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529 - Is America Already In An Irreversible Free Fall? - Viet Thanh Nguyen · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Vietnamese podcast.
0:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, I am in the home of Yetan Wynne.
0:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yetan Wynne has retired from teaching and I ask Viet if I can join him on a podcast to talk about how he feels about
0:15
[SPEAKER_01]: how open you can be with retiring from an institution that perhaps might have held you back and here to talk about the state of America.
0:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the podcast.
0:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd like to be back here with you, Ken.
0:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I reflect on every time I sit with you because I feel like I'm getting more comfortable with what I do and today I thought about like sitting in a living room well, now I'm setting up.
0:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can't imagine how you must feel as a year has gone by and now that you're out of USC as an institution, how much more relaxed you are.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk a little bit about
1:02
[SPEAKER_01]: do I look more relaxed to you yet?
1:04
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, not yet.
1:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The reality hasn't really started kicking in yet.
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I got my last paycheck as a professor from USC about a month and a half ago.
1:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So the new reality is just starting to arrive.
1:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But we met at USC University of Southern California.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And everything I'm going to say about USC is actually I think not.
1:20
[SPEAKER_00]: unique to USC it's more indicative of the place of higher education in the United States, which is also indicative of a lot of things about economics and power in our in American society.
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very grateful to having been a professor at USC for 28 years.
1:35
[SPEAKER_00]: gave me a lot of opportunities in different ways, including teaching, meeting people like you.
1:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's no doubt that USC, I think, gives a symptom of so many different things around power around the way in which almost everything we do as Americans is tied into profit.
1:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So, go into USC is an incredibly expensive proposition.
1:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I think total cost is somewhere around $90,000 a year right now.
1:57
[SPEAKER_00]: That's crazy, right?
1:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not, it's not unusual.
2:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the ironies about American higher education is that if you make your costs cheaper, people think your university's worth less.
2:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's not just a fault of higher education, people like to blame higher education for the costs, spiraling costs of universities, but a lot of Americans want to pay more.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: not everybody, but some segment wants to pay more and that helps to keep the prices high.
2:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And that affects everything we do in a university.
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything becomes the spite of fact that we're supposed to be pursuing truth and knowledge and all these wonderful things.
2:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also saturated by worries about profit, both in terms of someone's individual pay, but also the profitability of an entire university.
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that was
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Symptomatic of so many other aspects of life in American society where everything is saturated with the desire for profit for celebrity for spectacle that extends to politics extends to sports and USC being this major corporate institution was affected by not just capitalism but by celebrity by sports by spectacle by politics so all of these things are intertwined and
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was dependent on that for my salary.
3:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So stopping out of it hopefully will, I think is your implying, give me more freedom, psychologically, but also just in terms of being a writer and saying what I want to say.
3:13
[SPEAKER_01]: You know the economics of almost 400 grand a year for an education at USC.
3:19
[SPEAKER_01]: When you think about your children, what do you feel like, do they need that?
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think they'd be alright without?
3:27
[SPEAKER_01]: something that you was seeing above.
3:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So for years, you've ran total for four years at USC.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, I had everything in.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I had everything in.
3:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I went to school at Berkeley at a time when Berkeley caused probably about eight or nine hundred dollars a semester in tuition, unbelievable.
3:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But even now, Berkeley is probably 15,000, 12, 15,000 dollars.
3:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Still an enormous amount of money, but a relative bargain.
3:50
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife went to a community college for the first two years before she went to UC Santa Cruz.
3:55
[SPEAKER_00]: We both came out, okay, so there is no doubt in my mind that if my children decided to go to the community college route, the United States University of California route for a fraction of the cost.
4:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They would turn out fine, but there is, again, in the United States, this mentality that more expensive is, is better.
4:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And so people go into debt for that kind of thing, and we really should not have that kind of mindset.
4:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But as a country, we should also be thinking of ways by which things like education.
4:25
[SPEAKER_00]: for healthcare should be cost that are born by society as a whole and not just by the individuals who are sending their families to that and we should think about the ways in which education is wrapped up with so many other things besides education.
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: People go to universities, they want the next dorm, they want the very successful football team which requires a very expensive coach, et cetera.
4:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we have a problem here that in which by way of which education in the United States is also tied into a lot of other kind of problematic values that we as a
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not sound like it's gonna go away.
4:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's not gonna go away.
4:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't.
4:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's impossible for us to go backwards.
5:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what are we gonna do?
5:05
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you gonna wipe off this idea of branding per each institution?
5:12
[SPEAKER_01]: It's impossible.
5:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you want us to be seeing with the Lamborghini Degree, the Rose Rose Degree.
5:18
[SPEAKER_01]: You wanna be in that elite, right?
5:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Like most people, if I'm gonna work that hard to, you don't get a 4.5 in school,
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: high school.
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to make sure that I make it to Harvard or Yale.
5:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, why would why would we go back?
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's possible to go back in a capitalist system.
5:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A capitalist system is built exactly in what you described, which is ever increasing wealth and profit as realize at least partly through the visible exhibition of that wealth in a Lamborghini or in a Harvard degree or whatever it connotes a lot of wealth.
5:51
[SPEAKER_00]: However, if American capitalism declines or collapses, it may not be possible to sustain that model anymore.
5:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that is part of the larger issue, whether capitalism as a whole can sustain the trajectory that it's on.
6:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You can look at other countries.
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You can look at Western Europe, for example.
6:08
[SPEAKER_00]: pretty good higher educational systems that cost nowhere near the amount of money that an American higher education would cost.
6:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They seem to be doing okay.
6:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Now are they doing as spectacularly wealthy as the United States as an arguable kind of the situation.
6:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think the American models built on this mindset that
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: only that pure capitalism is the only way by which a society can be organized and the United States has come to represent that to the entire world.
6:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But the United States is driven with all kinds of internal contradictions and external pressures.
6:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the force of change may not come about because Americans want it, but because it's forced on them by politics and economics.
6:48
[SPEAKER_01]: When you walked into USC, you were a young man, and you had certain ideas about teaching and about who you were in about America, those three things are probably transformed a lot in the last three decades.
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you give me a little color about that?
7:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm middle-aged now, you're technically middle-aged, and then this point, and so it's an age old story that your illusions have to be tested by realities for every generation, and I think certainly for me, those illusions, at least when it came to higher education, those illusions were wrapped up with this idea about what higher education should do and could do, and for me higher education transformed me completely intellectually, politically, personally,
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wanted to do some of that work myself for my own students and I felt that I probably did that in some ways for some people.
7:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, part of the fall of the illusion is that no matter what the individual professor does, the institution as a whole,
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: so much money in an institution, whether it's the military or the government or higher education, there's going to be corruption.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: USC becomes sort of symbolic of that, because we had more than our fair share of corruption in scandals over the past 25 years.
8:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really exhausting to recount them all, they extended not just through football and basketball, but also into our hospital system and things like that.
8:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was really disillusioning to think that higher education itself is a corporate institution that is undermined by its own desire for increasing recognition, profitability, spectacle, reputation, all this type of business and that it is inseparable again from the U.S. as a whole, including the military industrial complex, you're a veteran and you came to
8:42
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one symptom of the way by which an American university system is looped into the federal system which is not only federal research money, but also military industrial complex money as well.
8:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's hard to imagine yourself as an individual professor trying to transform your students when they're in an institution that's designed to reproduce them to be a part of.
9:03
[SPEAKER_00]: the American military industrial complex in American domination.
9:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was a really, you know, that was a, that was hard for me to cope with the further that I got.
9:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The higher I rose in the ranks.
9:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the time I resigned from USC, I was a university professor.
9:20
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the highest rank you can achieve in the university system.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I could have I could have stayed in that position for 20 30 years until I died 40 years making very high salary doing very little and probably nothing would have happened.
9:34
[SPEAKER_00]: to me.
9:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But it would have been my own way of selling a little bit of my soul to just this kind of a system.
9:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, that, again, that is tied to my understanding of what the United States is.
9:48
[SPEAKER_00]: We live in a country in which we are telling our young people that they can rise to the greatest heights if they work hard, get the education.
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: But what are those
10:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does that even mean to achieve fame and power and recognition and success?
10:06
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the consequences of that?
10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But for oneself as an individual, for US society as a whole, but then also the ramifications for the rest of the world, because everything we do in the US, at least for now.
10:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, for instance, let's get into that, because you're saying something that I have to ask.
10:25
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think you were becoming or what's holding you back if you stay in it?
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: What were you not able to do?
10:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like I let me clarify this.
10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: What I'm asking is you're saying that for you.
10:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It just sounds like your freedom is really limited, or this ability to kind of develop into something more or different by staying your in shackles.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll go back to the moment when I was like 19 or 20 and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and you know, I came from a refugee background, I was a refugee, my parents were refugees, my parents did not have higher education and we never said the word professor or teacher in our team professor or scholar in our house or PhD so this is all new to me at 19 or 20 and I decided to get a PhD going to academia, this was a job that my parents
11:27
[SPEAKER_00]: that once I achieved tenure, which is I just learned about that at 19 or 20, tenure means you have job security and technically the university can't fire you.
11:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I said to myself, once I have tenure I'll do whatever I want because they can't fire me.
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got tenure and I thought that I
11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: partially did what I was what I said I was going to do.
11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I became a writer, which is not what I was hired to do.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But the further I got into the university system, the higher the ranks I went, the more invitations I got to do things that a lot of people would be interpreted as signs of success, enjoying this board, enjoying that, other board, get to this invitation to give a lecture or travel internationally.
12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And the more I thought the more I do this, the more in fact I'm actually
12:12
[SPEAKER_00]: becoming incorporated into systems of power.
12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, still really do and say whatever I want to do, because if I do and say whatever I want to do, those opportunities will start to dry up, which when it came to October 7th is precisely what happened.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I said,
12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a genocide, and I think we should have a ceasefire, and then that became controversial.
12:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In ways that I had personal consequences for me that were nowhere near as bad as it was for Palestinians or for Muslims, but nevertheless, some measure of that.
12:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That was just one symptom of the way by which even the more successful you become in an institution of track, the more you are actually, despite whatever you think,
12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: about your independence, you are now a part of the system.
12:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And that part of the disillusionment for me at reaching 40 or 50 was I think I'm now part of the system.
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm now the man.
13:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember, you know, we were doing a search for the new university president.
13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: We were doing these round tables for the university community.
13:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I was sitting up there in a dais with a search committee and Rick Carruso who was chair of the board in of USC and chair of the search committee and young woman stands up and points at all of us and says, you were also fat and happy up there.
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, yeah, Steve, and I was like, that would have been me 20 or 30 years ago, and now that look at me.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you're up there.
13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you just, you are a part of it, no matter what else you're doing.
13:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can still obviously speak out within the system, but there are limitations.
13:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I had stayed as a professor, I would have had to expense so much energy, teaching, committee work, meetings, etc.
