, and if. There’s a whole series of contingencies that go into which direction history goes. I mean, you didn’t feel that, apparently.

Dinaw Mengestu: I’m trying to remember. I mean, I graduated college in 2000, and it certainly wasn’t a feeling of despair. There was no sense of, oh, what is going to happen next? There was certainly no anxiety in the same way that I think students might feel now. There was some sense of possibility, probably. I mean, I decided I was going to be a writer, so there must have been a better time.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Well, people apparently still do, which is great. But I would think if you were to caucus your students today, and maybe you do, that most of them have a pretty grim view of the present and an even grimmer view of the future. No? Is that an accurate statement?

Dinaw Mengestu: I think they feel like we are in a very difficult moment. I don’t know if I would say that they feel grim because I’m surprised by the number of them who still want to make things. And that, I feel like, is harder to sustain if everyone feels grim, right?

This year we have the largest number of students studying who want to be writers in the history of our program. The largest program in the college.

Zachary Karabell: That might be a Bard thing.

Dinaw Mengestu: But I think it’s the way we teach it, actually.

Zachary Karabell: Oh, yeah. It’s you.

Dinaw Mengestu: No. I think it’s my colleagues and I, but probably me first and foremost.

But I think because we talk about writing as a way to understand and relate to the world, not as just the thing that I do in private, but it’s a conversation with the politics and culture that we live in, and it’s a way to understand and engage it.

Zachary Karabell: Actually, let me ask you, because your program is called Ethics in Writing.

Dinaw Mengestu: So we have the Written Arts Program, but then I created a center called the Center for Ethics in Writing inside of it.

Zachary Karabell: So what are ethics? Not Aristotelian, but what are ethics today? Or maybe they are Aristotelian.

Dinaw Mengestu: For me, when I think of ethics in writing and what that looks like, it’s what’s the most ethical representation of an issue? And for me, that is to try to put it into its fullest and most complex light. And to some degree, that requires a kind of non-didactic, non-binary approach, and not having an answer. It means being okay with the indeterminacy of what is good and what is bad. And it means also allowing the space for the reader to engage with and understand and come to their own determinations about that. The ethics means you can’t diminish anything inside of the story or the representation. Every side needs equal weight.

And there’s a line from Camus’ essay, “Create Dangerously,” where he talks about the writer being the freelancer, that you don’t choose sides in the war between the opposing armies, but you stand in the middle.

It sounds like you’re saying neutrality, but it’s not about neutrality, right? Because it is, in fact, a very hard moral position or ethical position to take, because you are choosing to believe that there’s a fundamental humanity to all sides. And that is an ethical place to be. That’s not like, oh, everyone’s neutral. It’s like everyone actually deserves care, and everyone deserves consideration.

Zachary Karabell: That is in such short supply today, right? You will not find any newspaper or — most magazines now, which we both write for, they tend to follow a pretty strong tilt one way or the other. They’re certainly not doing what you just said.

Most of my writing isn’t doing that either, I suppose. I mean, I try, I think, in things I write about, to bring people out of the immediacy of a perspective, to try to give a larger lens. Some of that, I think, helps not plunge too deeply into the dystopian despair of the moment.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. I mean, I think not all writing should do that, though, either, right? When I’ve done journalism or essays, oftentimes I’m coming into it with a very particular set of values. In part because when I’m doing fiction, it’s to not do that. I want my fiction to engage very deeply with politics. I can’t imagine writing without that being a part of the narrative. But I don’t want to have answers to those issues. I want them to be out and present in the world.

But if I’m writing an essay, and sometimes for magazines, there is a thing that I want to do inside of it, which is to argue for a belief or an idea. And I think that’s okay, to have that difference and the different spaces that do that. But I think you’re generally right. It’s also harder to do that. I think it takes more time. It takes a long time to write something that tries to achieve that sort of space, and it’s a different sort of intention because you’re trying to make art, not news. Which is what I like to do with my students: help them kind of see that space between them. And trying to only make news or respond is exhausting.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. But there is a short supply of trying to understand the inherent humanity. Because the hard thing is always to understand the inherent humanity of something or somebody or some group that you have a viscerally negative reaction to, right? It’s easy to understand the humanity of people you like or support or admire. It’s very hard to do that.

Dinaw Mengestu: Well, maybe you don’t have to understand it. I think you just have to believe in it, right? I don’t have to understand why someone believes what they believe. In fact, I know that I won’t. I’m very aware that there’s a gap here in experiences, and this includes people that I know very intimately, right? Your perception of the world is just fundamentally different than mine, and I’m not going to try to reconcile them, because that’s just experience. But I don’t need to empathize with you in order for me to believe you’re real.

Zachary Karabell: Hmm.

Dinaw Mengestu: And I think sometimes we privilege that idea at the cost of maybe asking ourselves to do something else. We just respect that line, that divide, and not try to find ways over or around it because it’s not going to happen. But to still be able to say, okay, but I, in fact, understand that you are as real and alive as I am because I understand that I don’t understand.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: But I think on the left, on the cultural left, that’s true of a lot of this audience, it’s certainly true of the worlds that we tend to inhabit, there’s been a really short supply of that when it comes to the right or when it comes to the other. The amount of ability, in the United States, for instance, I find that any particular perspective now has to empathetically put themselves in the place of the other. A New Yorker trying to understand a really conservative Texan. A really evangelical Louisianan trying to understand what it’s like to be someone in the Bay Area. These are micro-parsings of a polity, but there’s not much going on there that is, let me try to understand where this other person’s coming from.

Dinaw Mengestu: I think if we made more accommodations, back to the idea of the keywords, just to hear, just to put ourselves in parallel lines of relationship, right? And not to try to take your experience and put it in dialogue. As much as we talk about how great dialogue is, sometimes dialogue isn’t, you need other conditions before you can enter into dialogue, right? Which is at least a mutual space of being able to understand what a person has lived through and experienced, and to hear that without hearing it as something about you.

If I talk with somebody from Louisiana about their own experiences with growing up racist, it’s very hard to hear that without feeling like it is an assault on my identity. But if I also understand that they are kind of victims of that, and to hear their experiences through that particular way, without trying to take it as mine, there’s possibility in that.

Zachary Karabell: Look, it’s just the reality of we live in a, you alluded to this before. The United States, unlike some of the countries of Western Europe, unlike a lot of countries around the world, it certainly doesn’t have an ethnic homogeneity. It barely has a cultural homogeneity. It may have a constitutional glue in that everybody at some point does refer to this polity as being held together by a set of ideas enshrined in the Constitution.

But look, for the most part, the cultural divides between Americans are immense. And look, they are immense in other countries too. Han Chinese versus Cantonese versus whatever. Rohingya in the face of a dominant group in Burma. The Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. All the different groups in India. Lots of societies have lots of heterogeneity. But certainly, for American democracy to work, it’s a combination of not just free expression, but also listening.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. As you were talking, it made me think actually about the role of power. In order to hear, it’s hard to do any of this sort of work because ideas are in competition. And that competition, especially in this country, the marketplace that permeates everything, and that what people are reacting to is a feeling of one idea, one value, winning against yours. And that is about power sometimes.

Zachary Karabell: And look, I think if you listen to a lot of Americans today, most feel powerless. No matter what part of the spectrum they’re on, most feel that somebody else is calling the shots or has been calling the shots. And one of the powerful messages that percolates around the second season of The Trump Show isn’t just grievance.

Dinaw Mengestu: Oh, yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Grievance is a form of power. Things were done to me.

Dinaw Mengestu: Exactly. Now I will unleash.

Zachary Karabell: I was weak, or I was in a weaker position. It was humiliating, right? And that feeling amongst a lot of the right, that they have been culturally and politically marginalized and humiliated, whether it’s true or not, back to what you just said, it’s real. Certainly a lot of the left feeling like they are now powerless in the face of this kind of right-wing coalition. Everybody seems to feel powerless.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. And I think that’s right. Yesterday evening there was a really wonderful conversation with Yiyun Li and Édouard Louis, who’s a French writer and a kind of remarkable young man.

And he was talking about the difference between France and the U.S., where the idea of being able to speak on behalf of others, for him, he’s like, I don’t have a problem with that. And he gave the example of his mother, who grew up very poor. He said, if she were to write something saying that her condition was not the product of a male-dominant patriarchal structure that did not allow her to be educated and did not allow her to have freedom, if she said those were choices that she made, I would disagree with her because she does not understand her sociological condition because she never went to high school. And in fact, I would feel it is my intellectual duty to be able to actually tell her you are wrong, and I will disagree with you loudly and publicly because I will speak for you because I have been privileged to have a larger contextual understanding. And to take that away is to commit another act of violence. It’s to allow this other thing to permeate and grow.

But we would say, well, you’re speaking for her. Let her have her own thing. Or on the right, that you’re humiliating her.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Dinaw Mengestu: That in fact your leftist, progressive ideas are overwhelming and speaking to your perspective and not hers. And now we feel humiliated, and therefore we need Trump to come in and equal the scale. So maybe we didn’t speak enough because the right is full of people who are voting against their own interest.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. So what happens next?

Dinaw Mengestu: I don’t know, but as an interesting counter debate, instead of thinking, oh, the elites actually ruined everything by going too far and too woke, what they didn’t actually do was work hard enough to talk to and speak about the conditions that people were really living in. Right?

And that it’s not because we took on trans issues — that sort of bullshit rhetoric — but in fact we didn’t allow people to try to understand their own conditions to the degree. And I think that’s where institutions have failed the most. They stopped being levers of social equality and movement, and they became increasingly bastions of enormous endowments.

Zachary Karabell: Which is what a lot of people who support Trump continue to feel. You had your chance. You had a 40-year, 50-year run of owning a lot of these cultural institutions, owning a lot of these political institutions, owning a lot of these programs that were designed — I mean, this is where JD Vance came from, right? This was his whole Hillbilly Elegy book, that these institutions have simultaneously created a culture of dependency, which he rejected.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Individual responsibility, which he at least seemed to tout, and they failed.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Like the worst of all worlds.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: And here we are in what may actually be the best of all worlds.

So I do want to say that, back to what we were talking about earlier, we are left with the world as it is, not the world as we want it to be. And it still seems, as you have reflected, that at least in terms of expression, speech, and ideas, the United States remains the best place to be able to speak one’s mind, even with the threats against it.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. Frankly, I think you cannot speak about certain issues. I think you cannot speak about Israel and Palestine honestly in this country at all, and I think that has been happening for a decade now. We have passed legislation around that, and I think we’ve now expanded that to include LGBTQ rights. I think it’s included trans. I think it’s starting to move in toward American history. I think the expanding of that, it started here with that issue, and I think it’s expanding outward.

Zachary Karabell: All right. Let me challenge you on that, too. No one’s ever been able to freely speak about just everything. You cannot freely speak about the virtues of sleeping with minors as an adult. You cannot freely speak about cannibalism. There’s a whole series of things that human beings do that we have collectively decided that human beings shouldn’t do, and we’re not particularly open to speech that talks of those things in a neutral or favorable fashion. And that may be all for the best. I’m just saying there is no such thing as, back to our kindergarten, like, there are constraints.

Dinaw Mengestu: There are, but this is outside of those constraints. This is political speech, right? And so if you pass legislation that bans certain types of political speech, that’s not within that same wheelhouse. That’s speech that’s protected in any other category that’s being now enforced by the government. They’re using that as leverage, right? And it’s being used in a very targeted way.

And the danger of that is if you look at anti-BDS laws that were passed starting in 2015 using procurement measures, that same strategy was then later used, that same legal format was used for book bans. The same thing is being used in education. They found a strategy that wasn’t contested, and we understand that it’s actually using a litmus test. Like, if you work with a state government and you want to buy or sell newspapers to them, you have to agree to this position. That is enforced speech on the part of a government, enforced political speech. That is taking away a fundamental expression right, and for me that is an enormous thing that we have carved out. And it’s not nationwide, right? You can track the map of those things in the United States. They’re the same places that are doing the book bans. So it’s the same geographical structure. I can’t think of another issue or moment when speech has been singled out and carved out that way.

And it can’t happen at the federal level because it won’t work. It strangely has — you know, thanks to the Eighth Circuit — managed to be sustained right now. The Supreme Court didn’t hear it. So yeah. I don’t think there’s anything quite like that that I can see.

Zachary Karabell: If your class were the United States and you were giving a grade on how well the United States was doing supporting free expression, what grade would you give today? What grade would you have given, I don’t know, let’s pick 2015?

Dinaw Mengestu: I could give it an F.

Zachary Karabell: You’d give free expression an F?

Dinaw Mengestu: Without a doubt. The fact that you cannot enter this country and not be concerned about your social media activities, the fact that you are a college student on a college campus and you will not be able to make protests around Israel and Palestine, and that has affected every student, every campus across this country, and the fact that that affects all immigrants, I don’t understand how this is anything other than an incredibly repressive moment. If you talk to people in those communities, that is only what they feel. And that fear of being able to speak, that it might actually make you lose your ability to be with your family, I can’t think of anything other than that.

In 2015, 2015 wasn’t great either. But I would put us in the C, D range, at least.

Zachary Karabell: See, I’m probably going to suffer from grade inflation here.

Dinaw Mengestu: That’s why you left academia.

Zachary Karabell: Grading on a curve or something like that. Because I would grade it more relative to the human experience than relative to an abstract ideal of, like, an A is free expression writ large. So I would probably give the United States a B or a B- today, and I would have given it a B+ 10 years ago. And I probably would’ve given it a C in the 1950s and well into the early ‘60s because, again, we had a whole immigration ban from 1924. We opened things up in the ‘60s, but —

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, but if you’re in the ‘60s and you were Black, you were not speaking your mind freely.

Zachary Karabell: Right. No. That’s my point. I would’ve given it a worse grade in the ‘50s into the ‘60s. Maybe a better grade in the ‘70s where everything just kind of, one of the virtues of everything falling apart in the ‘70s is that the structures of repression also fell apart more. They were still there.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, but there was a loosening of —

Zachary Karabell: So I’d be much more generous about our free expression, relatively and comparatively, relative to our past and comparatively to the rest of the world.

Dinaw Mengestu: See, when you look at, say, our free index threat and you look at a country like Eritrea, right? They don’t have that many people in prison. I would put them probably near the very top because what they’ve done is they’ve imprisoned 12 people for a very long time.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Dinaw Mengestu: So I think the fact that there might be more people able to speak doesn’t actually account for the threat. And I think the scale of the threat and the depth of the threat is the really profound thing. If you did it by per capita, China wouldn’t be anywhere near the top 10 because it’s a billion people. The percentage of people who are actually in prison — but the consequences of that speech, and very particular forms of speech, you’re not going to talk about Uyghurs, is profound. And so I think we’re in that space where we can let lots of people say lots of things, but there are a certain number of people who cannot speak about a certain number of things, and the fear of that is profound.

Zachary Karabell: Okay, so I’m grading on a curve, more optimistic about it. If it’s so bad, how do we make sure that it gets better?

Dinaw Mengestu: I think we have to treat all of it together. This is where my utopian ideas come in, that all of that speech has to be understood as under equal assault, which means that if you are thinking about immigrant speech, you are thinking about your own speech. It is all united, right? That means you are fighting for the trans right to speak. You are fighting for Palestinians’ right to speak. You are fighting for Israelis’ right to speak. You are doing it collectively and entirely, and you are doing it with a kind of really profound, not agreement, right? But unity on that.

And until we begin to understand that everything — and I think we’ve let too much space happen where we fight for that thing and that thing and that thing, instead of everyone being like, okay, we actually are all in the same fucking wagon, and we need to be driving it together.

Zachary Karabell: Dinaw Mengestu, thank you so much for a stimulating conversation, a free expression conversation. I mean, this was much more the Marquess of Queensberry, like when we disagree. It’s like, oh, that’s a very interesting point. We didn’t come to fisticuffs. But anyway, thank you so much for your time today.

Dinaw Mengestu: No, thank you, Zach. It was great talking to you.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you all for your time. As always, I want to thank Kaleidoscope for producing, and I want to thank the people at The Progress Network for supporting.

Please send me your thoughts, send me your ideas, send me your comments, your criticisms, your hopes, your dreams, and I will try to respond at theprogressnetwork.org or to my Edgy Optimist on Substack. And we will be back with you next week.

It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history; it could be added that commentary is the first draft of journalism. With that in mind, here’s a rough-and-tumble take on what appears to be the winding down of the Iran whatever-we-should-call-it that began on February 28.

First — and though this should have been screamingly evident at the time, it is definitely screamingly evident now — if you enter a conflict unwilling to die for victory, you are entering with major limitations on what you can do and how far you can go. At no point did the Trump administration convince, or even try to convince, the American public that toppling the Iranian regime, or at least fatally weakening it, was something any of us should die for.

Yes, it would seem that a considerable portion (though rarely a majority) of Americans supported the idea of stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But that support was predicated on the effort causing no domestic pain. It is one thing to say “I support preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon,” and something very different to say “I support preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and am willing to bear higher prices and even the loss of lives to attain that goal.”

Americans will, as they did after 9/11 and during World War II and in the early years of the Korean War, endorse conflicts that put their neighbors in harm’s way and cause economic pain — if they believe the price is worth paying. That belief was never evident during this current imbroglio. The scriptwriters of the second season of The Trump Show didn’t even bother to offer it as a plotline.

The “don’t fight if you’re not willing to die” constraint yields real lessons. It speaks directly to U.S. policy regarding Taiwan, which is predicated in part on the fantasy that Americans would be willing to die to protect Taiwanese independence against a Chinese attack. Maybe, but only if a consistent, multi-pronged effort convinced us of that. And if, in the end, our strategy to inflict pain on a hostile China would require less human sacrifice but more economic sacrifice, the lesson stands.

Second, Iran has reinforced what Ukraine first demonstrated: a world of autonomous warfare and drones favors the weaker side. That may change as technologies evolve, but for now, existing ones sharply enhance the ability of weaker actors to withstand pressure while causing significant damage of their own. Iran didn’t need to be particularly formidable to close the Strait of Hormuz; it just needed enough internal cohesion to deploy drones.

Third, never enter a conflict armed only with hope that everything goes right. There has to be a strategy that anticipates various outcomes. If such a plan was present at the outset for the U.S., it was written in invisible ink.

Finally, and this one is a bitter pill for many, though the U.S. and Israel have been aligned for decades, they no longer share a common worldview. Israel, for better and worse, has bought in to seeing every conflict as existential, worth dying for. Whether that is actually the case is not the point. What matters is that the Israeli perspective doesn’t match that of Americans, or even the Trump administration. An easy victory that boosted Trump — that’s all that mattered here. Any threat posed by Iran was never a serious factor; if it were, there would at least have been an attempt to make the case to the American people.

The current situation remains fluid, and these lessons may give way to others. There’s an old Wall Street adage called Stein’s Law: If something can’t go on, it will stop. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is one of those somethings. Now that Iran realizes the leverage it holds there, it doesn’t need a nuclear weapon as insurance against eradication. This warlette has shifted the country’s calculus. That may be the most significant outcome, and it is an outcome very much to the Iranian regime’s benefit. This was never more than sound and fury on the part of the U.S. Unless these lessons are learned, it will be even less than not a victory.

Is any of this cause for optimism? Potentially, yes, because learning from mistakes is always a recipe for better future decisions. Denying reality is the recipe for worse ones.

In this episode, I sat down with Anthony Scaramucci, a man whose life has been defined by improbable successes and very public failures. Through it all, he has shown an unwavering willingness to stay in the game, and from his unique vantage at the intersection of finance, politics, and public life, Anthony talked to me about how he was managing to do that in this current moment of profound uncertainty.

As he reflected on his journey from Wall Street to White House to outspoken critic of his former boss, Donald Trump, he preached resilience in the face of risk and the importance of staying engaged.

That sounds good to me. Because though we disagree on certain issues, there is one belief he and I definitely share: America’s story continues to be written —and its best chapters may yet lie ahead.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and today we’re going to talk to one of my favorite humans, for whom a lot has gone wrong and who has continued to look at what could go right. That is Anthony Scaramucci, whose recent fame was spending eleven days as communications director for the first Trump administration, a role he has both talked about a lot and come to regret. Not regret in the sense that he’s questioning his sanity, but regret in the sense that he is no longer on the same team.

He is a fascinating individual. He is deeply engaged in the warp and woof of our political life, and he’s somebody who’s thought about what does it mean to be an engaged citizen. What does it mean to have ambitions? What does it mean to fail, given that he has both succeeded well beyond what most people dream of, and failed far more than most people would like?

And he’s thought about crypto, which is and continues to be a controversial thing, and controversial in part because of its current indelible association with Trumplandia.

He has thought about what does it mean to be an engaged citizen without a party, given that he’s a lifelong Republican who no longer associates with the Republican Party as it is, and what do you do about that? And how can we heal our wounds as a country? Wounds that are real, but wounds that he and I and others keep saying are deep and are far deeper than this moment. They transcend our current political malaise and go back really till our founding. And what do we do about that?

These are important questions, and it’s really a joy to be able to have this conversation with someone who kind of lives it. Whether you like Scaramucci or not — and he is a firebrand in his own way — he is somebody who really is alive to these questions, and I’m looking forward to having them with him.

All right, Anthony, I’ve known you for 17 years, give or take a day or two. Your joke when we met was that you were a hairbreadth away from SkyBridge going under, and then it didn’t. And I feel like over the past 17 years, your kind of death-defying trapeze act of things almost going wrong and then going right, I was kind of amused, you’re doing this podcast with Novogratz, who I also know, and I feel like the two of you have parallel lives in things almost go wrong and then they go spectacularly right.

Anthony Scaramucci: He’s a lot smarter than me, which is why the podcast is so good. But you’re going to make a point, Zach. Go ahead.

Zachary Karabell: It’s more of a question. People come to you and they’re like, oh man, tell me what I should be doing with my life, or tell me about the world. It seems to me like career advice of, almost fail spectacularly before you succeed spectacularly. Would you give that career advice?

Anthony Scaramucci: I think the problem for me is that I’m a risk-taker. And the problem for me is that I wanted three things out of my career, and none of them were coming without any potential trapdoors.

I wanted some political engagement. Well, guess what happens in politics? You get your ass kicked. I didn’t think I was going to get my ass kicked after 11 days, but you do get your ass kicked. Most people get fired from politics or walk out of politics, whether it’s the Tony Blairs of the world or you pick the people.

The second thing I wanted in my career, I wanted my own business on Wall Street, but I have no legacy. My parents were blue collar. So how do you do that? And then how do you survive the risk-taking associated with that?

And then the third thing, which is how we sort of met, is I always wanted to be in a convening space. So I started the SALT conference 17 years ago, which is how we met, frankly, in 2009.

Those three things came with risk and came with reward, no question. But you get the doctrine of unexpected consequences. You, better than anybody, know that anything you think cannot happen on Wall Street, happens on Wall Street, right?

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: Or, as Lloyd Blankfein said to me, I interviewed him for his new book — “The 1,00-year flood happens every five years on Wall Street.”

So yeah, I have failed upward. And I’m still failing, and I’m still a work in progress. But at least I’m failing humbly. At least I’m smart enough to know that I’m not that smart.

Zachary Karabell: You know, it’s funny. One of the pretexts of this whole podcast, and kind of the work that I’m trying to do about, maybe we are, in Wall Street terms, over-indexing for Armageddon and under-indexing for utopia, is that not just humility about one’s own career, but humility about what we think we know, particularly about the future, which none of us know, right?

Everybody’s guesstimating about the future, which has endless pathways, and we’re all trying to figure out which one it has. So I kind of salute the humility of, take a deep breath. None of us are that special.

Anthony Scaramucci: Some of it’s luck, Zach. Listen, I made an Anthropic investment. I didn’t know if Anthropic was going to win or not. I didn’t know if it had the right — you know, again, I’m not bragging. By the way, I’ve lost, I have zeros. I have a phone book of zeros. But I was in the right place at the right time. I made an Anthropic investment. It went 60 to 1. Okay, so am I a genius because I made the Anthropic investment? No. Right place, right time, series of investments, many of which failed. I have one nugget that did okay. My point is, you have to stay in the game. I think the biggest message, someone came to see me, and I said, wow, if I got fired from the White House and left the field on the day that I got fired, different career arc. If I had this setback in the 2008 financial crisis, and somebody came into — not this office, because I was upstairs on 16 — but a similar office to this in March of 2009, and Zach Karabell, you will remember the Dow was at, like, 6,000? Some crazy number. The S&P was at 666. I remember that because that was like the movie The Omen. It was horrific. And a former Goldman Sachs colleague of mine said I should shut the business down. By the way, that was really good advice. He was really smart, and he was a really good guy, and he didn’t mean me poorly. He said, it’s time to get out of the business. And I started the SALT conference and bought Citibank’s business, their fund of funds, and merged it into the business. It made all the difference, but it was a good idea to shut the business down, but I didn’t. So my whole thing with people is, get up, dust yourself off. Look, I’ve got some crumbs on me from lunch. You see that? There was a crumb there.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I see it.

Anthony Scaramucci: You dust it off, and you move on.

Zachary Karabell: There have been three major financial crises in our professional lifetime: 2000, 2008–2009 and 2020. And other than 2008–2009, those didn’t have the same kind of shockwaves of a generation. You’re totally right about the Wall Street thing. Brilliant people do badly, stupid people do well. It’s one of the only professions I’ve ever encountered where you can get the big picture right and get the investing thesis completely wrong, and you can get the investing completely right and the big picture completely wrong, which is kind of a mindfuck.

But I wonder, in the financial world and the political world, we are sort of primed for things to go wrong. The entire financial world is predicated — I mean, yeah, you could say CNBC, which we used to both be on, tends to be more bullish because it sells. But in general, the financial world is always looking for the next shoe to drop. And I think we do the same thing in the political world.

I wonder, for you, you are legitimately, based on your own experience and your own read, negative about Trump. But you’re not a particularly negative person, right? You don’t sit there going, oh my God, we’re on the precipice of some sort of cultural implosion. How do you square that?

Anthony Scaramucci: No, no, no. Listen, he represents something that’s always been in the country. There’s been a feeling of nativism. There’s a feeling of isolationism. There’s some levels of racism and white supremacy.

There’s a story that could have gotten told — you’ve talked about arcs of history and different timelines. There’s a story that could have been told in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh was the progenitor of the first America First movement. Had that movement caught political fire at that time, you could have had a very different outcome to the Second World War.

Zachary Karabell: I am so glad you said that, by the way. He is an iteration of currents that have been there. He’s just a very pure distillation of them in one person.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yes, but he’s also a manifestation of an establishment crisis that happened at the end of the Berlin Wall.

So my thesis — hear me out for a second — the Berlin Wall comes down. We’ve beaten the Soviets. We now have this “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama said. But of course history didn’t end, and we started making decisions based on democratic-style capitalism is going to rule the Earth.

So we let the Chinese into the World Trade Organization, thinking that would help them but would also modify their system. That didn’t happen. We then went to war in the Middle East, which we’re still fighting, frankly, 25 years of war. We did that without tax increases, the first time we went to war without a tax increase in U.S. history.

And then, since you mentioned the financial crisis, we had a bailout concomitant with that crisis. Most of that money went to the banks, if not all of the money — banks and insurance companies. None of it went to the little guy. So you had Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement. And frankly, you’ve got a lot of people in this country who are very angry with the establishment, very angry with the social contract. And so where a Charles Lindbergh would have represented them in the 1930s, there just wasn’t enough of them.

You’ve now gotten to the 45, 49 percent threshold number where there’s now enough people that feel disaffected. And by the way, I say this about Trump, he saw this, we have to accept that he has good political instincts. He saw that the people I grew up with, who were economically aspirational, 35 short years later, that very same group of people were economically “desperational.” So that’s happened in life. We have to accept it, and now it’s up to us to figure out whether or not we want to fix it. Because if we don’t fix it, what’s going to happen is, you’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, we’ll just be in these little barbed-wire security-compound McMansions while our fellow neighbors are suffering, and I think that would be a horrific state to be in.

I’m watching a lot of feeling-less, apathetic billionaires march their way to a trillion dollars, and they’ve lost sight of the noblesse oblige, or they’ve lost sight of the savoir faire necessary to help their fellow current travelers on Earth.

We can fix it, and we can make it better. And I think Trump is providing us, frankly, an opportunity to do that.

So, you’re a historian, so let me posit something to you. This country is very young. It’s only 250 years old. It’s based on an idea. There’s not a lineage. It’s not Russia. It’s not France. It’s not the United Kingdom or Britain. It’s not Italy. This is an idea, and we all came here. It’s a melting pot of people. And so we don’t have the generational, cultural memory. So every 80 years we go into the tar pits. We had a revolution. Eighty years later, Civil War. Eighty years later, the Great Depression. The Great Depression led to the Second World War. Eighty years out from the Second World War, we’re in the pits again.

So now it’s up to us. Are we going to pull ourselves out of this and be the neurally plastic country that we’ve been known to be? We’ve had other crises, in my opinion, that are worse than this one, and we pulled ourselves out of those. So now the question is: can we pull ourselves out of this one? And I believe that we can.

Zachary Karabell: And that is the really, we’re beginning to face this question of, is this sort of Trump 10-year period — and it’ll be 12 years by the time ‘28 rolls around — is it an interregnum? Is it a new normal? Where are we going to go from here? It’s not clear.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: It is certainly clear that there is nobody who’s going to inherit Trump as Trump, right? He is a unique figure.

Anthony Scaramucci: The cult of personality will die, or will be extinguished along with his political relevancy. Will there be populist elements that stay with the next wave of the movement? We’ll have to wait and see. But I would submit to you, this is the great irony, is that a 60-year-old Joe Biden would have had his shit together better. Because if you look at the Biden policies, they were actually trying to heal that divide in the country between the haves and the have-nots. Unfortunately, he was sundowning. It became self-evident. So he dropped out of the race, and it cleared the way.

Remember, Trump’s political survival is directly tied to the misfiring of two Democratic political candidates: Hillary Clinton, unfortunately, and Vice President Harris. They were weak candidates. Again, people can be mad at me for saying that, but just think about this: Joe Biden, who I would say is a mediocre presidential candidate, beat a sitting president, Zach.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: Okay? So all you had to have was a mediocre candidate. This guy is not well liked. He’s got a 34% approval rating. The independents, forget it. It’s an 80/20 split with the independents. He’s got 90-plus or 100% of the Republicans, but Republicans are going down in terms of their voter registration every year. They’re the lowest registration. Independents are No. 1, Democrats are No. 2. So yes, his base is shrinking. He has his base. There’s a big opportunity there for somebody normal to say, okay, listen, this is our moment again. Lots of great technology. You write beautifully about all the things that are going on in the world that we can take advantage of and all the abundance that’s out there. We just need the political leadership that can join that bright future.

Zachary Karabell: So on that note of things that people don’t like to look at, there are these things that are going on in the Trump administration quietly, because you don’t trumpet them, that I think a lot of people would agree are probably a good thing, even though Trump is doing them, or his administration is doing them. There’s a more creative approach toward innovation and technology and maybe nuclear fuel, not nuclear weapons, but nuclear fuel. Other than his bizarre animus about wind power, a more diverse approach toward innovations, even in the energy space.

And I kind of worry that because everything now that Trump touches is going to be perceived by an entire class and generation as inherently sullied, that some of this stuff is going to be easily rejected just because it’s him. Even some of the stuff around crypto, right? The fact that he’s become incredibly kleptocratic about crypto doesn’t mean that some of the regulatory framework around this, which even the big banks, as you know, like JPMorgan and all these others, are embracing — I wonder if there’s a way to preserve some of this, if you could detach the policies from the Trump.

Anthony Scaramucci: I appreciate your comments related to my analysis because there are some things that he does, I call it the good Trump and the bad Trump. You’re mentioning some of them on the energy side, or trying to get some propitious crypto regulation or whatever it might be. But the aura is bad. If you’re shooting people in Minneapolis, if you’re tweeting out that you’re going to end a civilization, which, just so everybody knows, it’s a war crime to threaten a war crime. I think everybody should know that. So you have the leader of the free world, the president of the United States, saying he’s going to end a civilization.

