Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / SZEPS WORLD TOUR - KMELE FOSTER on Race, Spirituality & 'Wokeness'

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SZEPS WORLD TOUR - KMELE FOSTER on Race, Spirituality & 'Wokeness' · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. This episode of Uncomfortable
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  Conversations is the audio of a video live stream from the ZEPPS live around the world
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  tour sub-tax first-ever live streamed global podcast marathon where I'm crossing two
• 0:23
  dozen time zones in a dozen days and circumnavigating the globe to sit down with some of the
• 0:29
  world's most interesting people in some new global capital nearly every single day, sometimes
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  next one. If you're new to Uncomfortable Conversations, this is a place for wrestling
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  media in the meantime. Enjoy this conversation and thank you whether you're paid or unpaid
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  for helping us to make debate healthy again.
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  Are there any suspicious of your American lifestyle or the depravity of your American lifestyle
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  or your Jamaican family?
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  Uh, yeah, overtly, but mostly concerned about the fact that I'm a godless atheist. Although
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  in truth, I'm not actually a godless atheist. How religious I am. Let's get off from
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  roster after the 10. Well, this is the thing. It's not a conventional and a traditional religious
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  belief. Like I'm a I'm a molest and an idealist and I thought I'm a list. Oh, you believe
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  that like all of the things are all connected and part of their wild evil thing. Mono. Yeah.
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  Okay. Yeah. Like, and that thing is Spinoza's God. So this week, um, I suppose Spinoza
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  kind of strips it of any personness and perhaps even kind of a sense of it being a deity.
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  And in a very real sense, I don't believe that it's a thing that you pray to can the thing
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  thing. It is thought. I think that the two paradigms for thinking about what all of this
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  is is you drill down to the very bottom and it's just more stuff inert stuff, maybe vibrating
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  strings with spot and stuff. It doesn't do anything. And it's possible, but that's it.
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  It's also possible that you drill down all the way to the bottom and you get to China,
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  I think, if you drill. Yeah. Well, no, you drill right through the earth, you're in space
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  someplace. Um, but I think the the ground of being main out the material might be conscious.
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  And it's possible that we are from some moment kind of conjured from that thing and ultimately
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  return back to it. I mean, our experience of the world is fundamentally conscious. I mean,
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  there's some scientific interest in the question I've liked. It was a cold. It's not
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  pantheism exactly, but like, um, there's really something of a research. It's like it's
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  panpsychism. Yeah, right. You know, the, you know, the fundamental building blocks view
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  of those sandy consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about Sam on Friday. Yeah. I mean,
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  Sam and his wife. Yeah. Why not? Because certainly, they're old pants up on it. Yeah.
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  We've talked about this podcast on, but that's not religion to me. It's not, well, this is the thing.
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  What is, what is with it? I got on the sweet baby Jesus. It can be the sweet baby Jesus.
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  It can be that it can also be like, yeah, what Eastern traditions, which many Eastern traditions
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  stripped of the mythology, very much monast idealist kind of sensibilities. Yeah. The worth.
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  And so monast is everything is one. The idealist is what? Everything is consciousness.
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  There, but isn't idealism in philosophy? The idea that the material world doesn't even exist?
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  It can be that, but there are various flavors of idealist. Right. Okay. Yeah.
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  It's heavy man. We started really fucking pay for it. I was going to lead up this now. It's
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  right now. We're just, this is now we're going straight into goal. This is the thing. Like,
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  you are God in some line. So is everyone else. Why am God? But that's because of my attributes.
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  It's not because of any idealist. Camille Foster is with us. This is five of his apps live world tour.
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  You're around the world podcast marathon. We were traveling through 24 times zones and talking
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  to fascinating people in each stop. One of them is Camille Foster, the editor at large of Tang
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  all, which is recently new gig. Most people know him as the co-host of the fifth column. When did
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  him know me at all or not know you at all as the case maybe, but they would be, I mean, let's
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  forget about those people who doesn't know more fast about me in my world. Isn't it funny how
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  there are intersecting circles of celebrity where like, you know, like you said Sam as if everyone
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  knows who is Sam Harris would be. As soon as we're talking about consciousness, you say Sam, like,
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  oh, well, of course. Yes. But 98% of Americans have never heard of Sam Harris. Is it, it can't
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  be that high. So for that empty point eight percent of American maybe 60%. It's the same as pretty
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  well. That's the authentic celebrity. I'm not saying have they ever like, you know, seen him in
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  a magazine shoot a sort of reference. Yes, I'm saying like, I'm saying is it's sticky enough
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  that it's in there right? Yeah, I throw a Wal-Martin albuquerque and you're like, who's Sam Harris?
