Dan Carlin: In the old days when you used to say around the water cooler that the New York Times says blank. The New York Times might have been lying to us that that might have been propaganda. But was it better to have a shared view of truth even if it was false than to have 50 truths? And you can't even have a conversation now. Right. This is like having 10,000 reality choices where we are now. It's like pick your reality. [MUSIC]

Kmele Foster: I'm Kmele Foster with Big Think and I'm delighted to be here in conversation with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame, common sense. I think of you as a historian, Dan, but also a kind of public intellectual. I'm not sure which of those terms you more prefer or perhaps you have some other way of describing what it is that you do.

Dan Carlin: They both sound wrong. And historians absolutely wrong. Public intellectuals amorphous enough so we can have fun with it. But just your local neighborhood friendly podcaster with the Spider-Man guy say?

Kmele Foster: At the present moment, the sensibility that a lot of people have is that something is a skew. There is intense political division. There is high even at the moment despite the fact that most Americans, it seems, are beginning to identify as independents. It still feels like there's just a sharp political divide within the country. We've had a number of contentious elections recently. We've had the results of those elections questioned persistently on perhaps both sides of the political spectrum. But I think most prominently after the 2020 race, we still have lingering questions related to that in some people's minds. And at the moment, the notion of guardrails, constitutional protections and safeguards, norms even, all of those things seem to be in jeopardy and important respects. We have various cases that are testing the authority of the courts. We have many people who are interested in reforms that would forever, not forever, but would certainly meaningfully change the composition of the courts and their roles. Is that what we're talking about when we say here that all of these things feel almost not so much up for grabs, but at least much more fluid than they have at any other point in my lifetime?

Dan Carlin: I think where we get into trouble with some of these things is we're looking for, and I think it's the way we divide history books too, where you have chapters. So something happens and we realize we've entered into a new era where I feel like there's much more of a continuum. I'll go listen to some of the punk albums I used to listen to when I was 14 years old and you'll listen to the dead Kennedys and the lead singer, Jellaby, offers talking about the stuff we're doing in Central America and all these things. And stuff that this is all pre-internet, pre-digital, all this kind of stuff, but he's talking about things that morphed into the now. And that's when you realize how long some of these trends have been germinating. That's maybe a good way to put it. I would suggest that what we have now is the logical end result, but being a continuum, we're not at the end. We're getting farther down the road. This is all stuff that to me, we were talking about, and this gets to what you were saying earlier, in an amorphous sense. That we're on our way to something. I'm not going to talk about what to do once we get there, because I don't know what it's going to look like when we get there. But I feel like we've been on this path for a long time and I could suggest that if we zoom out even farther, when we know the story 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I think we're going to be able to trace back the roots of now to 30, 40, 50 years ago. And that's always the problem, I think, when we as human beings living in the story, try to figure out what's going on, is that so much of what's going on started before we got here. It's like the old Marx line that you don't get to make history the way you want. You inherit a world that was created by other people and that has constraints that those other people were dealing with. And then we add new elements, right? It's their world from 1960 plus the internet plus this plus that has changing moral values plus, you know, and add a bunch of different things. So, I mean, I feel like we're just in a more intense version of where we were when I was 14 years old. But those intense elements that have been added, the internet, social media, all these kinds of things, they keep dialing up the amplitude. So everything we were dealing with, for example, politically, or what they used to talk about the 1980s and the 1990s is trying to figure out a soft landing from the US post-war dominance, right? The hegemony that because we were the one power that wasn't devastated, that we were feeding, I mean, there was a sugar high, a historical sugar high that we had after 1945 that inevitably was going to come down as the rest of the world caught up. But what was that going to look like for the average American right on the street? So I remember in the 1980s when we were dealing with Japan starting to make cars that were getting into it. I mean, this was all a very big deal, but you don't see that as part of the larger picture, which is the coming off of the sugar high, the rest of the world catching up. And then you throw in these elements that have never existed before. I keep bringing up the internet because to me, that's the big, um, the big X in our equation, right? The part that didn't exist previously, because otherwise as a history nut, I'm going to attach this to similar circumstances in the past. But that's the element that didn't exist before, and that to me is the wild card. And when we watch our kids starting to attach themselves to a computer at the hip at 10 or 11 or 12 years old, I think it's reasonable to ask what are they going to do? And then collectively, what does it do to society? And how does that change the dead Kennedys talking about what they were talking about when I was 14? You know, I mean, I feel like we're on the continuum trying to make sense of it. And to me, it's easier for us to look back 10 or 20 years and now look and say, okay, I can see what I was talking about in the 90s and how that's playing out now. It's so difficult for me to do a common sense show now because we like to focus on solutions and clear thinking and all those kinds of things. And I feel like from where we're looking at things in the mix, I don't know how you do that. I don't know how you do that, honestly.

Kmele Foster: Yeah, Martin Gurri had a book that I thought was pretty great. And for me, it was incredibly clarifying with respect to just how to think about where we find ourselves now called the Revolt of the Public. And it's similarly focused on the, I think, what it called the information tsunami. And specifically, it's the Internet, of course, but mass media more broadly and the Internet making all of that so widely available. So many voices being able to kind of communicate all at once, the elites essentially losing the ability to kind of have this monopoly on narrative shaping. But...

Dan Carlin: The gatekeepers. Yeah.

Kmele Foster: Yeah. So that certainly feels like a kind of fundamental element of what's happened in our politics. I think that we have a tendency to think about the ways in which say Barack Obama and Donald Trump are very different from one another. But when you look at how similar they are to one another in terms of their kind of ascendancies into politics, Barack Obama was a political outsider who really wasn't his turn at the time that he found himself with a democratic nomination and then ultimately winning the presidency. And Donald Trump, similarly, a political outsider, essentially not so much a grassroots guy because he's very much a celebrity, even before he made his ascent in politics. But it was certainly not his time. The party was incredibly resistant during his first winning presidential run. And even in his second victory, it seems that he was a very kind of surprising force to many people, I think, even in his own party. The expectation after 2020 was that Donald Trump was over. He probably weren't going to see him again. And plenty of people were surprised by the fact that again, he was able to leverage a lot of the same tools communicating directly with the public leveraging social media, essentially establishing his own social media company. And I think it's hard to understate just how essential all of that is to the context that we find ourselves in, the fact that it feels like it's hard to even find agreement about what the actual facts are about circumstances that are going on right now. But relatedly with respect to circumstances that have transpired in the past, what is in fact true is something that's really hard to make sense out of at a time when we've never had more access to information and never had more outlets that are at least looking into these things, however well resourced or they are or not. I always think of the Steve Bannon line flooding the zone with crap, right?

Dan Carlin: That that was going to be a little less pleasant than that.

Kmele Foster: Yeah, but the whole idea was...