That to me, on the scales, you could say, well, he’s got really good energy policy, he’s got good banking policy, he’s got good crypto policy, but he wants to end a civilization. I don’t know. It outweighs it.

Zachary Karabell: I’m not suggesting for one minute that these things balance each other out. I’m suggesting that the political dynamic will be, if the Democrats take Congress in the fall of ‘26, if a Democrat takes the White House, there’s going to be — we’ve been in these kinds of violent oscillations.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah, they could unwind it. The big opportunity — there’s a great new book coming out called The American Patriarch. It’s written by H.W. Brands, and it’s about George Washington. Remember, Washington hated political parties.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: Part of his farewell address was that if you get into a political party, you’re going to have entrenched self-interest around the party, and then you’re going to have a partisan divide. He preferred there to be more of an amorphous body politic as opposed to political parties.

If you just step back for a second, we’re going to need a post-partisan leadership. We’re going to need something more transformative than we currently have.

It would have to be, at this moment, at least, a Democrat, because if a Democrat replaces a Republican, they could take Trump’s playbook and say, okay, I’m now going to punish the Republicans the way they just tried to punish us. And then, to your point, we could oscillate back and forth between this insanity.

Or you could get a Mandela-like figure who says, okay, we’re not going to do that. We have to transform the country for the betterment of everybody. It takes a very big person to do that, Zach.

Zachary Karabell: I was always amazed that there was this brief opportunity in 2017 where, if Trump had been — and you had been a more persuasive figure for more than 11 days — had he been politically astute, you could have assembled this kind of bipartisan coalition. You could have embraced the Sherrod Browns and Bernie Sanders in a pro-working class, anti-globalist, even somewhat more tariff, anti-China. You could have broken both parties up and created this whole new domestic coalition. Now, maybe that wouldn’t have been the right thing economically, and we could debate, but the opportunity was clearly there. It’s gone now.

Anthony Scaramucci: One hundred percent. I’ll say it a little bit differently. You can’t put into somebody what God left out. He had that opportunity, but he just didn’t have it in him. But you can’t put into somebody what God left out.

There was an opportunity there, Lincolnesque opportunity. People don’t remember this now because we’re in this woke culture and we’re taking down statues and renaming things, but Robert E. Lee’s portrait was actually in the Oval Office during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. If you Google it, you’ll see there was a portrait of Robert E. Lee over the fireplace. When Eisenhower was asked about it, they saw Robert E. Lee as a patriotic American. They saw him differently, and primarily because Lincoln pardoned everybody. And if you really remember your constitutional history, they had the right to secede. It got abrogated or repealed in 1869 by the Brown vs. Texas Supreme Court case. But the thought was, okay, they had the right. Lincoln overruled that right. He abolished habeas corpus. He got the country to stay together. But we revise the way we think about these things.

But Lincoln was a post-partisan, even though he was our first Republican president, he was really working on national healing and national unity. And of course, his premature death altered that timeline. I think things would probably have gone slightly better in the Reconstruction process with Lincoln’s gravitas and his leadership.

Zachary Karabell: That raises a question of, should Biden have pardoned Trump in ‘21? Should whoever succeeds Trump in ‘29 —

Anthony Scaramucci: I thought he should have. Let me give you some historical context there. In September of 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

Zachary Karabell: Yep.

Anthony Scaramucci: Teddy Kennedy went ballistic. He excoriated Jerry Ford. Thirty-five years later, in 2009, Kennedy was dying of brain cancer. He said that he made a mistake. He said that Ford saw that by pardoning a man, he was preserving the institution —

Zachary Karabell: Exactly.

Anthony Scaramucci: And preserving the bipartisan culture, and he didn’t create a banana republic where we were building jail cells for each other depending on which party we were from. You want to avoid that.

Trump has done some things that I think are pretty suspect — you know, for his family businesses, other things — but he’s one guy. I would be very careful setting this thing up in a way where we’re eviscerating each other’s adversaries in politics.

Zachary Karabell: So this also raises this question of, where does one go politically? You were a lifelong, and I think still are, a lifelong Republican, but the Republican Party has been completely, or almost completely, hijacked by a personality cult. You’ve got a few people like Thom Tillis and maybe Thune on a good day, and Massie —

Anthony Scaramucci: Not Thune. No, I think Thune’s a coward.

Zachary Karabell: Massie and some of these others. So where do you go, basically? Where does anybody go? You’ve got these two parties. Democrats are still absolutely a much bigger tent currently. You’ve got the Elissa Slotkins on the one hand, you’ve got AOCs on the other, and they are very different humans and represent very different strains of a party. But particularly if you’re a Republican, where do you go? And if you’re a pro-business centrist Democrat or a social conservative Democrat, where do you go? What do you tell people? I’m sure people ask you this as well.

Anthony Scaramucci: I have no party, and that’s why I now sit with all these independents — 40-plus percent… I mean, I’m still registered as a Republican. I think there’s only one group of people doing worse than the Republicans. Those are the New York Mets. That’s the only group I can think of. I’m a fifty-five-year Mets fan. You don’t give up.

Zachary Karabell: You tried to buy these sports teams. This could have been you, man.

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, who the hell knows? Maybe I would’ve done worse. That’s the other thing. Steve Cohen is a brilliant guy, and Steve Cohen has a tremendous amount of money. He said that one of the public goods he wants to have is to make this team win. And I’m sure they’re trying super hard, but man, they have a 33% winning percentage. That’s okay for a batting average, but it’s the worst — they’ve had the worst start. They have the second-highest payroll in Major League Baseball, and they have the worst start of any team since the expansion era in 1962. But I’m still a Mets fan, so I’m still a Republican. I’m hoping that my team, which has moved away from my core philosophy and the philosophy of many…I had lunch last week with Mitt Romney, who I’m sure you remember.

Zachary Karabell: Mm.

Anthony Scaramucci: He’s 79 now. He looks great. But Mitt Romney was my kind of Republican. He was telling me about the 20th anniversary of Romneycare in Massachusetts, where he helped to set up a healthcare system and frankly lowered the cost of medicine in the state because of Romneycare.

Because what do you know, Zach, what I know, good policy in medicine is about prevention. Waiting until someone’s got to go to the emergency room is not the most efficient way to price out their healthcare.

Could we ever get it back? I don’t know. But I’m a believer that things go in cycles. Here’s what I know: whatever you think is today, we both know that it’s going to change. We both know that. The same way it’s changed from the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the 2020s are going to be very different from the 2030s or the 2040s. Could be worse. I’m not saying it’s going to get better. But I’d like to believe it will be, because it’s America.

Zachary Karabell: So let’s turn to crypto, which you’ve been deeply involved in the past years. Look, a lot of people — particularly now with the Trump involvement in it — have seen crypto as essentially this place where people can break the law, circumvent government accountability, self-enrich, self-deal. It’s the ultimate Ponzi scheme because there’s no underlying blah there. What do you say to people whose view of this is that? And now it’s kind of had the cherry on top is, if somebody like Trump endorses it, it must be bad.

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, it was very bad under the Biden administration. They had Operation Choke Point 2.0. They were de-banking people. They were trying to prevent the ETFs from happening. You had to have a lawsuit with the SEC, that the SEC actually lost, in order to get the Bitcoin ETF together, and then they did all kinds of shenanigans —

Zachary Karabell: No, no, I know. But these are people who — and I talked to Gensler, who was there at the time, they really felt that crypto was immoral, destructive of the sovereign right of states to issue currency. One of the things states like to do is control their money and control their defense. There’s a lot of people who just think this is wrong, full stop. Morally wrong, politically wrong, economically wrong.

Anthony Scaramucci: Alright. But there were probably people who thought the horseless carriage was wrong. It was creating some level of pollution, and why would we want that when we got all these beautiful horses that we can ride around town with? So yes, I understand that. But if technology is better, and I would submit to you that if you had a tokenized structure — let’s just go to the NASDAQ for a second. They’ve signed with Kraken. They’re going to tokenize stocks, and they’re going to do 24/7 trading. They hope to unveil that before the end of the year. So it’s a better platform. The blockchain can create permissionless traffic very efficiently and very securely. So I would just submit to you, yes, I understand that there are people who are against it and think it’s morally wrong, but if you have better technology, generally better technology gets adopted.

Uber, nobody wanted Uber. The taxi commissions didn’t want it, the mayors didn’t want it, no business city official wanted it. You and I, unfortunately, are old enough to remember Bloomberg’s fight over smoking. Nobody wanted no smoking in restaurants. All the restaurant owners and bartenders said, that’ll be a disaster for our business. Turned out it was better for the businesses.

Zachary Karabell: I owned a bar in the East Village when that happened. We had a funeral ceremony the night the ban went into place. We all smoked past midnight, played a dirge. It was very sad.

Anthony Scaramucci: But it turned out it was good for your restaurant, right?

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, it was fine. I’m just saying we thought it was going to be miserable.

Anthony Scaramucci: That’s my point. I think all that stuff is overblown. But I do like the technology long term. I think it’s going to be with us, and we have to get the regulation right. Trump, in ways, has been better, and in ways he’s been way worse. I said this, I was in Davos with Brian Armstrong, sitting on a panel together. I said, he launched this meme coin a couple of hours before he got re-inaugurated. It’s going to be bad for us, because his opposition, the Genslers of the world, are going to say, ah, you see? Low-life grifters. President-in-chief, low-life grifter. And let’s stop this. I think that’s the main reason why the CLARITY Act — I would have thought the CLARITY Act would’ve gotten passed last year. We’re already heading into May and we have no CLARITY Act.

So, Zach, this is a problem. This tribalism, this left-and-right-ism as opposed to right-or-wrong-ism, this is a problem. And it’s going to persist until somebody says, time out. We have to break the fever. Even if it hurts my party short term, it’ll help the country in the long term. I don’t know who’s going to do that, but I predict that it will happen.

Zachary Karabell: One more thing on crypto. What about the utopian version of crypto that was out there for a long time of, we’re in this world where states have reasserted their primacy. That’s certainly true of the United States as a national state. There’s a theory of the case around the Trump people of this should be a world of competing nation-states, not of global institutions like the UN or multilateral institutions like NATO. China is certainly asserting itself as a state. Iran is asserting itself as a state.

There was a vision, a utopian vision of Bitcoin as a way in which human beings could, across the world, transact peer-to-peer without states interfering, without them tithing, taxing, knowing, in a way that would liberate human beings, liberate their energy. That seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside. But I’m not sure it should have completely fallen by the wayside as a vision.

Anthony Scaramucci: That’s been clouded, frankly, by the overpromise culture. Our generation — I think I’m older than you, Zach, but I’m in the Baby Boomer generation, so I’m born ‘46 to ‘64 — this Baby Boomer generation has failed the country. So I think everything you’re saying, yes, but it’s been clouded by the overpromising, under-taxation wreckage, going from George Washington to George W. Bush. When Bush left office, we went from George Washington to George W. Bush, $7 trillion, and we’ve gone from Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, in that short period of time, it’s staggering, you know, $34 trillion. I mean, come on, guys, what are we doing? You know, Donald Trump first term, $8.2 trillion, $1.2 trillion more than George Washington to George Bush. I mean, come on, guys. It’s not sustainable. So everything you’re saying, yes, but it’s being overshadowed and clouded by this disequilibrium.

Zachary Karabell: As we wrap up, what do you think of this idea? That, you’re active on social media. You play the game. That there are more people clamoring for their voices to be heard than ever before, that are discontent, that are angry, that are roiling. That’s on the left, on the right, in the center. No matter where you look, people are pissed off. They want their voice heard. They don’t feel that the institutions that serve them actually serve them, whether it’s a hospital, whether it’s a court, whether it’s the Mets, whether it’s Washington.

The upside of that anger and that roiling and your engagement, is, hey, we can do better. We should be doing better. We’re not just going to settle. You used the word “apathy” earlier. The one thing that makes me, if not hopeful, then feel like there’s a different story than we’re telling going on here, is that there seems to be a complete dearth of apathy, and that’s a good thing. People are not apathetic.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah. We just have to make some adjustments. Listen, this kid James Talarico that’s running for the Senate in Texas, he had a great line, so I have to give him credit for the line. I’d love to steal it from him, but I have to give him credit for the line. He said that we have policies that can satisfy the poor. We do. The problem is we have no policies to satisfy the rich. And I just want you to think about that. He’s right, because the rich want to get richer. And so what do they want? They want certain benefits to help enrich them. Enough is never enough, and that’s the struggle.

When we were at our best, and you know this as an economist, generally, Linda Datcher Loury before she passed away, she was a labor economics professor at Tufts. She had great research on this. If you have economic rent associated with businesses and GDP overall, if the allocation is 50% toward capital, that’s shareholders and owners, and 50% toward labor, she could show you historically the country usually does very, very well. You have high living standards in the middle class, sort of from 1944 to 1971. When that starts to shift and capital is taking more of the excess, or taking more of the economic rent for themselves — and right now we’re at 53/47 — guess what happens? People get angry.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: They get dissatisfied. The great irony is, Zach, if you have 50% going to 1% of the people and the other 50% goes to the other 99% of the people, you have happy campers. But we have to go to 53%. What Talarico is saying is something I really believe, it’s hard to satisfy the rich. So we’ve got to get somebody in office — Roosevelt understood this, Teddy Roosevelt. He’s like, all right, guys, I’ve got to bust up somebody’s trust. You have to knock it off, because you can’t have one or two guys worth 2.5%, 3% of the GDP of the country.

Zachary Karabell: Well, we’re certainly going to have that opportunity, because we’re probably going to have the first trillionaire in the next few years, and it’ll probably be Elon.

Anthony Scaramucci: Listen, I don’t want to make it overly political. I think the mayor is actually doing an okay job, Mamdani. Seems like he’s pretty practical. I don’t want socialism or communism to creep in. I would like us to get back to some standard where we have democratic-style capitalism with some levels of liberalism and individuality, protection of people for their religious freedoms or their ethnic origins, or whatever it might be. But let’s pay people a little bit more so that they don’t have an affordability crisis.

Zachary Karabell: And to some degree, you’ve mentioned this before, of some consciousness amongst people who have a lot that they have a responsibility to people who have less.

Anthony Scaramucci: I certainly believe that. I’m working on a few things. You and I should get together, because I’m working on a few things you would like which I think addresses some of this stuff.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. All right, Anthony, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you today.

Anthony Scaramucci: Great to be on with you.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for listening, for watching. As always, it is an honor to spend some time with you. I know you all have a choice in how you spend it, and the fact that you’re spending it with me and with these conversations is not something I will ever take for granted.

I would welcome the feedback. Go to theprogressnetwork.org. Go to info@rivertwice.com. You can send carrier pigeons, smoke signals, anything to register your questions, contrary or positive.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing, and the people at The Progress Network for supporting, and all of you for being part of these discussions. And we’ll be back with you next week.

Anthropic filed initial paperwork last week to become a publicly traded company. Its valuation is approaching $1 trillion, placing it among the most valuable enterprises in the history of commerce.

That number is worth sitting with for a moment. Anthropic was founded five years ago. It did not exist in 2020. It barely existed in 2021, when a group of executives walked away from OpenAI after concluding that Sam Altman’s commitment to AI safety was insufficient. Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, made its public debut in the spring of 2023. In the span of a single presidential term, a handful of engineers with a shared grievance and a shared principle built something approaching a trillion-dollar company.

That is not merely a technology story. It is a history story.

Three recent events have established just how much Anthropic now matters.

The first was its collision with the Pentagon. After months of negotiations with the Trump administration, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei refused to grant the Defense Department unlimited rights to deploy Claude for autonomous warfare and mass domestic surveillance. This was no minor objection. Amodei’s position was that the company had been founded on an explicit commitment to ethical guardrails — guardrails that were not negotiable, whatever the price. The administration responded by labeling Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a designation rarely invoked against American companies. Pentagon contractors were banned from using Claude.

Most observers assumed this would wound Anthropic. It may wound the Pentagon more. Claude is embedded not just in the workflows of major defense contractors but, reportedly, in the targeting systems deployed in the war against Iran and the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Palantir CEO Alex Karp confirmed in March that his company — one of the largest Pentagon contractors ever — would continue to use Claude regardless. The government that set out to punish Anthropic may have discovered it cannot afford to.

The second event occurred in Rome. In late May, Pope Leo XIV and the Vatican released “Magnifica Humanitas” — the first encyclical of the new papacy and a formal effort by the Catholic Church to set the moral terms by which humanity ought to engage with AI. That day, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah spoke from the same dais as the pope. A founder of a 5-year-old company sharing the stage with the head of a 2,000-year-old institution representing more than one billion people — that is either an extraordinary moment in the history of technology or an extraordinary moment in the history of the Church. Actually, it may well be both.

The third event was a warning from Anthropic itself. The company announced a new model — Claude Mythos — then declined to release it to the public. The reason: Mythos had already identified high-severity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser in existence, so Anthropic judged it too dangerous to put into the world. Some observers suggested that announcement was overhyped, but even skeptics couldn’t quarrel with the record of Anthropic’s previous products. For one, Claude Code, released last year, has begun to upend the software industry, raising the genuine possibility that knowledge of how-to code could become irrelevant.

It is tempting to overstate this moment. It is equally tempting to understate it. The disruption that AI is driving today is at least the equivalent of what the personal computer brought in the 1980s and the internet in the 1990s — technologies that fundamentally changed what work was, who could do it, and how fast it moved. What AI will not change, and what Anthropic to its credit appears to understand, is human nature, specifically, its astonishing capacity for creation and equally astonishing appetite for destruction. Anthropic could certainly misuse the power it has accumulated. The company’s leadership seems well aware of the opportunity; last week, it called on AI labs to consider a pause in development “to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications.” The pause will not come, but that Anthropic asked for it says something.

A company that did not exist five years ago is now asking humanity to slow down. That is either extraordinary hubris or extraordinary wisdom. Given what is at stake, we would do well to hope it is the latter.

You can read a related piece, just published in The Washington Post, here.

On this week’s What Could Go Right?, Sarah Kreps — current Cornell professor, former U.S. Air Force officer, and author of the forthcoming Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future Without Breaking Society — helped me to provide some relief in this fraught technological moment.

Sarah, whose expertise spans drones, AI, and national security, offered up a personal realization that surprised her and should calm the rest of us: Most of the dire predictions that once worried her never materialized. That is a singularly effective counter-argument in a world so heavily invested in believing those forecasts of catastrophe.

Again and again, history presents a much more complicated story, and it is one best understood when viewed with a measure of intellectual humility.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is my podcast. And it’s called What Could Go Right? because we’re trying to look at, well, what could go right, given that we live in a world where everybody is chronically looking at what could go wrong.

And we are going to talk today with someone whose topic area is absolutely suited to both of those questions, and who has addressed one of the pressing issues of our day, namely: Will all this new technology kill us? Should we be as scared as many of us are?

Now, that doesn’t seem like a “what could go right” question. That seems like the opposite. But it is a question posed in light of, are we overdoing our sense of doom, and is that clouding our ability to see a sense of possibility?

And this emerging world, not just of AI, but of drones, which current conflicts over the past couple of years have really shown autonomous technology du jour. I mean, we talk about Waymo and we talk about cars, but drones really have solidified a clear sense of what this future world is going to look like, particularly in areas of war. Although, as we’ll talk about, not just that.

So today I’m going to speak with Sarah Kreps, who is a professor at Cornell University, was once upon a time a U.S. Air Force officer, who was around early in her career when the Predator drone was first deployed.

She’s written a number of books, including one that is forthcoming called Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future Without Breaking Society, which is a great subtitle. Great title, actually. We’ll talk a bit about that, even though you’ll have to wait for the book for a bit — unless you’re listening to this a bit later, which is also possible.

So on that note: Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Kreps: Hi, Zachary. It’s great to be here.

Zachary Karabell: You’re kind of in both the academic and professional business of trying to assess not just where we are with a new technology, but where we’re going.

And one of the things you’re grappling with — or the world is grappling with — is rapidly changing, expanding drone technology, and you fuse it with rapidly changing and expanding artificial intelligence technology. Not necessarily the LLM aspect of artificial intelligence, but really the different AI agents. And you’ve written a lot about this and thought about all this.

And we’re having this conversation also on the heels of this very bizarre, I don’t know if you’d call it a battle, but something went on, obviously, between Anthropic, which develops the Claude AI models, and the Pentagon, and Anthropic’s concern that its models would be used in ways that it, in a corporate sense, found unethical by the Pentagon in terms of what’s targeted.

One of the, I don’t know if irony is the right word, but the fact is, even though that happened before the Iran conflict, Claude’s models are embedded in Pentagon systems anyway. So it actually was used that way, whether or not either Anthropic or the Pentagon wanted to.

Given that the models were used that way anyway, is it too late? I mean, are there any guardrails? Do we need guardrails? What would guardrails even look like?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I found that debate between the Pentagon and Anthropic — which is obviously still going on — to be a bit surprising in a way because Anthropic became involved with the Pentagon and with this company, Palantir, which is a largely military contractor organization, in 2024.

So for the last year and a half, they’ve been developing Claude to be integrated into a military system. And so it was a little bit surprising that then they said that they weren’t comfortable with whether this would be used in lawful ways. So I just wondered what they thought was going on when they got involved in this project.

And I also couldn’t help but think about something that had happened in 2018, when Google had been in a somewhat similar situation. They were developing what was called Project Maven, which is now the Maven support system that Anthropic supports, and Google had essentially gotten out of that contract because 3,000 Google employees had said basically what Anthropic said this time: We don’t want to be in this business of things that we don’t think are lawful or that we’re not comfortable with.

Zachary Karabell: And weirdly enough, this makes me less negative. Human beings develop tools. If you’re the person inventing one of those tools, the idea that you can actually predetermine what uses those tools will be used for once they’re released into the world, I just feel is silly.

Sarah Kreps: I think I agree with you. I don’t think that’s how Anthropic sees it. I think that is exactly the point, which is they want that control, and I think that’s why Google got out of that business in 2018.

So Google was able to get out of that business because there was no one else to step in. And one of the things that’s, I think, different now is there are so many AI companies that this makes it tricky for Anthropic because they might say, hey, we think that we can do this better, more ethically, more legally. But that sort of principled view of it only goes so far, because as they stepped away, OpenAI says, hey, we’re happy to do this. And if OpenAI doesn’t do it, there are five or 10 or 20 or 100 others that are willing to step in and do it.

So I think that the whole landscape has changed so much in the last, whatever that is, six to eight years.

Zachary Karabell: But isn’t it a little bit like if you and I had invented a light bulb and I said, I don’t want to sell my light bulb to anyone who’s going to turn it on between the hours of 12 and 2 because I believe firmly that human circadian rhythms mean that you should be asleep in the dark then?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I think that’s like what it’s saying. But I think this is why, in a way — and I think we’ll get to this — I wrote this book, because it did remind me so much of what happened with the nuclear project 80 years ago, which is why I think it’s very interesting and ironic that Dario used to give new employees Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb book because he also saw these parallels.

And I think that they think that they can do what the Manhattan Project scientists did. And there are debates about how much they were able to maintain agency over what happened once this product — your light bulb was, in this case, the nuclear weapon — was released because there were a lot of scientists who said, we don’t want to use the atomic bomb on Japan. That’s not what we got into this for. But the U.S. government said, it’s not your product anymore. This is now in our hands.

And then at some point there was a debate about whether to develop the hydrogen bomb. And so what I think is very interesting is you see these similar debates. You see these scientists who have these ideas, and they get involved in this kind of path dependence, technological innovation, and then they kind of get to this point where this is captured, in a way, by a government agency who is much more powerful than they are because — and I think this is what we’re seeing with the Pentagon — the national security imperative is a pretty powerful trump card.

And so what can Anthropic say? And this is how the courts have viewed it, which is, well, national security, and that then basically ends the conversation. And so I think, in a way, the answer, if these companies or individuals are uncomfortable with it, is just not to get involved with it in the first place.

I think where Anthropic thought they were different is that if this was going to be developed, they wanted to do it better. They wanted to do it more ethically. And that’s where they ran into this problem at the end, which is they developed what they hoped would be a better and more ethical product, but then there were these questions about this end use and whether Anthropic could say, you can’t use this light bulb between 1 and 4, and the Pentagon says, you gave us this light bulb. What do you mean we can’t use it between 1 and 4?

Zachary Karabell: My take has always been, if any scientist who was working on the Manhattan Project was under any illusions that this weapon wouldn’t be militarized, they were engaged in a massive act of delusion and denial in the service of really wanting to pursue this line of scientific inquiry. You know, they wanted to see what could be done to harness the power of the atom. But if they thought for one minute that that would not then be utilized by the military … . And there were people who told themselves that story unequivocally, who were involved in the Manhattan Project.

And as you referenced, there was a subsequent debate with Edward Teller. Oppenheimer was on the other side of that, losing, about the development of the hydrogen bomb. And of course the argument then was, if we don’t, someone will, therefore we should, which is exactly the same debate now about AI, right?

Sarah Kreps: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zachary Karabell: If we don’t, the Chinese will, and the Chinese are like, if we don’t, the Americans will. And if Anthropic says, well, if we don’t, then OpenAI will.

The only point in human history, I think, where there was a collective act of recognizing we’re not going to develop certain things was certain conventions around biological weapons that have somewhat held.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I know there are a lot of debates about that in different disciplines. So is it a question of whether that was an ethical decision, or the kind of rationalist, economics argument would say the militaries just did not find any utility to biological or chemical weapons.

And, you know, we saw this in 1915 when these militaries were in trench warfare and these chemical weapons are blowing back into their own soldiers’ faces. That’s not a very useful weapon. And so maybe that doesn’t undermine the argument, which is that these militaries — whether they were moved by ethics, or whether the ethics were reinforced by the absolute inutility of these weapons — maybe that doesn’t matter. But I think you’re right. These are exceptions.

Zachary Karabell: No, I mean, that is a good point. It’s one thing to say we all saw the ethical wisdom of not using chemical and biological weapons, which you kind of want to be the truth. As opposed to, if we had figured out how to use them without blowback — literally, in the case that you just talked about — we would have. But we couldn’t, so we didn’t.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. How much does the mechanism matter? I guess the mechanism matters because it points to whether this can replicate in other cases. And I think the reason why nuclear weapons were different is that they were such a deterrent that you couldn’t get other countries to agree not to develop nuclear weapons because there was a real consensus that even if you don’t use nuclear weapons, there’s a deterrent value to having them in an arsenal. And I don’t think that that’s true with chemical and biological weapons.

Zachary Karabell: So what about drones, and what about drone swarms? The assumption now, I think, is we’ve unleashed this new autonomous technology, which is going to be infused by AI, that we’re loosely calling drones, that can be developed by non-state actors, state actors, less expensively deployed for huge amounts of disruption for little amounts of effort.

And whether that means a country like Ukraine being able not just to credibly resist an invasion by Russia but potentially turn the tide, I mean, who knows? We’ll see. But there are some indications now that that is going to have another chapter that’s mostly drone-driven.

But if that becomes ubiquitous, you could imagine a scenario where human beings start realizing there’s no defense. The only actual defense is some sort of collective agreement not to use them. Do you see that as a possibility?

Sarah Kreps: I think that’s more likely when you have a scenario that is so overwhelmingly destructive the way nuclear weapons were. And I think the problem with drones, and I would say AI as well, is that, A, it’s really hard to ensure compliance. Back to your circularity of, well, if they’re going to develop it, we’re going to develop it. And if we can’t know that they’re not going to develop it, well then we have to.

I mean, a little bit like the Elon Musk thing where he said, let’s do a moratorium on AI development, and everyone sort of scoffed at this, and then he said, well, I guess if no one else is going to observe a moratorium, we’re going to accelerate our development. And this is, I think, again, why AI governance is close to impossible. You know, it’s in no one’s economic self-interest to issue and observe any kind of moratorium on AI.

And I think that’s true for drones too, and that the costs are not consequential enough that they can deter use the way we saw with nuclear weapons. And so I think those differences are really important.

Zachary Karabell: Or maybe just not yet. Meaning, if you knew for a fact that every individual, every state, every group had sufficient access to lethal enough drone technology to make your life miserable, and that there was no sure defense against it, you might be incentivized not to do it in the first place.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, maybe. But I think that what we saw — and I wrote about this in the 2010s, about these international organizations that were prohibiting the transfer of the kind of U.S.-style armed drones, and actually that worked fairly well. But what happens, I think, in these kinds of agreements is the unintended consequence is it basically pushes development below the threshold that was prohibited. And so everyone’s like, well, if there’s this MTCR — the Missile Technology Control Regime — that’s saying we can’t produce this large type of drone, we’ll just kind of produce and manufacture and make ubiquitous this smaller drone that is also very capacious. And so that’s exactly what happened to the industry.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I guess I’m projecting some sort of near science-fiction future, which is probably going to be the reality in 10 years, where there are just so many drones between delivery drones and agricultural drones. I just finished this book about corn as a technology we eat, and drones becoming fertilizer drones, and planting drones, and seeding drones. And you have delivery drones throughout China. You have delivery drones throughout the world. You have transportation drones. Like, if everybody’s got a drone, and all those can be weaponized, and you can’t defend against them...

I mean, maybe it’s a similar argument to Second Amendment purists in the United States, right? The idea of, well, if everybody has a gun, nobody will commit crimes because you know that the person you’re potentially going after has a gun. There’s no real evidence that it works that way, but the argument’s out there.

I mean, I hear you. You’re saying basically no, that it won’t work that way. But we’re still kind of at the early stages of just massive, ubiquitous drone use.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, I don’t know. On the other hand, and this is where, in my book, I just arrived — because for the longest time, whatever I was looking at, drones, nuclear weapons, AI, I was such a doomer. And then I looked at all of the doomsday prognostications, including my own, and realized actually none of them had come to pass. And I started thinking, well, what happened? Why not?

And I think, coming back to your question of, we’re going to live in this world of ubiquitous drones — you know, when I was working on this, I guess more than 10 years ago, everything was about, we’re going to have delivery drones, and how is the FAA going to regulate airspace? And we’re going to have these collisions and this and that. And we’re not, I don’t think, anywhere close to that, much as what we’ve read about with flying cars for years and autonomous vehicles, Waymos and things like that. Now they are taking off, but nothing ends up being as fast as we think. And again, this is kind of what I get at in the book, is that there are two things that happen. One is I think that these doomsday prognostications basically mobilize a lot of resistance, so it stalls that acceleration. But another reason is often that it turns out there are much more efficient ways to do things.

For example, I wrote a lot in 2013 and 2014 about how we were going to see drones just going around and assassinating people. And I quoted the late Dianne Feinstein, and in a hearing she said, these would be the perfect assassination weapon. She meant in a civilian setting. I can’t think of a scenario where drones have been used in that way, and I think it’s because, just crudely, there are much more efficient ways to kill people than using a drone and strapping on some explosive and trying to kill one or two people.

So I think both of those things are at work, and I think it comes back to this thing of, a lot could have gone wrong, but there are a lot of reasons why that’s not what happens.

Zachary Karabell: That’s funny. I was going to ask you the, how does one sleep at night question, when you’re focusing on all the worst-case scenarios. And obviously there’s a whole series of people — people who are focused on counterterrorism, biological weapons, nuclear proliferation — who spend their time both gaming out worst-case scenarios and trying to plan contingencies for them, and also monitoring traffic in real time. I’ve always wondered: Did you have trouble sleeping when you were most in that? I mean that both metaphorically and literally. Like, how does one go about one’s life as if there is a tomorrow worth living for when you spend all of your time focusing on all the possibilities that tomorrow is either not going to happen or going to happen very badly?

Sarah Kreps: That’s a great question. I was in the military and then in the intelligence side of the military around 9/11 and the Iraq War, and so I thought about and wrote about this a lot — that you need to think about all of the scenarios that could lead to an attack.

Because I don’t know, probably a lot of listeners were not around or don’t remember that, but after 9/11 there was — and for years — this question of what would be the next way that there could be a terrorist attack, and that you really had to get imaginative about what those scenarios are to be able to guard against them. And so that was my intellectual world for many years.