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  Like how many people? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. It's wild. But can I ask
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  a question Josh? Are we actually we're going? Yeah, this is it. This is the content. There's no
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  warning whatsoever. This is the high quality content. Yeah, no, no. Once you're sitting down in front
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  of the camera as far as I'm concerned, you're fair game. Okay. That's more like I'm sitting
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  awkwardly. So let me know. Is this my self differently? Yeah, I know that that's mine.
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  Um, it was good to see you. It's great to see you and let it come all the way over halfway
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  around the world. I mean, it's not a very long trip by my standards, but by American standards.
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  Yeah. San Francisco to New York. Mm-hmm. Across the world. I want to tell you that I made the trip
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  just for you that I was going to be here. Then you can stop talking like it's really
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  nothing wrong with it. It's not I've done some other things at least. Something wrong with
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  a bit of delusion. Yeah. Uh, speaking of delusion, let's just before we leave the
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  religion. So does it affect your life, your daily life, your, um, you know, your beliefs about
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  monism and idealism and everything being consciousness and everything? Yeah, I think. Yeah.
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  And that didn't do what way. Well, I imagine that everyone I meet is part of the same
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  tapestry. And I imagine that my interior world as complex and varied and expansive as it is
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  is the same thing that everyone else has their own interior world. And it's hard not to have
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  a great deal of empathy for for everyone. What about you? What about my animals? Animals as well.
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  Do you have them? Well, this is I'm actually wrestling with this now. Yeah. And it's funny because
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  for years I have this sense that like our consciousness can't be anything like theirs and have
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  increasingly been challenged in that belief. First, you get a dog and you start to oh,
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  and you, you own this dog and you have a deep relationship and you get angry with each other.
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  And they love you unconditionally, it seems. And you do it inadequately, but you're learning
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  from that. And then you see other animals having their experiences of the world. I'm sure you saw
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  what is it? It was a Netflix dog like my octopus teacher. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I'd stop eating
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  octopus. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as long as I was showing. Yeah. And I've been thinking very
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  seriously about just not eating meat at all anymore. I get that they eat one another, but we are
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  enlightened in a different sort of way. Yeah. Also, they don't do what we do, which is
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  corral billions of other species into torture chambers and men. And then basically, you know,
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  and they only use them in order to bring down the costs and erase the efficiency of a pound of
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  their flesh. Yeah. That's the thing for me, which is like, I don't, I wrestle with it as well,
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  because I do think that if I could do, if it had to go full rogan and just go out with a
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  crossbow on hunt elk, right, then I really don't hear if there's anything wrong with being
• 9:37
  part of the circle of life in that way. Right. If it does hurt the elk. Yeah. Yeah. But the idea of
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  just right creating a concentrated animal feeding operation where billions of sentient creatures
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  are treated. Yeah. Surely as if they're not sentient. Yeah. And only so that we can just have
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  slightly cheaper. Yeah. Yeah. Lash. Yeah. It's bizarre in divorcing yourself from the real cost.
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  And yeah, source of your food, the understanding of something had to give its life. Yeah.
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  For you to obtain sustenance, like our predecessors would have had that intimate connection. They
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  would have had that experience of life and death in a very profound, real visceral way. And
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  it takes something for us to think about it. Yeah. That's right. It takes something for us to
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  contemplate it. And even in the way that you were just describing it, this kind of systematic,
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  industrial scale murder. Yeah. Yeah. And for me, but also torture. I mean, people knew how awful it
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  is in these, you know, the, the taking of the life is one thing. Yeah. The forcing that creature to
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  endure misery is another. I'm going through something. And it is not how what is, I didn't
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  realize we were recorded. But people were going to hear me. This is how monism and how I do it.