Dan Carlin: ...how do we conceal the important things amongst a ton of unimportant things so that by the time you figure out what is important versus what's not important, it's already a done deal. The fact that somebody has enough input into the public informational sphere so that they can do that is a change from the old days. You mentioned gatekeepers, gatekeepers is the way we used to think about them, right? And we would slam the fact that the gatekeepers, I mean, I always tell this story because it's so indicative and young people always, their eyes always get so big when I tell them. But I remember as a kid in the 70s, we used to come out of the supermarket and you would see every car in the parking lot had been flired. Somebody gone in Xeroxed, their messages, they'd put it under every windshield wiper. And I joke all the time to my kids that that was the old version of social media, right? If you wanted to get your word out, that was how you used to do it. And you know, it would always be some cult or some weird thing that was, you know, that you'd never put it. The gatekeepers would keep from getting in the regular media, but that was how it used to be. You couldn't flooding the zone with crap was a lot harder to do in the old days, right? And I've had a lot of conversations with people is about shared facts. This question about, can you have a society where debate and stuff like that is important if you don't have a sort of a touchstone where you can say, okay, that's true because so-and-so said it was true. And in the conversation, we all agreed that in the old days, when you used to say around the water cooler, that the New York Times says blank, and that used to be enough to settle whether it was a fact or not, that the New York Times might have been lying to us, that that might have been propaganda. But was it better to have a shared view of truth, even if it was false, than to have 50 truths? And you can't even have a conversation now. So I've had a bunch of arguments with people about, you know, the nature of truth. Can you have conversations over things where we have different worldviews? And I mean, that's the problem I have as a person who likes to have a good conversation argument or debate today, is we never get past the, you know, who are your sources

Speaker A: or what are your facts? We never get into what we would have called in the old days the meat of the discussion, because we never get to, I mean, we differ over the reality we see if that makes sense. And the question then that I would have is, can you have a situation where we're all occupying our own little information or reality niches? I mean, is that even a thing? And I'm not sure, I keep looking for historical analogies where we've been in other periods like that. And I know they existed, but the difference might be you can find areas where there may be an alternate reality. So you have reality A that most people believe and then alternate reality B. This is like having 10,000 reality choices where we are now. It's like pick your reality. And I can't decide if this is an integral phase where we're like ironing things out. So in 20 or 30 years, we'll go, wow, that was a weird, you know, inner-regnum that we were living in. Or whether this is the new reality. And that gets back to what we were saying about, how do you do a common sense show or anything to talk about these things when we're still trying to figure out what it is we're even seeing, if that makes sense.

Speaker B: I suspect it isn't quite binary, but it almost feels like I could describe two possible futures here. One where things get meaningfully worse, where there is exceptional levels of distrust of all of the important institutions where people are kind of finding their narrative. Wherever they want to splintering all the way down. I kind of call that now. That's what I'm talking about. But say it gets worse. Say that gets more difficult to navigate. And then there's another possibility, which interestingly for me could be brought on by much the same forces. There's this sense that there's nothing I can really trust that we develop, but we potentially develop some cultural antibodies where we're better able to make decisions about what is true and what isn't true, where we don't become cynical about everything, but become kind of usefully, functionally skeptical of a great many things. And when I look around the information ecosystem, I see the ascent of all this AI generated content, for example. I know for myself, when I'm consuming stuff on social media or encounter some news story, I'm always asking the question out, is this real or is it fake? And I'm not just looking for someone to fact check it for me. I just have this understanding that not only could I be duped by this, but a lot of elite talent who is supposed to know better could be duped by this as well. And if we find ourselves developing those muscles and new publications and new institutions start to spring up, that can actually help us sort out and a fact from fiction. It feels like that's kind of another very real possibility and that there is perhaps some reason for optimism at this point that we might actually find ourselves in a world like that. I mean, is that optimistic story something that you think might be credible here?

Speaker A: I love your term antibodies. I love your term because I think that's a good way to put it because I always say there's a fork in the road always ahead of us, right? Things can get better, things can get worse. The better thing, because every time I bring something like that up, somebody writes me and says, "Well, it's funny you mentioned that I was going to get in touch with you." We started a new company where we're creating a news app that will help you filter. In other words, there are people who see the need and are trying to figure out if this is a problem that's been exacerbated by technology can technology get us out of the problem. The answer could be possibly. The reason I'm doing a podcast now is I started a tech company with some buddies back in the late 1990s. One of the things we were working on is something I called news based on your views. It was going to be sort of like if you think about a webpage with a slider at the top. The slider allowed you to move the politics of the page you were looking. If you imagine the simplest way to look at it, think about left, right, and center. You go to the webpage, it's a news site like the Dredge report or anything else, and in the center is the default. If you turn it to the left or the right, the stories all change. It's a combination of stories that the left might not have covered that you see on the right, or it's the same story, the same headline, but from a right-wing outlet or a right-wing viewpoint. The goal wasn't to isolate you from the other side's viewpoint. The goal was to educate you on just what you were saying. How does the news media take an event like today's story? The president has a near assassination attempt. Oh my gosh, how do the different outlets cover that? If you could literally shift on the same outlet and watch the story change, watch the writer change to a more conservative writer or a less conservative writer. See how the headlines, see how the photos, I thought it was an improvement on media literacy. But you mentioned antibodies, which is another way to look at it in more of a pendulum sense, right? Because we have this need, my stepfather used to say that the greatness of America was this, we build a better mouse trap idea. Well, that's the antibody idea, right? The pendulum swings and we have this obvious need. People can't figure out, fact from fiction. We're drowning in misinformation. Is there a need then that the better mouse trap can fulfill? I don't know the answer to the question. I just know that I think, I could think of professors back in history class that would say that everything that we're experiencing now is a version of what we used to experience only worse. I mean, when you think about the impact that things like Gutenberg's Bible and moveable print and all that sort of things have, I mean, it's a similar vibe, if you will. A similar destabilization of the way things were, and a lot of people wondering about what this means for us. This is obviously, you know, amplitude-wise far above anything we've ever had. But it's interesting if you use it as sort of a connection to those earlier destabilization platforms and ask yourself how we got ourselves out of those problems. I think we have two different kinds of situations, though. You have a situation in a non-free country where the people really have no input and it doesn't matter what facts they believe because they're not impacting the leadership decisions anyway. You think like a Putin's Russia, or you think about our situation, or Europe, or countries that are supposed to be democracies or republics where the information and informative level of the population is absolutely crucial to the system working out the way it's supposed to. And then you ask yourself, have we created something that breaks our system if you keep people from knowing what's going on by flooding the zone with crap? And the answer to that question is unknown, which is why I'm not doing a common sense show about it. I feel like an observer more than an advocate. I used to know where things were going. I could talk about that intelligently. I feel like I'm just along for the ride now, like all of us are, you know, if that makes sense.

Speaker B: Sure, sure. So we've zeroed in on the kind of cultural dynamics, the rise of particular technologies, this really robust information ecosystem that we find ourselves in, which pretty fractured. Robust is a nice way to put it. But I want to talk about some of the other institutions, and particularly our political institutions. I'm very curious about something I've heard you talk about in the past, executive power, which is something that has expanded pretty reliably over the course of many, many administrations, and the current administration is certainly no exception to that. They've made a lot of kind of unprecedented changes with respect to attempting to do things via executive order and pronouncement. I suspect we all know, but I'll say that Congress doesn't really legislate in the way that it has historically. In fact, it's largely kind of separated itself from that responsibility and obligation. They barely even pass budgets anymore, which has forced the courts to do a great deal more. So I offer all that as context for what I'm going to say next, because one, the institutions were designed, and there was an expectation that they would work together, or at least be these kind of counterbalancing for the rest of the world. But when the legislature isn't doing nearly as much as it used to or was expected to, the executive branch is doing a heck of a lot more than perhaps it ought to, and certainly than it was expected to. And the courts are, it seems, still playing their traditional role, trying to adjudicate these disputes over what can and can't be done under the law by the legislature, what the proper restrictions on the executive branch ought to be. But there is a lot of concern about whether or not the courts will continue to be able to play that role. And I'm curious about your thoughts on that, given what you've seen historically, if we've perhaps gone through periods like this before, and you think things are about kind of normal where the courts are concerned. And then I want to talk about executive power in particular. And if you think that we've seen, again, just kind of, you talked about this steady progression that we can kind of look at history as something that, wow, this unprecedented thing is happening. Versus, yeah, we've kind of been on this trajectory for a while. And certainly with executive power, it feels like we've been on this trajectory for a while, but it also feels unsustainable.