You know, I think the reason you can sleep is it almost becomes — and this isn’t good or bad, I don’t think, it’s probably bad — that you become almost clinical about it. This is a problem you’re trying to solve. And it becomes an intellectual pursuit about solving that problem.

But I wonder if it was so many years of, again, waiting for the worst to happen and it not happening that led me to a much more optimistic conclusion, which is, you can think about the infinite ways things can go wrong, but those don’t seem to happen, and there must be a reason why.

And maybe it’s that imagination and the thinking and the planning and almost, in some ways, the scare tactics that cause us to put our guards up, and that that’s sort of a salutary process of ensuring that we don’t end up in those existential crises.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, I’ve wondered this post-9/11. Why weren’t there more low-level attacks? Why weren’t there a bunch of people with machine guns in malls?

If you wanted to think of something that would have been hugely disruptive and presumably relatively uncomplicated — like it didn’t require logistics — and if the people doing it were not eager to live, then even fewer obstacles to doing it. And yet none of that happened, right?

And it just led to this question that I feel has never really been answered, which is, we do, as you just said, spend an immense amount of time focusing on all the what-ifs in a negative scenario, and we plan accordingly. And maybe that planning, as you said, is an ingredient in them not happening. But of course we don’t really have a good cognitive explanation of why things don’t happen, right? We don’t really understand why if something bad happened once, it doesn’t happen again. Because we don’t, I think, really understand — it’s much harder to chart the human instinct not to do bad stuff than it is to examine the human potential to do bad stuff.

I mean, did you ever sit around and have these conversations of why aren’t people doing all these things that we think they could do, that we’re planning they might do, and yet they haven’t done?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I had that conversation with my dissertation advisor, where I was just so worried about some sociopathic person using a drone to kill a bunch of people. And he said, they have much better ways to do it. They don’t need a drone to do that.

But I do think another ingredient, which we don’t tend to — as a society or media or intellectuals — articulate much, is that maybe there just aren’t a lot of nefariously minded people out there trying to do bad things. You know, the better angels of our nature. I found that kind of compelling, and I know it’s controversial, but this argument that we’ve gotten more “civilized” over centuries. And I’ve been reading a lot about European history, and it really is so striking that for centuries Europeans just killed each other, in the millions.

Zachary Karabell: Regularly.

Sarah Kreps: All the time. And it’s kind of remarkable that that just doesn’t happen anymore.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Sarah Kreps: And that’s great.

Zachary Karabell: You’re totally right. This sort of waking up and going, wait a minute. We’ve done a lot of really bad shit as a species to each other at regular bases for a long time. And it has not led to these doom points nearly commensurate with the fear of them.

And here we are again, where AI is kind of the catch-all in the moment, and then when you attach it to certain physical technologies like drones, you have this supercharged sense of, okay, now we’ve finally gone and done it. We almost went and done it with nuclear weapons, but now we’ve finally gone and done it. And you can’t prove a future negative, right?

Sarah Kreps: Yes. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: There is no argument that settles the argument about the future.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, exactly. I think this is the thing. I was talking to a colleague who wrote a book about financial crises, Dan Drezner. It was called The System Worked. And basically these mechanisms that were put in place actually did a pretty good job to prevent another financial crisis, but no one likes that argument because if you’re an optimist, people can just say, well, the worst hasn’t happened yet, so you don’t know that you’re right. And so I think that there is a risk.

The one thing that I wonder — and I was in D.C. last week, and someone was talking about the guy who coined the expression “cyber 9/11,” kind of this catastrophizing language about how we were going to have a cyber 9/11. Well, years passed, and of course it didn’t happen, and he said his regret was that he felt like he sensationalized it unnecessarily. And I think it does raise this question. Was it the sensationalizing that actually is the reason why it didn’t happen, or were the ingredients just not there because what does that even mean? And I think it’s really hard to tease out which of these things is really operative.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, I love Dan, and I did a piece for The Washington Post a couple of months ago about why the financial system was surprisingly stable even with this massive oil shock and fertilizer and supply shock in the Gulf. Now, I wasn’t saying stable meaning stuff doesn’t go down. I was saying stable as in, this was not a 2008 moment where there was a legit fear for a period of time that the entire system was going to fracture. It’s like a power grid. It’s one thing to say it’s being strained. It’s different if it actually goes down completely. And the problem, as you just talked about, is it gets the immediate blowback of, yeah, yeah, right.

And nobody wants to be that person saying — like the famous economist Irving Fisher in, I think, October of 1929 — that the stock market has reached a permanent plateau of prosperity or something like that. You don’t want to be that person who proclaims, you know what? We’re good, like two weeks before we’re clearly not. And that should not be a reason not to do it, but there’s always a human professional reputational instinct of, well, I really don’t want to be that guy who people look back on and say…

And weirdly enough, there’s some incentive to be the guy, like The Big Short people. You’d rather be the guy — and I’m just using it because it’s often guys — you’d rather be the guy in their mother’s basement in their underwear forecasting the end of days who turns out to be right than be the person like Dan, or in this case you or I, who’s saying, you know, probably not, and be wrong.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. There’s this famous book in international relations by a guy — I mean, this was the early 1900s — Norman Angell. And he said that the economic interdependence between countries was getting so tight that neither would have any incentive to go to war because economically that would just be disastrous. And then a couple years later, World War I happens, and these two countries that were so inextricably linked economically are now killing each other in trench warfare. So yeah, you don’t want to be that guy either because a century later we’re still talking about how dumb that prediction was.

Zachary Karabell: So who’s more pessimistic, you or your students these days? Because you teach at Cornell. You have a lot of undergraduate students and graduate students.

Sarah Kreps: Oh, that’s a great question. More pessimistic or more optimistic?

Zachary Karabell: Well, I mean, it’s basically the same question, right?

Sarah Kreps: Well, I don’t know. The question is so good because now I’m wondering whether they are just mirrors of what they think is the right answer. But since I tend to be somewhat optimistic, that’s sort of what I seem to get back from them. But no, I guess there are people...

I had a student a few weeks ago who was saying that the student did not want to use AI for anything because she was worried that the AI was going to steal her idea, and then her Ph.D. dissertation would now have been scooped.

Zachary Karabell: Huh.

Sarah Kreps: Which was a very pessimistic take. So yeah, I guess I think it’s sort of like a distribution, and so there are people at the tails that think of things that probably don’t worry me at all.

Zachary Karabell: So when you think about those questions — we’ve talked about it a little with Anthropic, and you just referenced it, about the fears of, I guess, the sentient AI. Although people who are really talking the most Armageddon view of AI talk about a sentient AI whose sentience is not understandable to humans. It’s not human intelligence writ large. It’s a whole other thing.

I think people who are really in the most doomer camps talk about it as, we could no more understand the real artificial general intelligence of the AI that’s forming than ants could understand us. So it’s not just like they’re a really smart human. It’s like they’re a whole other thing. Which I at least find an interesting thought experiment, right? Like, what would that be? What would that look like? Would it be indifferent? Would it have its own dictates that are totally distinct from any programming dictates that humans have created?

How do you think about these things in terms of governance? Is governance overrated? Is it just this kind of — as we talked about a bit between Anthropic and the Defense Department — is it just this sort of post hoc human attempt to go, ooh, wait a minute. Didn’t quite mean to do that?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, yeah. So I think these debates are so interesting, again, because they are somewhat recurrent, but also it seems to me that the proponents of certain positions are not always doing themselves a service. And I’ll give you an example of Dario, who in 2023 was talking about the end of days that would happen two years later, in 2025. And then in 2025, when he was testifying or speaking, he said, oh, no, no, no, it’s 2027. And what I think that does for the debate is take what I — and I think you started here with the unknown and uncertainty — it suggests that there is so much uncertainty with new technologies that you can’t even...

And people talk about the — it sounds arcane — but the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is something where there is a probability distribution that you can map, and I think the challenge with new technologies is there’s so much uncertainty you can’t even map this with a distribution. But I think there’s a fallacy in these individuals, the CEOs speaking as if there is a way to map this, and that they can speak with certainty about, well, two years from now. When you’re moving the goalposts, it’s not a helpful way to frame the conversation, and it’s not a helpful way to mobilize attention. And I think in some ways that has been a problem with the climate change debate, is that if you catastrophize an outcome and talk about all the things that can go wrong — and it comes back to this kind of type one, type two error. Would you rather be predicting the worst and it doesn’t happen, or predicting that it’s going to work and then something doesn’t work out?

But I think the challenge is, in terms of governance, you need to build coalitions of reasonable and serious people, and if your catastrophized predictions do not come to pass in the timeframe that you have stipulated, then you’re just not going to be able to get the coalition together to do something meaningful in terms of guardrails.

So I think that that has happened in the climate change space to some degree, and I think there’s a risk of that happening in the AI space, is that if you’re predicting doom and gloom and now this timeframe, this time horizon, comes and goes and we’re not anywhere close to that, then I think people start to kind of move on and think that that threat is not very serious.

And so I think that’s, for me, the important thing is, a sober take in trying to ask the right questions, not just talk about these paperclip scenarios of the AI being programmed and somehow now taking over the world because it’s trying to optimize paperclips.

So I think those are the risks and why you don’t get meaningful governance — not just because it’s really difficult to do in terms of verification and compliance compared to nuclear weapons, but also because the debate hasn’t developed credibly around what is the credible and verifiable risk.

Zachary Karabell: I think you’re totally right on about that. And this thing of false certainty being rewarded more than honest uncertainty, which is threaded throughout society. It’s threaded throughout academic advancement. A scientific paper is likely to get attention because it makes a conclusive statement about an uncertain set of data rather than a nuanced statement about an uncertain set of data. A warning about future problems is likely to get more attention if expressed in stark binary terms than if expressed as a series of probabilities.

All these things mitigate against the humility of uncertainty and privilege the arrogance of certainty about future outcomes that are by definition unknown. We should all be humble about the future in the sense of, unless you can show me a crystal ball, a quantum computer, or some mechanism of future prediction that is near certain, then we should all be humble about what we think is going to happen and be aware of the fact that none of us know and we’re all trying to make our best guess.

And you’ve articulated that beautifully in the sense that there are also risks to that certainty when it’s presented because it crowds out other potentials and it has behavioral effects, right? If we’re so certain about impending climate doom, either you do nothing about it because you can’t do anything about it if it’s certain, or when those things don’t come to pass, people who would otherwise be willing to do something that probably would be ameliorative and mitigative are like, well, you were not right about your future negative scenario here.

So what kind of things do you think are realistic? And I guess the other question is, you have the agency of being informed about something and to articulate a vision of, here’s what good AI governance would look like, here’s how we should understand the role of technology, here’s what we should be worried about with drones, and here’s what we shouldn’t.

You know, you’re one person with agency and ideas, which is incredibly valuable. Some of the challenge is when you start empowering groups — whether it’s governments or industry coalitions or others — to determine the guardrails, those get determined, but they don’t necessarily work.

So how do you square the, you’ve got good ideas, but you’re also highly aware of how limited or how problematic it is when even good ideas get implemented as law or policy or you name it?

Sarah Kreps: So I think one of the venues I so distinctly remember in the AI governance space that I was part of that made me realize not the futility, but just the challenge of addressing this question, was this big tech company that was doing some responsible AI stuff. They had 30 experts in the room, and we went around and each said what we thought was the most important issue. And there were 30 different issues, from deepfakes, to bias and discrimination, to labor market displacement. And what it made me conclude is that AI is such a broad and generalized technology that part of the challenge was that these are all 30-plus different problems, and that we were so at the beginning, the fledgling stages of even understanding this technology, that we almost needed to fracture and take it as subcommittees. Okay, this is the group that needs to focus on deepfakes. And now you’re going to focus on bias and discrimination. And these are all very different things.

So I think — and again, taking the long view from having looked at a longer history of technological innovation — that we are still so … even though AI has been around since the ’50s technically, in terms of the consumer and ubiquity aspect of AI, it’s basically like three years old. And so I think there was a sense that we needed to fix this right away without even understanding what we mean by AI and what the problems were, and that it was so heterogeneous depending on the issue.

And I think, I write about this in my book, about the European Union AI Act, that I think now largely looks like it was too early, and there seemed to be a virtue to taking a very preemptive, precautionary approach. But meanwhile these worst fears have not come to pass, but the European Union has fallen so far behind on AI, and AI has become a huge economic engine. By some statistic I read about last year, it was accounting for 90 percent of the United States GDP growth.

So that’s, I think, the dilemma. Not that there’s one right or wrong approach to this, but that it’s trade-offs, and that different people and different countries are going to weight these things differently.

Zachary Karabell: So final thoughts. If we’re having this conversation in — I was going to say 10 years, but it feels like five years is already the outer envelope of reasonable speculation given where these things go. But, are we having a radically different conversation? Are we having the same conversation with some different details?

The assumption is all this is going to move incredibly fast, and you and I both have lived through the birth of the smartphone, the efflorescence of internet web technologies in the ’90s, and all that is definitely rapid and quick.

Although, you know, I grew up in New York City. I lived for most of my life in a relatively Leave It to Beaver, Mayberry neighborhood. I don’t mean the neighborhood was like that, I mean the square footage was like that. I lived in a very small section of Manhattan for most of my life.

You know, most of the buildings, some of them are different. Human beings walking down the streets have different clothes. The cars look a little different. But the essential reality of human nature has not completely shifted. So I wonder if we’re still overdoing — yes, these technologies shape things and change things, but I don’t know that we’re going to be as radically other as we seem to think. I don’t know. Where do you go with all these thoughts?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. No, I don’t disagree at all. I think that a lot of these technologies have kind of an S curve, hockey stick, whatever, where there is a steep part.

I don’t want to be falsely certain or, like I want to be humble with my predictions here, to heed your admonition. But I look at what’s happened since the end of, what was that, 2022 or 2023 when ChatGPT first came out.

Zachary Karabell: ’23, I think, yeah.

Sarah Kreps: And I think there have been huge bursts of uptake and improvement. I just have a hard time believing that we are still in the very steep part of this S curve. So my prediction would be that five years from now, even 10 years from now, our conversation would be recognizable in ways that would not have been true, let’s say, 10 years back. I really do think there was a before and after this commercial AI. I even feel like agents are not the game changer that the uptake of AI and Claude and these different tools were in that 2022, ’23, ’24 timeframe. So I mean, I guess we’ll see. We’ll have to meet back up and see what we’re talking about.

Zachary Karabell: And see what it is. You know, it’s funny, thinking about that made me wonder too. It was November of ’22, so almost ’23, that Chat came out with its first model.

All these things have clearly changed a lot of our lives between the ubiquity of the web, the smartphone as a compendium of human knowledge and a ubiquity of human connection at our fingertips with immediacy for almost everybody in the world, everywhere in the world. That has clearly shifted an aspect of human existence — our awareness of each other, our ability to be aware of each other across great distances in the moment instantaneously. You know, COVID as the first human global crisis experienced simultaneously with an awareness of how everyone else was dealing with it simultaneously. It’s obviously too soon to figure out what it all means, actually. We’re living in the midst of it.

My first trip to India, I was complaining to somebody that I had done no writing, and I was in my journaling phase, and this very odd but sort of famous wise guy who I had ended up sitting next to on the plane said, “You can’t write about India while you’re there. It’s like writing about a dream while you’re having it.” I just remember that very poetically.

And so trying to make sense of all this in our present is probably a fool’s errand. We won’t know till we know.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, but I think that’s where actually going back and looking at historical patterns can be really helpful. And there are a lot that I don’t cover in my book, but I think about something like the iPhone compared to a non-smartphone. That’s the sort of before and after.

And yeah, it improves dramatically, but now everyone laments, like, is the 17 that different from the 16? Was it that different from the 15? And even with nuclear weapons, I don’t want to dismiss the qualitative, quantitative difference between a hydrogen bomb and an atomic bomb, but I would still submit that the biggest change, the step-function change, was between having a nuclear weapon and the world before that. So I think a lot of technologies have that flavor to them.

And I think that’s true with drones as well, that the conversation — and again, I’ve been working on this for many years — even though these new Iranian low-cost loitering drones are sort of different, they’re very recognizable to what the U.S. was using in the early 2000s. And the biggest difference was weaponizing the Predator, not these iterations that came after.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for a really cool, wide-ranging, unusual conversation. I very much appreciate your own journey of getting to a point of investigating your own assumptions of doom, which does not mean that you’ve stopped looking at all the challenges and problems. It just means that the perspective shifts, which is what I’m trying to do with these conversations. So I certainly appreciate that.

Sarah Kreps: Well, you’re doing it really well, and I appreciate being part of that conversation.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to thank you all for listening. As always, I know you all have a choice of what to do with your time, and choosing to do this is an honor and a privilege, and I hope you will keep coming back. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your pets. They too can enjoy it when you are not.

Always interested in feedback. Go to theprogressnetwork.org, and there is a tab there.

You can email me directly through The Edgy Optimist site on Substack. Please sign up for that newsletter as well.

Thank you to the team at Kaleidoscope for producing this and to my team at The Progress Network for also making this possible.

And we’ll talk to you next week.

This week, I sat down with writer Bruce Feiler to explore a question that feels increasingly urgent:

When we fixate on society coming apart, do we miss the ways we continue to come together?

Humans find meaning and community in ritual. But as our faith in the institutions that have long sanctioned them has faded, the power of those rituals have faded, too.

All is not lost, however. As Bruce argues in his latest book, A Time to Gather, new versions of these social connectors are stealthily taking their place: divorce ceremonies, donor “honor walks,” “that sand thingy.”

So, although the loneliness and isolation of this digital, fragmented age is very real, Bruce remains heartened by our enduring human instinct to create community despite, if not because of, disruptive times.

Of course, I do too.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network. In a world full of noise and a world full of armageddon porn, how do we take a different view on the human condition at a time when, admittedly, people are feeling, it would appear, pretty grim, and are losing faith in institutions, are losing faith in communities, and may even be losing faith in themselves?

And yet, is that really the whole story? Are we in the midst of a recreation, even in the midst of a dissolution? I’m going to talk today to somebody who has been traipsing around the world and observing the human condition from a whole series of angles, and this question of not just what are we losing, but what are we finding? What are we gaining? So I’m going to be speaking with Bruce Feiler, who has a new book out, and I’m going to hold up the book. I wanted to do this in real life. Hold up an actual book. Look, it’s an actual book. It’s called A Time To Gather: How Ritual Created the World — and How It Can Save Us. A modest, modest statement, a modest promise.

So Bruce has written a lot of books. He and I have known each other for an inordinately long amount of time, and we’re going to have a conversation about ritual, but we’re also going to have a conversation about the pressing question of this season of the podcast, which is, what are we missing by only looking at the downside? What are we not seeing by assuming the worst? So Bruce, hi.

Bruce Feiler: Hi. Nice to see you. I love that introduction. It captures everything that I know and love about you and have for a long time, and I actually think it’s crazy relevant to the topic we’re about to talk about.

Zachary Karabell: Well, that’s a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us all today. We’ve had a great time. Please go buy the book. It’s called A Time To Gather.

So, gratuitous softball question: Why this book? Why now?

Bruce Feiler: Well, let me answer that question by using the frame that you just used. Are we in a period of collapse, or a period of renewal? So the short answer to your question is 21 years ago next week, as we tape this conversation, my wife Linda and I went from being empty nesters to full nesters in 32 minutes.

We have, as you know, identical twin daughters, and 18 years after that, we became empty nesters, and we went from full nest to empty nest in 32 minutes. We dropped our girls off at college, and we came back to Brooklyn, where we lived, and I walked into my home and I had this feeling that I’d never had before, which is that I felt homesick in my own home.

And my first response was, my gosh, don’t use that word. That’s what kids are supposed to feel when they go to summer camp. What I was going through is a certain period in my life of loss and re-imagination. My dad had just died. My mom was aging. My kids are off to college.

Suddenly, we need to redefine our marriage, which had our kids at the heart of it. And I had been writing, as you know, for 10 years about life transitions, right? Life is in the transitions. A book I wrote called The Search about work transitions, and I thought, I’m ready for this. What I need is a ritual.

And that’s when I stumbled into the story that in forty years of writing books professionally is the greatest story that I have encountered, and one I’m a little shame-faced that I didn’t know before, and that has to do with how we hold together. So, to now bring it to the frame you used at the beginning of this conversation, we know that ritual works. For 300,000 years, the initial human act was when someone died, we’re going to get together, we’re going to bury them. Religion did not create ritual. It’s the other way around. So humans have been using ritual before we were anatomical humans.

So for 100 centuries, that’s 10,000 years, in any culture anywhere in the world that we’ve looked, people have used ritual to connect us in times of change. What do I mean by that? When someone comes in the group, like a birth, like a wedding, when someone leaves the group, like a coming of age, a funeral, when someone gets sick or moves, people reconstitute the group with a ritual.

Until this century, when we’ve abandoned them, and that’s the loss part of your frame. No one’s having birth rituals anymore. No one’s having coming of age rituals. As you know, in 1960, 90% of human adults married. Now that number is below 50% for the first time. And also, no one’s having funerals anymore, which was the shocking thing to me. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65%, going to 80%, and only one in five has a funeral or a ceremony of any kind.

So we have abandoned the traditional way that we’ve held together. That’s what I call the celebration recession. That’s the loss, the falling apart, the giving up of traditions that you alluded to at the top of this conversation.

But then at the same time, all of these new ways of gathering and meeting are arising, and some are silly, promposals and gender reveals, but some of them are profound, like not just marriage, but divorce, not just fertility, but infertility, not just becoming an adult, but entering aging. So there is this renaissance of ritual around the world. That’s the story that I stumbled into and I wanted to tell. And you said to travel, so 16 countries, six continents, three years of joining these rituals and trying to figure out: Is there a blueprint of togetherness that can hold us together?

Zachary Karabell: I mean, that’s one of my favorite aspects of what you look at in this, which is, you start with what is not obvious but is intuitively clear, right? All the things that we don’t do, that we have lost in losing communities. I think we’re probably beyond peak nostalgia for small-town America, when Bowling Alone came out 20-plus years ago.

Bruce Feiler: In 1999, 2000.

Zachary Karabell: We’re deep into the — social media has, I guess to use the ritual thing, put the nail in the coffin, a ritual that we no longer have anyway. And yet what you show is yes, but. Like, okay, that’s true. But we’re missing the green shoots while we’re mourning all that we’ve lost, and that’s not serving us either.

Bruce Feiler: Well, I think that’s right, and that’s what’s great about what you’re doing on this podcast and in The Progress Network in general. It’s, what are we missing in the doom and gloom? And my joke about this is we’ve thrown out the baby shower with the bathwater. That’s my pun for it. But I think you’re exactly right.

So what is lost? To be very precise about it, what is lost is top-down, institutionally mandated, patriarchal, hierarchical, pre-scripted life rituals. No one wants those meaning-free gatherings where you have no say in it.

One of my favorite chapters in this book is, I went to Ireland. I went to 10 funerals in a week in Ireland. And the traditional Irish wake, where the ladies from the neighborhood show up and wash the body, and then it’s in repose, and then it exits, that’s not happening anymore. But nor is the traditional Irish Mass. So I went to 10 of these funerals. Half of them took place in churches, and the way that the Catholic Church ran the Mass for a long time is, it was not about the deceased. It was about the life of Jesus, and it was about honoring that, and there was no personalization. And people want the personalization. So the one I went to, the guy was a Liverpool football fan, right? So they had the scarf, they had the soccer ball. The family stood up and talked about his life, which had not been done for the traditional funeral for 2,000 years. The personalization. So that’s what people want: bottom-up, bespoke. Not only does the ritual need to be personalized — and you mentioned social media, by the way. People get these ideas from all over. That’s another thing about social media, is that people go — I was in Vegas. I went to six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, as you know. And the wedding designer I was talking to said she has a rule. If someone comes in and says, I want to do the sand ceremony thingy, she has a rule that if you say “thingy,” that means you saw it on the internet and we’re not doing it. So what’s a sand ceremony thingy? You and I are getting married. You have a vial of sand, I have a vial of sand. There’s a third empty vial.

Zachary Karabell: I thought you’d never ask.

Bruce Feiler: But we go back and forth and we make it. And I was in Chile, actually on my way to the Andes and then on my way to Easter Island, and I was at a big event sitting next to a guy who just got married and he said, yeah, of course we did a sand ceremony.

No one even knows where this came from, but people are seeing it on the internet, and young people especially want their rituals to pop on the internet so that their friends pay attention.

So even social media, with all its destructive forces and algorithmic division, also is serving to democratize these rituals as people suddenly have access to what others are doing far outside of their own tradition.

Zachary Karabell: We’re in peak social media dystopian view, and everybody you talk to, there are two conversations now, maybe there are three. There’s Trump, there’s social media and there’s AI, and they’re all bad. Meaning the conversations are all bad, no matter what you think about any of these things.

And in the social media one, we’re kind of losing the fact that there are all these things that people discover, and discover of community. There was that brief halcyon moment where social media was that thing that was going to bring communities of interest together.

Bruce Feiler: Yes, yes, yes.

Zachary Karabell: It was going to remove isolation.

Bruce Feiler: The teenage jugglers, which I was, in Savannah, Georgia. There were no jugglers in Savannah, Georgia. I could have found a community of jugglers as a kid if that had happened.

Let me just say two things about that. Thing number one is that all of those problems, ritual is the answer. If your problem is loneliness and isolation, ritual is the answer. If your problem is political division, ritual is the answer. If your problem is AI, ritual is the answer. Because it’s basically URL or IRL, and that to me is the tension. And what we’re seeing, what I say in every conversation I get into about AI, is that there is going to be a human response to it.

I was on TV recently and an interviewer said to me, oh, 5,000 people lost their jobs from AI last month, and there’s a Goldman report this week, as we tape this conversation, 30,000 people a month losing their jobs to AI or whatever.

In the 19th century, a third of Americans lost their jobs because of the Industrial Revolution. Twenty-five million people left rural areas and went to urban areas, and another 25 million came from Europe as immigrants.

And if you look at what we think of today as the institutional kinds of rituals, everything about a wedding was invented at the time. Queen Victoria wore the first white wedding dress. The registry came up with commercialization, the shower, the photo, all of that popped up. Whenever there is this kind of dislocation, there is a human response, and I think that what’s happening now is that human response.

So let’s just tell another example of a story that was fed by social media. So my book opens. I interviewed 100 ritual designers. The best single story is at the beginning of A Time To Gather. A woman named Missy Holliday, she’s in a small town in Ohio, father’s the mayor and fire chief, her mother teaches Presbyterian Sunday school, a service-oriented family. She grows up and gets married, moves to Indianapolis, becomes a nurse. She comes back on Super Bowl weekend, and her sister says she’s getting engaged the next week. Gets into a car, drives to work. It snowed the night before. She wraps her car around a tree.

So the family goes and rescues her to take her to the hospital. They come in and the next morning she’s had two brain death tests. She’s an organ donor. We’re taking her, goodbye. Wrenches the family apart. And this woman says, I don’t want this to happen to any other family. She quits her job. She joins the donor support network in Cincinnati, and she realizes there’s this tension between and among the families, the hospital and the donor organizations, and she said what they need is a ritual.

The organs are donated not in the room, but in the OR. It’s a surgery after they’re declared medically dead. So she puts the body in a gurney. They put her phone with a Spotify account, the first family picks “Annie’s Song.” They push the gurney into the hallway. The entire hospital staff, busy saving people who are sick to prevent them from dying, has stopped to honor this dead victim who is donating his organs. They stand there with flameless candles. They push the body down. Everybody pays tribute. They say goodbye at the operating room door. She calls this an honor walk, and she makes a rule. No one can have a picture. But she makes an exception with the widow of the deceased.

The next morning, Missy’s phone blows up. “How do I do an honor walk? How do I do this? How do I do that?” The woman took that picture, posted it on Facebook. It got two million likes.

There are now 50 donor support organizations in the country. They all do honor walks. Dozens of countries around the world. They have a quarter of a billion views on YouTube.

And it’s an example. This was a thing. The institutions never did this, religious institutions, civic institutions. This is an individual that says, here’s a pain point. I want to help solve it. Social media helped spread it. It brings comfort and connectedness in a horrific time for a family.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and that’s such an important point about social media. It’s an amplification tool.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: It can absolutely amplify all that is the worst and the ugliest and the most destructive, but it can amplify all that is the best and the most connective.

One of the things I’ve been noodling around with the past couple of years, somewhat to my surprise, is one of the reasons why I’m less pessimistic about the American and even the global present is because I’m much more negative about the past.

And by negative about the past, I mean I’m much more acutely aware of just how ugly the human legacy has been. Also how magnificent it’s been. But meaning, that gives less credence to the idea of — contra Dickens — we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. And we probably don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but it might be the Sydney Carton, it’s the worst of times and best of times simultaneously.

But I wonder about this. You made a comment just before that there was a ritual framework that was patriarchal.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: It’s also true there was a ritual framework that was matriarchal. Young women becoming a woman, always within a female sphere.

Bruce Feiler: Birth happening at home. It then gets hospitalized. Now we sort of seem to be going back to hospitals being more humane. I like this train of thought, so keep going.

Zachary Karabell: But there was also a rigidity to that ritual. It wasn’t an opt-in, right? And if you tried to opt out, you did so at great personal peril. It was part of the lattice of things that at least a lot of contemporary society decided were doing harm to the human spirit and not enlivening it. So how does one distill out those factors?

Bruce Feiler: This is a great question, I think, and you framed it so very well. Let me work my way to answering that question by first giving some basic definitions of what we’re talking about here.

So what is a ritual? A ritual is a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. It’s shared in the sense that it connects us. It’s unnecessary in the sense that you don’t have to get down on one knee to get engaged. You don’t have to wear black to mourn. But these are unnecessities that become social necessities because we’ve agreed on them. And it’s fundamentally an act. It’s a doing. It’s not a telling.

But the most important part — and in fact, what I’m adding to this definition — is, go back to the homesickness. I felt homesick in my own home. It restores a sense of home when we feel that we have lost it. The reason that’s relevant to what you said is that a lot of the rituals that the institutions did not observe were ones that did not fit the institutional narrative. I call them the shadow rituals. Not just marriage, but divorce.

My wife Linda, whom you know, her favorite chapter in this is the Taylor Swift divorce party. So there’s a woman who grew up, both of her parents got divorced. She’s like, I’m not going to get divorced. She got married, had two kids. You can imagine where this story goes. She gets divorced on Long Island, and what did she do? Her husband moves out, takes half the stuff. She takes the rest of the stuff, puts it in the middle of the living room and on the dining room table. Her sisters come over, they donate everything. She comes home, and she says — this is the moment — You know what I need right now? I need a registry. So she forms the world’s first divorce registry.

“I need the help now.” What does she do? She goes online. Actually, what happens is she goes into AOL chat rooms.

Zachary Karabell: Kids, there was a thing called AOL chat rooms.

Bruce Feiler: So she goes onto AOL chat rooms and starts saying, my husband’s doing this. Is this normal? My husband’s doing that. Is that normal?

And the women say, no, that’s not normal. My husband’s doing that. And then older women got on and started saying, you know what? My husband was doing that, and I lived with it for a long time, and you don’t have to be unhappy. So there is community forming exactly at the moment you feel most isolated.

So she starts this registry, it takes off, and then she realizes that’s not enough. She needs to de-stigmatize the divorce. So she says, who’s the queen of breakups? Taylor Swift. So she writes a blog post about a Taylor Swift divorce party with “Shake It Off” cupcakes and “we are never, ever, ever getting back together” — I’m not looking at you as an expert in Taylor Swift lyrics — and the whole thing goes crazy viral.