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  So I was just luring in just to create a sense of false security. Yeah. I'm going to have to
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  surrender me. My, my, my go to meal is honestly birds. And I urge them and feel bad about it every
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  time. And I told you I injured my finger recently. And I literally, I chopped off a decent chunk
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  of flesh as well as a lot of fingernail. And I'm just looking at this meat.
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  Hmm. Oh, I'm going to make it on the grab in here. No, it made me think that my exact
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  thought would, this is it. Like that's what I am. You're meat and mind. Yeah. That is all. Yeah.
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  God, you're going to go. But if you want to feel better about burgers, I'll tell you, can I say
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  one thing? We'll make you feel a little bit better. I'm out of weight. Okay. Go ahead.
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  A lot of people when they go on their journey to vegetarianism will stop eating red meat,
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  right? And they'll come though, I only chicken or I only fish or something. There's a strong moral
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  case why that's the, I've got it asked backwards in the sense that if you think about the pain
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  and suffering of each individual animal has been like a unit of experience. Yeah. And you care
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  about the morality of torturing and killing an animal. Okay. You get a lot more out of a cow.
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  A single cow. Yeah. A single human being can sit down and eat a whole chicken. Yeah.
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  But you know, a cow is going to feed dozens of people. And also, it's quite easy to get
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  beef that comes from cows that aren't tortured. Like the way that we treat chickens,
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  including, and a lot of people will only be like, I only have milk and eggs.
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  Well, you look at how they treat dairy cows and how they treat caged head dens. They
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  tell me that that's better just because you didn't eat them meat. Yeah. If you can get a cow who's
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  been wandering around in the sunshine, and I luckily live in a country where most of the beef is just
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  for economic reasons in cows that wander around in the sunshine, because that's cheaper and a
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  climate like Australia is than trapping them in a mile up at can I farm out gigantic barn.
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  Then I am cooler with that than with the factory raised egg. Yeah. So that's the no egg is actually
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  good. No bacon. Yeah. That's my fums. And I'm going to have it medium rare to see me.
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  When you say that we like, you said something like separate ourselves from that or we like,
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  it's not just a cultural practice where we walk through the aisles in a supermarket and pick up
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  at the meat which looks very sterile in a styrofoam tray covered in cling film on the floor.
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  We're not thinking about what where it comes from. It's okay. It's enhanced by dyes.
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  Right. Exactly. Yeah. Or like the salmon, the ease, like red. You know, they feed salmon, red
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  diet and make it look, you know, it's fucking gross. Anyway, I try to avoid that salmon, but yes.
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  Right. Yeah. But it's also like there's a whole legal out of us to keep us diluted in the sense
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  that like it's against the law to film inside abattoirs. Is this like yeah, the agriculture
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  industry persuaded the US government to pass laws, I think in the 70s or 80s, but people will
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  fact check me, which they're they're called ag gag bills agriculture. They gag people from whistle,
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  like it's the only industry where you like, you can't be a whistleblower and you can't go and
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  reveal terrible practices. This offends my libertarian sensibility. Yeah. So there's a cozy
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  relationship between big agriculture and the government, which is expressly designed to keep people
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  in the dark. Hmm. So, well, is your next meeting about that? You might as well. Idealism.
• 14:20
  Yes. Veganism. Look at rich. Oh, liberation front. Look at a guy like rich role, you know,
• 14:25
  rich. No, oh, rich is a fabulous guy. You got to get into his podcast. He's going to be on this
• 14:29
  show in on Thursday in LA. Okay. And so this is the episode. I will. Or tune in live. Or just
• 14:37
  come to LA with you or just come for us. Yeah. Just to make them both flying back west on the
• 14:41
  way out. We're heading off tomorrow. Yeah. When you go tomorrow. Think like you'll understand
• 14:46
  some sentences. Yeah. Yeah. I could divert. We'll pass in person today. Did you get your
• 14:51
  jet blue mint upgrade? No, that happens tomorrow. So you're going to make you give away the secret.
• 14:56
  Yeah. So the secret. Yes. Is you go to the airport the day of your departure. I really should not
• 15:02
  tell because you're going to start competing with the upgrades. Yes. And on a route that has the
• 15:06
  mint upgrade, you pay for the upgrade at the gate. You buy a regular fare. Really? You buy the
• 15:10
  upgrade the day of at the gate. And I will sell this. We could say this because they have raised
• 15:15
  the price. But that's how I would score at the mint upgrades. Yeah. No. So if there's an available
• 15:20
  seat, they'll do it at the gate. Not checking. Yeah. Well, you go well, check in. I mean, most of
• 15:24
  us checking. Oh, that's right. Yes. But I do go to them at the front before I go. Yes. Secure. Yes.