13:47
[SPEAKER_00]: These are all,
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: necessary for the function of the institution, but there are also distractions for my time when what I felt was really important, my one talent is to write, and I had to try to give myself the time to do that, and therefore to be the best writer I could be, but also to speak the best truth that I knew.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And what did you say to that student that stood up?
14:08
[SPEAKER_00]: What did you say?
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody say anything?
14:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't say anything.
14:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a young person calls you fat and happy.
14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: What is what's to say?
14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I'm not.
14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Because to the young person who is, I'm just going to project under this person, you know, going tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this education who is 20 or 22 years old who is in deep anxiety about their place in the world and their future, et cetera.
14:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I am fat and happy.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't say 30 years ago, I was getting arrested and protests as I was.
14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't make any difference.
14:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I am what I am now.
14:40
[SPEAKER_00]: She is what she is there.
14:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The generation of difference is real.
14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And when people in the 1960s were saying don't trust anyone over 30,
14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They had some, there was some truth to that.
14:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you, you, you, there's exceptions, obviously, but on the average, the order you get, the fatter you get, the, the well-known view, the more, the more complacent you are, the way things are, because they tend to benefit you.
15:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, not everybody, but the general trajectories there.
15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't, I don't think she was wrong.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's really nothing I could say.
15:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, you know, the search produced a president who pretty much
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, the very things that USC had always done, and so she was not wrong that the institution would continue in its path.
15:23
[SPEAKER_01]: The constraints that are placed on professors and somebody
15:32
[SPEAKER_01]: forces you perhaps to get more creative with the way you protest, the way you communicate to the outside world, about your views, maybe.
15:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, it gives you a position of power being entrenched in the system when you do finally communicate to the world and say,
15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Gaza genocide, all of these things has a little bit more weight as a university of something California professor or does it not?
16:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It does.
16:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, let me put it this way.
16:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's a certain little bit of cloud when you have a title and a business card and all that people pay a little bit more attention to you.
16:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, it's all reputational, right?
16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I went a prize, people are like, oh, you're recognizing what that prize is.
16:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, you must be worth something, therefore, we'll listen to you.
16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a title for me in a university, the same function, right?
16:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So you do have some cloud obviously.
16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little bit easier to approach other institutions of power like let's say I want to be published in the New York Times.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I can use a little bit of cloud to do that.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say I want to have a meeting with the University president.
16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I can do that.
16:32
[SPEAKER_00]: However,
16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: What change is really going to take place?
16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The university, again, just USC is a symptom.
16:41
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a university with a multi-million dollar endowment.
16:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got tens of thousands of students.
16:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got a huge hospital system that's actually really important to how it operates.
16:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Most students, most people don't know, like, you know, university major research universities, a lot of the profit comes out of their hospitals.
16:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So you don't know these kinds of things until you get into the nuts and bolts.
17:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you don't know that the board of trustees actually really runs the show.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The president is working at their basis.
17:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So how much power does up even a president really have?
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The president could have a vision, but the board of trustees says, there's a red line here.
17:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't cross it.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The president can't cross it.
17:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So even a president is constrained.
17:21
[SPEAKER_00]: by all kinds of things that the average person doesn't see.
17:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, you can use your cloud to try to enact certain kinds of change within the institution, even outside of it, but the institution, because it's so deeply invested in literally profitability and money, it's extremely hard to change the general course of that institution.
17:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
17:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I have so much respect for people who stay within the institution to try to fight it, but the reality of it is that most people in the institution don't fight it.
17:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm hoping that stepping out of it will give me just psychologically and physically just more time to say things with that restraint.
17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm excited.
18:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I look forward to hearing what you have to say next to.
18:05
[SPEAKER_01]: What would it take, would it ever, would you ever consider teaching again, would you do you ever imagine a place in your life where you miss it so much that you can get back in?
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's that towards the end of my career.
18:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought I got, I was better, I, you know, I,
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: When I started off as a teacher, I first started teaching when I was like 21 or 22 as a teaching assistant.
18:28
[SPEAKER_00]: My students were my age, some were older.
18:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I became a professor at 26, same situation.
18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The advantage there is youth, some a little bit closer to the students, but this is advantageous lack of wisdom.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and experience.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And so by the end of my career, in my early 50s, I thought I had more wisdom.
18:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I just, I just seen so much with the students.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I was more sympathetic.
18:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I was more empathetic.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I was more caring as a person.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a lot older than the students, which meant that I also could see them.
18:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I think more holistically.
18:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They thought of themselves as adults, obviously.
18:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought of themselves as adults, but also as children.
19:01
[SPEAKER_00]: in certain ways and I felt that found them be vulnerable and in need of care that I couldn't provide when I was younger.
19:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I got better as a professor, but I was also just more exhausted and I felt that I had lost a passion for teaching that I had when I was 25 or 26.
19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, what was the question again?
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, the, you know, guy now, I've lost my child because I'm like listening to you.
19:27
[SPEAKER_01]: We can move on.
19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: How are the students today different than when you first started?
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think the students today are basically very much different than from when I started.
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're different if you look at a specific situation like USC, they went from being the university of spoiled children when I started into university of serious connections or corruption, depending on your point of view.
19:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And SATs, GPAs are way way better, students are intellectually better equipped.
20:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But...
20:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Emotionally, the way they look at the world, I think they're the same.
20:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all, you know, 18 to 21 in the average, lots of anxiety, lots of excitement, lots of exuberance, lots of ambition, lots of questions, all that I think I stayed the same.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: What's also stayed the same is that there's going to be a certain percentage who are going to be
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: disabled in certain ways, disabled by the economics of their situation, disabled, I mean this disabled not been in negative sense.