Speaker A: Well, the thing to remember about executive power is it is tempting, and not just for the executive, but for everyone who wants the same things the executive is trying to do. And this is something where, I mean, people get angry with me and they accuse me of being, they'll say, you're both sides are, right? Because every time, and I'm a devil's advocate, I absolutely am. So anytime I go too far on one side, I always even up on the other side. But what I try to tell people is that it's okay to say that one party's been worse in one respect or another at this time or at that time on the question of executive power. But when you've got a trend that takes decades and decades, some would say going back to Andrew Jackson, I mean, you can date it whenever you want, but that's going to be a bipartisan thing. And to me, the biggest issue, and I have this discussion with people all the time, not enough people pay attention to the fact that the Constitution's number one goal is not efficient legislating. It is tyranny prevention. And we pay a huge price in this country for the inefficiencies in our constitutional design because it's trying to keep those powers separate, because it's trying to keep too much power from ending up in any of the single branches. Now, the truth of the matter is, is if you want to make progress on any number of issues, we'd be better off throwing that out the window. That tyranny prevention stuff causes us all kinds of headaches. But you see how much it matters when we come close to really needing it. And I think that's a perfect case. All those things that you bring up can be explained as attempts to try to do a better job at

Speaker A: passing what people who are currently in the Trump situation, they'd like to pass it. And they'd like to pass an agenda that people like the Heritage Foundation have in one form or another been pushing for 40 years. So the last thing that they want to hear is that Congress needs to interfere more and slow things down and re-establish guardrails and all these kinds of things, which is the same thing that liberals would have felt like during FDR's administration when he's trying to pull people out of the depression, but doing so in ways that increase the tyranny potential, right? So this is the, in my view, the problem we have as a country is our inability to understand that we have a two-party system that has developed in a country that has nothing in the founding documents that design that at all. There's nothing in there about Democrats. There's nothing in there about Republicans. There's nothing in there about Wigs. There's nothing in there about Federalists. The founders disliked factions, as they called them, which would have been their word for parties.

Speaker A: That's probably unrealistic, but it's important to realize that what we have now and what has developed organically over 250 years is not part of the design. You know, when we talk about, and I've talked about this for years, you know, when you get on the radio and you start talking about wanting third-party members or independence to run more, boy, do you get a lesson in how hard that is? Because over 250 years, the two parties have managed to give themselves, let's call it, it's like an automatic tournament berth in like a basketball tournament or something like that. The Democrat Republican automatically get in, somebody else has to really, really be extraordinary to make it in there, and that's wrong. And what it does is it, my stepdad would say it's a competition question. We can't get better anymore because if you don't like the Donald Trump administration, then you get to be pushing the Chuck Schumer side of things.

Speaker A: And there was a great book. This is actually on point, but there was a book by a Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. He's made it free. It's on the internet now, if you want it. It's called Republic Lost. And I love the way he designed the book because it's supposed to show you the problems that have developed in our system. And he understands that because the problems are bipartisan, that the arguments need to be bipartisan also. So every page is sort of set up so that you have the left-wing argument for what he's saying on one side of the page and the right-wing argument for what he's saying on another because unless you're a corrupt person yourself, or unless you don't think you can ever get what you want done past, because most people don't want it, then you don't benefit from a corrupt system either.

Speaker A: And what Lessig was trying to point out is that both of our parties have over time become embedded in this system, where, for example, he says, what is it that gets you promoted from the local mayor, who's a Democrat or Republican, to move up through the party? And he eventually, you know, spoiler alert, he points out that it's fundraising, that what you've proven to be good at throughout your rise in the party power structure is you're good at bringing people together who will then give money, who will then help the party, who will... You know, it all makes sense when it's explained that way, but the bottom line is these people that get up to the top positions of power, Donald Trump accepted because he's not part of that system, but these are people who didn't demonstrate fantastic leadership skills. They didn't demonstrate the ability to work across the aisle. They didn't demonstrate the ability to come up with really unique and groundbreaking and interesting legislation. They were fundraisers.

Speaker A: And so I feel like when you look at the leadership now and you say, well, why aren't they pushing harder against the executive branch, for example? Most of them, and I say most of them because it's hundreds of people, right? There's a whole bunch of different... But most of them aren't those kind of people. They weren't picked for those reasons. Those are not their strong points. They don't really want that most of them. I mean, they may want to get done what they want to get done, but that's not... These aren't ideologues, most of them. And you can see it because they often give up the opportunities to really push what they say they believe in for other things.

Speaker A: And this is why, for example, if these people really cared about the institution of Congress, or they cared about the guardrails, or they cared about the Constitution, then you would never see the President able to go to war without Congress screaming and yelling. The fact that they don't is a sign that they don't want to, right? And they don't want to because they've worked out that there's no advantage for them. If I make the President get my declaration of war, if I'm a Congressman or a Senator, how does that help me? It helps the institution, helps the country, does what it's supposed to do, but me personally, that just gets me in potential trouble.

Speaker B: Right, you're on the hook for the decision.

Speaker A: Yeah, the war goes sideways, I'm in on it, right? On the other hand, I can do something like just say, I'll give an authorization to this and that. And then if it goes sideways, I can claim, well, that's not what I signed up for. If it's good, I can say I was in the whole way. In other words, the Founders believed that the various ambitions of all the people, men mostly in their day, right, in these different branches of government would counterbalance one another. My pride would counterbalance your pride, my sense of, you know, and it does work that way sometimes for a while, but somewhere down the road, people figured out that I can have all of the perks that matter to me in this job without any of the things that are a pain in the rear for me in this job.

Speaker A: And when that happens, I think you start getting different people. I can remember several different eras in legislative history where you would see a great leaving of competent, experienced people who just said, I can't operate in this environment anymore, or Congress has become too divided, or fundraising's too much a part of my job. And I remember several eras where you would see it just as sort of an influx of people just leaving because this isn't what they signed up for. Well, then my question is, is it those people signed up for the reasons we want them to sign up for and left because they can't do that anymore? What are the people who take their place doing, right? And over a period of time, then, do you end up replacing people who at least mentally are trying to do what we think they're supposed to do in that job with people who don't care, who aren't leaving because it doesn't bother them as much as it bothered their predecessor?

Speaker A: Well, what do you end up with? There's a great line from the movie, The Untouchables, the remake with Sean Connery and Kevin Costner and stuff, and they're trying to deal with a corruption issue in Chicago in a courtroom because the Al Capone types had bought the jury. And the real famous moment in the movie is when, because the jury's been bought, they can't get Capone and whatever, and they come in and they bring in all the jury replacement members that aren't corrupt, and then that changes everything, right? It's essentially like replacing your corrupt government with a non-corrupt government overnight. And I remember thinking, that's kind of what we need. I mean, there's an old line William F. Buckley said, we do better if you just simply went down the phone book and randomly picked a name and made that person, your Senator or Congress person. Well, that might have been hyperbole once upon a time, and it still may be, I don't know, but eventually, if things go the way they're going now, you're going to look and you go, Joe Smith from, you know, Wisconsin might be a better choice than some of these people. That we've got right now. And at that point, when random is better than the selection process we have now, I'd say that that's an interesting point we've come to in our history too.

Speaker B: Sure. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. I want to retreat back to something you said, right at the beginning of your response about kind of both sides. It seems to me that when someone is alleging both sides, they probably ought to be trying to make some determination as to whether or not you're offering some useful context for trying to better understand the circumstance, or whether you're trying to kind of obfuscate the situation and help someone escape culpability by saying, but what about what they're doing? And they do that online all the time, by the way.

Speaker A: Of course.

Speaker B: I think we see that we see that latter thing all the time. I think we really don't see quite enough of people trying to excavate some additional context related to something else or find this trend line that may run through both parties because that's a heck of a lot less satisfying for someone who is in fact a partisan. I don't want to believe that I am somehow even partly responsible for the way that things are right now.