• 15:29
  Just check with them and say, what's the price for a mint upgrade? Right. And at these fixed
• 15:32
  prices, they're not charging you the difference between them. They're not saying none. It is a fixed
• 15:36
  price and it is an upgrade price and it's different from the price that you pay if you just buy the
• 15:40
  seat up. What is it like? Given away my. What is it only said on a trans car? It depends. It's like
• 15:44
  350. But on some days, it could be like seven something. But I mean, this is a. I don't know if I
• 15:48
  have a seat. But three days. They'll do. Yes. Absolutely. Four and a half hours, five and a half
• 15:53
  hours up in the air. That's right. And you get to sit by yourself and like one of those little
• 15:56
  bunkers. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Bunker doesn't make a sound. That's called a sweet.
• 16:00
  No, sweet. It's a sweet. Sweet. That is bunker. I say bunker because I am always thinking about
• 16:04
  keeping the rabble away from it. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. It's a war. Yeah. Clebes versus me. Yeah.
• 16:09
  Males. And if I don't get my upgrade, I'm a cleave. Yeah. That's right. Oh, the indignity of it.
• 16:15
  I've suffered it many times. You'll enjoy this. I'll miss trip. I thought we're going to have to
• 16:20
  do a lot of travel. So instead of buying a ticket to separately, I'll get I was in Europe and I was
• 16:26
  in Norway. Yeah. Norway happens to have absurdly cheap business class fairs to anywhere in the
• 16:32
  world. Oh, I don't know why this is the case. It's not like that poor. Everything in Norway is
• 16:37
  expensive. It's absolutely multi city. So I got a one world business class explorer fair which
• 16:44
  allows you up to 16 flights. What? Anyway, in the world, you can backtrack within a continent block
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  but basically a world divided into four zones. So the Americas, like Asia, the Pacific, you know,
• 16:59
  Europe. And you can go as much as you want. I think there are you have to use more and four segments
• 17:04
  in each one except for the United States where you can use six because you have to transit so much.
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  And you can cobble together the most insane routines. It's all in business class or first class
• 17:12
  if you domestic in the States. Yeah. And you can rack up a ton of miles because you're getting like
• 17:18
  2.5 X on every mile. So I'll be like, you know, one world emerald all of that craziness. We could
• 17:26
  literally just talk about this for the next hour and I will please, but we will need to talk.
• 17:30
  We will talk about others. I need that. Okay. It's amazing. It's so good. And it was I think it
• 17:34
  cost like less than $5,000 which is a lot of money. But no, but not for what you just for you. Yeah.
• 17:40
  That's all over the world. And you know, and you know how I flew from Boston to New York yesterday?
• 17:47
  via Miami. Uh-huh. Boston to Miami to New York. Not very direct rooting, but it got me a ton of miles.
• 17:55
  And from Miami to JFK, American Airlines runs triple seven which is three class service that they sell the
• 18:01
  old first bus as business bus because it's a domestic flight. So I was able to have the flagship first
• 18:07
  bus sweet on a business class ticket by selecting one A and knowing what you have to say all the way to
• 18:13
  Miami. Yeah, I did. I did. But I hate it to work anyway. Especially if you're on a white seat.
• 18:19
  I'm in a huge suite. Yeah. The seat turns to fake. It's actually, I'm really sad they didn't
• 18:24
  rid of this because American is getting rid of first bus, but it's so cool. Are they really? Yeah.
• 18:28
  I did. Well, no, they're not getting rid of domestic first, but they ain't rid of three, you know,
• 18:31
  the four class international we have economy, premium economy. Yeah, listen first. Yeah, they get
• 18:36
  rid of first. So they're calling business like just like United has. They just have to have
• 18:41
  Polaris now just business. But you know, but Americans old first class seats, they swivel to face
• 18:48
  the windows. Yeah, there's a desk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're looking at like four windows.