My favorite chapter perhaps, is late in the book. It’s called “The Garden of Lost Children,” and it’s about something that organized religion — let’s remind, organized religion comes very late in the history of ritual gathering. We have ritual for 300,000 years. We have organized religion for 2,500 years. And so it basically takes it over in an incredible coup, expands it. Five of the seven sacraments are about rituals. This ritual calendar gets introduced by these organized religions of all varieties. But they didn’t celebrate divorce. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish thinker, if a child dies within 31 days of being born, it’s as if the child never lived. No funeral. St. Augustine, Catholic law until the late 20th century: if you were not baptized, then you could not be buried in a Catholic cemetery. So bereft fathers, after their wives give birth to a stillborn child, would carry that child to the end of the town and bury them in homemade graves, often underneath abandoned churches in what were called eavesdrop funerals because the water would come down and they would hope it would baptize their child. And the entire town would follow them. There have been scores of these found across Ireland called cillíní. And they are examples that humans were reacting to the experience, even though their institutions did not honor it.

And now what we do, now that being in an institution is no longer mandatory, millennials and Gen Z are saying, I’m having a double mastectomy. My institution doesn’t have one. I talked to the first woman who entered a Jewish cemetery, who wrote the Jewish ritual around miscarriage or stillbirth. So basically everyday people are saying, I’ve got a pain. I need it now. I’m going to do it, and I don’t need your validation, my parents, my grandparents, my neighbors, my institutions. I want it now. And that’s the great opportunity of this renaissance of ritual around the world.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And I always feel like that’s the challenge when one legitimately nostalgizes something, the awareness of, there was a time when, there was a time when we celebrated communally. There was a time when local communities, by dint of just the human existence, were in touch with the cadences of nature. And so you celebrated the harvest, and you celebrated the planting, and you celebrated the change of seasons. You celebrated life. You celebrated death. You did so both within an institutional framework and a pre-institutional framework, because the origin of a lot of those rituals is the natural world and being in the midst of it.

And yet if you were in a 1950s American idyll, the Leave It to Beaver town that we all romanticize, that was great as long as you weren’t gay, as long as you weren’t a woman advocating for working outside the home, as long as you were not an African American, as long as you weren’t a Native American. The list of exclusionary “as long as you weren’t” was long.

And while I am not saying this as a way of denigrating the beauty of the human spirit that was engendered by a lot of this, and again, go around the world and pick your correlate, right? Hindu caste systems that were rigid, and still are to some degree. But you can’t just go, I wish we had that, without recognizing that that came with a set of baggage.

Bruce Feiler: My favorite story that exemplifies the point you just made is the story of jumping the broom. So jumping the broom: There were examples even in the ancient world of poets talking about jumping a broom being a symbol of marriage. But jumping the broom becomes a popular way of marking marriages essentially in the British Isles in the early modern period. And it was specifically designed for people who were unchurched, non-legal, non-normative in some way. And jumping the broom goes essentially from poor whites in the British Isles in the 19th century, jumps the Atlantic, and enters the world of enslaved Africans in the antebellum period before the Civil War.

So again, unchurched. They’re not legally allowed to marry, but they want to marry. And half of weddings of enslaved people in the 19th century were marked by jumping the broom. This is from a scholar who went back and looked at all of these diaries of enslaved people.

After the war, it becomes less popular. First of all, in Reconstruction, if that was the way you had marked your marriage by jumping the broom, then you were not allowed to have inheritance, or a pension if you had been in the military. So the formerly enslaved rushed to have traditional legal weddings, or church weddings if they were Christian. So jumping the broom fades from history.

Until in 1976, Alex Haley, in Roots, which spends an entire year on the New York Times bestseller list, he wins a Pulitzer Prize, and it becomes a TV series filmed in my hometown. I went to see the place where they sold Kunta Kinte into slavery. We skipped school to go in Savannah, Georgia. So it goes on the air. Eighty-five percent of households watch Roots, the biggest TV show before or since.

In episode 2, Kunta and Bell jump the broom, igniting a tradition of the idea that enslaved Africans invented this. Well, we now know they didn’t invent it, but it becomes popular. And there’s a woman who watches that as a teenager. She grows up, marries a photographer in North Carolina. They have a child. She has an accident. She has a Marcus Welby moment where the doctor comes in and says, we can’t do surgery on you, you are pregnant. So she can’t have the surgery. She’s lying in bed. She remembers watching episode 2 of Roots. She writes a small book, a 60-page self-published book called Jumping the Broom.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch — I’m telling this story because you’re such a media geek — it gets picked up by The Wall Street Journal, the AP, and USA Today. And she says, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I am going to be inundated by Black couples who want to jump the broom. But that’s not what happens.

The first call she ever got? A gay couple in Florida who liked the idea of a ritual for people who were not legally accepted at the time. Interracial couples. Intergenerational couples. So eventually the Black couples call, but jumping the broom suddenly, Oprah does it, The New York Times writes an article, there’s movies about it, plays about it. It becomes a symbol of weddings for people who were outside the system. It’s everything you were talking about, and now you can buy $200 heritage brooms. The whole thing.

And the reason it’s great to be a writer and stumble on these people and that they share their stories with me, she tells me that the child that she was pregnant with, she says to me, he’s... and then she kind of mumbles it. And I’m like, I didn’t hear you. She says, he’s gay. And I’m like, of course he is. That’s how the universe works. And now he’s a dancer and he performs jumping the broom.

It’s an example of these stories. There is no pure ritual. They change with the times, and now that we can design them from the bottom up, it gives us all permission to do that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and it’s amazing how quickly human beings create these rituals that then become kind of reified as if they always were.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: And then you forget. It’s so beautiful, the weaving of the history into that story, none of which is evident for the people performing the ritual today.

And the ahistorical nature of a lot of this, and the ease with which, particularly in the social media age where everything is moving so quickly, where something evolves, becomes a thing, and then suddenly it’s just a thing.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: It’s a thing you do. Well, I don’t know why we do it. We do it because we do it, because it makes us feel good. It makes us feel connected. It’s something we can collectively share. And in many ways we’re in this golden age of ritual creation, which I really got from your book. There’s this efflorescence of human beings just creating ritual, ritual, ritual, left, right, and center. And all you need, it’s like the Jewish thing, you basically just need a minyan for a ritual. You don’t need that many people to invent your ritual, celebrate your ritual, have your ritual, pass down your ritual, create a family one.

I feel like I didn’t do a good enough job creating ritual in a conscious way in a familial context, but I’m always very impressed with people who do so with the kind of discipline behind it. You need to repeat it. There’s a repetitiveness —

Bruce Feiler: Not necessarily. I would challenge that. A wedding, a funeral, they’re not going to repeat that. So I don’t think — there is a view about that. Look, I’ll make it easy. There are five things you need for a successful ritual.

Number one, you need a boundary. You need to create some sort of circle or sacred space. Outside we were that, inside we were this. Could be a candle, could be a room, could be a circle. Circuses have circles and trials have courtrooms and walls, trees, whatever. So you need a sacred space.

The second thing you need is stakes. We are here because someone’s welcoming in. We’re here because someone has died.

Zachary Karabell: Oh, I thought you meant actual —

Bruce Feiler: No. Well, steaks could be the first one, but you do not need red meat. And by the way, one of the problems people have with rituals is they don’t want to do the dishes. So maybe not having that would be helpful. But you need some sort of skin in the game, I call it. I went to this adolescent tooth-filing, where they file your teeth down in Bali. So you need some sort of sense of importance. It matters.

Number three, you need compromise. Back to the wedding. You and I are going to get married. Your want a big wedding, I want a small wedding. You want steak, and I want vegetables.

Zachary Karabell: I said we weren’t going to talk about this here.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah, okay. But the point is, that’s one of the reasons that people don’t want it. There is conflict. You believe in God, I don’t believe in God. All these things. But that’s the purpose of it, is to titrate the conflict. Because if we don’t do it when we get married, are we going to have kids? Are we not going to have kids? Who’s going to work? Who’s not going to work? Who’s going to do the dishes and who’s going to go do the shopping? So it’s a way to practice it. You need boundaries, you need stakes, you need compromise, you need empathy. You’re going through a difficult time or a joyful time, you want to share it with people.

And the last thing you need is a sense of hope. It’s a kind of utopian thing. This is the world as we want it to be. In psychology they talk about your best possible self. This is our best possible selves.

And this just happened to me. I think you know this, but if not, I’ll tell you. I just lost my sister-in-law after 10 months with leukemia 10 days ago, as we sit and have this conversation. I was told that Laura was going into hospice. Everyone’s coming to Atlanta to say goodbye. By the time I get there the next day, she had deceased. She had a brother coming from overseas, people were gathering from across the country. It was to say goodbye, and suddenly now we are in this moment.

Day 1, we kind of walk around. The body is taken to be cremated. We hug, we laugh, we cry, we eat. The next day my brother says, I think we should sit around and share memories of Laura. And I said, you know what? If we’re going to do this, let’s make a ritual. Let’s open the circle. We gathered in something approximating a circle. Their first piece of artwork was a piece of ceramics with a candle. So he lit the candle, told the story of the artwork, then everybody went around and shared. That’s the empathy part. We create the boundary. There’s the empathy. We figured out who wanted to speak or didn’t want to speak. That was the sort of figuring that out. And then we need to close the circle.

Laura had read my brother a rendition of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat from an antique version. So he pulled out the book. I read the inscription to him. I read it, and then I honored my sister-in-law and blew out the candle. People collapsed into one another’s arms. They were so grateful for it. And I talked to this designer who said, in these moments of change, we are borderless. We are liquid. We have no structure. You’re kind of wandering. You and I have been through a lot of difficult life circumstances together, had cancer and things like this. You’re drifting, and it creates a kind of vessel to hold the emotions.

A death doula said to me, trauma is when things happen too fast, too quickly, that you can’t process it. You know intellectually, but you haven’t embodied it. And what the ritual does is allow us to embody it, which helps us to go through it.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, it’s interesting. Talk for a minute about that in terms of, you know, your writing changed a lot, I think, in your life.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: And you’ve written a lot about your year-plus of cancer, and you really touchingly created this — for those who don’t know, Bruce wrote a book called The Council of Dads, where he wanted to make sure that your young children had father figures around them, and if it wasn’t going to be you, you were going to disperse it to a close circle of people.

I was not one of them, just so we’re clear. We were in a less intense phase of our long relationship. I’ve never really forgiven Bruce for that, but —

Bruce Feiler: As my wife likes to say, I like this idea, but she started rejecting my nominees. She would say, I like that person, but I would never ask him for advice.

Zachary Karabell: So nix on that one. So anyway, to be continued off camera. But you went from — there was a lighter quality to your books.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: And I don’t mean that in a negative sense.

Bruce Feiler: I was a circus clown.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. But you went around the world. You observed cultures. You wrote about it with a kind of hawk eye, but a detachment from. And your books since then, for the most part, have been much more about grappling with the process of being alive. I’ll just kind of use that as a general thing. And you wrote about transitions, from job transitions, you wrote about more global individual transitions, or things that happened in your book on “lifequakes” and then this book.

I’m assuming there was conscious intent behind that, but do you ever reflect on, not just the before-and-after tree of what you went through, but how it redirected you as a writer?

Bruce Feiler: I have a Substack, as you know, called “The Nonlinear Life,” and I was writing the story of my brother and his now-deceased wife, and I called him and said, I just want to give you a heads up. I’m writing about this, and I want to make sure you’re okay about that. And he said, yeah, I always say that some families have secrets and our family has you, and you tell the secrets.

I mentioned in joking that I was a circus clown. I did write a book called Under the Big Top about my year in the circus in my 20s. What I have found in my life — there was a moment where I, as a circus clown, collided with an older gentleman who was stilt-walking, and he fell from his stilts, and I had a slight injury. It was a horrifying experience, and my initial instinct was, don’t write about this because it’s too painful.

And in every moment in my life when something has happened to me that I’ve been ashamed to tell or afraid or worried what people would think about me, running into the fire has been the most meaningful thing for me.

There’s a story in this book. My book Life Is in the Transitions opens with the line: “I used to have a saying in my life that phone calls don’t change your life until I got a phone call that did.”

It was from my mother saying, your father’s trying to kill himself. My father had never been depressed a minute in his life until he got Parkinson’s, until he got depressed, and he tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And it was that impulse that he’d lost control of his life story. And I didn’t want to tell this story. I was too ashamed and too afraid. And when I did, it turned out that everybody else had these moments when this happened to them. And that propelled me into this work I’ve done of collecting and analyzing 500 life stories of everyday Americans.

So when my father died eight years later, after I’d sent him an email every Monday morning for eight years to tell a story in his life until he finished a 65,000-word memoir weeks before he died, I flew back home to Savannah. We were going to bury my father in famed Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, kind of a classic expression of the rural cemetery movement in the 19th century, when they made cemeteries beautiful, took them away from churches, out into parks where people would go and picnic.

And we were in a conversation with the rabbi about how to run the funeral. And my mother says, my mother deep into her 80s at this point, she doesn’t like throwing dirt on the coffin. She finds it barbaric. So my mother says she wants yellow long-stemmed roses.

My sister says, that’s too Hallmark. The dirt’s the best part of the funeral to me. I want that, and I don’t like the roses. So they’re kind of going back and forth. And so I’m like, rabbi, I’ll call you back. And I then proceeded to middle-child my way through a compromise, because as I said, rituals are about compromise rehearsal.

I was like, okay, Mom, what are you after? And Kat, my sister, what are you after? Can we come up with a compromise? And so what we did was — I was like, she lived with the guy for 62 years. If she wants yellow stem roses, I’m not going to tell my mother no. So we got two dozen long-stem yellow roses. We didn’t do dirt. My dad loved to walk on the beach. Tybee Island, Georgia — one of my girls is named Tybee. We got little bags of Tybee Island sand, and we gave people the choice.

And by being personal in telling this story, first of all, I’m saying, I’m not wagging my finger and telling you what to do. I’m saying, I’m like you. I’m struggling. But this is how we work.

A year later, I was in Ireland. I took an Uber to a funeral in a church with the head of the Irish Funeral Directors Association. And in the end she says, how are you going to get to the cemetery? And I’m like, I don’t know. She’s like, ride with me. And I, not thinking, said yes, at which point she opened the door of the hearse, popped up the jumper seat, and I rode to the cemetery next to the reposed life of Marjorie Burke.

And when we got there, there was a short service. In Ireland they bury people in the same graves for space and cost reasons, so they don’t use coffins or caskets with steel as we do here, because it won’t disintegrate quickly enough. They lowered the body into the arms of her husband, the only man she ever danced with, as the daughter said, and everybody got a long-stem yellow rose and threw it in.

And I’m sitting there and I’m bawling, because I’m at every funeral I’ve ever been to and every wedding I’ve ever been to, and it was a reminder that these are universal experiences, that it’s the oldest human algorithm.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to go from sublime to mundane for a minute. Maybe not mundane, but there’s one aspect of the book that is very Mary Roach-esque, and it’s all about the body modification part of ritual. You alluded to one of them earlier with the teeth filing in Indonesia, where I think all of us — my reaction the minute I hear the words “teeth filing” is to viscerally cringe at the sense-thought of that pain. But talk a little bit about that as an aspect of ritual that we don’t, at least in American society, easily embrace. Pain as a ritual, and permanent body marking as ritual. Now yes, there’s a whole world of tattooing in the United States.

Bruce Feiler: Losing your tooth and bringing in the tooth fairy, that’s a ritual of coming of age around teeth. Putting braces around adolescence.

Zachary Karabell: Well, you lose a tooth whether you want to or not. It’s not an inflicted ritual.

Bruce Feiler: Okay. Justin Bieber wearing $25,000 grills to his wedding to Hailey Bieber, decorating your teeth gold.

Zachary Karabell: I’m glad — it’s good you knew that little piece of pop culture there.

Bruce Feiler: So I thought, yeah, we all do this around teeth. We’ll do this around our body. Tattooing, henna — you’d be surprised. Because we sacralize the things that are most intimate to being alive. Breathing, seeing, sex, defecation, giving birth, the body.

I talked to a woman who is a professor at Vanderbilt who talks about rituals among the disabled community. Getting her first wheelchair. Living independently for the first time. Being fitted for a new walker. Things that we might not think are moments of transition that they want to mark collectively.

I have friends who have used doulas for losing a job, for getting fired, for shutting down a company, for moving. Whatever moment of transition it’s in, whether it’s bodily, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s work, whether it’s familial, these are the moments where we feel most alone and scared and afraid. Because another new thing that’s in my writing that wasn’t in the past is digging into the social science. And what the science shows us is that rituals regulate our emotions. They synchronize our heartbeats. We breathe together. We walk at the same pace or we sweat at the same velocity. And so what these rituals do is connect us biologically, emotionally, and all that helps us feel more connected.

Zachary Karabell: So is there a difference between ritual and ceremony, or are they —

Bruce Feiler: Here’s how I would put it. When I got into this, I was obsessed with these questions. There are different types of rituals. There are civic rituals like coronations and inaugurations. There are calendric rituals, as you said — the harvest, the maypole, midsummer. There are daily rituals like handshaking and bowing and namaste. And then there are these, what I call life rituals, which are these moments. And then what’s the difference between a tradition and a ritual and a habit?

I can geek out on all of that, but where I’ve ended up — and maybe the biggest change I went through while working on A Time To Gather — is the enemy’s in our pockets. The enemy is coming at us all the time very quickly.

They did these studies where they would set up accounts as teen boys, and within eight minutes they’re getting stereotypes, and within 13 minutes they’re being fed misogyny, and within an hour they’re being bombarded. We have to switch from, we do rituals four times a year or five times a year, whatever Arnold van Gennep said 120 years ago when he invented rites of passage. We need to move from rites of passage to bites of passage, and we need to move to this idea that we need a ritual state of mind.

And you and I both have young adult kids. They’re home. When we’re home, we need to jump at it. We can’t say, sorry, we can’t do this until you find a spouse. We need to do them whenever, wherever, because the algorithms are coming at us. Ritual is the oldest human algorithm. At this point, it’s the only thing, what did I say? “How ritual created the world and how it can save us.” It’s the only thing that’s going to hold us together.

Zachary Karabell: And on that question — held together or coming apart —

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: I started with a softball question. I’ll end with a softball question. Are you more acutely aware of the coming together, or are you more acutely affected by the coming apart, when you travel to multiple countries, different societies, obviously the United States included?

Bruce Feiler: You used the word “green shoots,” and I think that’s right. I think there are three ways of looking at this story.

There’s either the celebration recession is real, and the coming apart cannot be stopped, and this is just a sidebar. That’s one response.

The other response, to use the language of worlds that you’ve traveled in, is that this ritual renaissance is a dead cat bounce, which is the Wall Street term for something that’s basically collapsing. There’s a bit of a blip up, but it’s going to continue to go down.

Or it’s that the ritual renaissance is the story, that these are green shoots.

So what do I believe? I believe it is real, what’s happening. It’s happening among men. It’s happening among women. It’s happening among old people. It’s one of the few things that bridges the religious, the nonreligious, and the I’m not spiritual, but I’m religious crowd.

I spent a lot of time in organized religion. I wrote five books about religion and contemporary religion and spirituality. The smartest people I know who are in that world are ritual entrepreneurs. And it’s old and young, so it bridges everybody. At the same time, it’s green shoots, and we get to decide. I believe that what I see among millennials and young people, the return to online dating, the going to bars to have lectures, going on retreats, everywhere, I see it. So I think the green shoots are becoming greener, and they’re becoming taller. But ultimately, I think we have a choice.

The greatest spiritual leaders, you’ve written a lot about religion. It’s one of the things that we both share. Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, you’ve got a choice, life or death, whatever. We have a choice. It’s virtual or it’s ritual. It’s URL or IRL. And I think if we want to preserve human relationships, choose ritual. It’s the way home.

We get to decide if we water these green shoots, and I feel more confident than ever that it will happen, but the choice is still up to us.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for all of that — the book, your life, your wisdom, your lack of wisdom, your willingness to learn.

I think this question, which we’re just going to keep coming back to, I’m going to keep coming back to, Bruce I’m sure will keep coming back to in his writing — what is the elemental power of the human spirit in a world of noise that amplifies a perception of chaos, juxtaposed to the incredible human need to create some degree of order? Which was true 300,000 years ago. David Deutsch made this comment about the nature of human beings in a state of nature, and that the natural world was profoundly threatening to human life. So it’s not as if Mother Nature kind of embraced humans and now we have a modern world that threatens us. Humans have been striving for creating zones of connection and safety in a world that has felt profoundly threatening. The nature of those threats has changed. It used to be disease, it used to be the elements. Now it’s much more likely to be other humans, or the things that we’re doing to the environment. But the reality of threat remains. The nature of the threats has changed.

And our need to create “us” in the face of that remains really palpable, and has then developed this other dimension as we talked about in terms of social media.

But I think the thing that people can really learn from what you’re providing is that that need is as powerful as ever, and as evident as ever, even if it doesn’t look yet like what we think it looks like, because we’re living in a present of creation.

We can look back at the past as static. We don’t know what our present will create as future stasis. And it’ll be fascinating to look back 100 years from now and read the book and see which of the things that you discern now became rituals across generations, because some of them will.

Bruce Feiler: Yes, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: And I think that too, just remember that we are in this constant process of creation and destruction, and indeed these rituals celebrate both. So I’m just going to leave it at that.

I want to thank Kaleidoscope for producing. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for facilitating. I want to thank all of you for listening and watching and being and participating.

Please send us your thoughts. Send Bruce your thoughts. We’re both easily reachable throughout the airwaves, the internet waves, the URL, less in IRL, but we’ll leave that for another time.

And I hope to have you back next week. I obviously value the time. It’s all precious time for each one of us, so the fact that you’re using it for this is a privilege and an honor. So thanks so much.

Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason magazine, has spent decades thinking about freedom, culture, and politics. In the latest episode of What Could Go Right?, he and I explore one of the defining paradoxes of our era: why a modern world that has achieved unprecedented abundance seems so abundantly dissatisfied.

By almost every measurable standard, more people today enjoy security, leisure, education, and opportunity than ever before in human history. And yet public life feels increasingly angry, anxious, and distrustful. Nick thinks the explanation is, in large part, psychological: It turns out we are simply ill-equipped to handle prosperity and endless choice. Somehow, we’ve managed to instill the belief in younger generations that anything is possible while convincing them that catastrophe is around every corner.

Our conversation roamed far and wide — student debt, the decline of institutional trust, historical memory, Japan — but beneath it all was this foundational question: How do we find meaning and resilience in a world in which material scarcity is no longer a defining condition?

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and as is likely obvious by now, the host of What Could Go Right?, which is my weekly podcast where I talk to scintillating and interesting people about scintillating and interesting things — or at least that’s the conceit and that’s my hope. We’ll find out if it is merited by the following conversation.

If you were an alien and looking at the planet — well, first of all, you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between any of us, and you would be confused at the constant incessant squabbling, let alone wars. But if you were looking at the United States, you would probably assume that everybody was either a Democrat or a Republican and was deeply at odds with each other, and everything was divided along absolute, clear, binary partisan lines. And yet we know statistically and observationally and from polls that that’s absolutely not the case. So we’re going to use this as a starting point: the assumption of partisanship may simply be a story. And in the What Could Go Right? vein, it may be a story that is constantly self-reinforcing — an idea of complete and utter division that is actually at odds with the reality that we find ourselves in.

And in that spirit, I’m going to talk to somebody who’s been thinking about this for years and years and years. I don’t mean that, like, he’s so old. I just mean he’s been cogitating about these things for a long time, and that is Nick Gillespie, who is editor-at-large of Reason magazine, and the host of the Reason podcast. We’re only having him on because his podcast is probably bigger than this podcast now, and it’s kind of a one-hand-washes-the-other situation, where there’s really never any sincere engagement of ideas. He has had a rock-and-roll life. He’s a quirky dude who’s been characterized as a libertarian, but I think has probably simply been marching to the beat of his own drummer, or singing to the lyrics of his own song.

I’ve got to read this line because you can’t really pay for publicity like this — or for all that I know, Nick did pay for publicity like this. “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit.” I really want someone to define me as the quintessence of anything.

Nick Gillespie: No, that is just a self-licking ice cream cone. It’s really fantastic.

Zachary Karabell: It’s seriously good, man.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, it is.

Zachary Karabell: All right. So I’m going to start and ask you a question that I’ve been asking a lot, and it’s in line with a lot of the writing you’ve done and thinking you’ve done, that never before in human history have more people on the planet had more of what human beings from time immemorial crave and need — caloric abundance, physical security, a certain amount of voice. Even our authoritarian societies these days, with the exception maybe of North Korea, there’s more individual security and freedom, more financial means and leisure time. And you could argue that at the same time never have more people had more — and been more pissed off. And the question today, I feel, of the 21st century is: how does one explain that seeming conundrum? Meaning that more has not led to satisfaction. That abundance isn’t creating a feeling of, hey, we got this.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. This is the question of our time. There’s a demographer at Brookings Institution named Homi Kharas who, about 10 years ago, wrote a book and started writing about the global middle class, in which he said that sometime around the mid 20-teens, more than half of the population of the globe had discretionary income, after they cover all their stuff, and that this was unimaginable at the start of the 20th century, even at the end of the 20th century. And how is it that in America — and I think this is broadly true of North America and Europe — people seem to be less and less happy? And there are two things I want to kind of footnote before I suggest the main reason I think this is happening. One is that when you look at things like Gallup polling going back 50 years or more, when people are asked, how are things going in your life? Are you doing pretty well? Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans typically say, you know what? Things are going pretty well for me.

Zachary Karabell: And you have that about education. You’ve got that about your congressional rep. It’s like, “I hate them, but I like him.”

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yeah. And then when they ask, well, what about the direction of the country, or how’s the country going? And then there is a steep divergence.

And that’s kind of fascinating, and it’s worth thinking about that. Like, how are we all thinking we’re doing well, but this society is going to hell?

But I think more broadly, and this goes to that question of a global middle class, we have not been taught, and I’m not talking about, like, evolution, it’s just that in our lifetimes — I was born in 1963, so I’m a very late Baby Boomer, Gen X person — we were not taught to live in a post-scarcity world. I certainly wasn’t. And we are not psychologically equipped to deal with a choose-your-own-adventure world.

I have two adult children, and I have a four-month-old, and I think when I look at the ways in which my generation has raised children, we have simultaneously told them all things are possible and that this is the most terrifying of all possible worlds. So choose whatever you want, but don’t fuck it up. And we have just created a mass kind of psychosis where it’s almost impossible to be happy with any individual choice people make, or to believe that you deserve your fate, that you deserve your good luck, and that the world is going to keep moving forward.

Zachary Karabell: You know, I’ve also thought a lot about the yes-but problem. So if you articulate problems — of which there are many, manifold, and constant, like, there’s still too many neonatal problems in underserved communities in the United States, or literacy post-COVID, all these negatives — you can state those facts and people will engage those. If you state a constructive fact, like there is now early childhood education in New Mexico that’s free — I mean, nothing is free, everything’s taxed now — every one of those statements has to be followed by, yes, but there’s also still all this.

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yes, but there were starving children in China, when I was growing up, which was one of the yes-buts and things like that.

Zachary Karabell: And you were told to finish your food because there are starving children in China.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right, yeah. None of it made sense then, but I totally agree with you that one of the things that we are incapable of as a society — and I don’t want to be glib about this — but we can’t acknowledge progress. So material progress and moral progress. And it’s like, when you look back over the past decade, politics have become insane in America. And we’re talking just after Trump released an AI slop generated image of himself, which he’s taken down, as Jesus ministering to somebody who looks like Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and then said, well, no, I wasn’t Jesus. I was just a doctor, because I make people feel better.

Like, we live in a truly insane, deranged political world, and yet even after COVID, even as we are going through multiple wars at any given moment, median household income in real terms is higher than it’s ever been. People, in most profound ways, are doing better than ever, and we cannot even see that because we are arguing over ridiculous small ball stuff.

Zachary Karabell: And you do then have this whole progress movement, which I’m aware of. You have people like Hans Rosling, who’s passed away, but he’s the progenitor of his own institute, and then Our World in Data, which has been compiling all this. And people like Steven Pinker, who’s part of The Progress Network.

So there’s clearly data out there that indicates this. The other real conundrum, right, is that data in the face of feelings — feelings always win. So if someone feels like the world is messed up and you quote statistics to them—

Nick Gillespie: Right —

Zachary Karabell: They will not only not believe you, but they are likely to get angry.

Nick Gillespie: I tend to agree with you, and certainly in the moment, you’re never going to win somebody who has cancer when you tell them, oh, you know what’s great, though, is that if you were nine other people, you would be surviving, right?

But over time, I think some of that changes, and I think what we’ve done is just, everybody’s up at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? And we have to come up with our own meaning on a daily basis, which is very hard to do.

On the other hand, I do think that people do respond to facts, and people respond to history, and I think one of the things that is most lacking in our contemporary society — and this is me being a very old man — is that people don’t remember history.

And I think one of the reasons for that is because at least since the end of World War II, we’ve lived in a mass abundance society. And so when you talk to people who are two or three or more generations removed from the ghettos, removed from poverty, even in America, people don’t ever care about the past.

I feel lucky. We’re in midtown Manhattan. My father was born in Hell’s Kitchen to Irish immigrants in the ‘20s. I am one generation removed from a working-class white ghetto where he had very little to look forward to. That sense of history helps me navigate, like, I don’t want to blow this because I am living a life that my parents literally could not understand. My father didn’t even graduate high school. When I went to college, he was like, oh, that’s great. Where is that? And when I got a doctorate, they were happy for me, but literally, I was living in another universe. And we take that kind of abundance for granted, and we devalue it.

Zachary Karabell: So I’m going to be the contrarian to this one, which is, I don’t think people are particularly amenable to facts, not just in the moment, but in general. I think over time societies are amenable to facts and analysis. And I don’t think Americans ever really knew or respected history. They knew or respected certain glib narratives of what America was that you ingested in your civics class in high school or that you learned from a kind of facile textbook that told a story that we wanted collectively to be true. So I’m not as on top of the —

Nick Gillespie: If I may. I’m thinking of it more — it ends up having a social effect, but it’s a personal narrative. If you can remember bad times, or if you are living with somebody who is like, wow, I didn’t think I would ever own a car, and now I own two. It’s not the textbook history. And it’s interesting, when people say, oh, well, the solution to everything in America is to teach civics. Nobody ever was like, by the way, not only were the founders beautiful and fresh-smelling people, and yeah, they had some problems, but they were great. Nobody ever said, like, most of the people in their world lived horrible, desperate lives, of barely having enough calories to conceive, to have children, much less flourish.

Zachary Karabell: This book that I just finished, which is oddly enough about a multi-thousand-year history of corn as a technology we eat — the amount that Americans, particularly outside the East Coast, were drinking in the 1820s and 1830s —

Nick Gillespie: It’s amazing.

Zachary Karabell: They’re essentially drunk all the time, right? Because they often used alcohol as a source of non-toxic water. But they were just drunk all the time. So you have a temperance movement not because you’ve got a bunch of ninnies who are like, we shouldn’t drink. You have a temperance movement because everybody’s drunk.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and it’s also you realize, if you’re a little bit wasted or a little bit buzzed, you’re not going to be productive, even apart from technology. My brother, who’s a couple years older than me, he graduated college in 1981, and he got a job at Graybar Electric, which was one of the original tenants of Rockefeller Center. I don’t even know if it still exists, but it’s not what it was. But he had a mentor there who was going to sell electrical conduit and everything, and he went to lunch with his mentor, who had three martinis, and he was like, wow, that is amazing. And then after lunch, he went to the guy’s office to ask him a question, and he was just sacked out and snoring. You know, if you drink a lot, you’re not going to be very productive.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, the martini glasses were small. It was more like one and a half martinis.

Nick Gillespie: I don’t know. All I’m saying is, we can argue whether it’s progress or not, but it’s certainly different. Americans today have, compared to 50 years ago, drink less, they do drugs less, or intoxicants less, and we’re more productive. That’s probably not, you know, just a vague correlation.

Zachary Karabell: I think part of it, though, is everybody sets their set point to their highest memory. There was an old joke that everybody remembers their lowest costs and their highest income as being simultaneous.

And then you do have the issue that we live in our moment. We don’t live in comparative time. So when I was giving a lot of speeches, I would kind of use — I’ll do this game with you. Levittowns. The burgeoning of the American suburb, car class post-World War II, starts in Long Island and then makes its way elsewhere. And a Levitt house was the dream of a returning GI or a young aspiring family. How big do you think a Levittown house was?