Speaker B: And I think that the point that you made about Congress is exceedingly important. I mean, the President has enjoyed, and we've seen this a few times recently, actually, having, you know, pretty much control of Congress and the White House and a fairly compliant Supreme Court in the sense that it's conservative and still decides to try to go it alone in a bunch of instances because one, it's easier, but two, it does kind of offer some cover for Congress persons who may not be excited about all of this.

Speaker B: It's been very interesting to see Republicans become less remarket oriented, more populist and more enthusiastic about things like tariffs. And I say enthusiastic. The enthusiasm seems to come from the White House. Congress for the most part is just kind of mum on the issue for the most part. And seems to comply with his desire without raising too much of a fuss. And it feels like a lot of our politics kind of functions in that way.

Speaker B: Certainly, the most recent conflict in Iran seems to function in that way as well, where there might be some concern expressed about it, but there isn't really an interest in Congress flexing its muscles, asserting its authority, its proper authority in that instance, and trying to direct the course of things. I don't know if you had an additional response on that or you kind of were cool moving along to a different topic, but I would love your feedback.

Speaker A: What the president is doing now is he's not breaking down walls that didn't exist. He's breaking down walls. We pretended existed, but didn't. And this is what we were screaming about for years on the Common Sense show is that if you don't use these powers, for example, Congress's authority to declare war, at what point do they go away?

Speaker A: There are actually some legal theories out there about the US Constitution that would suggest that if a power is not used long enough, and if you're comfortable and you do it a certain way for decades, it's almost a little like how some states assume if you're living with somebody else, if you're living with somebody for seven years, it's community property, right? If you don't...

Speaker A: declare war for 40 or 50 years, it's kind of like, backed into the Constitution in an unwritten way. But everybody sort of, like I remember seeing it during the second Bush administration, where they went to Congress for an authorization for the war in Iraq, but made, it was almost like their little signing statement out that they used to do too, where they would say, "We're coming to you for this authorization, but we are saying explicitly that we don't think we have to come to you for this authorization." In other words, we're not saying that we require this, but we're going to be... And Congress was cool with that, too. In other words, we're all cool with pretending we still need to do this. But that's a fig leaf. Now, when the president currently says, "I'm not even going to play that fake game," and everybody's in an uproar, what we're doing here is defending the fig leaf of protocol. And I was having a conversation with the buddy asking whether or not there's a refreshingness to simply throwing it out and saying it was never there to begin with. That was not really a guardrail. We were making ourselves feel better at the end of the day, pretending it was a guardrail, better to know it's not and deal with it, versus, "Hey, even the fig leaf of protocol acknowledges that there was a protocol and that that's better than no fig leaf of protocol at all." I don't know the answer to that question, but I think that that's what this president has done. He's just said, "None of this ever mattered in the last 20, 30, 40 years anyway. I'm not going to pretend it matters. Screw you, Congress." And Congress has kind of gone, "You can't do that." And here's the problem, and this is where you'll see it on the Internet, too. I get so upset with that both sides-arism approach on the Internet because someone will say, "Well, you didn't say something when Barack Obama killed Anwar Al-Al-Liki with a drone." Which, by the way, I did say something when that happened, but the point is that if you don't see how that at least gives the other side an argument, which is what they're using now, right? Where were you? Nobody ever sits on the Internet and says, "Well, you know what sure Obama did that, too, but let's talk about the policy." That never happens. Again, when we were talking earlier about how you never can have a good discussion anymore because we just get hung up over truth and fact and sources, this is this way, too. We never talk about whether it was good to drone an American citizen like that. We just say, "Well, Obama did it, too. So how could you have a leg to stand on?" Okay, can we have the discussion about whether any of them should have done it? And that's the problem I have with the partisan lines here, is that you can't have that cross-party discussion. And you mentioned something earlier that made me think about the word, "I like to use a lot in this situation." It's empathy. Try to put yourself in the other guy's shoes. And what I say is, if you are cutting your own person some slack, that you would not cut this person from the other side, then you're a political hypocrite. And that is what all of these people online, by the way, when they say, "Where were you when someone so was doing it?" That's what they're implying, right? You're a political hypocrite. The question is, is how do we break out? There's an old line, I don't know if Gandhi really said it, but it said it in the movie, right, where he said, "I know a way out of hell." What is the way out of hell in this problem that we have for us, this political hypocrisy, this inability to say, "Hey, let's not criticize Trump for doing this because Obama did it, too, and I didn't yell when he did it." But that's why I get to both sides of your tag when I point out that, "Listen, we got here, and I can say it up for it. I think the Republicans are worse than the Democrats over the last 30 or 40 years." But that doesn't change anything. If I elected Democrats the whole time, I don't think we're that far from where we are now anyway, right? Once we have this fig leaf of protocol problem, unless you mentioned the two forks in the road, right, getting better, getting worse, unless you're going to have somebody that says, "elect me and I'm going to put the guardrails back up, I don't know how we fix that, and no one's going to want the guardrails back up when there's guys in power because it's counterintuitive. If you say, "elect me and I'm going to give up some presidential power back to Congress," which may be run by the opposite party, by the way, "Who's going to elect me?" So that's where we get down this road, "Can we make things better or aren't things going to get worse? We're required to do some pretty counterintuitive things as an electorate to make things better. Are we capable of doing that?" I don't know. Mark Cuban said two days ago something about he's had it with both parties. Yay! What can we do about that? And I don't want to pretend that multi-party systems are an answer to the question. I think the reasons Netanyahu and Israel are so extreme right now is because he's got minor parties dragging him into these. So there's no panacea when it comes to multiple parties, but our duopoly in this country right now is messing with the part that I was always told was part of the genius of America by my stepdad. He said, "What makes us geniuses, we get better through competition. We've got Hertz and Avis here, and there's no incentive for anyone to be any better than 1% better than the next guy." And I think that maybe helps explain our political decline as a system.

Speaker B: Yeah, so much there. I mean, one thought that I had that was triggered by something you said a moment ago is just about the sense of existential peril, like persistent existential peril that our politics has been. It feels like just kind of overwhelmed by both sides of our political divide here are insisting routinely that if they win, that's kind of it for us. And I can appreciate why someone might make those arguments. I can give some credibility to both sides. Here I am. Give some credibility to both sides and say, "Okay, maybe you're right. Maybe you're right." But it also feels like if we're going to have a conversation or we're going to think about politics through that empathy lens that you mentioned a moment ago, or we really try to put ourselves and the other person's shoes in a meaningful way, it's much harder to do that when we imagine that what we're facing is kind of an existential crisis, a set of policy proposals that will forever change the country in a way that we simply can't come back from. It may be the case that it's appropriate to talk in that sort of way. It often, however, to me feels like we are engaging in a sort of hyperbole, and that it's probably better to embrace this Adam Smith dictum that there is much ruin in a nation. And however bad we might imagine things to be, the reality is that the country's pretty resilient. We tend to come out on the other side of these things. There's an ability to recalibrate, and we at least embrace that sort of perspective. It feels like maybe there's an opportunity to have a more constructive sort of conversation about our politics and about where things stand and how we might make navigate our way through things. Because as you mentioned, I don't know that multiplying the number of parties is necessarily going to fix this, and I don't have an expectation that they will kind of correct themselves on their own. But if the electorate is much more engaged than these conversations and can do it in a way that is perhaps a little less, a little more dispassionate is perhaps the right way to say that there might be an opportunity for more fruitful political engagement.