• 18:53
  It's like, I'm looking at the floor and coastline and I've got my online. Yeah, they're bringing me my
• 18:58
  diet coax. I'm tap, tap, tap and away. I've swiveled around and facing outwards. It's great.
• 19:04
  No, that's good. Where else would you want to be? That's good. I wouldn't want to be here. But
• 19:08
  then I've been a concentrated animal feeding operation. It works. And there's someone like a
• 19:12
  hot woman in a short skirt. Not for me. They're not for me. They're not. But then she's bringing
• 19:16
  on me drinks. He's not up. I'm generally speaking like on average. They're in their 80s. Come
• 19:21
  out. No, no, no, no, it doesn't. It depends on the airline. Well, you fly jet blood. It's six out of
• 19:25
  10. Okay. Pretty good. American Airlines in United. They all, I think there's an age required.
• 19:30
  Well, they might be dealing on. I think so. And it's like facial symmetry is actually the
• 19:35
  finger discriminated dancer, which actually facial symmetry. This is the greatest privilege.
• 19:39
  It is. It is. It's the only one that actually that's all right. I knew you get a conversation
• 19:44
  around to privilege and identity at some. You were an amazing piece in Tangle, which I think you
• 19:48
  love to which everyone should read, which we will link to in the show notes when this post.
• 19:54
  Well, you summarize it. I don't need to summarize you for you. Well, the title was let's have an
• 19:59
  authentic racial reckoning. It was me meditating on us being five years removed from the peak of
• 20:04
  the Black Lives Matter moment in the summer. And most of there's been like a lot of retrospective
• 20:11
  pieces written recently. Most of them have tended to take a look at what it had achieved
• 20:15
  politically, et cetera, et cetera. The Ferguson effect. If you're conservative, you use on that.
• 20:20
  What's the Ferguson effect? The Ferguson effect is this notion that there tends to be a spike
• 20:26
  in violent crime associated with these pronounced moments of activism around policing.
• 20:32
  That the police essentially pull back for different reasons when they are under heightened
• 20:38
  scrutiny after a moment of, say, like a Michael, the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
• 20:42
  which is how. In Ferguson, Missouri, people might remember this from 2014 or something or
• 20:46
  2014. And that was the beginning. That was the first time I remember these huge national,
• 20:52
  like shitstorms. Yeah. Over. Yeah. The one the one that preceded it would have been
• 20:57
  Trayvon Martin, the report. Yeah. It wasn't police officer and ride. In that case, he was a guy
• 21:01
  who kind of thought he was a police officer. That's right. I think he's a co-playing. Yeah.
• 21:06
  And so after Ferguson, the claim was that there was so much anti-police sentiment that in Ferguson,
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  they were like, well, fuck you, we're just not going to police the streets anymore.
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  There's some of this more crime. Yeah. That or the police are acutely aware of the fact that
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  they're under this heightened scrutiny. And as a result, or a little less willing to do their job
• 21:23
  in the same way they were doing it before, just to avoid the risk to themselves. So whether it's
• 21:27
  them doing something as kind of an active reprisal or them not doing something because they want
• 21:32
  to preserve self out of self-preservation, either way, there tends to be this spiking violent crime.
• 21:36
  And we definitely observed it after Ferguson. And we cemented it in a sense after the Black Lives
• 21:44
  Matter moment. And we did see a pronounced spiking violent crime, which is probably a constellation
• 21:49
  of different things as most social phenomena are. But I wanted to take a slightly different look
• 21:54
  at this. And because I have all sorts of complicated ideas about identity and race, it seemed to me
• 22:00
  even in that moment that the most durable consequence of the racial reckoning wasn't so much,
• 22:07
  you know, the legislative agenda that Martin might have fulfilled or what happened with leasing.
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  It was the way that it altered the way that we talk about identity, the way that we think about
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  ourselves and the way that we relate to each other. And I think the phrase race monomania is
• 22:22
  something that I use in the piece. And I think it aptly describes what happened to us. We became
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  completely obsessed with race. It became the single most essential lens for trying to understand
• 22:35
  our politics and our economics. And I just tried to not only think about what that means, but also
• 22:43
  try to articulate a perspective on how we might do things a bit differently. How do you think about
• 22:49
  your rights? I am a member of the human race. And it doesn't really go much further than that. I think
• 22:55
  interestingly, you know, you have a sibling. And do you have someone? Yeah, I don't know. We have
• 23:00
  siblings. And whether they're full or half siblings, I only have half siblings. No one is surprised
• 23:05
  to discover that siblings are radically different from one another. And when you have cousins, you're
• 23:09
  similarly, there's some genetic proximity there ancestral proximity, if you will. But no one
• 23:14
  is surprised to discover that your siblings and your cousins are radically different from you.