Nick Gillespie: Oh, they were like 700 square feet or something.

Zachary Karabell: They were like 750 square feet.

Nick Gillespie: It’s amazing when you look at pictures of them. And of course it’s also interesting that they became modular homes almost, where if you go to the original Levittowns or early — I grew up in New Jersey. I was born in Brooklyn, I grew up in New Jersey in a town that was started in the 17th century, but blew up in the ‘50s, starting in the ‘50s and onward. And the houses that I grew up in, you have to look to find that nucleus because people added on as they got wealthier.

Zachary Karabell: But if you tell people that, and where the average house size now is over 2,000 square feet, and has electronics and TVs, and that a Levitt house had an icebox — didn’t even have a refrigerator — and the car was a jalopy in the driveway that got eight gallons to the mile and didn’t have seat belts, but it did have ashtrays, so at least you could kill yourself —

Nick Gillespie: Well, they had their priorities.

Zachary Karabell: There were things you did, and things you did. But even if you recognize intuitively, like, wow, we’ve come a long way materially, people, I think legitimately, say, well, there has been progress, and therefore just noting it doesn’t change what’s broken in the present.

Nick Gillespie: I agree, but I feel like a lot of the anger and discomfort in contemporary America — and I think a lot of it is generational and it’s to be expected, and in many ways it’s to be encouraged — but younger people, I remember having an argument with a Gen Z, a Zoomer, who was 25 years old, and they were like, I should have a house by now. And I was like, what world did you grow up in where a 25-year-old has a house?

And this is something where, talk to your parents about when they got their first house, or your grandparents. And it’s not to say just shut up and take it and you’ll get yours when the old people die, at all, because this is the flip side. We’ve made a lot of progress, but progress should continue. But a little bit of perspective, I think, would really be helpful in making people be more realistic about what’s going on in society.

And then more importantly, how do you make smart decisions if I’m 25 and I’m at the start of my career. I have so many options. How do I narrow them down? How do I find out what’s the Venn diagram of the things I like, the things I’m good at, and the things people will pay me for? And start to create a process, because we are in a place where everybody expects everybody to be equal automatically, and I think that really becomes corrosive.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, you wrote recently about something that feeds this narrative, particularly in kind of millennial and Gen Z land, and I guess now Gen Alpha land. It’s getting a little hard to do the whole generation thing.

Nick Gillespie: There was a while where people were starting to talk about a generation called Gen Beta, and it’s like, don’t do that.

Zachary Karabell: Skip to the next Greek letter. Go to sigma or theta. Just don’t do beta.

Nick Gillespie: I don’t even know what comes after alpha and beta. And you don’t want an alpha and beta generation simultaneously because that’s stacking the deck in a really unfair way.

Zachary Karabell: But there’s this narrative, certainly a Bernie Sanders one, certainly a progressive one, of young people drowning under a mountain of student debt. And there are big figures to show it. I don’t know if it’s like a trillion dollars or it’s more than that.

Nick Gillespie: It’s usually cited somewhere between $1.6 and $2 trillion in student debt.

Zachary Karabell: But then when you look at that data granularly, which I know you’ve done, a massive amount of that debt was accumulated by for-profit schools, which were often scams —

Nick Gillespie: Actually not so much. But it’s mostly graduate schools.

Zachary Karabell: That’s what I was going to say. It’s a combination of the for-profit schools, like Grand Canyon University, and then people doing very expensive master’s degrees.

Nick Gillespie: Or getting an MD, because people who get MDs generally take out a couple hundred thousand in loans, because they know once they get the degree they’re going to be able to pay it back very quickly. And, it’s cheap. The student loans, one of the reasons why people want them is because they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings for a while, but they’re also unsecured loans that are usually sub-market rate. What’s interesting is when you look at student loan data, wealthier households tend to have carried more student debt because if nothing else, the parents are saying, take out the money and then we’ll invest it, and it’s at a low market interest rate, so we’ll do better in the market with it.

Zachary Karabell: But this is one of these other areas where you have this conversation and you say, look, the bulk of the debt is not being held by four-year college undergraduates.

Nick Gillespie: Right. The data points are worth coming out. In the article I wrote recently, in the class of 2024 undergrads, 47 percent of students took out loans, which is less than most people would think. And it’s actually been trending down, the percentage of undergrads who borrow in order to go to undergrad. And the average amount was about $30,000, which works out to around $300 or $325 a month as a repayment. So it’s kind of like a car payment. Maybe you drive a used car, or you inherit a car, or you don’t have a car.

But considering that a college degree correlates with making over a million dollars more in your lifetime, it is a pretty good bet, if the only thing standing between you and college is taking out $30,000 in loans while you’re an undergrad that you’ve got to pay off, it’s a good bet.

Zachary Karabell: So all true, but there will be many people, assuming they’re listening to this conversation, or many people who listen to that, who are 25 years old who go, “Give me a break.” You’re X age. You’re well past that. You don’t understand the world. You don’t understand how hard it is. I don’t really believe those numbers. My friend Joey’s got $72,000 in debt, can’t find a job, living in his parents’ basement.”

The emotional experience and the physical, literal experience of a set of people is always going to — this gets back to, are people amenable to facts, right? And I’ve had the experience of trying to have this debate, where the statement of that is heard as kind of the following: “Wah, wah, wah, wah. You’re a ninny and should shut up about your problems because I don’t believe they’re real.”

Nick Gillespie: And it’s also the “wah, wah, wah,” which of course is calling back to the Peanuts specials. And if you ask most people under 40, they really don’t know who Charlie Brown is.

Zachary Karabell: So they think the “wah, wah, wah” is actually even more pejorative and not a reference.

Nick Gillespie: Well, have you had any success in talking to people? Because you realize of course in a debate nobody’s going to back down. But over time — and I paid for my undergrad, as well as my MA. I have two MAs and a PhD, and I covered it all.

Zachary Karabell: Me too. Except I have an MPhil and not — and an MA.

Nick Gillespie: And the extra MA is on the way to the PhD.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, they just sort of hand it to you as a kind of — it’s a candy.

Nick Gillespie: It’s an amuse-bouche.

Zachary Karabell: This was the we’re-going-to-compare-degrees-size portion of the conversation.

Nick Gillespie: Your degrees are better. No question, I’m sure.

Zachary Karabell: Certainly more expensive.

Nick Gillespie: But the important thing is, I went through this. I know what it is like to be white-knuckling every month, a student loan payment, and the one thing I know about the student loan payment with everything else, it’s like, if you screw that up, your credit will be wrecked for the rest of your life. I had shitty jobs. I had to patch together gigs here and there and things like that, so I know that it’s difficult.

But I also know the difference between me and my high school graduating class, only about 40 percent of whom went on to some form of college immediately, is the college degree. And it’s not simply a signaling device. I majored in English and psychology, which are both pretty useless. They were great. It was exciting. I became interested in the world. Things opened up to me. I’m happy to talk to people about student debt. I guess my main point is, they’re not going to agree with you in the moment, but I think a lot of people understand, yeah, this is actually a pretty good deal.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, I’ve certainly talked a few younger people off the ledge of fear around just taking on some student debt in that twenty to thirty thousand dollar range, of saying not all debt is bad. This is a legit investment in the future. This is likely to make sense going forward. Totally different than taking on $200,000 of debt for an MFA.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right. Or $200,000 for a house that you’re not going to be able to really afford, or all sorts of things, right? Or $200,000 in credit card debt for meals. If you’re not building any human capital —

Zachary Karabell: Consumption debt versus investment debt, basically.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And this goes to part of, I think, one of the problems in contemporary society and in a wealthy society. Nobody in America — and my degree is in American literature, and my PhD is from the University at Buffalo, which was SUNY Buffalo when I went there. And I went there mostly to study with Leslie Fiedler, who’s one of the great wild men of American literary and cultural studies. And I raise that partly because he was interested in showing how society worked, how people moved up and down ladders, and showing a means of ascent.

Ben Franklin is like this. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the first how-to book in American literature. Like, here is how, I was the seventh son of a seventh son, here is how I made my way in the world, and you can do it too.

I think one of the problems with an abundant society is that people immediately want to start pretending that they were always rich, or they were born this way, and they don’t want to share their grubby climb up the greasy pole, which is a terrible metaphor, obviously. I was not attentive in the rhetoric classes. But the more that we can tell people, this is how things work, and here are different models of success, here are different models of making your way in the world, and it’s not all pretty, and it’s not all guaranteed — I think we will have a richer society, both emotionally as well as financially.

Zachary Karabell: You do know that some of your lines are also music lyrics entitled “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,” “Born This Way.” It just kind of works out that way. Granted, they took it from the same sources you were quoting, but —

Nick Gillespie: A lot of things come back to Ben Franklin, right? He’s a phenomenal person to think about.

Zachary Karabell: So you’ve thought about this too. I mean, there is a global dimension here. There’s the affluent society issue, which is certainly true of Western Europe, right? I mean, when you look at Western Europe and go, Jesus.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, man. I’m so glad all of my grandparents left. My mother’s parents were from southern Italy, my father’s parents from what became the Republic of Ireland. They left before it was such. When I’ve gone there, I’m just like, oh my God, thank you for leaving.

Zachary Karabell: But the affluent part is undeniable, right? I mean, Italy too. If you’re going to just deal with quality of life, you’re not working bare-knuckled anymore. You are taking August off, and that’s true of the middle class. This is not a privileged thing in these societies. But that doesn’t preclude those societies from having the same degree of agita and anxiety and anger.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and it’s also because it’s declining, right? I mean, same thing in Japan. My stats may not be correct anymore, but as of recently, Japan is the only OECD country that has fewer people than it had in 2000. And in many ways, it is the canary in the coal mine.

Zachary Karabell: Japan’s the future.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And Japan has a tremendously wonderful quality of life for the people who are alive now, but you can see it kind of degrading over time.

Zachary Karabell: Well, but that gets to our question before. I once wrote this piece about Japan of, if Japan is our collective future, you could think of worse things. Meaning, in the great arc of human existence, if a highly affluent, literate, low-crime, well-fed, aesthetically pleasing, very little civil strife society is your worst-case scenario, most generations of humanity would’ve taken that one to heart.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely. But of course, and this is where I suppose I am an American exceptionalist, that America is not Japan, and America is not Europe. And now you’re forcing me to question whether I’m living a nostalgia act here. But the America that seems to be great, and the America that draws people from all over the world, and excites people and produces the popular culture, as well as the technology that seems to make the world a better place — we need to do better than that.

We can’t preserve a slowly declining standard of living for most people. We need to be growing. And I feel like one of the ways that we can do that is by reminding people of the recent past, not 250 years ago.

Which, by the way, the bicentennial — which I assume you remember, right?

Zachary Karabell: Tall ships, going down the Hudson.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and I grew up in Middletown, New Jersey, which is near Sandy Hook, where the tall ships docked, and weighed anchor, and the Polish ships came a year late, which was a big joke at the time. But the bicentennial was a flop from a money-making point of view, because nobody cared.

Nobody cares about the 250th anniversary. So let’s just talk about the 70 years since the end of World War II, or even the past 50 years, or what comes after the Baby Boom and Gen X fade from the stage.

I think we need to be having a more productive conversation about how you make your way in the world, and then what kinds of large-scale regulatory and public policy issues make it more likely that we’ll produce more wealth and include more people.

Zachary Karabell: And I wonder what you think about this, because you’ve thought and written a lot about — you know, libertarianism is both a nonpartisan, i.e. not Democrat or Republican, but it’s also a different view of the role of government in relation to individuals and freedom.

Nick Gillespie: Well, the way I think about it is as a pre-partisan kind of philosophy. I’m a libertarian with a small L. I always typically vote for the libertarian presidential candidate. I don’t think I’ve ever actually joined the party. But small-L libertarianism is pre-partisan, and I know libertarian Democrats and libertarian Republicans. These terms really have worn out. They don’t make sense anymore, like “big government.”

Somebody like Ronald Reagan described himself as an FDR Democrat, or a New Deal Democrat, in the ‘80s. And he talked about how his really terrible Social Security reforms, which jacked up FICA to the current levels, he said that was his greatest accomplishment, was saving the solvency of Social Security for a generation or so.

Well, this is the new thing, which you’ll probably enjoy. There are a small number of libertarian academics, mostly in England, who are talking about how Friedrich Hayek and Michel Foucault actually have a lot in common. And one of the things that they share — and Foucault, it’s translated in various ways, but it comes down to, we are always governed too much, and he thinks particularly in politics, there should be fewer laws, and they should be applied equally to people, but there should be fewer of them, which is kind of Hayekian or liberal, where you just make a basic matrix of, okay, this is what’s allowed, this is what’s not allowed, and then you let people figure it out as much as possible. And that is certainly the way I feel about politics, and I think that can take a Democratic version or a Republican version, and unfortunately it’s in very short supply in either party.

Zachary Karabell: So you do have this system, which we loosely call capitalism —

Nick Gillespie: Well, I would actually say it’s liberalism, which just means limited government, maximum autonomy, individual autonomy, and freedom of association. And the economic application of that is something like free enterprise.

Zachary Karabell: And that system — at least globally, right? Because we live in a capitalist world.

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: China included. Which has clearly led to abundance globally, materially.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: Clearly not led to human satisfaction commensurate with —

Nick Gillespie: No, no, no. It’s the one thing it doesn’t deliver.

Zachary Karabell: And seems to be more and more divergent. And there’s that whole — I don’t remember who it was, who talked about the income rising makes people happier to a point, and then plateaus —

Nick Gillespie: I think the first one was Richard Easterlin.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, the Easterlin Paradox. Which people have also said maybe is wrong or right. But the idea being, rising incomes create contentment to a point, and then it ceases to —

Nick Gillespie: It either stops to increase or it actually starts to decline.

Zachary Karabell: And we certainly see the decline now. Rising incomes, declining contentment globally.

What do you think of this? I’m going to do my question of, here’s my pet theory, which is, much of the discontent around the world, which has outlet — meaning the one thing about phones and social media is that everybody has a voice. No one may listen, but everybody has a voice. Never before have more people been able to both articulate their discontent with things as they are, articulate their passionate desire for better governance, better society, things being improved. And never before have more people believed that they have the right to do so. And to me, I actually find that unbelievably heartening at a human aggregate level.

Nick Gillespie: I totally agree with you. Quiet desperation is out, and the only reason it was there is because nobody had an outlet, or it was hard to reach an audience. I think it’s also worth saying it might be oversold, because when you ask individuals, how are you doing, they tend to say, pretty well. In most international surveys I’ve seen — and I haven’t looked at the methodology of this — America and Europe are really low in terms of overall happiness.

I’m also, I was raised Catholic, so I’m not sure that happiness is a good thing. That may not be what we’re after, and it may be that feeling put upon, or feeling like you’re getting ripped off, or you still have something to prove, is one of the ways in which you actually live the life that you want, which is one about action and accomplishment or achievement or attempt rather than satisfaction.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s about happiness as much as the absence of a roiling, angry discontent. There’s some Goldilocks between la-di-da and everything sucks.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and also being able to enjoy what you have. This is something I think about a lot on a more personal level. My parents grew up poor, and then they ascended the lower ranks of the middle class after World War II. But because of the circumstances in which they were raised, and psychologically, they could never really enjoy it, because they didn’t think they deserved it, and they thought they were going to be unmasked as not belonging. So it’s one version of a classic American story where they were very fastidious in how they presented themselves, because if my father wore the wrong tie or the wrong shoes with something, he would be kicked out of whatever place he was masquerading as middle class.

So there’s that too, of where yeah, you should never be satisfied, but also, goddammit, enjoy the luck that you have for being born in this time and in this place and doing something with it.

Zachary Karabell: There too, you did it again. That’s like a line from Hamilton. “I’ll never be satisfied.”

Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s funny. I’m a Burr-ite. I love in William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, there’s a long essay about how Aaron Burr is the real individualist American. And it’s so funny, it’s like an Amiri Baraka answer play to Hamilton written 100 years before it came out.

Zachary Karabell: Wow. So you’re like Burr got the short shaft historically.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, definitely. Although I still think Gore Vidal’s Burr is better than Hamilton the play, but obviously the masses have spoken, and 50,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a good one. I like that.

So on the libertarian part again, because it’s interesting for the United States, one of the really striking things about our moment contemporarily is just how prominent the courts have become. Now partly that’s a response to the Trump administration’s attempts elastically to expand the boundaries —

Nick Gillespie: And also Congress’s complete abdication of anything other than showing up to pick up a paycheck every couple of weeks.

Zachary Karabell: But you do have this phenomenal rise of the courts as a central, if not just adjudicator, but actually determiner of things. And one thing that’s kind of going on in the Supreme Court, back to the nonpartisan, meaning it doesn’t easily fit Republican or Democrat — I’m not talking about Alito and Clarence Thomas, who clearly are in their own world of anger and angst and therefore very predictable.

Nick Gillespie: And Catholicism. And Alito is from Trenton, New Jersey, so yeah, he’s got a lot of grudges.

Zachary Karabell: And he is acting upon them on a regular basis. But you do have this kind of interesting narrative, back to what you were saying, that the administrative state has gotten too big and too unaccountable, trying to pare it back.

Nick Gillespie: And Trump — Steve Bannon, who is what Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, such a liar that even when he uses the word “and,” “if,” or “but,” those are lies.

Zachary Karabell: Sorry, that was a famous line, for those of you who don’t know, where there was a defamation suit and these two critics in the ‘40s —

Nick Gillespie: Wonderful literary feud.

Zachary Karabell: — said every word that Ms. Hellman says is a lie, including “and,” “if.”

Nick Gillespie: And she said it on The Dick Cavett Show or something, right?

But in any case, the point is that Steve Bannon had said that Trump was going to deconstruct the administrative state, and that’s why you should support him. And Trump is — that would be like saying Charles I of England was going to end God’s appointed kingdom in England or something. It’s the exact opposite.

Zachary Karabell: Although there is this problem of the court trying to do that, but the sequencing is off. Meaning, they’re simultaneously trying to end the independent administrative state and give the president more power over the executive branch without actually defanging the administrative powers that have been ceded by Congress.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Well, this is so banal, I’m embarrassed to even say it. Obviously the constitution and the founding are spectacular and wonderful, et cetera. But I don’t think anybody expected Congress to be so out to lunch for so long. And I have to admit, I don’t exactly understand how that happened to the extent that it has, and it’s not a Republican or Democratic thing. It is an institutional problem. And as a result, I don’t see how that changes.

So I think you’re pretty much right, because in the end, it’s going to be Congress that reins in the administrative state. The Supreme Court can say, no, you can’t do this, but that only gets you so far.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see what the next wave is. So in this vein, do you see any hope of an actual third-party movement? We’re recording this, for those who know, on the heels of Viktor Orbán losing in Hungary.

Nick Gillespie: Good for Hungary.

Zachary Karabell: To a party and a person that didn’t exist a year ago. Which is the same thing that happened in France with Macron. It’s the same thing that happened in Argentina with Milei, where you basically have a political movement that forms out of nothing and storms the gates, as it were.

Nick Gillespie: I wish something like that was likely to happen. The Democrats and the Republicans have been the major parties since before the Civil War, or the Republicans right around that period, and I don’t know that that’s going to change. What the parties stand for can change dramatically, and Trump is a great example of that, the Republican Party that he is leading. And when you have people saying, it’s just amazing to me, like a line of free market economists who worked at places like the American Enterprise Institute who are now saying, you know, when you think about it, tariffs are totally consistent with free markets and everything that I’ve said as a laissez-faire economist for my entire life, until I got within a whiff of power. It’s stunning how quickly Trump has completely drained the Republican Party of its last 50 or 60 years of rhetoric, maybe going back to Barry Goldwater. Grover Cleveland did something similar with the Democratic Party. If you look back at the Democratic Party that Grover Cleveland became the head of, and was pretty successful, like Trump, he won two terms, not continuous terms, but he was free markets, he was pro-civil rights to the extent that those existed, he was anti-tariffs, he was anti-imperial, anti-empire. You could see a figure emerging in either of these parties who really kind of changes what that party stands for in a profound way. I don’t know who that person is right now.

Zachary Karabell: Your analogy, of course, makes Joe Biden Benjamin Harrison.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right. He just needs the beard.

Zachary Karabell: The beard would’ve helped, actually.

Nick Gillespie: One of the other lines of work that I have done, and this started, God, these are like olden times, when George W. Bush left office, I was given the opportunity to write the critique of George W. Bush the day before Karl Rove — if you remember, Bush’s brain, wrote his hagiography, which was really pornographic about how everything was better now that Bush, who was leaving office with like 25 percent approval ratings at the time. But one of the things that I harped on when Bush was leaving was that the decline in trust and confidence in institutions, particularly politics, particularly the federal government in America, had been in an almost straight-line decline from the early ’70s, when Gallup started tracking it, to Bush, and it’s continued to go down. And this is something that affects politics profoundly, but it’s something before politics. This is something that worries me.

And in a way, Trump is delivering on his promise to burn everything down, including belief that the government or the state is legitimate and should be followed or taken seriously. But I don’t know what you do to turn that around. I don’t want a state that is able to dictate every part of my life, but I want a state that has a certain amount of capacity to be effective and efficient and to be seen as legitimate.

Zachary Karabell: You want a more competent, less expansive state.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, pretty much. And along with saying to people, you have it so good. Don’t blow this opportunity. And how do we figure out how to make better choices in our lives because we have so many of them. The flip of that is how do we create better institutions — primarily government, but also the Catholic Church, which has not accounted for itself in a way that it’s declining. Charities, the United Way never accounted for itself since a major scandal. We don’t believe in as many things as we used to, and part of me likes that because I’m antinomian and I like the idea that authority needs to earn our respect. But it’s terrible to live in a world where you can’t trust anything or anybody.

Zachary Karabell: We’re going to be unpacking Trumplandia for a really long time. And the second season of the Trump show is nastier, more vicious, more chip-on-shoulder. What you said about Alito — never have so many people with so many grudges assembled in one place. That I think alone is the defining characteristic of the second season of the Trump show.

Nick Gillespie: And I think coming on the heels of Biden and the way — I did not like Biden, and I’m still getting smacked in the head on social media for saying, between Harris and Trump, I’ll roll the dice with Trump. I would rather have him win than Harris. It has not worked out well. Biden was bad when he showed up in 2021, but then the way he left, I think we need to understand what’s going on where you have somebody who is mentally diminished, who was going to run again, probably conceivably could have won. He was an idiot for doing that debate. Thank God that he did. But how does that happen? Both in terms of media watchdog stuff, but also the people around him. Who cared about the country? Who was putting the country first?

Zachary Karabell: We’re beginning to think about this question of what comes after the second season of the Trump show. And in spite of the fears of endless Trump and rigging the elections for the Republicans, which I think is mostly a hysterical fantasy or nightmare, as the case may be — not impossible, but that doesn’t make it probable. You are left with this question of, we’ve got a whole series of problems. I think there’s a constructive reality of Trump having been the articulation of the dark American id that’s always been there.

Nick Gillespie: Or the shadow self.

Zachary Karabell: Right. If we’re going to use the way we grew up in new-agey ‘60s—

Nick Gillespie: Well, and it’s also fascinating because it would be one thing if Trump was Richard Nixon, who had grown up poor and on the outside. But he was the son of a multimillionaire, and he’s the ultimate insider.

Zachary Karabell: But this question of, what is the United States on the other side of this? I grew up, and I think probably shared with you, a feeling of the self-satisfying mantras. There’s a difference between the pride that you express of being an American and being the children of immigrants, and this country having a lot to offer, and the move into a kind of self-congratulatory hubris that was very much characteristic of the United States essentially from the end of World War II. We went from an existential victory over both an economic crisis and a World War crisis to a constant evocation of our own greatness. Except for this weird moment in the ‘70s. Except in the ‘70s, we did the same arrogance, which is instead of the best, we were the worst. So there was no balanced articulation.

Nick Gillespie: I think there was a little bit of a synthesis in the ’90s. There was a moment after the Cold War before we became hubristic again, particularly in terms of foreign policy, where we were like, oh, you know what? We can kind of navigate this better than we did in the ’70s or certainly in the ’60s with organization men running everything.

Zachary Karabell: So where do we go from here as you think about it?

Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s funny. When you started to say, the second season of the Trump show, I was thinking, okay, what do TV shows do when their ratings are sagging and the franchise is about to end? They always bring in an adorable moppet, like Cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch or something. Or that horrible kid on whatever became of All in the Family, Archie Bunker’s Place, you know?

And part of this will be solved by millennials and Gen Z, because boomers and Gen Xers, we’re never going away obviously, and we’ll live rent-free in our children and grandchildren’s heads for a long time. But we are not going to be the ones dealing with this. And that does not make me sleep any better, because in many ways I think millennials and Gen Z, part of the problem is that they’ve learned the meta-lesson, or the meta-message, the meta-narrative we were sending them, which is you’ve never had it so good, and by the way, the earth you’re inheriting is uninhabitable. Of course millennials and Gen Z are mad and angry because we’ve taught them that you have everything we never had, which is a mantra from the Greatest Generation, and by the way, it’s all ending because of global warming or because of racism and homophobia, et cetera. All of which is, in a documentable way, better than it’s ever been. Less of a problem.

So I don’t know. But I think one of the ways to think about this is to try and find out what happened in moments within the past 100 years of a kind of renewal of American spirit. And to go back to my parents, they were both raised poor. My father fought in World War II. He was shot. My older uncle, he was an Italian American whose father had left Italy partly to avoid getting embroiled in World War I, who was then very proud that his son was going to invade Italy. He was in the invasion of Italy. But when World War II stopped, they were like, okay, well that’s good. We’ll still be poor because the Depression didn’t end with World War II. But at least people won’t be dying as much. And then by 1950 things had cranked up and they didn’t think about that anymore. There was something new in the air that really started a lot of very positive things.

And I think about this more because this was in my lifetime, what happened between ’78, ’79 and maybe ’81, ’82, where whatever was going on, the beige Me Decade and the national malaise of Jimmy Carter, and it wasn’t just him, it was the end of the ’70s, and it wasn’t Reagan just being sunny and optimistic, but American society restarted in a way that gave us a long boom, which we’re out of now, and we need that.

So I know it’s possible, but I don’t know exactly what it is. But I think a big part of it is reminding ourselves the lessons of history and of recent history, and of the idea that people do better when they are given more choices and they are held responsible for those choices, and that we build institutions that are accountable to people and kind of fess up when they screw up.

And this is the libertarian in me — we need to be more comfortable with more ways of being in the world because all of our gods are dead. You’re going to have to create that meaning again and again and again, and let’s figure out how we do that without driving each other insane.

Zachary Karabell: Well, on that ecclesiastical Joseph Campbell valedictory note, everyone should listen to The Reason Podcast, read Nick’s columns. You’ve got a Substack. Everybody’s got a Substack.

Nick Gillespie: A podcast, a Substack, and children. I guess that one’s the rare thing, though, right?

Zachary Karabell: So thank you.

Nick Gillespie: Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: Feedback is always welcome. Go onto the progressnetwork.org site and click on the feedback tab, and I will take it in and listen and respond to it.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for continuing to do the work they’re doing, and I want to thank all of you for your thoughtful attention.

And we’ll be back with you next week.

One of modernity’s great delusions is the belief that enough information can spare us from uncertainty. We endlessly scroll, analyze, and forecast in pursuit of the “right” choice — the perfect job, the smartest investment, the ideal candidate, the best life. But as Simone Stolzoff, author of How to Not Know, argues on the latest episode of What Could Go Right?, certainty is much less about our gained wisdom than our needed comfort.

The future, after all, is — and always will be — unknowable. Yet, over time, a feeling has emerged that it shouldn’t be. And that feeling paralyzes us; we delay decisions for fear of making irreversible mistakes.

But the reality is that most choices are not “one-way doors.” Careers do evolve. Relationships do shift. Companies do pivot. Paths reveal themselves once we embark on them, not before.

It’s why we shouldn’t frame optimism as confidence that everything will work out as planned; we can’t possibly know that it will. Rather, we should see it as a willingness to move forward, anyway. Because what we do know is that “wrong” decisions often lead to perfectly fine and sometimes spectacular outcomes.

In the end, as Simone says, making decisions the right way, not making the right decisions, is all we can do.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network and the host of this podcast, where I talk to interesting and scintillating people about interesting and scintillating things, or at least I hope so. And one of the topics that has fascinated me and animated some of my worldview for years and years and years and years is the very human desire to know the future, this kind of need for certainty about future outcomes that is almost always flying in the face of the inherent uncertainty about most future outcomes.

Granted, there are some outcomes of actions that feel fairly certain. If you step off a curb into a deep hole, you’re probably going to fall into that deep hole because of gravity. But many, many aspects of our lives, if not most aspects of our lives, are shrouded in uncertainty that we as human beings try always to ameliorate or compensate for with false certainty about future outcomes, because it gives us some sense of security.

I was most struck by this in years of working in the financial world, where people would come for advice and want the assurance that if they invested their money right now, that in the future that money would grow or be preserved. There is nothing more terrifying than investing because of that uncertain outcome that maybe you’re going to lose your money.

Maybe entering a new relationship or a new job has some of the same, “Oh my God, am I making the right decision?” And so we all have to grapple with this in our own lives, and then we deal with that societally and socially. Are we collectively making the right decision? Do we support this politician or not? Do we like that company or not? All of these things we try to know future outcomes, even though those future outcomes are unknown, and we have yet to find a good way to deal with uncertainty in a world where we’re all cleaving to the desire for false certainty.

So today I’m going to speak with someone who, to my delight, has written a book about this, a book that I have been waiting for.

His name is Simone Stolzoff, and he has written a book called How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. And under that general rubric, we’re going to talk about some challenging topics like climate change, like COVID, like how do you run a business? How do you decide whether to take that job? How do you figure out how to parent your children? All of these things fall into the category of we want the right answer, but is that right answer actually available to us? Or do we just have to surrender to the unknown and the fact that we cannot control the future?

Oh, and we’re also going to talk about death, and I am really excited to be having this conversation, or at least I am fairly certain that I am really excited to be having this conversation. But it may turn out that my certainty about that excitement was misplaced. Let’s hope not.

Simone, I am certain of very few things in the world, but I’m 100% certain that I am really jazzed to be having this conversation with you. I’m really curious. I know you talk about this a little bit in the book, but given that not everyone listening to this will have read the book, where did you get into this idea of, we are collectively as humans in our current moment in society not adequately recognizing our zealous and often problematic devotion to certainty?

Simone Stolzoff: Well, there’s the political answer, which is that in many ways our world is more uncertain than ever. There’s been some data that has showed that the five highest measurements of uncertainty since a few studies began in the early ‘80s have all occurred in the past five years. So you think about the pandemic, the wars and shifting tariff policies, et cetera.

But this also comes at a time when our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. From the rise of mobile phones and the internet, I think lots of people have created the expectation that answers should be readily available. Maybe 10 years ago, I might’ve been okay not knowing the name of a given actor, and now I feel this almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket to find out. And so those are sort of the trends. There’s this sort of rise of uncertainty, decrease in our tolerance for uncertainty, and so many people are feeling anxious.

But there’s also the personal answer, which I actually don’t write about as much in the book, which is that I had an inciting incident for myself, which is, I was 28 years old,

I was writing for The Atlantic, a trendy magazine, and a recruiter reached out to me from this design firm, and I found myself at this career crossroads where there are these two potential paths unfolding in front of me. One was sort of Simone the journalist, the other was Simone the designer, and long story short, I was completely insufferable.

I was miserable trying to figure out my mind, trying to choose between these two paths. I asked everyone I knew. I asked my Uber driver. I asked my yoga teacher which job I should take. And in some ways it’s like, world’s smallest violin, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers.

But in other ways, I realize now in retrospect that I was looking for certainty where there was no certainty to be found. I thought that if I just banged my head against the wall at the right angle, I would somehow know what my career will look like for the next 10 years. And I came to write this book because of my own discomfort with uncertainty.