Speaker A: Oh, God, there's like five things I want to say about this. I'm never going to remember all of them because they're all on five different paths. The first thing is, and remind me about this, but we're not incentivized to keep the level of heat in our political culture down. The incentivization all runs the other direction. Sure. But let me, I want to play off something I just said because I'm going to talk about political empathy, and I can hear a friend of mine saying, you're asking me to empathize with people who don't think I should even be allowed to exist. And I wanted to address that for a minute because that's a very logical point. So take for example something that I got wrong, and I talked about this quite a bit because I saw things like the racism of my youth, and I grew up during the busing era and all in the family, all that stuff where society is trying to iron out a whole bunch of long-term problems. It's been dealing with it, and iron it out publicly, right? And I, like many of my generation, thought that we were looking at a generational problem, that these were people from another time period that were slowly aging out, and that as they aged out, we would have a different reality when it came to things like race and all those kinds of things. And of course, obviously, completely wrong on all of those fronts, but I'm interested in why I was completely wrong on all those fronts. And one of the things I think deserves a tie in here is if you look at the people who think that race is really important on a white person level, a lot of those people like the Trump administration. Well, why are they voting for that? And why are, as the racism risen up, I told a story to you when we talked earlier about an interview I did with a Croatian during the Yugoslavian Civil War, and I had known the history of the region and how there's these ancient hatreds between some of the people who are in the world. And I brought it up to the guy and he just stopped me dead. And he said, "All of that was going in the other direction. All of that was trending. We were having movies made about Serbian girls falling in love with Croatian boys. You know, it was going their version of the all in the family Archie Bunker route, right?" He said, "But then the economy turned." He said, "And demagogues found that they could get power by playing with the old hatreds, blame your economic situation on the ancient people we've never liked." And he said it was like pouring gasoline on a bunch of glowing coals that you thought were burned out already. And it just flared right up because it's an ancient tool that demagogues can use. I think you can play in the ancient hatreds. But the ancient hatreds come up because other reasons arise, economic in the former Yugoslavian he was suggesting. Well, you could make a kind of a tie in here that the party that's benefiting from, let's call them, disaffected, disenfranchised whites in the American Rust Belt, voting for the Trump administration. What if we could have helped those people four or five administrations ago in the Rust Belt, not end up in the Rust Belt? Are those people in a different place that you had mentioned earlier about the importance of each of these elections and how we've heard now for a generation? This is the most important election in our lifetime. What if that's always been true? What if that's been true for 40 or 50 years, right? In other words, when we were screaming and yelling and listening to the dead Kennedy's scream about the Reagan administration, I thought the

Speaker A: Reagan administration was particularly nasty. Now, in the context of things, it looks positively glorious compared to where we are now, but that's the continuum, right? But had something changed early on? Have we gone in a different direction in 1964? Oh, that would have been gold water. But you know what I'm saying? In other words, from before I was even born, we could have been on a different path now that would have set us on something different, but once you don't solve problems and once people become more and more desperate, that's when extremism arises, right? So if you solve the problem of what are people going to do for meaningful work, you know, in the parts of the country that are feeling, you know, watching their towns disappear and their children leave, and if you don't solve that problem, it's going to find a way to make you feel its pain. We did a show once called "The Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger" on common sense. And the entire part was how you could decide this finger doesn't matter at all, just a little finger who the hell cares about this. But if it gets gangrene because you ignored it, it'll poison all of you. And that's how I feel about the body politic, too, is you can only go so far in destroying people's lives, or if you're not actively destroying them, they're not doing what you should be doing to maintain them, they will make you feel their pain. And there's an argument to be made that that's what we're going through now. And if we don't solve the problem this time around, it will be ever more amplified the next time we come around. You know, there's somebody who described history as not a circle, but like, almost like a mobius strip, where you do come around to the same point, but it's on a different level, right? And I feel like we've had to deal with this, what are Americans going to do to make a living and raise their family and have a higher standard of living than their elders had, which was always, you know, our benchmark. I feel like we've been having this discussion since at least the 1980s, maybe the 1970s. How long can you not solve that problem before it's going to turn a system that should be functioning like a spinning top and perfectly equilibrium? At what point does that top become unbalanced? And once it does, how do you restore its equilibrium? And that gets us back to what we were talking about earlier. I don't know what to say in a common sense show now, because the whole show was about how the top was going to get out of balance. I don't know how to get it back in balance.

Speaker B: That's so interesting. And now I'm in the position you were in just a moment ago. There's so much there that I'd like to respond to.

Speaker A: I love these conversations, though, because you had them enough. We end up getting stuck on, well, where did you hear that? And who did you get in your source? This is much more fruitful, isn't it?

Speaker B: I think so. You mentioned just in terms of race and identity and the really, I suppose I could say increasing salience of race as an issue in American politics. Again.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's so odd.

Speaker B: And the Mobius strip analogy is phenomenal because I think that actually is a really great representation for what, at least I've seen happen here where in the 1960s and 70s, when you talk about race, there's a very particular sensibility about kind of institutionalized, formerly institutionalized races. Jim Crow, everything that came with the law.

Speaker A: Which has to be addressed.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it kind of made sense. But as someone born in the 80s, lived through the 80s and the 90s, my sensibility about race and identity was forged in that particular context. And in that context, what was clear to me was probably embodied in that Michael Jackson song. It doesn't matter if you're black or white. There was a sense that we were moving away from a particular sort of sensibility.

Speaker A: You were just as wrong as I was. That's just it.

Speaker B: I was. I was. And what actually seemed to happen from my standpoint was this issue became increasingly salient in these ways around particular narratives, whether or not the narratives were completely completely consistent with available facts and data. So, you know, police involved shootings became a massive issue around the country. And it's something that I've worked on directly and have covered and even even done a bit of activism with respect to. And it's something that's been a concern for me, but I've always been concerned that that issue was kind of miscast as a racial justice issue. Because the data did not bear out the kind of assertions that were being made about the disproportionate risk faced by particular communities. It seemed to me that the appropriate access upon which to have conversations about that was, okay, so what if, in fact, too many people are being killed by law enforcement and they're unarmed in certain circumstances, how can we have better transparency, more accountability, better training to ensure that not too many people are being killed by police in circumstances like that. To take the kind of hierarchy of concern and to place at the very top of it, the racial designations of the persons involved in those shootings, it seemed to me was always a huge mistake because it would presuppose a certain set of things that we ought to be taken into consideration with respect to the solutions that might be workable in those contexts and also make us think about the problem just in too narrow or way. At a time when I was seeing plenty of examples of persons of all backgrounds kind of facing those kinds of circumstances. And I think that that is pretty indicative of a lot of what's happened with conversations around race and identity and kind of imagined harms and peril. And it seems like a lot of the resistance early on to some of the things that we saw say in 2020 with Black Lives Matter was less people who were saying, well, hey, what about white people and more people who are saying, I'm sorry, why are we talking about race? Don't we have the same concerns? The kind of all Lives Matter response to Black Lives Matter was never about, and at least so far as I could tell, asserting that your concerns don't matter, it's that all of us ought to matter. It was about being broadly inclusive. And it was interpreted as something that was perhaps aggressively bigoted. And I think that that almost inspired a kind of backlash. I think it gave strength.