• 23:20
  And somehow there seems to be this presumption that this notion will come ancestral similarity,
• 23:26
  which race is supposed to approximate, actually says something really profound about who we are
• 23:31
  in the world, that there is an us and there is a van because of that ancestral similarity. Again,
• 23:37
  presumed because oftentimes the actual facts are far removed from our perception and our kind of
• 23:45
  dealings with race. Well, I mean, it's true. Getting it to ancestral similarity or the genetics
• 23:49
  would be silly. But I think the claim, I think there were probably two claims that get made
• 23:53
  that are so silly, silly on their face. One is for centuries, there was an aggressive attempt by
• 24:01
  white people to do it, to make those delineations and strength. Well, by the white people who were
• 24:07
  running a bridge empire and who were, you know, it was just in father's business. Which is it,
• 24:10
  which is it most white? Well, a lot of them own today. Yeah. If they didn't own slaves, they were
• 24:14
  call with slaves. If they didn't, if they were part of the bridge empire, they were called the
• 24:18
  bridge empire. Generally, I mean, it was a widespread and pervasive attempt to such a gay black
• 24:24
  people on the basis of their race for hundreds of years. And then secondly, so that would be one
• 24:31
  thing that like, you know, we didn't start this game. We black people, you know, you guys started it.
• 24:37
  So now don't deprive us of the right to also see with ourselves as a community in opposition to
• 24:42
  that history. Yeah. And then the second would be there would just be cultural reasons why people
• 24:47
  are similar, like the way that Jews might be similar in some ways, even though it's not a skin
• 24:52
  color theme. Well, then, so I mean, there's an explicit sort of ideological homogeneity there,
• 24:58
  not even ideological, but philosophical. Right. And not even just food or whatever, you know,
• 25:03
  they might be looking up to here. Black people joke about the way black people talk on the way,
• 25:08
  black people walk. But how about black people dance? They're not talking about a genetic thing.
• 25:12
  They're talking about where power actually sometimes they sometimes they are because the way we
• 25:17
  actually talk about all this stuff is sloppy and modeled in profound ways that I want to tackle
• 25:22
  what you were describing. There's two different things. And you're you're correct in as much as
• 25:27
  that is a more thoughtful way to examine things than the kind of biological genetic homogeneity
• 25:32
  that's imagined, although there's also been a resurgence in that sort of race realism amongst
• 25:39
  particularly like reactionary conservatives. Oh, yeah, I'm dead every year. So that's
• 25:44
  actually a thing now when people believe it. And in many respects, that's why arguments for that
• 25:48
  are more robust, not even exclusively white people. There are plenty of identitarians who
• 25:54
  identify as black. But even the rendering of history that you offered a moment ago, I think
• 26:00
  is it over generalizes. And it papers over a great deal of nuance that is actually more
• 26:09
  profound than I think most people appreciate the fact that most southern whites in the in the
• 26:13
  Americas prior to the Civil War, not only did they never own slaves, they never had the potential
• 26:19
  to own sex. They were desperately poor. They were competing with slave labor and the slave labor
• 26:24
  was impoverishing them. The skilled trip to the extent you were a practitioner of a skilled
• 26:29
  trade, you were competing with slaves who could do all kinds of skilled labor and we're doing it
• 26:34
  essentially for free. It's not only intelligence now, but it's well, well, we're not quite
• 26:38
  there. It's like with the AI. Well, they weren't hallucinating. They weren't hallucinating.