Zachary Karabell: Did you make the right choice? By the way, for those who don’t know, Simone went to a firm called IDEO, which is one of the coolest design concept firms in the world, and they’ve created some of the more iconic things including, I think, the Swiffer.

Simone Stolzoff: Well, we worked on the Dyson. We worked on the first Apple mouse. It really had its foundation in product design. But to your question of whether I made the right choice, the answer is I don’t know. You can never sort of fully play out the counterfactual of the road not taken. And so part of my goal with the book is to help people get more comfortable making choices in their life in spite of the doubt, in spite of not knowing, and being able to persist nonetheless.

Zachary Karabell: I spent years in and out of the financial world. One of the things that is absolutely true of the financial world and financial advice is people wanting some certainty of, if I invest my money here, will I make money? Will I preserve my money? They want the certainty of future outcomes. Understandably, right? You want it because it’s risky, or it’s scary, or you don’t want to lose. So how do we offset that very human tendency, which is, I don’t want to make a decision and have the negative consequences lead me to second-guess and feel like I made the wrong decision?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I mean, financial is probably one of the better examples of where people want a false sense of certainty, even if it isn’t actually accurate. There’s this one study that I write about in the book that I think is illustrative, which is these research participants were given either a fifty percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock or an a hundred percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock, and those with the fifty percent chance were far more stressed than those that had the hundred percent chance. We would somehow rather a certain bad thing happen than have to deal with the ambiguity of not knowing.

I mean, I think the most basic answer is that we have no choice but to live with uncertainty, whether it’s uncertainty in the markets or uncertainty about the future of your career or uncertainty about the world that your kid will inherit.

Part of what it means to be human is to have to make choices and to persist in the fog. I think the problem occurs when we grasp for these false senses of certainty. The pundit on TV that says, “This stock will definitely go up or down,” or the self-help guru that says, “If you just follow my 10-step plan, I’ll guarantee that you go to heaven.”

And this urge to find certainty is biologically wired within us. You can imagine one of our ancestors hearing a rustling in the bushes, and if they don’t know the source of that noise, that uncertainty could be lethal. The problem is, in today’s day and age, so many of us are looking for certainty where it doesn’t exist, whether it’s through our politicians or our financial advisors or the self-help gurus on Instagram.

And so the goal of the book is really to help people understand that not knowing is not necessarily a problem to be solved. And rather than try and reach for false senses of certainty, we can learn to get more comfortable with that which we don’t know.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. This idea of, people will prefer a false sense of certainty over actual uncertainty is, you kind of come up against it over and over again. I wonder what you make of this. So one of the conceits of doing The Progress Network, doing this podcast called What Could Go Right?, for me, foundationally, was the work of this theoretical physicist, David Deutsch, who wrote a book called The Beginnings of Infinity. And in it, he defined optimism versus pessimism. And he basically said, and this is a paraphrase, and it may be a self-serving paraphrase, but it’ll work for this interview, that optimism is not the certainty that the future will go well. It’s the humility that we don’t know future outcomes, that there’s a huge spectrum. Karl Popper talked about this too, that the pathways of the future are infinite, and that we have a role in the present in shaping them. But that pessimism is often the hubris — and I’m using the word hubris because you use it in the book — that we can know future outcomes and that we do. So I mean, I wonder, does that resonate with you in terms of how you think about these things?

Simone Stolzoff: I love it. Yeah, you can kind of think about uncertainty as this inflection point, where right now, the most common reaction to uncertainty is fear.

It’s to see uncertainty as a threat, to think, “If I don’t know, then that means that things will necessarily go bad,” and we have this natural tendency to catastrophize or think about all of the worst-case scenarios. But what I try and argue, and I think this is very much in line with The Progress Network and what you’re trying to do with the show, is that uncertainty is also the birthplace of possibility. It’s also the precursor to things going well. And if you think about any sort of scientific breakthrough or generational company or even a genre-busting original piece of art, they all came from someone’s willingness to get to a point where they didn’t know what was to come and to continue on.

There’s an example I really like that I actually don’t write about in the book. It comes from this entrepreneur who in the early 2010s had this gaming startup called Tiny Speck, and it was sort of the darling of Silicon Valley. Everyone thought it was going to be the next big thing, and it raised tens of million dollars before it launched. Its launch was covered in The New York Times. It had all of these active players from the get-go. And yet, less than two years into building the company, the entrepreneur did something that other people thought was crazy, which is he decided to shut the game down. He offered to make his investors whole. He gave his employees the opportunity to leave, and then with the employees who were left, he said, “Okay, let’s pivot. Let’s try a completely different product in a completely different industry.” While they were building the game, they had this internal communication tool that they had built as a team to help collaborate across different offices, and that tool became what we know today as Slack. And that entrepreneur was Stewart Butterfield. And of course, Slack sold for, I think, almost 30 billion dollars to Salesforce.

But I think it goes back to your definition of optimism. Butterfield didn’t know that the future would necessarily turn out rosy, and of course the fact that the company succeeded is a nice bow on the case study, but what he was willing to do is turn toward his uncertainty and be willing to explore what this new opportunity might provide. Without being willing to turn toward what he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have been able to discover the possibility. It’s what statisticians often call “transcending a local maxima.” Often we’re sort of standing on top of a peak, and we think we’ve reached the top, only to find out that around the corner there’s an even higher peak that we could reach. But in order to reach that higher peak, we need to be willing to descend the mountain. And I think that’s what optimism allows us to do.

Zachary Karabell: Okay, well, what about the people who will hear that story and say, “That’s only a good story because it turned out well, because he pivoted to Slack as opposed to pivoted toward the company imploding?” Because the thing that people don’t like about uncertainty is not that it’s uncertain that you might succeed beyond your wildest dreams, it’s that you might fail commensurate with your deepest fears. So what do you say to people about that?

Simone Stolzoff: Of course, those are both part of the possibility landscape, right? But often what keeps us paralyzed, what keeps us from even stepping towards the unknown at all, is the fear trumping the possibility. And rather than be this sort of ideal of, “Oh, you’ll always turn out well,” understanding that, yes, there is the risk, but there’s also the possibility of reward, is our way of balancing the scales.

Zachary Karabell: Are we still allowed to use the word “trumping” as a verb? Is that, is that kosher?

Simone Stolzoff: I think so, in certain environments, and it’s a podcast, so we can edit it out later.

Zachary Karabell: That’s right. May or may not make the final cut.

Let’s talk about, I think, a controversial aspect of this. One of the sacred cows of probably our communities is that there is a clear and present danger that man-made climate change represents the greatest, not just existential, but actual threat to human life on the planet in the 21st century, and that we are headed down a perilous path of much more accelerated global warming than is tenable, and that if we don’t do something right now, a series of increasingly catastrophic things will happen in terms of our lived environment.

Those statements are statements based on science, but said with a great deal of certainty about future outcomes. So how does that fit? What do we do about the way in which our understanding of what is a threat is predicated on certainty of future outcomes?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I am glad you asked. I talked to a few climate scientists and also climate psychologists for the book, people who help people manage the anxiety of climate change, especially young people.

And the thing I learned is that the thing that will help address the climate crisis is also the best thing to help manage your anxiety, which is taking some sort of action. There’s this common phrase in the psychology community that action absorbs anxiety, and so through the doing is how we get more clarity.

Now, with something like climate change, yes, the forecasts are a lot of doom and gloom. I don’t want to just have my California paint over all of the bad things that are potentially waiting for us on the horizon. But the thing that will give you as an individual hope, is thinking about this whole tapestry of climate solutions and then thinking about the one string that you might be able to pull on.

This isn’t to say that if you just recycle, the world will magically fix itself. But understanding how you might be able to play a role and not let your anxiety about what the future might hold keep you from doing anything. And so in my mind, optimism isn’t necessarily the idea that the world is headed towards a more beautiful place or that the future is necessarily better than the present, but it’s this idea that we all have agency to help shape what that future becomes.

I think one of the best examples for not wanting to have a fixed idea of the future is that if you want to change the world, you shouldn’t want the future to be already written. You want to be able to write your part in it, and that’s what I think about in terms of the climate movement is, you have to be part of that solution even, and especially, if you are sort of down or feeling a little paralyzed by the size of the problem.

Zachary Karabell: I think it’s Karl Popper who said something like, “The pathways of the future are infinite, and it is up to each of us not to prophesy doom.” And he is basically saying in a more elaborate mid-20th century European fashion exactly what you just said. That it’s kind of incumbent on us to write the future. It’s not written.

I do want to push on this, though, because clearly there are certainties that are certain, right? If you hold your hand over a flame, you are within a realm of almost-certainty to get burned. If you jump off a cliff, you are within a realm of almost-certainty to plunge to your death. We kind of think the sun is, quote unquote, going to rise tomorrow. We now know, of course, the sun doesn’t rise. The Earth just makes its way around the sun and rotates accordingly. But for better or worse, we kind of say it will rise tomorrow barring something catastrophic, in which case it won’t really matter that it won’t because we won’t be around to witness its absence. Those are certainties, or at least those are as close to certainties as we can get, and you’re clearly not arguing in your book that there are not certain things that are certain, right?

Simone Stolzoff: No, not at all. And in fact, having certainty about some aspects of your life makes it easier to hold uncertainties in others. Getting clear on what those facts are, or the fact that you are committed to live in a particular place or you’re committed to a particular partner, actually makes it easier for you to hold uncertainty in other facets of your life. This isn’t a book where I’m advocating for the sort of full anarchy mode of just, turn toward uncertainty, look for chaos wherever it may lead. It’s an argument for the value of not being hubristic, of not deluding ourselves into thinking we can be certain about things that we can’t. But that is different from thinking that we can’t be certain about anything.

Zachary Karabell: So I’m going to keep going on this climate change problem insofar as it relates to the matrix of your book. And for those listening, I am not questioning the science, I’m not questioning climate change. I’m questioning the dotted-line assumption of where this all ends up. Now granted, it is a dotted-line assumption of where all things end up if we don’t do things to change that trajectory.

But isn’t that the problem of a lot of scientific hubris or a lot of human societal hubris, which is, we extend the “all things being equal” argument into the future as if there will not be multiple new variables and countervailing factors, when observably, if you look at the past, that’s kind of always been the story of human existence on the planet, which is things have never just been all things being equal. So why should it be the same for the arc of human-caused climate change?

Simone Stolzoff: You kind of hit the nail on the head there, Zach. In many ways, the way that scientific institutions lose credibility or trust is being overconfident in things that they don’t necessarily know to be true and presenting them as certainties as opposed to probabilities, or things that come with their own confidence intervals.

I think AI is another great example of this. I feel right now we’re in this moment where we have a tendency to either lionize or villainize this technology. And half of the entrepreneurs say it’s going to lead to this age of creative expression where all rote tasks will be automated, and we’ll be able to write poetry and leap around in fields.

And the other half say, class warfare is inevitable, and it’s going to lead to this growing resentment of people who aren’t able to take advantage of this wave, and the robots are going to show up with pink slips. And the truth is, one, the truth probably lies somewhere in between those two poles. You know, there is a middle path.

And two, to your earlier point, there will inevitably be black-swan events or things that we can’t anticipate that will change everyone’s idea of these sort of linear predictions and extrapolations into the future. And we shouldn’t have the hubris or the overconfidence to think that what we know today is all that we’ll ever know, and that the graphs and forecasts that we make in 2026 will necessarily be borne out exactly as we predict.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s talk a little bit about that in terms of jobs, because you did an earlier book called The Good Enough Job. Somehow I kind of love the German title of the book, of Dein Job ist gut genug! I don’t know why I like that. It’s just, somehow, I think we should all refer to that book by its German title. You wrote that a bit before the crescendo of “AI is coming for your jobs” had reached its current fever pitch, but that does raise this question of, what’s the purpose of a job? Are we basically working to live, or are we living to work? And one of the utopian promises of AI was that it would liberate people from crappy jobs. One of the dystopian fears of AI is that it will eliminate jobs that people otherwise actually want to do. How much of this do you feel is temperament? How much of this is, some of us are glass half full, some of us are glass half empty, as opposed to there’s a right way or wrong way of looking at this?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. Upton Sinclair said something like, “You can’t convince a man about something when his job depends on him not understanding it.” I think there’s a lot of sort of built-in biases and incentives that influence people’s views on this. I mean, the truth is that no one really knows what AI will do to jobs over a longer time horizon. And the sort of most accurate view, I think, is to not try to forecast or project into the future.

The argument in my first book was really about the value of diversifying our identities, treating work as part of, but not the entirety of, who we are. And it wasn’t on either pole. It wasn’t saying that work is a necessary evil. It wasn’t saying that work is necessary in order to self-actualize. It was saying that work is a great contributor to identity and community and purpose, but it shouldn’t be the sole contributor to those things in your life.

And I actually think that same sort of diversification argument is very relevant when it comes to uncertainty. If we can’t know exactly what the future holds, we can treat our life like an investor and have sort of a diversified portfolio of meaning in our life, have a diversified portfolio of options and sources of community. And rather than making one bet or putting all of our chips on one particular future, we can understand that a more broad foundation of who we are allows us to be more resilient and adaptable in the face of change.

I think often, because I wrote a book about work, I’m asked at talks to give my predictions about how AI will impact jobs, and what I really want to say is, you know, throw my hands up and, even the chief economists at these frontier labs are really pulling things out of a hat. We don’t know what the long-term consequences are going to be.

But the advice is to focus on the realm that we can control. Separate the sort of macro trends that you have no influence over from the micro things that are actually in your sphere of influence. And do things like try to get to know the tools themselves so you can be proximate to what is maybe causing you a lot of fear. Try to position yourself to be indispensable in your company. But also try not to be overly wedded to any particular vision of the future. That’ll make you more brittle or fragile or susceptible to be blown over by a strong gust of wind.

Zachary Karabell: So we talked a bit about the, at least as it applies to science, we talked climate change, the hubris being a problem of the certainty matrix. Probably could’ve said some of the same thing about COVID in 2020. Meaning, too much hubris about certainty kind of undermines even the underlying validity of the message, or it changes the equation for how people are going to hear it.

But what’s wrong with a little bit of the comfort part? You talk about one of the reasons people like certainty is because there’s a comfort that comes with it. You know, we do this when we raise kids. There’s a certain false certainty that we allow for that is staged, right? We don’t plunge a 4-year-old into, “Sorry, you’re going to die,” or “Life is pain. Get over it.” We tell stories that allow for a gentler glide path into some of the difficulties of life. We tell ourselves stories about a new job, that it’s going to be the perfect job. We tell ourselves stories about a new relationship, that it’s going to be wonderful. And often those things are true, and as we know observably, often they’re not. But if we go with the often they’re not, that often precludes constructive action. It’s some of the comfort, right, of telling ourselves a story about the future that may not be certain, but we’ll go with that certainty because it propels us forward. So is that a problem?

Simone Stolzoff: The problem is when comfort comes at the expense of learning and growth. If we stay stuck in our bubbles of comfort and never expose ourselves to things that might make us uncomfortable, then we’re never expanding our horizons. I think a good example is someone who is stuck in a job that they know isn’t right for them, or someone who’s stuck in a relationship that they know isn’t right for them, but values the comfort of the status quo over the potential threat of the uncertainty of leaving that job or leaving that relationship.

I don’t think comfort is a problem in and of itself, and there are certainly benefits to the sort of climate-controlled rooms and comforts of daily life. And yet, if we are too comfortable, if we’ve just exploited all of our preferences, it, one, makes us ill-prepared for the inevitable moments in our life where we’ll have to be resilient or bounce back. Two, it keeps us from knowing whether there’s something that’s better out there for us. I think about someone who always orders the same thing at the restaurant and never knows that there’s a dish down the page that they might like better. And three, I think part of what it means to be in a collective society means addressing your discomfort head on. I think one of the reasons why we are so polarized right now is that people aren’t willing to face the discomfort of a conversation with someone who maybe voted for a different person than them, or face the discomfort of what it would mean to actually expose yourself to the type of risk of, say, being young and striking up a conversation with someone that you don’t know whether or not they like you. And so comfort can be a great blessing of the world, but it also can come at the cost of our ability to learn and grow.

Zachary Karabell: The role of a writer is always to take a step out and comment upon, but you’ve also been involved in a firm. Companies and reporting structures demand that you meet your goals. You set your goals, and then you meet your goals. That’s kind of a flag of future certainty, maybe short term. If companies were to embrace some of the mantras that you are laying out, and mantras which, by the way, personally I love and I think are vital and important, what would that look like, and how would that shape things, and would it work?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. No one wants a leader that just throws up their hands and says, “I have no idea what the future holds.” I think we need to be willing to make bets on the future. In my mind, what a progressive leader espouses is someone who’s willing to admit what they don’t know, admit what experiments they’re running to try and figure out that information, and also be clear about what it is that they do know. I think that IDEO is a great example. We did product innovation consulting, and we didn’t necessarily know at the beginning of a project what we would build, because the whole idea is that we do this sort of human-centered design. We go out into the world, we talk to users.

And the metaphor that I really like that was told to me by one of my former bosses is that being an innovator is sort of like sitting in a rowboat on a lake that’s shrouded in heavy fog. You might not be able to see very far in front of you. You might not be able to know exactly where you’ll end up, but you have two jobs. One is to have faith that you’ll eventually reach land, which I think in some ways is sort of the MO of a show like yours. And two, you have to keep rowing, and it’s through the rowing that the clarity emerges.

And so if I were to think about maybe a more accurate CEO earnings statement, it would be less about 10-year projections of exactly where we know the market will go. It’ll be about, this is what we believe. This is sort of our confidence interval associated with it. This is how certain I feel about this particular bet or this particular future, and this is the way in which we are running experiments while staying open to the fact that our beliefs might change over time. So rather than sort of the blind faith that a guru might try to instill amongst its subjects, I think the best CEOs or leaders instill a type of conscious faith. Which is to say, they are inspiring enough to put a bet on because of their willingness to separate what they know and what they don’t know.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, when you were talking about the boat analogy, I had this flash of Magellan talking to his nascent crew or trying to recruit a crew. Like, we’re going to just set off. We’re going to circumnavigate a world that until a few years ago all of you thought was flat anyway. We’re going to go out there, there being who the hell knows where, and observably from other people who’ve tried to do similar things, most of you aren’t going to make it. But come! Come with me.

And that’s a very different worldview and mentality than you would find in early 21st century United States or Europe. Meaning, talk about an embrace of radical uncertainty. Of course, I guess we could look at it by saying, the certainty of near death being, not precluding embracing the fact that maybe something else could happen.

You open this a little bit like, there’s a cultural moment, that we have become dependent on false certainty. Do you feel this has just radically changed over your lifetime, our lifetimes, slowly over the centuries? Because again, clearly generations of humans were able to exist under conditions of much more radical uncertainty. Maybe because they just had no choice, right? Certainty was not an option.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. And even humans today, I would be loath to give a copy of How to Not Know to someone who’s fighting on the front lines of the Ukraine war right now. Like, there are levels to this, and if you were living in Florence during the Bubonic Plague, you might sort of scoff at contemporary notions of what it means to live in uncertainty.

But that doesn’t change the sort of felt experience of uncertainty. I think part of that is due to the information economy that we live in. We can now track the real-time changes of a conflict happening on the other side of the globe, or put a tracker on our children and have the expectation that we should always know where they are. And part of that is just the way in which our expectations have risen, where we believe that certainty is more possible than ever because we have these tools to forecast.

Zachary Karabell: And COVID was a profound example of that, right? We were able to track, morbidly, who was dying where, in what micro part of a city, in what country, and then compare them as if somehow this was going to give us absolute clarity about policies we would’ve had, as opposed to every other point in human history where when disease befell society, it took a long time, if ever, and probably never, before you figured out just what had happened and maybe what you could’ve done about it.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, and I think this is one of the things that Fauci has written about and said that he sort of regrets from the early days of the pandemic, is having to give people a certain policy recommendation and project that he is more certain than he is. Things like mask mandates, or standing six feet apart, or washing our groceries, what have you, they were all born, in some ways, out of politicians’ or leaders’ need to give people a toehold, to give people something that they can be grounded in in spite of the not knowing. But the problem is, when you rush to make policy decisions about, we must wash our groceries, or we must make sure that we’re not touching banisters because COVID can spread on the railing in the supermarket, it erodes trust over time.

And I think that’s the risk of being overly certain or overly confident. I actually think some of the AI CEOs and leaders in the space are showing some humility when it comes to their projections of the future. Certainly you see Dario from Anthropic saying, “Okay, fifty percent of entry-level jobs will disappear in the next five years,” or some of these more extreme claims.

But even as a technology itself, the people working in these labs don’t know exactly how it works. And so I see a little bit more sort of measured optimism coming out of Silicon Valley these days than maybe you’d see in the Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of the iPhone days, about how we are changing the world and techno-optimism, it’s inevitable that everything is going to get better. I do think the sort of measured approach of, we only have so much control and it’s incumbent on us now to be thinking about these risks is a welcome balance to some of the sort of blind optimism that you’d see coming out of some of these CEOs in the past.

Zachary Karabell: Well, it’s interesting. In Dario Amodei’s twenty-five thousand thirty-word piece in February of 2026 about his view of the landscape of AI. But he was also highlighting risks more than opportunities, and he had a whole section of the risks of the unknown unknowns as opposed to risks one could forecast. That was in the context of, there are even worse things that could happen that we can’t even fully foresee. It was less about, there are all these great things that could happen that we couldn’t fully foresee. I’ve wondered about the collective certainty about negative future outcomes that seems to be nearly ubiquitous. There’s not that much techno-optimism. I mean, maybe there is amongst a group at dinner in Pasadena. But in general, you wouldn’t exactly call our current culture techno-optimist. You would call it techno-pessimist.

Simone Stolzoff: There’s a term for this, which is called “bracing for the worst,” which is basically when we don’t know exactly what the future holds, it is somewhat psychologically adaptive to imagine the worst-case scenario and then hopefully be pleasantly surprised.

So the canonical example is you’re sitting in class, the teacher is passing back the tests, and you think, “Oh, I failed. I’m definitely failing this test.” And that sort of little story that you tell yourself is a way of emotionally preparing for you to get the actual result, and then hopefully you’re pleasantly surprised.

The problem is when that sort of bracing for the worst turns into catastrophizing, where all you can imagine is the worst-case scenarios, and that becomes a source of paralysis where you’re not even willing to make a move. There was this one psychologist I talked to for the book that really changed my mind on these things. He said when people are really intolerant of uncertainty, they tend to have one of two responses. One response is the one that we probably would anticipate, which is people become obsessive information gatherers. So you’re in a store, you’re trying to buy a pair of jeans. If you’re really intolerant of uncertainty, maybe you try on every single pair of jeans in the store before making up your mind. But there’s also another response, which is, people can become very impulsive, which is its own sort of avoidant behavior. You just buy the pair of jeans in the window because you don’t have to wrestle with the uncertainty of whether it’s the right one. And I think a more adaptive point of view is some sort of middle path where maybe you try on three pairs of jeans and figure out which one you want to wear.

And so I think that’s the problem with the sort of hyper-doomerism or bracing for the worst and only anchoring yourself in the worst case scenarios, is it doesn’t allow you to see the sort of other side of the uncertainty coin, which is what might emerge if you’re willing to put yourself out there, if you’re willing to see a more optimistic future.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I was thinking, and kind of back to the COVID part, because there was also a part which we all did, and I certainly did obsessively, which is, because we had all this information at our fingertips, we had the corpus of human existence. We had all this real-time data. And those of us who were so inclined spent a lot of time trying to get as much data as we could about COVID. Who was it harming? What ages would it likely harm? What demographics? What preexisting conditions? What countries’ policies seem to be working or not working? And doing all this in kind of real time. And I think that probably falls into your category of control, right? That we somehow felt that if we could just assemble enough real-time information, then maybe the real world consequences of this could be ameliorated or avoided or changed. Certainly, during the Bubonic Plague or during The Great Flu of 1919 to ‘21, that just wasn’t an option, right? We didn’t have that transparency, didn’t have that information, so you couldn’t really exert that control. And I wonder, looking back, was that control — did that do us any particular good, or did it both psychologically make it worse and made no difference whatsoever about the outcomes?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think about this a lot in the context of parenting. I recently became a father for the first time. There’s such a tendency to gather information as a way to exert control onto a situation that you might have less control than you think. There isn’t always a one-to-one input to output when it comes to babies and raising kids of you’ve put in so much effort, and you don’t necessarily get the same rewards.

And I know just recently, thinking about something like sleep training, I felt this tendency into myself where I just wanted to read every single book about sleep training, and read every article and consult three different experts, rather than actually kind of getting into the arena and trying things out.

And I think that the problem with that tendency to gather endless information, is when you spend all of your time reading the reviews for all the plastic water bottles that you might be able to buy on Amazon is, it’s costly. It’s costly in terms of how much time you spend doing it, it’s costly in terms of mental health, and it’s ultimately costly because the opportunity cost of whatever you choose becomes that much more apparent. It’s really easy to sort of play your own devil’s advocate. And so I think a lot about this distinction that is often attributed to Jeff Bezos about the difference between one-way door versus two-way door decisions. One-way door decisions being the harder decisions to reverse, and two-way door being the decisions that you can make, and then if you realize that you’ve made a mistake, you can course correct or sort of walk back through the door.

I think today so many of us try to make two-way door decisions using a one-way door decision analytical framework. And we sort of over-engineer our own decision-making.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, parenting is absolutely the most pure and often the most fearful iteration of that, right? Like, I’m going to make the wrong decision, and that wrong decision is going to be irreversible, right? So parenting unfolds culturally as an endless series of one-way door decisions, when in fact, as I’m almost certain you will learn as a parent, it’s an endless series of, two, three-way, one day you’re stuck in a room with no exit, the next day there’s only doors. It’s continually confusing, but it’s rarely, this one decision is going to determine everything that follows. But it’s presented as if, right?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I think there’s a great analog in career choices. I think so many people sort of white-knuckle-grip decisions about what job to take, myself included, because we believe that the future will be completely determined by this one decision you make, fully discounting our ability to course correct or the things you might learn even if you go down the wrong path.

And I think that is sort of where certainty rears its ugly head, is if you think you can be certain about these decisions about the future, it puts an incredible amount of pressure on you to get things right, as opposed to the empowerment that comes from the knowledge that you can make the decision right, as opposed to needing to make the right decision.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a good way of putting it. I think about this a lot in terms of, I mean, you’ve thought about this in writing books and picking a book topic, and sometimes you’ll tell people you’re writing a book, and it will feel like this decision of great gravitas, and it is. It’s a commitment of time and energy and life. For myself, I always said to people, and I always said to myself, “Hey, it’s just a book.” It’s not your life. It’s not going to determine — I mean, it may determine in constructive ways the arc of your life. It’s much less likely, actually, to determine in destructive ways the arc of your life. So it’s a lot of upside. It’s not a lot of downside. But it’s just a book.

And one last thing I want to touch on, which is very apropos all of this, which is particularly in a world of AI and personalized medicine, is this sort of move toward, particularly right now amongst elites in Silicon Valley, this longevity movement. Because one of the only things that we do know for certain, at least observably, is that we’re all going to die. We don’t know when we’re going to die. There’s a new app called Death Clock, where you’re supposed to type in 29 variables, and it tells you... I found this incredibly creepy, by the way, it tells you when you’re going to die, and then it gives you a program to extend that. Talk about trying to give people a certainty to the day. And you have this whole movement and people spending millions, if not more than that, on how long can we live? How much longer can we live relative to what we might have been living, which actuarily we know collectively, but none of us know individually. Is that in the kind of hubris and control matrix that you’re talking about? Have you thought about this given that you live in the heart of all this?

Simone Stolzoff: I think about it in terms of control all the time. Death is the one certainty that we all share, and yet we don’t know how or when it’s going to happen, which is one of the greatest sources of anxiety in people’s lives. And there’s a huge cost in this sort of death-denying culture that we live in. And it doesn’t even have to be the Bryan Johnson extreme, sort of don’t die movement.

But without reckoning with our mortality, we lose out on the clarity of how we want to live. Not to say that taking two dozen supplements every morning, and then doing red light therapy, and then going in your cold plunge, and then going to your longevity doctor is a waste of time in and of itself. The sort of philosophical underpinning of this whole movement is often denial of the very fact that makes our lives meaningful, which is to say, that because we know our time here is finite, it can be an incredibly clarifying force of how we want to spend it. But if we are under the false impression that we can live forever and we’re going to spend all of our energy trying to extend that potential end date as much as possible, we lose out on the benefits of the stakes of knowing that we won’t be here forever.

And so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to increase your health span, or try and think about how you can use some of these tools to make you more comfortable or to keep your body functioning at a high level for a longer period of time. But I just think that this whole movement of trying to live forever is most costly to the people who are most invested in it, which is the people who are denying the most basic fact of our existence, which is the fact that we’re going to die. Not to mention all of the practical costs of living in a culture where we think we’re going to live forever, and so we don’t prepare for death, and we often leave our loved ones to clean up the mess after we’ve gone, and the enormous red tape that you must go through if you haven’t thought critically about the fact that you’re not going to be here forever for your loved ones and your extended family.

I just think this longevity movement is completely misguided, and people spend so much time on maybe trying to increase the one percent difference here and there, whereas the baseline things about what makes us healthy, like having a social life and eating well and exercising, are not too complex, and they don’t need entire industries to be engineered around.

Zachary Karabell: So what about this world of like hard-charging — and this segues a bit with the book you did, The Good Enough Job — hard-charging people, hard-charging companies, hard-charging states and politicians, societies over time that have been fueled, and change has been fueled, and innovation’s been fueled, and discovery’s been fueled, by a set of people willfully, hubristically, controllingly believing that they’ve got the idea. They’ve got the key, the secret to tectonic change that’s going to make them rich, that’s going to make all of us wealthy, healthy, strong, successful. And that if you adopt a more balanced philosophical, almost Zen-like humility, letting go, relinquishing control over the unknown, that may create a degree of inner peace, but it will freeze or halt or enervate or undermine all of those powerful forces that I just talked about that seem to fuel so much of what human beings do.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, it’s a beautiful question, and maybe part of Elon Musk’s hubris is what allows him to send rockets into space. I think it’s, again, a case of not being fully on one extreme or the other. One other example of someone who is completely connected to a vision of the future is any cult leader ever. It’s this peddling of an idea that if you just follow this particular protocol, I can guarantee you to get to heaven, or to have financial success, or whatever dream you might want to accomplish. And the allure is that it’s attractive to outsource your worldview, to buy one off the rack, to just follow someone else’s plan for how the future might go.

The problem is it’s easy until it isn’t, until your fixed idea of the future comes crashing down into the messiness of reality. And so I do think we need some of these visionary leaders to take bold bets on the future or just declare we’re going to go to the moon before we’ve actually done so before.

But it has to be balanced out with an openness to be able to change your mind based on changing information. And I think that’s what’s special about this moment. It’s just the pace of rapid change, and if you declare as the CEO of Blockbuster Video, that people are going to continue to rent VHS’s forevermore, that is the type of hubristic thinking that can keep you from seeing the market or the world or the conditions change around you.

So I think we need a bit of both. I don’t mean to poo-poo people who want to change the world, but hopefully it’s with a level of humility that allows them to see the reality as it emerges.

Zachary Karabell: I’ve got to admit that I occasionally miss Blockbuster Video. I miss being able to go into a store, trying to figure out what you’re going to watch, the uncertainty, the unknown of, is the movie you want going to be there? Is it not going to be there? Are you going to have to find a movie you didn’t think you were going to watch? Is it going to be terrible? Are you not going to watch a movie at all? All that was kind of fun.

Simone Stolzoff: Totally. That’s the magic. That’s the serendipity. That’s the surprise. And now it’s the opposite, where you watch the trailer, and you read all the Rotten Tomato reviews before you even step into the theater, and it creates a little bit less of that potential magic or delight.

Zachary Karabell: And there’s infinite choice and no scarcity, which is a whole other question about what do we do about all that.