Speaker A: No, you've absolutely hit the nail on the head. And it's so human. It's that all you have to do is go too far in one direction. And there's a backlash. I think we operate on the Newtonian laws here, right? For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And as soon as you go too far in one direction, there's going to be a reaction. I'll tell you this is a personal story. But I think this dovetails into something we were saying earlier when we talked about the role that the increasing amount of digitalization, you know, we talked about the Internet, but there's an angle to this that we don't think about. Which is the fact we have a camera with us at all times now. So I'll tell you a story. I was on the assignment desk at KABC in Los Angeles and Eyewitness News. And I used to work the late shift a lot of the time. And the late shift, as soon as our last crews were in for the day, you start getting stringers who would bring you the footage. And the stringer folks is somebody who they're like a freelancer. And they would go out with a police scanner in their car and they'd hear about something like a traffic accident. And they go and they shoot their own video. And then they go to the TV stations and try to market the video. So I'm on the assignment desk and some guy calls up and says, "I've got video of somebody being badly beaten by the LAPD. Do you want to buy it?" So I had to call the boss and the whole thing because there's different rules about if you wanted exclusive or if you just want to be able to use a different prices, we ended up passing on it. And it ended up going to KTLA channel five. It was the Rodney King beating video. Which of course we turned down at KABC. And then had to put KTLA and the little chiron in the bottom right-hand corner every time we showed it. But the bottom line was the reason that was such an important video to so many people in Los Angeles was, I used to take calls at the assignment desk all the time for people who lived in say Compton, right? And they call up and they'd say, "My son just got beaten up by the police." And I'd say, "Okay." And we'd start the conversation about what do you want us to do about it. And they'd say, "Well, we have photos." And they'd say, "Well, what are the photos of? Well, we've got a photo of his black eye." And I'd say, "Well, I don't know the circumstances that that black eye happened." And I said, "If you had video, if you had something that would show the circumstances, then maybe we could do something." And of course, nobody had a video camera with them when they needed it. So never... So when the Rodney King beating happened, it was seen as so important because this was representative of something that we had been told happened a lot. But that we couldn't cover, we couldn't tell the rest of the population how often this happened because we didn't have enough context, right? So that was why Rodney King was so much more important than anyone else is because, "Okay, even though you don't see what happened five minutes, it was so much more context." And it was enough context that you could look at it and say, "I'm not really sure I care what this guy did." Right? It doesn't matter what he did. He didn't deserve this. And so to me, that's a perfect example of what you're talking about too, which is you can have something like that and go, "Well, holy cow, something like that should never happen in a society like ours." And then what ends up happening though is then when we turn it into the white and black thing, then people on the other side say, "Well, I never heard a black person in my life and I'm a white person. Why?" In other words, you get that Newtonian reaction again. And what's so sad about that is it stops us from noticing something that is unabashedly happening, which is Rodney King is getting the hell beaten out of him in a way that unless he shot a police officer, he shouldn't be having happened to him, right? And so that's the larger conversation, which should have said that if Rodney King were white, what happens then? In other words, I think that this whole, you know, there was a scene, and I remember seeing it on television and thinking, "This is going to work against this cause so badly." But it was one of the Black Lives Matter protests, and it was some white young people sort of kneeling or asking for forgiveness or something from some black students at the protest. And I just remember thinking, "This is not going to help anybody. This is going to be on Fox News tonight. This is going to prompt the counter, really." In other words, there's that empathy thing we talked about earlier at Play Here Too to understand, and you know, I had this problem, I'm jumping around, I apologize, but I had this problem when I was a protester in my protesting days. There were always two groups of protesters, the ones who were desperate about being effective, and the ones who

Speaker A: were more concerned, and this has come from me, and I'm not going to be a protest. I'm not going to be a protest, but I'm going to be a protest, and this is coming from one of the effectiveness crowds, so I may be biased, but we used to think that we're performative people. They wanted to be seen in the right place, doing the right, but part of that was the way that I used to argue, "Let's cut our hair, let's dress in suits, let's go down there, and, you know, oh, we're not going to, that's not who we are." Yes, but what if it's what we need to be to be effective? Right, and so I felt the same way about when I saw that protest with the white kids kneeling and asking for forgiveness. Okay, maybe you have a reason for doing that, maybe that serves to purpose, but I guarantee you that's going to work against whatever you're trying to do here, and yet that's, if I had said that as a protester, there would have been pushback. In other words, some people thought, "So this is what I mean about that Newtonian thing and having empathy." If we could somehow merge those, a combination of having the empathy and realizing that you have the empathy so that you can see the Newtonian thing happening, then maybe we stand a chance to nip the next Newtonian counter-reaction in the bud, but you know what's going to happen, and you don't have to be a genius to figure this out. But I mean, what's going to happen, let's just say the Trump administration goes by the wayside and we have the post-Trump era. What are we thinks going to happen in the post-Trump era? Don't you think there's going to be prosecutions? Don't you think there's going to be investigations? Don't you think that like the Nixon administration, there's going to be people going to jail?

Speaker B: Listen, first of all, I should say that that has to happen. This is why we're in a conundrum. If you don't do that, then you don't punish people who violate the Constitution. But when you do do it, how are the people who support the president now going to view that? They're going to view that as lawfare. They're going to view that as the pendulum swing. They're going to view that that the lesson they learn is the next time that they get power, they've got to be even more nefarious.

• Aggressive.

Speaker A: - Yes. And this, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who already know, I apologize, but this is the Roman Republic tit-for-tat retribution cycle that led to the death spiral there. Over several generations, the Marius and Sulla things that you see playing out at the end of the empire, that it leads to Caesar that gets more murderous every time power then goes to the other side. That's where we are. So being able to look ahead and say, can we somehow put a monkey wrench in this dynamic we're living in the middle of, play as right into the point you brought up earlier about the two roads we can go down. One road is we repair and we get better and we have a second American Renaissance. The other road is we're Marius and sulling this thing down to the Caesar day. And then the, I mean, you know, so I feel like that's where we are. I don't know which part of the Roman cycle we're in, but it's the Mobius strip thing again. It's not exactly like ancient Rome, but it's enough like ancient Rome so we should recognize it.

Kmele: - Yeah. I mean, that's just so, it's so consistent with what I've been seeing in the news cycle just this week. In Virginia, you just had the redistricting.

Speaker A: - Another thing that's a true party, Jewo-oppole thing. Yeah.

Kmele: - Both parties absolutely doing it, but there's a kind of a vigorousness with which the democratic response is taking place now that is happening at the same time.

Speaker A: - It's karma baby, it's karma.

Kmele: - A lot more, a lot more. I just saw a commentary piece, I think, in the bulwark that was, you know, stridently in favor of court packing, for example. And from their standpoint, the description, and I think this is almost verbatim, you know, it's time to take the gloves off. We've got to do whatever it takes. Anything that's appropriate, anything is appropriate in service of ensuring that tyranny doesn't win. We have to do everything possible to seize control and to bend the rules in our favor so that they don't do it. There's just probably a way that people respond to that from the other side, and it's with a similar sort of reckless abandon, insisting that they need to bend the rules in their favor. And yeah, that feels unsustainable, and that might be the most kind of dispiriting thing to come out of this conversation so far.

Speaker A: - On partisan crazies, what we've done.

Kmele: - Yeah.