20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just saying they don't have the same opportunities that somebody, some people have come in with because they come from family wealth and generational experience with academia.
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's always going to be a percentage who feels that they're out of place.
20:45
[SPEAKER_00]: because they didn't come in with parents with wealth, so they didn't come in with multiple generations of college graduates, so they didn't come in with a whole body or a whole mind.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They have other kinds of issues.
20:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Those, that's always there, you know?
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I mean when I say that I have a better understanding of the vulnerability of students.
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: There are students who are vulnerable individually, because they have a learning challenge, or they're vulnerable individually, because they have a mental health issue.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They're students who are collectively vulnerable because they're a part of a vulnerable population.
21:15
[SPEAKER_00]: All of that is there as well.
21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So the specifics can change, but I think that whole picture of the student population has not.
21:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, they're also, they're specific things like social media, artificial intelligence, that characterize this generation that we didn't have.
21:29
[SPEAKER_00]: in our generations, and that is a real thing.
21:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And one reason I quit is because I didn't want to deal with artificial intelligence.
21:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I mean, if I'd stayed, I would have had to deal with it, and we all had to deal with it, but I didn't want to deal with that.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, every generation has its own particular kind of new technical political issues that they have to confront, but the overall
21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's the same.
21:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And you think when we introduce AI into actual learning for the students to kind of like integrated into their essays or, again, with a writing, do you think that we have a way to mitigate them from
22:12
[SPEAKER_01]: actually doing the work, I guess what I'm asking is, is there a way to incorporate it and have them do the work and have them do the actual critical thinking?
22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there is.
22:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I have faith that we can do it.
22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have faith that we will do it.
22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so I'll give you an example, you know, the very last class that I taught was a nine person seminar and in that nine person seminar, there was no electronics, so they couldn't bring any device into the classroom, they had to do writing in class every time we met this is you per you your idea to do this.
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it's not, it's not unusual.
22:41
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of professors are now turning into this good example.
22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The only time they could use a computer was at home and they wrote their final paper.
22:47
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the only thing they could do at home.
22:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Their final exam was actually one on one oral examination with me for 30 minutes.
22:52
[SPEAKER_00]: which I think is actually more terrifying than having to write a paper.
22:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So that means that it's completely possible to do a kind of education where you separate the human being from all the technology.
23:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's very doable.
23:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the problem is it's labor intensive.
23:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of done that with like 15 or 30 students.
23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Could I do with 150 students, which was my largest class?
23:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the issue.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, again, going back to the cost profit model of education right now, everything is being driven by profitability.
23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They're bringing in AI.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They have, you know, the majority of professors and teachers in high education are actually non tenure track, which means non permanent.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They're paid some par wages.
23:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They're economically vulnerable.
23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They have enormous teaching loads.
23:37
[SPEAKER_00]: the boutique educations that go on at, you know, very expensive universities, I think will incorporate AI and also at the same time try to increase the human touch in the model model that I just described, but the entire model of higher education as a whole is driven by mass market profitability where each student is a consumer who's paying a lot of money, but it's also a site of profit in terms of how much the lower amount of resources can be invested in the student, the greater the profit the university can extract.
24:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So, at 9, 10% class, at 30% class, that's less profitable than 150, or 1,000% distance education force.
24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this is where I'm pessimistic that the temptations use AI to do that at the expense of the students' ability to learn and the teachers' ability to teach that that temptation is what's being offered to us right now versus this other model where AI could be used as a supplement.
24:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for example, like I do it now, not by choice, but if you do a Google search now, it defaults automatically to AI.
24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the sad thing is it's actually so far seems to be pretty good.
24:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Very good, yeah.
24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when I do stuff that I don't know anything about, like, what kind of bike should I buy?
24:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I turn to AI and it's, and it's worth.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you do do you do you transport that to education or any other kind of professional field in the temptation, obviously, is that then people don't have a sense of expertise in their own area.
24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm running a novel and I will use AI to help me do research, but I know how to incorporate that research into my own work without plagiarizing it.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: or I have a sense of when to trust it and when not to trust it.
25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: A new generation of people, or a generation of people who don't have that kind of long history of professionalization and expertise, they may not be able to do that incorporation.
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we should be teaching them, and I'm not sure that we are going to be teaching people how to use AI versus how to use us.
25:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Since we're on this topic, I was not going to talk about this, but since we're here on AI
25:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm experiencing this problem is that when I go to write things for myself that I want to make it sound like me, I write it, I get a thousand words in and I'm like, I really want this to be spit-shined a little bit in terms of the structure.
25:51
[SPEAKER_01]: But what ends up happening is AI-rewards things and makes it sound far better than what I can make it and sound like, and it doesn't sound like me.
26:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But how do I use it to help me restructure, make things better without real, how do you do that without having it restructure your words or put words into your writing and take it out and edit it?
26:18
[SPEAKER_00]: break question I was thinking about the exact same thing because you know I saw picture on my social media feet today of Japanese soldiers on the beach in Singapore around a group of Chinese prisoners and I looked at that picture and I was like that's AI because it's too clean like if this is an actual picture of World War II where this was taking place with La Grainia et cetera et cetera and here it is so polished I knew that even the situation actually happened the image itself most likely did not happen
26:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The literary equipment is the same thing, like you, what you described is probably going to be the future where everybody sounds the same.