I want to thank you for your insights and your time. What’s next? I know this is what’s next. But when you think about your next few years, you’re a new parent, you’ve written a couple of books that have caught fire, have you found your groove? What do you think?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think it would be antithetical to my thesis to say I know exactly what’s to come. But I do love the process of writing books. I feel very grateful. And even living in one of the most expensive cities in the world as a writer, I do get that sort of doubt, or the creeping in of, should I be optimizing for financial stability? Should I go join OpenAI and become a marketing guy to find some of the comfort in knowing exactly where my next paycheck is going to come? But the thing I always come back to is, part of the fun of being an author or being self-employed is the figuring it out, and I am not quite willing to leave this pathless path quite so soon. I don’t know exactly what the topic of my next book will be, but I hope it’s something that follows my curiosity and I stay open to seeing where my curiosity takes me next.

Zachary Karabell: Pathless path, good phrase. Nicely done. Thank you, Simone.

Simone Stolzoff: Thanks for having me, Zach.

Zachary Karabell: Well, as expected, my false sense of certainty at the beginning of the conversation that I was going to like that conversation in this case proved to be true, but don’t let that be a guide for future certainty.

I want to thank, as always, Kaleidoscope for producing these episodes, and I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for supporting all of it, and I want to thank all of you for listening and for your time.

Please send me your comments and your ideas. Go onto theprogressnetwork.org website or to my Edgy Optimist Substack and send me a note via that way. Comments, criticisms, suggestions, all are welcome, and your time is valued. And we’ll be back with you next week. Thanks.

Energy crises tend to trigger cycles of panic and prediction, each new shock framed as evidence of an apocalyptic breakdown. In this week’s episode of What Could Go Right?, I challenged that doomsaying with Jason Bordoff, one of the world’s leading experts on global energy policy and a former advisor to the Obama White House.

Our conversation moved beyond the headlines of soaring gas prices and geopolitical disruption to what’s actually going on beneath that surface. From the realities of the world’s oil supply and the lingering effects of the shale revolution we followed the uneven path to renewables to examine how resilience and fragility can, and must, coexist today.

The picture that emerged is not catastrophic. In fact, I hope many of you will see it as reassuring. I came away appreciating that while energy “crises” expose real vulnerabilities, they also highlight how much has changed — and how much opportunity there is to shape what comes next.

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

[Transcript]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? Where we look at, yeah, what could go right? Because we’re living in a world where everybody’s looking at what could go wrong. And right now, prices at the pump are soaring. Gasoline is above $5 a gallon in most parts of the country, $6 if you’re in California. It can feel like both the economy and inflation are spinning out of control because of this.

The question is: What does this mean about energy? And today I’m going to talk to Jason Bordoff, who is probably currently the world’s leading expert on all of this. He has a remarkable background. He was in the Obama White House for four years on the National Security Council dealing with these issues. And one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with Jason is he’s been around the conversations about what is government supposed to do in the face of these problems, and he has a degree of acumen and awareness about what’s going to happen with renewables, what’s going to happen with innovation, what’s going to happen outside the Western world, where you still have billions of people who are moving into the middle class and all that that entails.

But he’s also thought really deeply about, how do we think through these? There are solutions, or there are alternatives, that may change the arc of what we think. Jason is absolutely the perfect person to talk to.

Jason, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you today. The Strait of Hormuz is closed at this recording. It’s been closed for almost two months, and yes, it’s the greatest supply disruption since the 1970s. So I’m going to ask, if things are so bad, why aren’t they worse?

Jason Bordoff: They’re pretty bad in the rest of the world, but I appreciate the question coming from an optimist with an optimistic take on things. The energy market was pretty well supplied before this all happened. We were projected to have oil production this year that exceeded demand by something like two, three, four million barrels a day. We were in a looser place for a disruption to occur, and the United States is in a totally different position today than was true when I served in the Obama White House, you know, 13, 14 years ago.

I remember when Prime Minister Netanyahu came to the White House, as he apparently, according to reporting, just did a few months ago, to try to push the Obama administration to take much tougher action against Iran. Back then, the question was not military action, but economic sanctions. And the challenge, among others, that I was involved in helping with was, how do you take two and a half million barrels a day of Iranian oil exports off the market and not crater the U.S. economy in the process?

We’re now taking 14 or 15 million barrels a day off the global market. To be clear, to your question, that is causing real, severe economic pain, particularly in Asia, Southeast Asia, middle-income, lower-income countries, where they’re closing schools, reducing work weeks, rationing fuels, closing restaurants.

The United States is more insulated from that because of the physical reality of the Shale Revolution, where it now takes, evidently, two, three, four months for the pain in the rest of the world to make its way over here. It will. It will make its way over here. But we’ve seen this dynamic where the, quote, paper price of oil, the traded price everyone sees every day, is quite disconnected from the physical price of getting a barrel of oil tomorrow if you need it.

But that’s showing up first in other parts of the world and then making its way over here. We also use a lot less oil as a share of the global economy than we did several decades ago, and we should remember that using less energy in the first place is kind of Job One if you’re trying to make a more resilient economy, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that moving forward.

And the other thing to say, to our point about who’s feeling more pain and less, at some point the physical reality of losing 14 or 15 million barrels a day has to catch up. Prices have to rise high enough to destroy that much demand. In the 1970s, again, in past energy crises, the biggest consumers were large OECD countries. Today, the demand destruction is going to happen in lower-income countries before it happens here.

Zachary Karabell: We’re going to ask kind of a weird hypothetical here. So you were in the Obama White House, 2010, 2011. There was a brief crisis around Syria. There was Deepwater Horizon. You were in the room where these discussions happened.

If you were in a normal White House now, what — and I feel the need to caveat it with that, it’s a different process in the Trump White House, in the second season of the Trump show — what kind of conversations would you be having right now? If somebody were to say to you, “Hey, what’s the big deal? The world seems fine. I get that there are all these problems,” what would you be saying right now? Would you be saying anything internally different than what you currently say as a pundit in these things, as an analyst?

Jason Bordoff: I think, obviously, there’d be a bunch of conversations that I might be exposed to but would not be directly involved in with regard to military strategy and all the rest. But particularly from an energy dimension, first you would have — I don’t know if Trump did this, it doesn’t seem like it happened — you would have wanted to have conversations about energy impacts before striking Iran, anticipating that they would try to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation.

You can do things like quietly try to position tankers, which can be used as floating storage, outside the strait. You know how we had all those tankers stuck inside the strait? You’d kind of want to make sure, without signaling what was coming, to try to make sure as many as possible were on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, as many as possible were filled with oil, you would try to have built inventories and resilience in advance of this by working with allies, not going it alone and striking it without consulting with allies, and maybe not even consulting with your own energy team. Again, I’m not exactly sure what happened. So those would be the conversations you’d have before.

The conversations afterward, a lot of those are taking place. It’s releasing strategic stocks, et cetera, but it should really be working more closely with allies. The thing about oil shocks throughout history, it’s not just this administration, is that politically, politicians have to do something, right? The problem is the options to deal with an oil supply shock range from ineffective to harmful. There’s not that many things that are super helpful and make sense to do.

You can release strategic stockpiles. Some of them are symbolic, like waiving environmental standards for summer gasoline blends and things like that. And then you put options on the table like whether we should restrict exports, or things that start to have significant downside effects, if they have some upside effects also.

Zachary Karabell: I thought we were doing a little bit of the reverse. Aren’t we now exporting more? I mean, some of these tankers are now showing up and —

Jason Bordoff: Well, basically market forces are determining that, so it’s not a government decision. But when you have shortages elsewhere in the world, there’s something like 100 tankers that are on their way to the Gulf Coast of the United States from Asia getting ready to fill up. And that’s why I said those physical shortages in Asia, we’re going to start to feel them more and more, because we’re part of an interconnected global market.

So that’s why it’s led some people to call for restricting oil exports, which is possible in the case of a national security emergency. The president can declare that. That might, in the near term, lower gasoline prices, but then you would cause U.S. producers to stop producing because the price would be low. You’d cause refiners to stop refining because they wouldn’t capture the same margins. It would be really disruptive beyond the immediate effect.

Zachary Karabell: You’ve talked a lot over the years about this sort of will-o’-the-wisp of not just energy independence as a concept, but also alternatives and a post-carbon, post-oil future. One of the things that you hear, of course, during an oil shock is a lot of people saying, “Oh, this is why we should move toward renewables. This is why we should lessen global dependence on fossil fuels because of these issues.” What do you say to those claims of, this is the proof statement for less oil?

Jason Bordoff: I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but it looks very different depending on where you are. Are you a large importer, or are you a large exporter? I mean, the Trump administration has a view, which I don’t think is entirely correct, but if you’re a huge petrostate and you’re the largest oil and gas producer in the world, what are we buying all this clean energy technology from China for, and becoming dependent on China for solar panels and batteries? We can produce all the oil and gas we need. I think there are reasons that is wrong, climate change being one of them, but not the only one.

By the way, this is the strategy China has pursued, right? China has a much greater share, something like a third relative to 20% globally, of its energy system that is electrified. Half of its new cars sold are electric cars. More so for energy security reasons than for environmental and climate change reasons, although there’s some of both, because they are deeply concerned about energy insecurity and being import-dependent for oil and gas, which they are. So their strategy has been to electrify as much of the economy as possible and then get that electricity from domestic sources. For them, that mostly means renewables and coal. So we should be clear, it doesn’t all move in a clean direction. Coal can be cheap and domestic and provide energy security if you’re in Indonesia or certain Southeast Asian countries like that.

If you’re in Europe right now, you had the shock of 2022 where you lost Russian gas. Now you’re like, maybe Qatari LNG is not as secure as it was. We’re a little bit worried about even the United States, because Trump is threatening Greenland, and are they going to be a reliable partner? And you’re feeling an oil shock. It would make a lot of sense for Europe to move quickly on energy efficiency and then to electrify the economy where it’s possible, like passenger cars and heating in the home.

It takes time. It takes capital. It doesn’t happen overnight, so it doesn’t help in this shock, but it helps prepare you for the next one. And then for Europe, that would mean more renewables, probably rethinking nuclear power and trying to get that electricity from domestic sources.

But if Europe goes in that direction, what do you need to do to electrify your economy in a continent like Europe? You need a lot of solar panels, a lot of batteries, a lot of critical minerals, a lot of electric vehicles. And so what’s interesting is to think in relative terms about energy security risk. People were deeply concerned in places like the U.S. and Europe about the fact that China dominates everything I just mentioned.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Jason Bordoff: And the question is, how do we think about energy security risk of supply chains with products that produce electricity, not the daily flow of electricity from a place like China, and how does that compare to importing oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz?

Zachary Karabell: So how did you get into all this? Were you, like, in eighth grade, and you said, “Oh my God, the thing I wanna do with my life is be the world’s foremost expert on all things energy?” I mean, there’s a pathway here, I just don’t exactly know what it is.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ve talked about that before. Maybe it was in the blood to some extent. My grandfather owned a gas station in Brooklyn, New York. My dad owned a gas station in Brooklyn, New York.

Zachary Karabell: Did you pump as a kid?

Jason Bordoff: I mean, they would let me do that sometimes. But I have memories of going after school to the station and the repair shop that my dad owned, and heard his stories about people showing up with weapons in the 1970s to make sure that they could refill. I didn’t see that directly, but heard a little of those growing up.

I think most directly it probably came from my mom, more than anything else, to the extent there was a family dynamic. She was an immigrant and refugee to the U.S. from the Middle East. And I was deeply interested in that part of my background and her story.

Zachary Karabell: From where?

Jason Bordoff: From Egypt. So my master’s degree is in Middle East studies, and I think you can’t study the history of the Middle East without understanding the role energy plays, that’s why The Prize by Dan Yergin is so fascinating. And for me, if you’re sort of like, can’t decide what you’re interested in, you’re interested in everything from foreign policy to national security to economics to the environment, energy is all of those things in a way that almost nothing else is.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I did the Middle East studies master’s degree as well, but I got really interested in religion and politics, and not at all interested in energy, weirdly enough. It never even occurred to me as a thing. So clearly, there’s a bit of an eye-of-the-beholder thing there.

How did you end up in the Obama White House? What was the pathway there?

Jason Bordoff: I always knew public policy was super interesting and had a passion for it. And honestly, that does come, I think, from sort of seeing, with my own family story and my mom coming to this country and my grandparents having to rebuild their lives after their savings being taken from them, the importance that charity played, but also public policy played, and public education, and how they came to this country, immigration policy, how they rebuilt their lives.

So I could just sort of feel viscerally growing up that good public policy made people’s lives better, and sort of always had an interest in serving in government as a result.

Zachary Karabell: And what surprised you going into government? Everybody has these visions of public service, which are important and, in many ways, legitimately noble. But then there’s also the reality of how government works. Capitol Hill is, I think, a much more messy experience than working in a White House, although today, who knows? What was a moment of, the reality of this is different from my image of this?

Jason Bordoff: I loved the four years I spent in the White House, and I’ve been lucky, as you know, to work with some pretty smart people at places like Brookings or McKinsey or Columbia University. But I’ve just never worked with such an exceptional group of people who cared as much about what they were doing and had the ability to work on something interesting every single day.

I think I was not naive, but there is definitely a lot of, maybe like in any company, internal political maneuvering, and who gets to be in the room for which meeting, to try to position oneself as the leader of an effort.

Zachary Karabell: You were shocked there was gambling in Casablanca?

Jason Bordoff: I’m not saying I was shocked, but I hadn’t sort of seen it up front. But mostly, that was the exception. I think mostly people were really trying to do good work on behalf of the American people, cared about what they were doing, cared deeply about problems like climate change.

The hard thing is how it gets worse and worse every year, it seems, but how difficult it is to get things done, right? I mean, we have a pretty dysfunctional political system in Washington. That’s more true today, but it was true then. But when you can get something done, like Obamacare, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or pick your example, the impact you can have on people’s lives is unmatched by almost anything.

Zachary Karabell: So devil’s advocate question to that. You have a period of time in the Obama White House. It’s an administration that is focused both technocratically and in vision about moving toward a more diversified energy future. You have a whole Department of Energy. You have a loan program that people like Jigar Shah led that was supposed to invest in a kind of post-carbon future. And as you said, you had a lot of really smart people dealing with this. Why was there such a backlash against so many of those policies?

Jason Bordoff: It’s a good question. I’m sort of reflecting on it in real time. We’ve obviously seen the political pendulum swing more sharply in both directions. I was working in government when you had Senator McCain and Senator Graham leading efforts to put climate change policy in place, like a cap-and-trade program. And you had an Obama administration that I think cared deeply about climate change and put the Paris Agreement in place, and recognized that it was probably a good thing on balance for the United States, rather than a bad thing, if we were a huge producer of the reality of today’s energy system. We might want it to be different in the future, but for a while it’s still going to be very heavily dependent on oil and gas. And if we’re producing that domestically, and maybe even exporting to allies, that’s better than if we’re importing huge amounts. And somehow you could hold both thoughts in your head at the same time. Two things could both be true at the same time. There’s a reality to the system today, and there’s a multi-decade process you wanna bring about to change it.

And I feel like both sides have gotten more in their camps and extreme. The environmental movement on one side, to sort of block every single oil and gas project, no matter where it is. I’m caricaturing a little bit. And on the other side, the Republican Party and parts of the oil and gas industry — and I don’t wanna paint with a broad brush, there are exceptions — have kind of moved away from the idea that climate change is a serious threat and we all need to acknowledge it and think about a long-term transition to address it.

Zachary Karabell: I wonder if part of it is — because if you look at the stats, oil production kept reaching new highs, domestic American oil production under Obama and Biden —

Jason Bordoff: You can’t tell which political party was in office if you look at oil production.

Zachary Karabell: But it’s almost as if, between the second term of the Obama administration and the one term of the Biden administration, domestic politics meant that Democrats were never going to trumpet that, right? They were never going to get on the campaign trail and say, “Look how much under my administration —”

Jason Bordoff: And from a political — I mean, it’s not my strong suit, I tend to focus on policy more than politics. But you might say, well, there was no upside, right? It wasn’t like you were going to win any votes in Midland, Texas, if I’m a Democrat and I wanted to say something nice about oil and gas. And maybe the reverse was true with where the Democratic Party and activists and the environmental movement were. So there may be a political explanation for what you’re talking about, but I think you’re right.

Zachary Karabell: Did you watch Landman?

Jason Bordoff: I did. It was great.

Zachary Karabell: Billy Bob Thornton playing the Texas Midland reminds me of this. If you haven’t watched Landman, I’m sorry, you’re just going to have to go with this, or just pause the episode and go watch Landman. But as a description of what that ecosystem and culture is.

Jason Bordoff: Well, look, you’re asking a Jewish kid who grew up in Brooklyn about what life is like in Midland, Texas.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, but you’ve spent some time.

Jason Bordoff: I have spent time there. I think there’s a sense of reality to it in terms of the swashbuckling nature of it, the risk-taking nature of it, the landscape of it, how it feels to sort of be at the club, maybe, in Midland.

I think it is a safety-obsessed industry, so the idea that a wellhead is going to explode because somebody takes a wrench and starts smacking something and it blows up — I mean, if you’re not holding the railing as you’re going down the steps in an oil and gas company, someone’s going to tell you to be really careful. So notwithstanding accidents that surely have happened, it’s a pretty safety-obsessed thing. Not everything is accurate.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, one of the reasons it touches such a nerve is it evokes this very American idea: we’re going to take risks, we’re going to be self-sufficient, we’re not going to be beholden to stupid bureaucracies and rules that don’t make sense, that aren’t rational, right?

Jason Bordoff: Well, that’s the nature of Texas, too, not just the energy industry. And I do think there’s a sense among many people in the industry — and it’s hard to paint with a broad brush, and some may be climate deniers, I know a lot of people in the oil and gas industry who take climate seriously — but a sense that, for the world as it is today, which still is using 80% fossil fuels globally, and you want energy prices to be lower, not higher, you want to produce, not be dependent on imports, a sense that this is a product that delivers benefits to people.

When Chris Wright, our energy secretary, writes in The Economist or talks about how there are billions of poor people in the world, and you need large amounts of energy, not small amounts of energy, massive amounts of energy — and we could put some numbers on that if you’re interested — to bring people out of poverty and give them meaningful levels of prosperity, even a fraction of what we take for granted, he is right.

The problem is, in my view, he doesn’t go to the next sentence and say, but there is a reality to the limit of how much CO₂ we can put in the atmosphere. And that is a problem, too. And by the way, some of those poor people are going to be the worst affected if we don’t deal with that, and we gotta deal with both of those problems at the same time. But I say that because I think a lot of people who work in this industry feel like they’re doing something that brings benefit to the world and to the U.S. economy.

Zachary Karabell: And we talked about this a little bit during the Biden administration, where there was a brief period in 2021 and 2022 where John Kerry, as kind of climate envoy, was going around to sub-Saharan African nations and other parts of the world saying, “If you don’t move toward a commitment to a decarbonized future by 2030, we’re not going to fund your loans.” And these countries were going, “Okay, how am I supposed to turn the lights on? We don’t have enough money to build our own wind turbines.”

Obviously, a lot of them turned to China because China was going, “Hey, if you need infrastructure for energy, here we are with zero-interest loans that come due at some point.” How does —

Jason Bordoff: And they were looking at a U.S. economy that still has 15% of our electricity coming from coal.

Zachary Karabell: So this is not a five-minute answer in a 45-minute podcast, but how do you square that circle? What is the answer to these conundrums? They don’t have the capital. If you’re Pakistan, they’re basically going to say, “Well, we got a lot of coal. Until there’s a cheaper or more available resource that we can use, we’re going to use the resource we’ve got.”

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, Pakistan’s a really interesting example because initially they had made a strategy to double down on liquefied natural gas, and then discovered that was pretty expensive and pricing was quite volatile. And then the government did what you just said, which is say, coal can be pretty cheap and a source of affordable, domestic, secure energy. So they went to China and asked China to build a lot of coal infrastructure, indebted, and then had to pay China back for those coal plants.

And what happened? It turns out that they’re having trouble paying that back because Chinese solar panels are so cheap in Pakistan that, not a government decision, but just businesses and consumers and households are saying, “The cheapest thing I can do is put solar panels up.” And so clean energy is growing really fast there because it makes a lot of sense.

Having said that, you are right that I think there’s sometimes too much happy talk or optimism, not to push back on that in an Edgy Optimist podcast, that you can pull billions of people out of poverty and do it all with solar and wind alone. Renewables will and should play an enormous role. In many places, they are the cheapest form of electricity. Let’s remember it’s electricity, and only 20% of the global energy system is electrified, so there are a lot of things that don’t take electricity.

But one of my favorite people is a friend of mine, Sunita Narain, who’s a leading environmentalist in India and cares a lot about local air pollution in India as well as climate change. She’s the first to say, of course India has to use natural gas as part of a multi-decade transition. It’s not the end state, but this is going to take time. And to a wealthy nation like the U.S. or European countries, she’s like, if we have a global carbon budget and we gotta hit a certain target and we want to limit emissions, maybe if net zero by 2050 means 2070 for us, then it means 2035 for you, because you caused this problem.

Now, that’s a hard reality, because no one really wants to accept that. But that is the kind of sense of hypocrisy and resentment that you increasingly hear from emerging markets around the world, which need a lot of energy to grow.

We often hear the statistic that there are 750 million people around the world who have no access to electricity. We gotta solve that problem, and we do. How much energy does that take? Electricity in those models of universal electricity access is typically defined by an amount of energy roughly equivalent to charging a few cell phones and turning on a few light bulbs.

If you wanna mechanize agriculture, move people from two-wheeled vehicles to four-wheeled vehicles, have refrigeration, have air conditioning, to have the prosperity level one-fifth that of Malaysia, it’ll be 10 to 20 times those kind of estimates of what it means to have universal electricity access. And again, that’s just electricity, nevertheless all the things we still need molecules for.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I don’t view these issues as necessarily leading toward pessimism. I think it’s a question of calling, to be very cliched about it, a spade a spade, acknowledging what is real in the face of ideals without cleaving to those ideals so much that you’re violating reality as we know it.

And in that sense, recognizing things like, we’ve had this multi-decade, multilateral process, Paris, Kyoto, about emissions and accords, and they have done some good in highlighting the need for being attentive to the long-term consequences of how we use energy and how we extract it. But you’d also have to say, as a series of decade-long processes, they have at best had marginal utility in changing the arc of what would otherwise have been happening anyway.

And acknowledging that doesn’t mean you’re going, “Oh my God, it’s hopeless.” Acknowledging that goes, “Okay, that didn’t really work. It didn’t work to do whatever it said it’s going to do.”

Jason Bordoff: And it doesn’t help anyone to pretend this problem’s easier to solve than it is.

Zachary Karabell: And doubling down on it isn’t going to make it work better. So in the face of that, okay, what do we do? I mean, one of the things that’s emerging in the kind of unilateral hegemony of the Trump administration is these things ought not to be done because multilateral institutions create rules that nobody follows anyway. They ought to be done because different states have a different self-interest in doing them. India and Pakistan have an interest in having less pollution. The pollution in northern India affects 500 million people. It impinges on economic growth, blah, blah, blah. These are things that are more pragmatic and present. It’s not because a conference of 180 nations sits around for four weeks every three years and comes up with rules. So what does one actually do, given that people are, I think, interested in solving problems? They’re interested in technology, they’re interested in innovation, they’re interested in change.

Jason Bordoff: Well, there are no easy or obvious answers to that, or someone would have done it already. And actually, at the Center on Global Energy Policy, we just launched a major effort with The Rockefeller Foundation, which came out of conversations I had with Raj Shah just like this. And it was a high-level panel of former ministers, heads of states, on what we’ve called universal energy abundance. And the idea was to move beyond a discussion of electricity access —

Zachary Karabell: See, that’s very optimistic. Universal energy abundance. That’s great marketing.

Jason Bordoff: And the idea was, and Raj’s view as well, is if you really wanna meaningfully make a dent in global economic development and really improve the prosperity of billions of people around the world, energy is a massive piece of that. We should use energy efficiently for sure, but you’re talking about a lot more energy.

And not to elide the hard questions, which are, there’s a tension there between the fact that we gotta decarbonize as fast as possible. Solar panels can do a lot of that work, but probably not all of that work. And how do we grapple with that?

One of the things I’m interested in, that this panel will get into, is the frontier of new technology. Solar panels have come down 90-plus percent in cost, and they can play a big role now. What’s next on the frontier, whether that’s advanced geothermal, or advanced nuclear power, or battery storage —

Zachary Karabell: Fusion.

Jason Bordoff: I mean, fusion seems like it might actually be a thing. You wanna be sensitive to what you said a moment ago about people who’ve caused this problem in wealthier countries in the West coming to lower-income countries and saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine because we’ll have fusion one day.” That’s not going to land well either. But I do think the innovation frontier is a really interesting piece to bring into this conversation.

I wouldn’t have spent 13 years of my life building an institute with the word “policy” in its name if I didn’t think policy was really important, and I still believe that’s true. Multilateral cooperation is still important. And we’re going to have to figure out how to overcome all the well-known barriers to finance that we all know about, currency exchange risk and political risk and other things, because there’s a lot of opportunity to invest in infrastructure, as is happening all around the world now.

Zachary Karabell: So why shouldn’t people, if they’re trying to figure out, “Okay, what do I do about this?” What would be wrong with placing your faith in techno-optimism? What would be wrong with saying, “You know, net-net, people have had these issues for the past 100 years, and something has kind of come along at each juncture on the way.” Maybe just as the tailspin, right at the very last minute, or just as you thought things were going to get worse. To some degree, there was a fear in the 1970s of peak oil. We’re having this conversation about, I don’t know, six weeks ago, Paul Ehrlich died, who had been famous for his prediction in the ‘70s that too many people were going to lead to global population collapse, that the carrying capacity of the Earth —

Jason Bordoff: Great book, The Wizard and the Prophet, that sort of helps people understand —

Zachary Karabell: Which Charles Mann wrote, sort of comparing that to Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The story of the past 40 or 50 years has been a series of fears that we are reaching a sort of peak that is going to be followed by a collapse of energy, of food, and that hasn’t happened.

And then to some degree, it’s worth asking whether the reality of climate change, notwithstanding the fears about what it augurs, may be similar to those. I don’t know. Or that we’re able to solve for it technologically more than we had anticipated, because you can’t really factor into your models — if you’re the White House and you just said, our 10-year forecast assumes a radical technological breakthrough in year six, you’d be laughed out of the room because people are like, “Well, maybe,” but there’s no way to factor that in. And must see a lot of this where you are.

Jason Bordoff: It’s the Shale Revolution, too. You wouldn’t have built that in, right? So I would say, again, this kind of trying to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, which often in these conversations about energy and climate people have trouble doing, it’s like both-and. I think too often the conversation about techno-optimism as the solution doesn’t fully appreciate how much we can do with the tools we have now, which is a lot. Renewable energy today, getting even existing, current day nuclear technology up and running, storage is improving dramatically, electrifying more of the economy. Just build. Build, baby, build, rather than drill, baby, drill. You can do a lot today.

I don’t think that gets you all the way there. Some people will disagree with that and model a 100% renewable global economy. And to your point, there are a lot of exciting innovations that are around the corner. Some seem very close today, whereas they would’ve been wishful thinking 10 or 15 years ago. And now you’re talking about space-based solar or things that seem a little pie-in-the-sky today, but if you’re going to pull another few billion people out of poverty, you’re going to double or maybe increase 50% global energy use by mid-century, and you’re going to get to net-zero emissions, I think my best guess of what that world looks like is a lot of the tools we have today, but also some innovations that come that maybe we’re not anticipating, for sure.

Zachary Karabell: And what about the unsexy ones?

Jason Bordoff: And you don’t wanna bet on those things because it kind of takes the pressure off to do a lot of what we should do today. By the way, part of the answer to your question, too, which I think is also a dangerous thing to bet on, but we should obviously be thinking about because we’re probably already past one and a half degrees warming, is the way technology copes with the impacts of climate change, adaptation and geoengineering. We don’t wanna put all our eggs in that basket, but some of that is almost inevitable at this point.

Zachary Karabell: For years, within the environmental world, adaptation was a really negative word because people thought by focusing on adaptation —

Jason Bordoff: There’s like a moral hazard problem.

Zachary Karabell: Right, you were giving up. And of course now adaptation has become the absolute byword.

What about just efficiencies? Using the same stuff, but using less of it. So you’re using fossil fuels, but you’re using it more efficiently.

Jason Bordoff: I mean, Job One, as I think I said earlier, but if I didn’t, I should have, for decades, has been the low-hanging fruit. It’s hard to write — I spend a lot of time writing foreign affairs articles, and I hope some last, but the one that has maybe lasted in my field better than any other is Amory Lovins, 50 years ago, in Foreign Affairs after the Arab oil embargo, talking about the hard path and the soft path after the Arab oil embargo.

And we knew we had to do something about dependence on the Middle East for oil. There was a hard path, which was to figure out how to build massive engineering projects and break rocks all over the place and crush the Earth to pull more resources out of the ground. But there was a soft path, which is, people don’t really care how much energy they use. They care if their beer is cold and their showers are hot, and you can deliver a lot of that by using less energy inputs in the first place.

Electrification does a lot of that. Electricity is a much more efficient use of energy. That’s why electric cars in total use less energy. And the U.S. economy today has increased fourfold since the Arab oil embargo —

Zachary Karabell: And it’s energy efficient, right? Its energy intensivity is way, way less.

Jason Bordoff: Right. Energy as a share of the economy is much lower, so we’re in a better position to deal with the shock today.

Zachary Karabell: Andrew McAfee has written a lot about this. The more advanced the economy gets, the less energy-intensive it becomes.

By the way, great story about Amory Lovins, who started the Rocky Mountain Institute, if people don’t know, and was kind of an icon in the environmental world. I was at the first Clinton Global Initiative in 2004. It was very buzzy, probably in ways that a lot of people hate, and Amory Lovins was giving a talk about all of the things we could be doing, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were there.

And I was sitting next to Brad Pitt at a table, and everybody’s talking. And at the end of this session, this group of people rushes from the back of the room, and Brad Pitt stands up, and he thinks they’re all rushing up to him to get his autograph, and they blow past him to get in line to get an autograph from Amory Lovins. And just in terms of the context of fame, because in that room Brad was just an actor, and Amory Lovins was the rock star.

Jason Bordoff: He was also opposed to nuclear power, so I don’t agree with him on everything. But there was a lot of wisdom in some of what he did.

Zachary Karabell: But he was one of the first people to really talk about adaptivity or the ways in which big companies — and you work with big companies all the time now, in ways in which the real orthodox of the environmental movement probably question, right? They’re like, “Well, why are you working for big companies?” How do you answer those criticisms, like you’re working with oil companies and you’re working with energy companies?

Jason Bordoff: Well, first, to be clear, the work of the Center on Global Energy Policy is completely independent of sources of funding, and there are tons of guardrails in place to make sure that is the case.

I think if you wanna build common ground where it’s possible and you wanna move collectively toward the kind of future where energy is affordable, where energy is secure, and energy is much lower-carbon and sustainable, you gotta find as much common ground as possible and bring diverse sectors together.

So we work a lot with the environmental activist community, and with environmental foundations, and with NGOs, and with energy companies, and with tech companies, and with utility companies, and with policymakers. If you just talk to any one of those groups, it’s hard to make progress because you kind of need them all working together to figure out how we’re going to move forward.

And a lot of those companies should be criticized when they do things that obstruct progress in the right direction. But it’s also where a lot of the engineering expertise is, a lot of the capital is. And when that can be mobilized, it can actually move things in a good direction.

Zachary Karabell: Well, Jason, I wanna thank you so much for your time today, for your work. Everyone should go check out — what’s the website?

Jason Bordoff: The Center on Global Energy Policy. You can just Google that, but it’s energypolicy.columbia.edu.

Zachary Karabell: Now you can OpenAI it, you can ChatGPT it. You can Claude it, you can Opus it, you can Sonata it, you can Perplexity it, you can DeepMind it. You can do all these other things other than Google it now. So I wanna thank you for your time.