Speaker A: - And that would be the only thing that would be the advantage for me of multiple parties, is it would be harder to fall into one of these two camps. You mentioned earlier about a rise in the number of people who called themselves political independence, and I do believe that this is the highest number of political independence we've ever had in this country. At least registered. But we have no power. I mean, there is no political independent party, and we're not united on anything. I mean, that's the other problem is that political independence is like what punk rock used to be in 1979. There's no special section in the record store. It's just everything else, right? So in other words, whereas Democrats may argue amongst themselves, there's enough agreement so that they're in the same party, same for Republicans. Independence span the spectrum from libertarians to greens to, I mean, so there is no, we're inherently, we're inherently divided from the get-go. So we decide elections now, which I find fascinating, but we have no candidates. Do you see how crazy that is? So what does a Trump or whoever's going to run for the Democratic, what do they do? Do they appeal to their base, which they have to do, right? What did Nixon say? You run to the right for the primaries, and then you run back to the center for the generals. The Democrats run left for the primaries, then run to the center. But why are they running to the center at all? Well, they're running to the center to get people like me, right? But as we talked about earlier, the radicalness of the times should reflect the level of the problems. I always use a termite example. If you have somebody come and inspect your house and say you have termites, but you just got them. You have a lot of different things. It can cost you a few bucks. You can freeze them. So if you catch it early, the solutions are minor. If however, you find out you've had them for 40 years and they've screwed up the structure of your house, well, then if you want to solve your termite problem, the solution has to be radical, right? It's not a small solution, or you'll still have termites. By kicking the can down the road for generations like we have, whether we're talking about race or economics or constitutional guardrails or any of the things that came up in our discussion today, you're ignoring the termite problem. So the solution that fixes the termite problem is going to have to be more and more structural as we go down the road. If we wanted to solve this problem back in the post-Nixon era, it would have been an easier solve. And so I think where you get to where we are now is where you get to the brittle stage, where solving the problem could be so radical that it could break and destroy the system we're trying to solve. And I think you see that with some of the things the Heritage Foundation suggests we do. And then all of that stuff is turn us back to like the 1940s or 1950s, well, you're going to break the system if you do that for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that you can't go back to everything the way it was. I mean, you're going to go back to segregation and separate but equal, or just leave that out and go back to the other things you liked about the 40s and fit. You see what I'm saying is that that idea to return to a glorious past that never existed in the first place, which the Romans also believed in, sets you up for a different kind of failure than those of us who are trying to fix a system but can't decide what that even means. So your idea about there being two roads ahead is fascinating because I feel like we're staring at both of them, at the fork, unable to figure out what the hell we do. And I think that's where we see the dearth in leadership here because we don't have people running for office promising a solution. Right? And I think that's quite true. They're promising to keep you from the other guy to do something about that. Or to simply undo the last five years or, I mean, when you've got a multi-decade problem, and this is at least give the Heritage Foundation credit for one thing, at least the solutions that they're putting forward are commiserate with the level of the problem. They're as scary as heck, but they're big and the problem is big. So if somebody is going to say, "Okay, I'm going to run for the Democratic nomination and I think we should give a child tax credit for this." And I think, I mean, these are little tinkering, tweaking things when we have a system where we're drowning and we've gone down two times already, that's not going to fix your termite problem, right? And yet if you talk about the kind of legislative fixes for our termite problem, you're going to look like an AOC or you're going to look like, you know, in other words, it's the most radical people in both parties that are actually proposing things large enough for the scale of the problem we face. But it scares the heck out of us for obvious reasons, but these tweakers and tinkerers aren't going to solve the problem. So that's why we're stuck where we are.

Speaker B: I want to turn in a slightly different direction here because we've talked about the institutions, we've talked about how to think about history, and there's something else that I think you're kind of uniquely well positioned to speak to, and that's the state of the polity broadly with respect to our attention spans, our interest in thinking in sophisticated way about complicated issues. I'm sure a little frustrated and vexed here. I'm sorry. I didn't interrupt you, Kmele.

Kmele: No, it's fine. But we've got the tic-tockification of everything. I've read a number of surveys that suggest that that is where young people are getting their news and YouTube shorts on X, on these other platforms where you're succinctly delivering your message, and that's the sickness. And there's an algorithm involved, by the way.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Kmele: And this is, the sickness comes at the expense of something. There is a nuance. A couple more characters, maybe a few paragraphs, perhaps even something book length. And you really have been producing a product for a long time now and kind of bucks that trend, and that tends to still work in certain contexts. So I hear that we're shifting towards this more kind of oral tradition of sorts, but it's almost like a guttural oral tradition versus what I would expect when I think about Oratian. I think about Emerson giving a lecture. Chris Hitchens.

Speaker A: I mean, Chris, you're hitting it. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah.

Kmele: And it feels like what we're getting though is something a little less robust than that. And certainly not the case that people seem to be interested in kind of these like lengthier, written prose on a variety of topics, you know, book sales aren't

Kale: what they used to be. But if we are moving to this oral tradition, it doesn't necessarily feel like we're moving towards one that is actually going to be particularly healthy for us. It's kind of a fast food, the fast food equivalent of whatever it was Emerson was offering. And that doesn't seem like a great outcome for us. So I'm just curious about how you're thinking about the cultural trends around information, dissemination and consumption. And if you are at all optimistic about the appetites that people are demonstrating for these kind of shorter versus longer form, the kind of nuanced versus particularly simplistic, perhaps even self-serving narratives that you can go out and find for yourself.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, look, the first thing that I thought of when you brought this up and I was able to see kind of where you wanted to go with this is I read a story today where young people are giving themselves digital breaks and trying to, you know, touch grass a little bit more in the old line of things. In other words, you know, we think about, I'm older than you are. I think about a world that I grew up in. I grew up in an analog world. And an analog world that was actually closer to the world of the Middle Ages or the ancient world than someone who grows up now. That's what's crazy to think about. But my era was the one where we went from the analog world to this one. There was a time period. Everybody my age had to say, "Holy cow, I'm going to have to learn to use a computer." Because when we grew up, that was one of the things. But that created a different world and it detached us from that old world. And so seeing the kids kind of thinking, well, maybe there's something really, we can feel the unhealthiness without knowing exactly because we've never had anything else. But we know this isn't how it's always been. This isn't what the human experience has always been. So we crave it, we want it. Maybe if we put the devices on the side for a month, we'll get a taste of it. That's that Newtonian counter reaction thing again, right?

Speaker B: In other words, what you mentioned, there's almost a human need for some of this stuff. And I'm going to break it down to personality types. Because I think, you know, I have a buddy who's a computer genius, but he's really a math whiz is what he is. And he sees the world in numbers. And we'll have conversations with each other. We almost have to have a translation device because I see the world in terms of a linear development. This happened that, you know, mine's a historical context and his is math. But it's the same thing, right? He finds a way to organize and make sense of the world in his way as math and my way as context. But these are personality types that seek to even want to make sense of the world. This is not something everybody feels a need to do, right? That's for some people, that's an important thing for them. Other people couldn't care less. They're living their lives. And I got another friend who's a musician. That's what he cares about. This other stuff is all interference. It's noise to him. His work.

Speaker B: But so I think the people that would like the long form content that you type about, to talk about are the kind of people who need that, right? They're people who crave context. There's people who say, you know, who the longer the conversation goes, the deeper it is, the more satisfying it is for them. Now, that's not normal. That's not everybody. But the reason I said earlier that when you said, how do these shows that we do evolve to be these long things? And I said it was an evolution that the listeners played a role in. They're the one, it's a famous story. I tell them all the time and I'm sorry, but I mean, I apologize. The first time we ever did a show over an hour long, I included an apology in the show. I said it is just not right to assume that I should take an hour of your time to talk about the Apaches. You didn't ask for this. And I got about 10 people writing the exact same phrase. We have pause buttons. And the minute, I mean, it was like a light bulb because I was an idiot. Of course, they have pause buttons, but it never occurred to me that there would be a bunch of people in the audience who would say, 60 minutes, we're hoping for an hour and 20, right? So in other words, these were people telling me that they wanted more. It wasn't me creating a market for it. It was me discovering that there was one and the market told me there was one.

Speaker B: And I think that's a personality type. I don't think that would appeal. My wife doesn't listen to my shows. It's not her thing, right? But somebody does. So I think there's a personality type that appreciates context that can deal with opinions maybe like when we're doing common sense, a lot of people listen to common sense don't agree with me, but they like that they're getting something from it depth wise, complexity wise that they don't get elsewhere. And I appreciate that. And those are exactly the kind of people that do what you and I were talking about earlier, the ones who were able to take themselves out of their own partisan views, able to have empathy, able to try to see somebody else's viewpoint, if only to make better arguments for their own side, right? That was my stepdad used to say, you want to sell somebody something, you better understand their point of view, right? And I feel the same way about politics. You want to sell somebody something, understand what matters to them. And I think that a lot of people out there who don't get context are craving it. It's a personality type. I don't have 10 bazillion listeners, but the ones who like what we have to offer, they're out there. And I think that's an interesting demographic to try to target, to be honest, maybe for other things too.