26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like that AI image, it looks the same as a thousand other AI images, because it's been made by a machine.
26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The writing is going to be the same model.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you could be writing to somebody else, and they're going to write back to you, but you guys will sound exactly alike.
27:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course the danger is like 50 years from now no one will know because that's door care because that's what they've been raised with.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But in your situation let's say that AI, you know, you feed AI 1,000 words, AI gives you a 1,000 words back that's been rewritten.
27:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not advocating that anybody does this, but what you would have to do is go back and mess it up, scuff it up, you know, it's like getting a pair of brand new jeans and you wanted to look like the way you wanted to look, you mess it up in various ways, right?
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to actually make it look less than perfect.
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then people will be like, that's, that's, that's can, he's less than perfect, you know, it's like a little less than, little less than polished.
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like looking at a Hollywood movie star.
27:39
[SPEAKER_00]: You can tell when someone's a plastic surgery.
27:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They look too perfect.
27:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to introduce the human, which is imperfection, which is also style at the same time.
27:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's very tempting.
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I turned on my email yesterday and outlook offered me three sample responses.
27:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there someone in ski malls?
27:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my God.
27:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty amazing.
27:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm actually tempted to use one because it will substitute me having to think, doing something to bureaucratic thing.
28:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to do, but I did not give into that.
28:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Speaking of scuffling up things, when you won your Pulitzer, what I think about in the last week thinking about this conversation that we're gonna have, I thought about once you win a prize like that, you can literally move into a university like Harvard or Yale for some higher, like the pinnacle of the United States, right?
28:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Why didn't you do that?
28:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Was that ever even a thought to you and is it really important to be at one of those institutions as a professor?
28:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I think for many professors it is important because again academics like a lot of people are driven not just by their pure pursuit of knowledge, but by the trappings of their life, their profession.
29:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Why didn't you ever move on?
29:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so, you know, what you would do is you would move on to the next highest ranked university, et cetera.
29:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, for me, in my case, you know, I got an offer from Princeton, for example, and I didn't take it.
29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And partly it's because, you know, honestly, I live in California, my wife lives in California is really hard to leave and she was like New Jersey, no way I'm going to New Jersey.
29:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, for me, like Princeton and everything that represents, in Harvard where I did a couple of fellowships,
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, once I've was exposed to Harvard, for example, where my brother went to school, but I got rejected.
29:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Once I was exposed to Harvard for a year, I realized, I think Harvard is full of, you know, what?
29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They're very smart, a lot of very smart people at the faculty level and undergraduate level.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no doubt about it, but there's a certain amount of self-congratulations for being at Harvard.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not unique to Harvard.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You kind of the corporate ladder, I'm sure there's a lot of self-congratulation, watching to come as CEO or something like that.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And so people who are, again, who are in the institution, in the particular world that gives them rewards with titles and all this kind of stuff, they accept that world for what it is.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I prefer being on the outside.
30:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I prefer, I mean, I'm at USC, but I can see hopefully USC from the outside.
30:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I could have gone to Princeton and seen it from the outside.
30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I gave the most prestigious lectures that you could give at Harvard University.
30:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I gave those lectures in a very self-conscious way, where I drew attention to the anomaly of being a refugee giving these lectures at Harvard University.
30:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was why, I think I'm just very skeptical.
30:37
[SPEAKER_00]: of the things that I'm not supposed to be skeptical about.
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if Harvard gives you an invitation to be a professor, are you sort of supposed to take it?
30:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
30:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So when the game of the invitations to give these Norton lectures at Harvard, I took it wronging because I knew I would say yes because I'm on the model of my naughty, but I knew I would never probably take a job at Harvard.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd ask me early if I would ever teach again, the only place I would ever teach again, I think would be Berkeley where I would just make sense.
31:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But I never do it full time.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I would just do it to be in around students for a while.
31:14
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you remind me of the book, the one who sold this for Ari, you know, um, the title.
31:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The title is just sort of like, uh, I think deep down inside, you have these Buddhist sort of like, uh,
31:35
[SPEAKER_01]: For me, you can't hide the fact that you could have made the decision to move on to a prince.
31:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I look at you, when I thought about it, I'm like, if it could have moved on to higher grounds, but you didn't, and it really just shows how real you are.
31:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And then now I'm like really hoping to see the real bit come out.
32:00
[SPEAKER_01]: But we're all cognitive three creatures, you know.
32:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't go to Princeton, but I still stayed at USC, for example, you know, I understand the Buddhist thing.
32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And also Catholic, the Catholic idea of giving up the world is the same universe as the Buddhist idea as well.
32:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm dwelling on this one line from the Bible that I heard many times as a young person that is harder for Richmond,
32:30
[SPEAKER_00]: this for a camel camel to go through the eye of the needle.
32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's really true, so I mean, I had these explanations, but look at my house.
32:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was just saying, so am I going to give this up?
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I just didn't do that.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So I recognize the contradictions of myself, and I think we all have contradictions, and that's what makes us human.
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's not saying these things in order to be resigned to the contradictions.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm saying these things in order to recognize the contradictions, and
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: to be aware that at least and hopefully all of us are trying to struggle through our contradictions, not to resolve them, but get to the next level of contradictions that we have to confront.
33:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Speaking of which, America is a contradiction today.
33:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I...
33:09
[SPEAKER_01]: go to Vietnam quite a bit to visit my brother.
33:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And nobody is allowed to talk about politics.
33:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Not even inside the house, are they encouraged?
33:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Or, you know, everybody's just so tight, right?
33:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody's talking about politics.
33:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just seems that people are more content with their family members, because there's no political discourse.
33:32
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, you know, red and blue.
33:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody is on the same team.
33:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it better to have that?
33:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Where nobody's talking about that, but they're getting along.
33:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I no longer talk to anybody, my family.
33:50
[SPEAKER_01]: In the way that I did when we were maybe 15 years ago, when we were, you know, all having a great time and we're drinking together and we're such a close family, nobody.
34:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not the one, I know I'm not the only one.
34:05
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think?
34:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an old trade-off, right?
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the society, or the party, or the government, or the individual who promises to give order and stability, always does that with,
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: As part of the bargain, you know, I'll make everything calm and I'm going to make everything happy, but you have to give up certain things.
34:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the only question is how much are you willing to give up?
34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have an answer for you, you know, because I haven't been to Vietnam since 2014 and part of the reason I haven't been to Vietnam is because I'm very political and, you know, a much of my work is not allowed to be published in Vietnam, for example.
34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And the TV series of the sympathizer was not basically not allowed.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: to be shot in Vietnam.
34:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So for someone like me in my particular inclinations, it's not a great place to be, but I recognize that for a lot of people, it is.
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I can see the pictures from your account and from all my other friends or social media, it looks great.
35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Vietnam has been totally transformed in the past 12 years in ways that I assume are really good.
35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm sad that I can't participate in that joy and pleasure in all of those kinds of things.
35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But even in Vietnam, I assume that the picture you're painting
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: completely accurate because not everybody's benefiting from it and there's some people in prison because they have said what they wanted to say not even in ways that are super threatening to the government.
35:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So there there are there is a price to be paid it just may not be paid but being paid by the people that you're encountering and the flip side of it here in the United States absolutely fractious like you say but that's part of the cost of having democracy.
35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think that this is not new in American society.
35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You said that we're full of contradictions right now in the United States.
35:48
[SPEAKER_00]: We've always been a contradictory country going back to the very origins and the divisions that you're describing, well, and we had a whole civil war about that.
35:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Things got much more violent back then.
35:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not as if this stuff hasn't happened before.
36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Just for some of us, it hasn't happened within our generation.
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, some of us.
36:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So it hasn't happened within our generation.
36:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's difficult.
36:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've lost that sense of unity, it's painful.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't know if the answer is then to think of things in a binary model, like the binary model is like Donald Trump is offering, and what Magda is offering, which is,
36:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just going to suppress all dissents, we're going to take total control of the political order.
36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You won't need to be unhappy because we'll be the greatest country owner of Festa.
36:35
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the promise, right?
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So someone has to give up something very substantial for that promise of stability to be realized.
36:42
[SPEAKER_01]: As we're inching towards closer control, government control, authoritarianism, a lot of us think that that's happening.
36:51
[SPEAKER_01]: If you ever get locked up with
36:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that if it was purely a personal consequence, it would be fine.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it would suck obviously, but it would be fine.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I would pay the price for whatever it is that I said.
37:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think my real fear is actually penalties for my family.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what really happens and truly brutal society.
37:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't just take you out.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They take out your family.
37:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But they let you live.
37:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And they take them out.
37:20
[SPEAKER_00]: All kinds of miserable horrible things can happen.
37:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's been done in the United States to indigenous people, to native peoples, to black people in this country.
37:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Mass deportations have been done before.
37:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So we already see that happening.
37:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously it's like children are being deported because of whatever it is that their parents are elected to it
37:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's happened.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the real fear is that family will pay the price versus just me, myself.
37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So if it was just me, then it would be fine.
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I think my family is taking care of and all of that.
37:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But I worry about my family.
37:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as I worry about going back to Vietnam, I was like, well, they locked me up.
37:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I asked for it.
37:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I get that.
37:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't want that anything to happen to my family.
38:00
[SPEAKER_00]: If we go back to go back to Vietnam.
38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the best answer I can give.
38:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a worry about it?
38:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have anything that it's coming?
38:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I also think that, you know, I don't want to have an inflated sense of my own self-importance.
38:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was like, I think you see right now, for example, which kind of writers have been penalized the most in American society or, you know, people who write whether they're professional writers are not.
38:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in recent memory, it's been Palestinians.
38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Palestinians act as if they're to have spoken out or written something, they're the ones.
38:32
[SPEAKER_00]: deported or threatened with deportation or actually incarcerated if we look a little bit further past into American history has been primarily or oftentimes black writers and black intellectuals who have had terrible things done to them Paul Robison.
38:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I think of him for example, he spoke up.
38:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Marked as a communist, he couldn't leave the country because his passport was taken away from it.
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It's career was destroyed because of his activism and he was like one of the greatest most famous artists of the mid-20th century.
39:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can be totally taken down by the US, but I think it's totally possible.
39:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's like that far away.
39:08
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not like...
39:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a real possibility.
39:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this, even if it doesn't get to that, whatever damage is happening right now is really me.
39:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I am nobody.
39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just thinking about censoring myself when I'm making these clips.
39:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to say more, but I'm like, self-centered.
39:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So that in itself is a punishment already.
39:35
[SPEAKER_01]: That we're already being limited by what we can say.
39:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But a lot of people said, screw it.
39:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just really put it out there?
39:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it is terrorizing.
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you've already, you've already,
39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: burn bridges with your family.
39:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess we're vice versa.
39:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you burn bridges with you, but you know, I mean You're able to do you're able to say and do certain kinds of things You're just telling you you feel freer when you're able to say what it is that you you feel like saying Yeah, but I don't have the full conviction just yet, but I I I'm a feeling that once I do fly off the handle, I don't hold back.
40:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean I've told you
40:11
[SPEAKER_01]: the messes that I've gotten into the, well, we're speaking about contradictions.
40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: We're, we supposedly live in a country of freedom.
40:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: We're free, right?
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But a lot of people, even with the technical sense of freedom, as you say, self-sensor, they self-sensor.
40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Unconsciously, oftentimes, or they self-sensor, deliberately.
40:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they know what they believe in, but they won't let themselves say it, whatever it happens to be.
40:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can argue that this is a cross-to-spectrum, that's why the right wing is saying, hey,
40:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, and then it's true, I think we should be critical of all kinds of orthodoxies, whether it's right or left or in between.
40:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that the real penalties, the real power is still being directed towards the liberal to left spectrum in terms of where the real punishment is being done.
40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if white people feel like they can't say certain epithets anymore,
40:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Are they being censored?
41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, maybe, but they're being censored from being racist and sexist and transphobic Which is different than being censored by demanding greater, you know, egalitarianism or freedom for the American people So there's different kinds of self-sensorship that could take place and they're not all the same Do you feel like we're in America and a state of decline?
41:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think we're in a free fall?
41:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's an already-able wherein a state of decline, and I think that if you want to be optimistic, you can say America could rescue itself, but I don't think it's going to happen.
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, whether the decline is fast and crashes hard or whether the kind of slow that remains to be seen.
41:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that the pathway for the United States to actually pull itself out of free fall or decline is very, very clear.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: at its core.
41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever you think about capitalism, you could argue that capitalism could be better for the people that it's supposed to serve.
42:02
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you do that?
42:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You do that by distributing the profits of capitalism more equitably to the people within society.
42:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Greater taxation, redistributed income, greater social networks, universal basic income.
42:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the pathways, I think are very, very clear.
42:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, can we do it?
42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the contradictions in American society that have generated inequality, the fear of being taxed, the fear of the government, et cetera.
42:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that force is so strong that an extremely pessimistic that even the people who are most invested in capitalism would be able to save it, because they believe that unrestrained capitalism is the only way.
42:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one of those built on this whole idea of, you know, with the Tea Party and with the, you know, the taxation of England and like, at the root, we don't believe in taxation or minimizing that taxation.
42:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I don't, I don't see it getting better and I don't see, like, the Vietnamese community really,
43:05
[SPEAKER_01]: understanding that communism and giving back, taking from a little bit from the rich is not communism, right?
43:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're just like a tiny fraction of America that believes in this, like kind of wonky.
43:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's just take everything we can.
43:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think there's a lot of people suffering at the bottom.
43:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I don't disagree, obviously, so that's what I'm saying, I don't think there is, first of all, let me frame this by saying, I'm not a believer in capitalism, but if you are a believer in capitalism, you should be, well, you can to try to save it and to restrain it, because that's the only way capitalism can actually survive as a part of a national society.
43:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Capitalism unrestrained, I think, leads to the destruction of nations, because ultimately,
43:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you look at what's happening right now, for example, with the billionaire tax in California, the billionaires, billionaires with sponsors, you know, how are you?
44:00
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to go to Florida.
44:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But imagine that on a greater scale, and then it does happen on a greater scale.
44:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you can't restrain billionaires.
44:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a Venetian decides to, we're going to tax, say, we're going to tax billionaires, or have greater taxes on billionaires, or wealth taxes, the billionaires is like, well, we're going to go to Singapore.
44:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what's going to happen.
44:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So the people who are most invested in capitalism are invested in capitalism first, national, the national identity or community identity.
44:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Second, and that's why I think America's in a state of decline because despite all the professions of belief in America and so on, that Trump and Mago are making, it's ultimately really about the survival of the individual.
44:37
[SPEAKER_01]: This might not be a clean cut answer, or I'm not looking for a clean cut answer, but do you think that
44:44
[SPEAKER_01]: MAGA and all of these people who are really on the other side of this argument are really in it because they think that it's actually better for America and for themselves, or do you think that this is just all outgrade?
45:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think it depends on who you're talking about, you know, I think that at the very highest level, so I think it is, I think it is about greed.
45:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that if you looked into the soul of souls of some of these people, no matter what they're saying in public, I think they're probably very deeply cynical.
45:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they may, I think they probably do, they probably, there are some sentiment of people who actually know I think what's going on.
45:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's planet of finite resources.
45:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a vulnerable planet.
45:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Many billions of people suffer because of capitalism.
45:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I can get mine, then it's OK.
45:41
[SPEAKER_00]: If I can form my little space colony or my island, refuge, or get a bunker in New Zealand, it's OK. That's creative destruction.
45:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a part of capitalism.
45:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They can't say that in public.
45:55
[SPEAKER_00]: though just blame the masses for leading to the destruction of society.
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the average participant in maga, I think that for them, I think that they do believe that capitalism provides all the answers and that if anybody given a fair shot can make their way in capitalism and those who fail, that's their responsibility.
46:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But part of what's going on for them is that they really do think the country has been invaded.
46:21
[SPEAKER_00]: both by brown people and immigrants and refugees, but also invaded by these foreign ideas, like around trans identity and things like that.
46:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they, I think they really do believe in that and that if you cleanse society of these infiltrations and these sort of some verse of ideas that it will be a better place.
46:40
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you working on next?
46:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote an article the sympathizer and there's a, you know, it's about to Vietnam War.
46:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And for me, it was always about more than the Vietnam War.
46:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It was always about us as Vietnamese people, but more than that as well.
46:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why I had to write a sequel called The Committed, which takes place in Paris because I wanted to talk about French colonialism and not just American imperialism.
47:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And to show that what I was also really interested in was the very nature of revolution.
47:09
[SPEAKER_00]: American Revolution, Vietnamese Revolution, French Revolution, were all of us living in the legacies of the American and French Revolution.
47:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Those of us who live in the West and those of us who have been colonized by the West.
47:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And for those of us who are Vietnamese, we've been affected by the Vietnamese Revolution, whatever you think about it.
47:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So these forces of revolution that have been
47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: unleashed upon the world, had transformed it in so many ways, and you and I are the direct consequences of all those revolutions.
47:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So the third and final novel is what I'm running now, and it starts in El Salvador in 1984.
47:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The committed ends in Paris in 1984.
47:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I think the reaction for some readers would be like, why is a Vietnamese-American guy writing about El Salvador in 1984?
47:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's because the moment that the United States lost in Indochina, it immediately pivoted to Central America.
47:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Nicaragua had been lost to the Sandanistas and right Ronald Reagan said El Salvador is now the new center of the so-called cold war.
48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't stop the communist You took over Nicaragua.
48:08
[SPEAKER_00]: They're gonna take El Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala as they took Cuba And then they'll be right there on our southern doorstep
48:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so for me, I want to be able to connect all those different things, and my protagonist from the first two novels, you have to read the novel, find out why, ends up in El Salvador in 1984, and then makes this way north to Ronald Reagan's America of 1984, which is also a symbolic year.
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And that will hopefully be the very, I know it will be the end of his story and the end of the trilogy because I'd like to move on to other things.
48:36
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you move on to?
48:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see.
48:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I have many ideas.
48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd like to write a fun, satirical, comic novel about exactly what we've been talking about the contemporary pitfalls and contradictions of the United States, which is really sad, but also really, you know, painfully funny at the same time.
48:58
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you manage to...
49:02
[SPEAKER_01]: direct yourself to say, I have a lot of ideas, but I'm going to sit and finish this.
49:10
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you, because that's like an iron will to do that.
49:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know a lot of people that we try to create and create a people and we're just so full of ideas, but speaking for myself, just to finish one thing is such a big mountain of climb.
49:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, you know, it's like, it's like running.
49:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the rookie Murakami book, what we talk about when we talk about running because it's about him running marathon.
49:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's crazy.
49:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It runs all these marathons and ultra marathons and so on, but he's cheating as a metaphor for writing.
49:46
[SPEAKER_00]: You put one foot in front of the other.
49:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's.
49:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's painful.
49:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You only see a certain distance ahead of you.
49:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you keep at it, eventually, you're going to run the marathon.
49:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that is my way of approaching a creative project.
49:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It is important to have a goal and object in the end that you can visualize no matter how distant and far away it is or how immense the goal seems.
50:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can't
50:07
[SPEAKER_00]: think that you're going to finish this project next the next day or the next week or the next month with the next year, you have to think about one little bit at a time.
50:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me, literally it's getting up in the morning and thinking, what's the next scene?
50:18
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the end of the chapter going to be like, I just got to focus on that.
50:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I do it 24 times, I've got a novel.
50:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So that kind of work, I think, psychologically, you have to get yourself into that mindset.
50:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what kind of larger project you have in mind, but I think they can all be broken down into some of the bits.
50:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm always one to finish a memoir.
50:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been at it for six years, and I just can't.
50:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I just can't, um, it's so difficult to sit and to,
50:42
[SPEAKER_01]: to finish.
50:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the right of Richard Russo has an obscene idea when it comes to writing, which is you have to, I'm going to substitute a simple word, poop out all the bad drafts before you get to the good draft, you know, that's basically true.
51:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're vomit, whatever.
51:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you just write it right, right, as long as you can write a bunch of stuff,
51:05
[SPEAKER_00]: and then let's say you write 2,000 pages and you're gonna extract 200 pages out of that.
51:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it sounds depressing, you're gonna have to write 2,000 pages, but I have the opposite of writer's block.
51:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I write too much of too many ideas and it's hard to get a cohesive strategy together to kind of,
51:23
[SPEAKER_00]: What's interesting, you've read the 2000 pages and then you look at it and you find out what's usable from all of that.
51:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the idea of the sculpture with a block of marble.
51:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They have to carve out what's not relevant.
51:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But you don't be able to carve anything out until you've actually got that block of marble.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It was 2000 pages in front of you.
51:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And it can take time six years is a long time in some ways, but it took me 17 years to write a short story collection.
51:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have sympathy for you, but it's also realistic that sometimes a book can take decades to write.
51:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it doesn't mean though.
51:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean though that it's sequential.
51:51
[SPEAKER_00]: This is mean like you have to finish that project before you do another project I was writing three books at the same time and so that's why some people said oh you're so prolific You published three books in three years, you know, and I was like, well, yeah, but I worked working on one book for 17 years I'm working on another book for 11 years.
52:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I was working on another book for three years.
52:08
[SPEAKER_00]: They were all happening simultaneously.
52:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah
52:11
[SPEAKER_01]: amazing.
52:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Viet, thank you so much for doing this.
52:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I look forward to what it looks like next year when we get together because you know these intervals are so interesting, I think for myself to track my own growth as I'm listening to myself listening to you and to actually hear the different stages of your life.
52:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Cool, that was great to talk to you, thank you.
52:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
52:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
52:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
52:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.