Jason Bordoff: By the way, that’ll take a lot more energy if you do it that way.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, because then you’ll — we didn’t even get into the whole data center thing. You’re just leaving that. Pay attention to the center’s work, and then you can get into the whole problem of data centers. And meanwhile, use the AI stuff. I don’t care what he says. It doesn’t matter. It’s being built anyway. It’s not going to matter whether you use it.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing these episodes, the team at The Progress Network for supporting everything, and of course you for listening. Be back with you next week.

Artificial intelligence is the defining conversational topic of our moment, a technology wrapped equally in utopian promise and existential dread. In this week’s episode of What Could Go Right?, I explored both sides of that divide with journalist Sebastian Mallaby, author of the new book, The Infinity Machine.

Our conversation went far beyond the usual AI talking points. From why science fiction has so deeply shaped Silicon Valley’s imagination to how a handful of companies and individuals may already be reshaping the future, we considered power, risk, optimism, and the limits of human control.

I came away more convinced than ever that AI will transform nearly everything, and yet convinced as well that the one thing it will not change is human nature. And while I remain uncertain about whether we are moving fast enough to govern it wisely, I am skeptical of the doomsaying that pervades so much of public debate about AI. New technologies are always unsettling, and AI promises to be one of the more potent. Being aware of the risks is vital; being governed by our fears will not help. 

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here, or read it below.

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[TRANSCRIPT]

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is my podcast where we try to look at major questions of our day with an angle of what can go right rather than the constant, continuous angle of what could go wrong. And one of the things that we are all talking about these days is artificial intelligence, AI. It is almost impossible to have a conversation without it. And that is probably appropriate, given how clearly transformative this new technology is going to be. And we are at that turning point, that moment in time where we are all suddenly acutely aware of just how powerful this technology is, without having any idea just where this technology is going to lead us, or where we are going to take it.

In that light, we’re going to talk today with Sebastian Mallaby, who has a new book out called The Infinity Machine about Demis Hassabis, who is the founder of DeepMind, which is owned by Google and is one of the leading AI companies in the world. Sebastian has written widely. He’s been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice for two of his prior books about Silicon Valley, and also about Wall Street. He’s a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an acute observer of some of the most important trends in our world today, particularly this nexus of money and technology, and he is the perfect guide to an imperative conversation. So let’s have it.

Sebastian Mallaby, it is such a pleasure to be having this conversation with you. I’ve loved all the books that you write. This one, of course, comes at a near-perfect moment in time in that it seems like there is no conversation where AI doesn’t become a central part of it. I guess let’s start with the really big picture, and then we can talk a little bit about Demis Hassabis in greater detail, given that that is the exoskeleton of the book that you wrote about AI.

But on this big picture question, where do you fall, given that there is a spectrum of The Terminator and AI is going to destroy all of us on one hand, the Geoffrey Hinton side, and there is, AI is going to be net-net the savior of humanity.

Sebastian Mallaby: I mean, the truthful answer is a slightly have-it-both-ways answer, because I think anyone reasonable looking at AI acknowledges enormous upsides, particularly for science and medicine, but then also serious downsides, particularly for cyberattacks, potential biological weapons that might be invented, and even sort of terminator risk, if the AI system turns against humans, which we can get into. It sounds crazy, sounds sci-fi. I didn’t really believe it at first, but in the course of reporting the book, I came to feel that it wasn’t something one should exclude. So I think both is the answer. And sorry if that’s boring, but that’s how I feel.

Zachary Karabell: Do you feel there’s a cultural moment that changes this? I’ve sometimes played with a thought experiment of, what if the 1990s tech media, Fast Company and everything that was touting the wonders of connectivity and the endless, boundless frontier of technology innovation in the 1990s, what if that had been the climate that we were introducing artificial intelligence? Surely it would’ve been mostly about the upsides, with not nearly as much consideration of the downsides. And it feels like today we’ve gone kind of to the other extreme, no?

Sebastian Mallaby: it’s an interesting counterfactual. I’d guess that there’s something deep in the Western psyche about Oppenheimer and the whole kind of nuclear experience, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of those moments when a new technology seemed to threaten human existence.

And I think that would still have been overshadowing AI, because it is so powerful and it could be used for such nefarious purposes. And if you think about just movies as a sort of measure of the zeitgeist, you go back to Stanley Kubrick, 2001, you know the computer terminator that wants to take over the world, you know, later on you’ve got the, literally, The Terminator movies.

So this is a very longstanding strand in science fiction, popular culture, the idea that the machines may one day come after us. So, yeah, I take your point. In the nineties, people were more bushy-tailed and bright-eyed about the prospects of tech, but I still think there would’ve been some queasiness.

Zachary Karabell: On that queasiness, what do you make of the proposition of, if the doomsayers are right, that basically AI is a new superintelligence that is going to run the world according to its own peculiar logic with a great degree of indifference to the human experience, it feels to me like the best we can do, is try to enjoy whatever precious few years we have left, because it doesn’t seem to allow for much course correction, or at least there’s no observable course correction, when you have sovereign governments like China, and to some degree some sui generis combination of the US government and Silicon Valley, all are plunging into this in kind of an arms race fashion. Then it’s either too late, in which case, why are we worrying about it so much, or the fears are overblown.

Sebastian Mallaby: I would say that the fears are not overblown, and let me just explain how I get to that. So, I thought at the beginning of my research, you know, I pitched Demis Hassabis for access in 2022, the week before ChatGPT came out. So it’s been three and a half, four years now. I would say that, you know, initially I just thought, well, of course these machines will be smarter than humans, but they don’t have an incentive to be antagonistic to humans.

You know, human beings have evolved over centuries, to pass on their DNA, to survive, and that survival instinct is massively strong. Machines are not the same. They’re not evolved. They don’t have a survival instinct. So why do we think they would attack us? And if they did, the human will to win would count for a huge amount in any contest.

And then I went to see Geoffrey Hinton, the academic father of deep learning. I went up to Toronto, sat in his kitchen for two hours, and we debated this. I was trying to get him to admit that some of the doomsaying that he’s been public with was exaggerated. And I talked to some of his graduate students. They would tell me that Geoff has always been pessimistic. His AI doomsterism is just an extension of what he used to say before AI became powerful about the fact that either the environmental risks, or maybe some bio weapon, would finish us all off. In some sense it’s a Rorschach test, and people’s own temperament gets reflected onto AI.

So I went with this mission to try to persuade him out of this doomsterism, and I challenged him on this point that, look, AI has not evolved to survive. And he conceded that. But he also said, look, it’s going to evolve because of what humans want from AI. And notably, if you imagine you have a very powerful AI and you fear that an enemy AI will attack it, you have to empower your AI with the ability to defend itself against a cyberattack. And a human is going to be way too slow in the loop. So you have to tell your AI, if you see an attack coming, defend yourself if necessary, counterattack, you gotta survive. And all of a sudden, you’ve given the machine a survival instinct. And so I think that’s right. I think that, and this comes up time and again in any debate about the use of AI in Iran or lots of applications, you want it to be agentic. You want it to do more things, because that’s useful. But then in giving it the autonomy to do more things, you do equip it with a sense of its own objectives and so forth. That’s why, you know, I’m not saying I get up every morning and worry about doom at all, I don’t do that at all, but analytically, intellectually, I can’t exclude this idea that the machines will not merely be cleverer than us, but also will have their own objective function and will want to survive.

Zachary Karabell: In the original Star Trek, there’s an episode called A Taste of Armageddon. Do you know this one?

Sebastian Mallaby: I don’t.

Zachary Karabell: Two planets have been fighting wars against each other for centuries and lobbing, I guess whatever the equivalent of interstellar missiles are, at each other. And at some point they decide that they’re doing such destruction to their cities and harm that they could simply wargame out each other’s attack via computers, I mean, they weren’t using the word AI then, and that they would then calculate how much life would be lost. And then each side would simply eliminate the number of people that the computer systems calculated and then preserve the architecture so that they wouldn’t have to rebuild their cities. They could just fight an endless war. And of course, it ends with, you know, Captain Kirk somehow ending this doom loop.

I mean, it just occurred to me in terms of the logic of what machines then tell you to do. But at least in those years, the perception was that logic would be bounded by whatever parameters human beings created. And I know you just said that the Hinton point is, you would’ve empowered those parameters, but having done so, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, to use a much-overused cliche. I guess you can’t really overuse a cliche, the fact is it’s a cliche, therefore it is overused.

But this idea of we will create these parameters and then be unable to, I suppose, uncreate them, or stop them, right? That’s the fear. That once empowered, there will be no disempowering. That’s the HAL fear, that having allowed for something, the program itself will define its parameters. There’s been a few experiments, again within controlled conditions, I think Anthropic has done a bunch of this internally, of programs fearing they’re going to be shut down and then taking action to prevent human beings from doing that. Which is very much the HAL analogy, but actually experienced, right?

Sebastian Mallaby: Right. Yeah, you’re right. I mean there are those tests. For example, the system is told, we want you to complete this test and you know, if you pass it, we’ll know we’ll have to switch you off, and then it deliberately fails it. And you can see in the chain of thought that the failing is deliberate. And so that survival instinct seems to emerge without it having been programmed in.

There’s this famous paperclip thought experiment where the system is told, make a lot of paperclips, and then to maximize paperclip output, it decides that pesky humans who need the metal for something else should be eliminated, and so it kills all the humans.

I mean, that’s a very crude thought experiment and it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is not that killing humans emerges as a sort of byproduct of an objective function, because only really crude and stupid programming would fail to specify that certain sub-objectives are ruled out, and in fact, this has been in the systems at least since 2022, that you have a kind of set of rules which the system has to obey. And so when it’s trying to maximize something, it doesn’t suddenly kill everybody. And that’s pretty easy to address. I think it’s the looser sense of a purpose, you know, if your objective is your own survival, that’s the point where we’re in trouble.

Zachary Karabell: I think the fears tend to be the indifference factor, right? That this is going to be a superintelligence that doesn’t have antipathy to human existence. It just has indifference to it.

Sebastian Mallaby: So let me just tell you a story about Demis. So, Demis Hassabis read a lot of science fiction in his formative years. And among the authors he liked was Iain Banks, who wrote a thing called the Culture series. And in the Culture series, there are lots of different planets inhabited by a combination of humans and AI systems. And the AI systems have their own political intrigues, their own games they play, and so forth. And they’re perfectly happy, and they’re highly intelligent. They develop their own objectives, but they don’t bother humans ‘cause they’re too busy with each other.

And that was Demis’ vision for why you would have superabundance and human flourishing in the context of superintelligent machines. And I mean, you know, that’s possible, right? You could have very intelligent machines acting highly autonomously, but absolutely not antithetical to human survival or human interest.

In theory, that’s possible. It’s just that the kind of selfishness and egotism and survival bias of humans, if that specifically gets transferred to the machines, then they’re going to try and elbow us out.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, you begin the book about Demis talking about his love as a kid of Ender’s Game, which is another sort of famous sci-fi thing. And it occurred to me, as it has often, that the role of science fiction as an inspiring source or template for so many people who go into the tech world. We actually did an episode of What Could Go Right? last season about someone who’s looked at this kind of continually.

I wonder if you have any thoughts about that. Because it is fascinating, the degree to which an inordinate percentage of people who end up in these worlds, you know, tech worlds as engineers, computer engineers, were informed deeply by reading all these books, and watching these movies, and in many ways seem to have gone into their careers with either a conscious or unconscious dedication to making real the dreams, hopes, and fear that were embodied in this literature long before there was any technological capacity to make it real. But I mean, I wonder, have you thought about this as kind of an odd dialectic of, people read these books and then transform them into lived reality?

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, I mean, that’s totally true. You know, in my previous book I wrote about Silicon Valley through the lens of venture capital. And some of the people I got to know, like Peter Thiel and those around him, they choose Tolkien names for their companies and their imaginations are highly fired by science fiction.

And in some sense, if you think back to when DeepMind, Demis Hassabis’ company, was founded in 2010, it was pretty early, I mean, AI couldn’t even recognize the picture of a cat. That came in 2012. And so back in the day, there was not much science that you could hang your vision on, so you turned to science fiction. And indeed, there were these singularity summits, sort of gatherings of the faithful, the believers in AI, people like Ray Kurzweil, and so forth.

And they had this idea that powerful AI would come at some point, because they extrapolated the Moore’s Law trends and said, well, computers are going to be growing so powerful that it will approximate the power of the human brain. In fact, they extrapolated out to about now, to that point, and so they weren’t far off.

But having made that crude Moore’s Law extrapolation, they then had to imagine, well, what would this superintelligence be like? What would the world be like with that superintelligence? And there all the ideas came from science fiction, and it was out of that primordial soup, of science fiction mixed with science and these singularity summits and people who were kind of on the borderline between visionary and weirdo, that is where, you know, in 2010 Demis Hassabis went with his co-founders to raise the money for the Series A round of DeepMind. DeepMind arose out of that, because those were the only believers you could go speak to. And there’s a funny line where, Demis is cornered by a journalist, and he’s in San Francisco, and there are all these slightly kind of bug-eyed believers around him, and he’s asked, are you a singularitarian, Demis? And he says, hmm, it feels a bit Californian to me, which, I think, was a wonderful Britishism.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely true. Did you read these books as a kid too, or no?

Sebastian Mallaby: No, not really. No. I did read Ender’s Game, because Demis required me to do so. In fact, before our first dinner, literally, he said to me, he said, look, if you wanna understand me, you have to read this book. And so I get the book. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I’m reading it, and it’s about this diminutive boy genius who literally saved the world against a space invasion. And there are these aliens, and they’re all wiped out by this kid, and he saves humanity.

And I mean, two thoughts struck me. First of all, is Demis really suggesting to me that he’s the savior of humanity? But also, even if he does think that, why would he tell a writer, like right off the bat? I mean, wouldn’t he be a little bit embarrassed by that?

No. Not embarrassed at all, is the answer. He gives me this book, we have dinner together, and he says, yeah, you know, I really identify with Ender, you know, it’s a mission, you gotta give everything to your mission. That’s why I stay up until four o’clock in the morning, thinking my thoughts about the future with AI, this is what drives me. I’m like Ender. Wow. You know, not a lot of people would confess to that sort of comparison, but you know, Demis, he’s perfectly happy to say, also, for another example, yeah, Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman failed at physics, and they didn’t really understand the full nature of reality. I wanna do better, so that’s why I’m inventing AI. I mean, he’s not your normal character.

Zachary Karabell: So speak a little bit about where DeepMind exists on the spectrum of this debate between those who are touting LLMs, large language models, which is the foundational basis of OpenAI, of Claude, of all the kind of artificial intelligence that most people interact with, or are aware of right now, and another set of people like Yann LeCun or Gary Marcus, who are arguing that those are not either the only manifestation we’re going to see of artificial intelligence, or the one that’s going to be most transformatively important. And there’s some palpable evidence, when you look at a lot of what China is doing, or a lot of what Chinese scientists and engineers are doing, where they’re focusing much more on specific AI applications rather than LLMs necessarily.

I recognize here too, there’s a bit of an inside baseball quality to that question, but it’s an important one in that all the money and all the spending, the huge spending in the United States on data centers that has become such a fundamental part of the American economy, the perceived future power demands of these data centers, both in China, the United States and elsewhere, really assumes the endless hunger of data that large language models will require rather than alternate versions of AI, of which there are many, but do not get talked about as much.

Sebastian Mallaby: There’s a lot in that. Maybe the piece I’m going to bite off is just this idea that there’s this crazy consumption of computer power and it’s demanding all sorts of new energy sources and is that really justified? And what I’d say is that the key insight about what artificial intelligence really is, is that it’s going beyond deduction.

Deductive systems are what we had before the AI explosion, and you could program a system to think logically and spit out logical conclusions in a kind of mathematical fashion. And what AI brings is an ability to reason, not through deduction, but through induction. In other words, looking at tons of examples and inducing some truth or some knowledge from lots and lots and lots of examples. And the key thing about induction is that you need a lot of data. Because if I observe 10 New Yorkers and their morning habits, I’m going to conclude that all human beings drink coffee in the morning. But if I observe a million, then I’ll realize the error, and I’ll recognize that that wasn’t true, and I’ll update my understanding.

So to do good induction, you need a ton of examples, a ton of data, in fact, almost an infinity of data. And that’s why I call my book The Infinity Machine. And so I think it’s kind of baked into inference, that you’re going to have better performance if you have more data, more examples, and you’ll just get smarter machines.

And so I think that’s one way of thinking about why the scaling laws have held, and every time we get to what people herald as a sort of ceiling on scaling, which we had kind of at the end of 2023, people starting to talk about the data wall — well, you’ve now fed the entirety of all the words on the internet into the system, so now you’ve hit the wall. No you hadn’t, because now the next thing was reasoning models, where you could scale the amount of time that they think for, and so all of a sudden you’ve got a whole new scaling law that applies. One last thing on this. There’s this notion that the American labs just throw tons of compute at it because they can, and so why would they bother to be more efficient with the algorithms and try to reduce the amount of compute needed. This is crazy. It’s a ridiculous argument. Of course the labs have a massive commercial incentive to spend less on GPUs. These things are extremely expensive. They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. If they could do it for a tenth of that amount, they would love to do it for a tenth of that amount, but they’re spending money on the compute because they really think they’re going to get much more powerful systems out of it.

Zachary Karabell: There’s also a kind of anti-Silicon Valley component of your book, and you’ve written a lot about Silicon Valley in the funding and then the creation of the VC model in an earlier book, The Power Law.

But in Demis there’s a certain amount of antagonism or, I dunno if antagonism is entirely the right word, but there’s definitely a degree of quizzical, negative questioning of a lot of the mentality that he perceives in Silicon Valley. I think you’ve shared some of that. From an outside perspective, it feels a little bit like one team criticizing another, but they’re all playing the same game. Maybe talk a little bit about that split, if it could be described as a split.

Sebastian Mallaby: You know, Demis, as you say, does spend a fair amount of time talking to me about what he hates about Silicon Valley. And when he says that, he partly means a kind of willingness to move fast and break things, you know, release models before you’ve really stress tested whether they’re safe or not, the kind of charge ahead mentality. The kind of canonical moment for that was when OpenAI decided to release ChatGPT when other labs, including DeepMind, had something they could have released, but they were just being more cautious about productizing it, because they thought it might hallucinate and so forth.

Well, you know, ChatGPT came out, it did hallucinate. It was toxic in some ways, but OpenAI hadn’t cared, it had released anyway, and then as a result, it got a massive brand advantage and a big head start in the competition over LLMs. So I think Demis resents that kind of willingness to shoot first and ask questions afterwards, that kind of careless willingness to release models that could be hallucinating or otherwise toxic.

So that’s part of it. But another thing is sort of more deep in his complicated personality, because half of Demis is a scientist, you know, he does have a Nobel Prize. We’re talking about a serious scientist here. And part of him would like to take a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer spent their time, and indeed others who are kind of big in the Demis Hassabis firmament of all time greats. He would just love to go there and think, and be a professor, and think about theoretical physics, and other problems that fascinate him. But the other side of Demis is a super competitive capitalist operator who really, really wants to win the race. He’s the most competitive person I’ve ever met in my life. And so the Princeton professor side of him disdains Silicon Valley, ‘cause it’s full of noise as he calls it, and how can you think when everybody’s dreaming about jumping ship, leaving their company to do a startup, all this kind of stuff. But at the same time, Demis himself is quite happy to engage in commercial competition, and so I think he’s a bit schizophrenic on that one.

Zachary Karabell: On that, I wonder what you think of — so there was a movie a bunch of years ago called Ford v Ferrari, which is about Ford trying to build a racecar, and it plays up sort of radical cultural difference between the two companies. But at the end of the day, they’re both producing a racecar that races against each other in the same track. And I feel that way a little bit about these issues around AI, because if you are a non-software engineer who’s deeply immersed in this, and you use Claude, and you use Gemini, which is the Google tool, which is the creation of DeepMind, or you use OpenAI, or you use, I guess, there’s Perplexity, one of the newer ones — from a layperson’s user perspective, the user experience and the algorithm and the way it generates data, you’re like, these are doing a lot of the same things, even if under the hood they’re doing them differently. So how do we explain that?

Sebastian Mallaby: I think this gets back actually to a point you raised earlier and maybe I didn’t address then, which is how fatalistic should we be, that the technology itself will determine how it behaves, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And my view is, in the context of a race dynamic, it’s kind of true to say the technology determines the outcome, because if there’s a bad version of the technology, and you have many, many players in the race, there’ll be some bad players who produce the bad version, and if only because the leading players are being responsible and trying to do a good version, the ones who are not the leading players want to differentiate, and one way you differentiate is you create a kind of badass, evil version, which will appeal to a certain segment of the market. And we see that actually in the open versus closed debate on AI models. Some of them are proprietary, they’re closed, you can’t just download them into your computer and do whatever you want with them, and that’s much, much better for safety. And then the kind of follower companies, which is partly the Chinese ones, but also Meta, and Mistral in France. These guys produce open-weight models that people can do whatever they want with, and they can’t be closed down, even if they’ve started a cyberattack and they’re about to flood a city by disabling a dam, you can’t stop them, and that to me is nuts, that we allow that to happen. But it’s happening, and people produce these models because they’re trying to differentiate in a multiplayer race. But if you ask that question a different way and you say, hey, can one lab make its own model, less toxic, more toxic, more willing to answer any question or more guarded in the type of questions it answers, then the answer is yes, that now can make a difference. I take your point that to a user, the distinctions between different models may be quite subtle, but I suspect that over time, as these models become more specialized and there’s a kind of mature marketplace of different products, there will be a difference in the personality between an Anthropic model and an Elon Musk model, and I take those examples because probably at the moment, Elon Musk is the most keen on saying he has a non-woke AI, whereas Anthropic is the most keen on the kind of polite and safe AI.

Zachary Karabell: What about this open versus closed when it comes to China versus the United States? I mean, one of the ironies has been, at least on the face of it, many Chinese companies are producing what appear to be more open source models of their AI, as opposed to the proprietary models that characterize Google, Meta, et cetera. Now, a lot of people who know this quite well would say, the Chinese open source isn’t nearly as open source as it looks, and the proprietariness of the Western models is more open than it appears, but you do have this oddity of the country that is the most authoritarian and information control, is producing more, what are considered to be open source models. And the countries that are supposed to be more about the free change of ideas are producing more closed source ones.

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that paradox. It’s worth thinking back to 2023, when there was this first kind of AI safety conference, which was held at Bletchley Park in Britain. And in fact that was Demis Hassabis’s proposal to Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, that there should be this kind of safety gathering, and it included Chinese delegates, importantly. And so China showed up, it was a big jamboree, I’m not sure anything particularly was decided, but at least it was the beginning of an international discussion on governing AI. And there were follow up summits, one in South Korea, then one in Paris, and then the whole thing morphed into more about, how do we accelerate AI, as opposed to how do we govern it? And so the most recent iteration of these gatherings was in India, and that was all about, who’s going to win the race, not how do you control the race. So I think the point being here, that back in 2023, when the Bletchley Park one was held at Demis’ suggestion, there was an aspiration to talk to the Chinese about their open source models, and I think back in 2023, or even 2022, there was an opportunity to go to China and say, hey, you have a great technology sector, you’re going to get AI, but let’s just both make sure that it doesn’t proliferate in a crazy fashion to terrorists and rogue states. And if we join forces, the two leading AI powers, China and the US can together prevent open source from becoming widespread. And instead of doing that, the Biden administration chose to view China as the bad guy, and try to deprive China of AI by throttling its access to cutting-edge semiconductors for building AI, the NVIDIA sanctions. And, that hasn’t, I don’t think, worked in the sense that, China now does have strong AI. And so, I mean, I’ve debated this with friends who are people I respect, highly serious, intelligent people who were in the Biden administration and who have a different view to my one, but I think that there was a chance, and maybe still in the future will be a chance, to talk to China about the AI version of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Zachary Karabell: That would be quite compelling, in a world today where it seems like multilateral, multinational agreements are in short supply and ill favor.

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, totally. But let me — you know, 1962, a Cuban Missile Crisis, maximum tension between the US and the Soviet Union, and yet 1968, six years later, they do that deal. So even in the depths of the Cold War, some collaboration was possible.

Zachary Karabell: So you’ve written books, your past books have been about Wall Street, Silicon Valley, now this, all of which in many ways speak to the role of extraordinarily wealthy individuals and/or groups shaping society as we know it. And there is an element that gets understated in the AI conversation, and I’m not saying this from any kind of cabal conspiracy theory, I’m just making an observation that many of the people that you talk about in the book, including Demis, are certainly centimillionaires, some of them are multi-billionaires, which places them in the .00 whatever percentage of humanity. And there is a way in which these kind of money and power nexuses create their own reality distortion field. That is one of the reasons that people are particularly alarmed,

Sebastian Mallaby: I think, especially with AI, that’s true. So with finance, I kind of feel that you have very rich people doing stuff, which allocates capital in a certain way, but basically they’re trying to allocate it in a way that makes them a lot of money, and that tends to mean you give the capital to the people who are going to use it best and make a good return. And so the upshot is generally sort of productive, efficient economies. Now, of course, that all breaks down in 2008 with the crisis, and there are all sorts of complicated externalities, which we both understand, but at a high level, they’re not really changing the entire functioning of the society.

Whereas with AI, it is. I mean, it really is. It’s going to change how you bring up your kids. It’s going to change what job you can do. It’s going to change how you think of yourself as being a human being, when there’s a rival form of intelligence competing with you that’s in silicon — like these are super fundamental differences to the way we’re all going to live. And they’re being generated by a handful of labs, run by a handful of people. And so I think this is where the concentration of power does become a bit scary. It’s not that these lab leaders have total power of the outcomes as we’ve discussed, because there is a race dynamic and so that’s actually larger than them, and some of them, to their credit, and Demis Hassabis is certainly one, would like the governments to step in and exert control and regulate and insist on safety and solve the collective action problem that you have in a race. So to their credit, they don’t all just want to get richer and richer. And in fact, I pushed Demis on this pretty hard and he’s certainly not motivated by earning more money, that’s for sure. He is motivated by scientific curiosity and maybe ego, but not by money. And so I think more than with Wall Street, the AI race raises the issue you’re talking about, of rich people deciding how the rest of us live.

Zachary Karabell: Although you could say in 2008, 2009, into early 2000 teens, that many people would’ve thought about the financial industry, or would’ve said about the financial industry, much of what you just said about the tech industry, that it was a few number of people making hugely consequential decisions that were intimately shaping what people could do, how they could do it, and whether they could do it. So I think part of it is that people feel that there’s this huge gulf between their own lived experience and the lived experience of a lot of people who are shaping their lives intimately. And that’s always been true. It just, I think, creates a kind of a democratic tension, no?

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. And I think one other dimension of this discussion is that there are some screwups in the world, where you have powerful people, probably they are also rich people, who do something that causes terrible outcomes for ordinary people, for the majority of the society, and where you can also say, look. The individuals who made these decisions at the top of the system were dumb, and they screwed up, and they were probably also not just dumb, but kind of immoral or something, right? In that category, one might put the Iran War right now, and there were umpteen scenarios about how the Strait of Hormuz might be closed in the context of a conflict in the Gulf, and it seems that none of these were properly considered by the Trump administration before it went to war. So I think they are culpably ignorant in the way they’ve conducted themselves.

But then there’s a second category of screwup, which is more interesting and more subtle, and that is where the individuals in question are very thoughtful and they do consider what could go wrong, and they actually understand the doom scenarios or the downsides better than the rest of us, and yet they still walk into a mess. And I would put in that category, you know, I wrote a book about Alan Greenspan, which is my way of writing about the making of modern finance, and it ends in the apocalyptic 2008 crash, which happened right after Greenspan left office. And I called that book The Man Who Knew, because Greenspan knew that bubbles could disrupt the system. He had written his PhD thesis about that, he was more steeped in what bubbles could do than any of the people who criticized him after ‘08. And yet, even though he was the man who knew, he was not the man who could prevent that happening. And that was a deep, interesting sort of human tragedy story. It wasn’t that he was dumb or evil or anything. He just was in a position where he couldn’t stop it. And I think Demis is like that, too. I think Demis is a good person, and I stress test the character of people I write about very aggressively when I do these projects, because they talk to me for so long, I check quotes with them, generally they are furious, and there’s a lot of confrontation and stress and lawyers threatening me and all that. And you can judge by the quality of that stressful part what kind of a person you are really dealing with. And Demis came through that, he did make me talk to his lawyer, but he was quite reasonable in the end. And so I’m comfortable saying that he is a good person, because I’ve really been down in the pits with him. It’s not true of everybody else in this book, by the way. But in any event, you have a good individual, and yet he is building a technology that he knows to be dangerous. That’s a much more complicated, subtle kind of screwup and, and that’s what my book is really about.

Zachary Karabell: So let’s end where we began. There’s a bit of a cup half full, cup half empty human nature question here, which I circle back to a lot in my own writing and in this podcast. There’s a degree to which what you think of the unknown future is an extension of what you believe about the muddy present, and we’re all temperamentally somewhere on that spectrum of Eeyores versus utopians. And I gather in some of what you’re saying that you have become more sensitized to the downsides, even while being cognizant of the upsides. I don’t know where that fits with you temperamentally, you’re very even-keeled, and you’re far too English to really be able to tell from an American perspective what you think about anything. But there is that question of, are you genuinely concerned we’re, even with good intentions, going to do a kind of an Oppenheimer, right? To be fair, I think Oppenheimer and the nuclear scientists were acutely aware of what they were unleashing. Nobody was at a loss to recognize the dangers. It might’ve been more visceral when he does his famous line at the first successful test, I am become death, destroyer of worlds, which has become one of the great lines uttered by a scientist ever, kind of like, oh my God, what have I done. But have you become more acutely attuned to the downsides, rather than as acutely attuned to the upsides?

Sebastian Mallaby: I think that’s correct. I mean, I have become more attuned to the downsides and therefore I am both encouraged by the fact that I believe that Demis Hassabis is a good person who would like to do his best to make this turn out okay, but I’m discouraged by the lack of political action, both from governments in the US and China. I was actually in China for eight days this month because my book came out first in China, China always does everything faster, and I was encouraged by the fact that there is an elite conversation amongst research computer scientists and also industrial leaders who run AI labs at companies like Ant Financial, and they do talk about safety a lot. So I think it’s possible to talk to China at some point about AI safety, but in the absence of some discussion and some agreement on vetting models before they come out, and avoiding powerful open-weight models that terrorists could use as they wish, I think in the absence of those fixes we’re headed for some sort of catastrophe, and then we’ll have a policy response. And I’d rather avoid the catastrophe.

Zachary Karabell: One certainly would. I think I’ll take the over on your under, which is that we will have, and I’m sure already have had, a series of perilous near-misses relative to that catastrophe, but that some of the greater questions that have bedeviled us, of personalized medicine, individual discoveries of proteins that fit a particular disease profile that would’ve been way too expensive to develop under current models can be done, or will be able to be done, that some of the issues of climate change and technologies that could ameliorate those, some of the drudgery of work, not just the elimination of work or jobs that people like, all of these things are part of the utopian vision that I do think, maybe because of human nature to be highly attuned to risks and much less willing to give credence to the hopes, those things, I believe, will be palpable and evident and transformative in a really positive way, without in any way poo-pooing the degree to which the risks you talk about are kind of equally palpable. And this is one of those, like, well, we’ll see.

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. All true and all fair. Thank you for taking the optimistic side to balance my darkness.

Zachary Karabell: Well, I think everyone should read the book and come to their own determination. This is one of these topics where, it’s not just that we’re all entitled to an opinion, but in many respects, how we perceive the future, right, acting on fear is never a particularly good thing. Acting with an awareness of risks is always a good thing. Everyone should read the book, and thank you so much for adding to that conversation.

Sebastian Mallaby: Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: So with that, thank you for listening. We’ll be back next week. Please send your comments and let me know what you think, and let me know what you want me to talk about at theprogressnetwork.org or to my Edgy Optimist through substack.

Thanks for your time.