Kale: I use a lot of AI tools, but engaging with these tools, one can very quickly, not just expand on particular things or try to answer questions. And I think answering questions with the LMS is perhaps less valuable than what I use them for, which is trying to synthesize the perspective that I'm entertaining to pressure test that point of view. And then in certain cases, to just kind of summarize other points of view in really efficient ways. And if with essentially the same kind of corpus of information, I can give you the short form, the long form, the kind of multi-part form of a piece, one that is kind of shaded to the left or the right, as you talked about earlier with the project that you were working on. I think that there's something pretty powerful in that. I mean, perhaps I'm just making a case for you to go back and try that thing again. Could you see something like that doing being a long term answer? Obviously not the version you're working with now, but the evolution of this in five, eight, 10 years, could you see something like this playing the role in solving some of the stuff we were talking about, the flooding zone with crap problem? Or is this likely to be the tool of the people who want to flood the zone with crap who figure out who figure out, you know what, we're going to now just make the large language models push the crap. We don't even have to flood the zone. We'll have an a laser beam of crap.

Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. I do think that there are a couple of things that make me optimistic. I mean, first is that the large language models, while they are expensive to build and operate, it's actually been surprising how cheap they can cheaply. They can be built. They'll get cheaper. They'll get cheaper. That's like everything else we've ever done. Yeah. And how cheaply they can be run. I mean, you can buy a Mac mini and install something local on your machine that doesn't even have kind of access to the internet. And it can still give you pretty robust support in any number of important ways. So the competitive landscape in that space, I think, will make it hard for someone to offer up a product that is just kind of biased in one direction or the other. And in recent history, whether it's open AI or Gemini or anthropics, Claude or Elon's Grok, all of those tools have kind of gotten to a place where they've become less partisan in rather obvious ways and more kind of general and curious and offering you on the one hand, on the other hand, perspectives on a number of topics that before there were all kinds of issues that seemed to be a function of people kind of pushing these tools in a left or right direction to try to achieve some specific kind of outcome. And yeah, maybe those tools can be a mechanism for encouraging us to think in more complicated and nuanced ways about important issues. But the real issue, I think, does come down to individuals. Whether or not we're invested enough and perhaps brave enough to embrace positions that are a little less certain, that it'd be more intellectual humility on our parts and for us to be more invested in, more invested in trying not to be wrong about things as opposed to trying to be right. You've tweaked my devil's advocate though now. Now all I think of is, "Palantir plus AI plus nuclear weapons plus the fourth amendment and we're screwed." Have you read the book, "If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Does?"

Kale: Yeah, I haven't read it, but I am exceedingly familiar with the arguments there.

Speaker B: It's one of those things, look, all tech works this way, right? When you're a nuclear weapon, I mean anything when you look at the big tech and just go, "Wow, there's an existential potential harm here." But as my wife and I'll talk about it, it could cure cancer. Yes, but it could create the authoritarian police state you're worried about. I mean, we live in interesting times, don't we, Kale?

Kale: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think the most pessimistic view on AI is one that it seems, to the extent it's true, it's just true and here we are. It's over and we should enjoy the next couple of years and there we go. Judgment day is coming. But I do think that I'm much more inclined towards the more optimistic vision of things, which is that we see some kind of important incremental changes over time that we get much better at doing the things that we already did as opposed to kind of creating a job's apocalypse and that the real meaningful competition that we're seeing amongst the people who are building these tools and the diversity of the tools, they're specialized in specific industries in many instances. I can kind of customize them to my liking. Might be good to support my own means. I just support my own means. I'm a little too. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of value in that. And I think ultimately, the challenge here is the open AI's and the anthropics and even palantiers of the world who are these big incumbents who are spending a lot of money to kind of get out ahead of these tools. As you mentioned, you're going to get cheaper. They're going to get better. To the extent there are huge challenges on the horizon, a lot of those challenges are going to be have these major companies are going to have to face them down first. And it's not going to be easy or cheap. And a lot of them could kind of crash on the rocks in the process. And the beneficiaries of all of that might be all of us. And the second generation of companies that come after them and can kind of build on the wreckage of those old firms and acquire some of their

Dan Carlin: pieces and utilize the data centers that they all built. And the extra energy capacity that we're going to need to build if we're actually going to have these tools in the future. So I'm optimistic, but that's mostly because the pessimistic view of things is so pessimistic. It's almost like the heat death of the universe. It's almost not worth worrying about. No, it's been different. Well, I mean, in the '50s, go look at all the literature when everybody thought they weren't going to wake up the next morning because of nuclear weapons and stuff. I mean, for me, I just look at AI completely differently. And that's just the military history, Guy Ami [guy in me]. But it's a weapon system. And the reason you have to think about a weapon system is that too many people think about it like a consumer product. And a consumer product is going to follow a completely different line of development than something that is a military product. Because the military product is going to blow past all sorts of restrictions we might be able to make on consumer products. So you might say something like, oh, well, we don't want to do this with AI. That would not be a good move. Yeah, but if somebody else will just say China can be our bad boy du jour in this conversation. But if the Chinese are working on it in the military sense, it acquires the same dynamic that nuclear weapons, in other words, we can't fall behind because it's an existential threat, as opposed to, oh, yeah, it might affect our ability to deliver products onto it. It creates a different dynamic. The survival mode is triggered. And all of a sudden, that opens up doors to rampant development. We might not otherwise think was wise if it wasn't so important a thing. And the only reason I bring that up is we've now had a couple of generations to live with nuclear weapons, which follows a similar dynamic. And I feel like people, it's normal in an American society where everything is sort of, we look at the capitalistic side of this, how we can make money off of it. But when you put it in a more military sort of context, I think that's when you're going to see how AI is going to function in terms of our ability to control it, our ability to let it go beyond a line where we would let it go. If this was just a consumer question, I think that's probably going to be a more accurate way to watch the development of AI is to think about it with like the next nuclear bomb type thing. And I bet it follows that path.

Kmele: You know, we used to call nuclear weapons and nuclear power a dual use technology, right? Because you can use it for both AI is a dual use technology. But we forget that one of the uses is military and existential.

Dan Carlin: Yeah. And then some of the limitations on your ability to utilize it are built into the tech as well. I mean, the nuclear fallout, if you're too close, you can't use it. That's where the problem is very terrible. When the EMC pulse happens and blows your AI out of the water, then what, right?

Kmele: Yeah. Yeah. And I think AI is somewhat similar in that at the moment, you know, we talk in the consumer context hallucinations, but that actually exists in the military context as well. And it's part of the reason why you can't have completely autonomous murder machines.

Dan Carlin: Go watch a movie like fail safe. The whole movie fail safe is about sort of a computer glitch, right? Well, what if that computer glitch were done on purpose? I mean, there's a, well, war games, the more updated version, I guess a fail safe is another one. Imagine the movie war games from the early 80s with AI. I mean, the whole thing is fascinating. And I always say, you know, if we fascinating and terrified, it's the stakes that actually make it interesting, though, right? In other words, if it wasn't so damn serious, it might not be so intriguing. If I always say that this would be such an interesting period to study from 500 years from now, you know, we were doing a history show on it. It just is a whole different thing to live through, isn't it?

Kmele: Yeah, yeah, it sure is. Now, I suppose 500 years from now, AI, Dan Carlin, AI Kmele, maybe continue to have this conversation.

Dan Carlin: That's right. And whenever we want it, things.

Kmele: Dan, this has been really, really wonderful. I am so grateful to you for just taking some time to chat with me. This is not gone at all as I expected, which is in some respects precisely what I expected.

Dan Carlin: I hope you get what you want out of it, but it was very enjoyable.

Kmele: Thank you so much, Dan. That means a tremendous amount. Dan Carlin, thank you, sir.

Dan Carlin: Thank you for having me.

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