• 26:43
  So, you know, that's that point, but I mean, yes, but if you were dropped,
• 26:48
  if you're if you with your skin color were dropped into the South, pretty civil war,
• 26:52
  depends on where and when actually what would have happened to me? There were there were black
• 26:56
  people who lived in the South who owned other black people to the extent we're going to talk about
• 27:00
  these those on that way. And I'm not that could even be an outlier, but it is materially true that
• 27:05
  it depends on when like when you look back at some of the the nature of integration
• 27:13
  during the kind of colonial period, there were periods where whites and blacks who lived in the
• 27:18
  South had closer relationships and most people would have presumed to be positive where they were
• 27:23
  involved in this. They were part of the same rattles mob that were upsetting the elites of a
• 27:29
  particular area. So again, there's just there is a deep complexity there, but even more important
• 27:36
  than that, like several hundred years is a really long time. And the notion that there is a
• 27:40
  particular durable consequence that manifests itself in the same way for all of these people
• 27:46
  is more a function of our imagination than it is a function of tangible reality. My family is from
• 27:52
  the Caribbean, there was certainly slavery there. I have an ancestor who is on the money there who
• 27:58
  helped lead a slave rebellion. What's on the money? I don't know. I mean, he's like one of the heroes
• 28:03
  of Jamaica. So he was like depicted. Oh, he's literally his picture is on the currency. I thought
• 28:09
  on a money. He's on the money, man. That guy is literally on the way. But I mean, his experience
• 28:18
  of the world is far renewed from mine. I live a life of obscene privilege. I lived here and we were
• 28:24
  talking earlier about living in New York and amazing contrast. This displays of preposterous levels of
• 28:32
  wealth and persistent branding poverty like all around it. And when when to the to the listener
• 28:37
  or the viewer when Camille said that, I thought, oh, he's so sweet that he cares so much about
• 28:41
  you the quality. And then I realized what he was saying is not that he cares about that quality,
• 28:44
  but that he only wants the opulence without having to be bothered by the poor people. And he was
• 28:50
  like, what the, why don't you want to live as if I'll see? Why wouldn't you want to insulate yourself
• 28:55
  from the poor people? And he was like, I mean, that's one that I love about New York. Personally,
• 29:00
  the bumping together of all of these different kinds of levels of wealth. I would always
• 29:04
  say for every when you are firing yourself off to the moon on Elon's rocket. With certainly two
• 29:10
  versions to create your higher end of pleasure and plenty, you're not going to money for people.
• 29:16
  He wants to spoil a fucking time when he would now go sexual. I'm only sexually attracted to one
• 29:20
  woman. Okay. Scientifically, you don't have to worry. You are watching this is uncomfortable
• 29:26
  conversations. Camille Foster is our guest. We're going around the world. This is what we're
• 29:32
  doing. We're basically traveling through every single time zone and every city that we get to,
• 29:38
  we're sitting there with fascinating people. So pretty much every day or sometimes more than once
• 29:41
  a day, we're doing live streams on some stack. So if you've come across from Camille or fifth column,
• 29:47
  then you should just subscribe to uncomfortable conversations as well, because then that will
• 29:50
  you'll get notified every time they go live. And there's also lots of great things. If you're coming
• 29:54
  from uncomfortable conversations, then you'll see the fifth column subscribe there. It's one of the
• 29:59
  most hilarious and informative and ridiculous American political podcasts. Yes. And you should
• 30:05
  retain it as well, which I mean, it's the new editor of large header, large yet. So just follow
• 30:10
  that, try to thought you say, I don't think you're going to knock over the arguments for regressing
• 30:16
  historical injustice simply by saying that the historical injustice was a dollar's blanket.
• 30:20
  I don't know what I want to mark it over. I think I'll set the table this way and not even set
• 30:26
  the table. I'll try to cut to the quick this way. Yeah. There's no shortage of historic injuries
• 30:33
  that we could take particular focus on and try to kind of trace out the the consequences of
• 30:40
  what seems more urgently important to me is to recognize actually what we talked about at the
• 30:45
  very beginning, the fact that every single person is thrown into the to the world in the hidegarian
• 30:52
  sets, right? And is experience in the world from their particular vantage point? And the one
• 30:58
  thing that is universal to each of us, and I was reminded of this sentiment recently when I watched
• 31:04
  Hunter Biden's ridiculous three and a half hour interview, which you should go watch. It's
• 31:07
  interesting. Should I? Yes. Is it? Absolutely. Do I care? I'm going to talk. Yes. And here's why.
• 31:13
  Hunter said the one thing that is common to all of us isn't love. It's actually suffering. It's
• 31:18
  pain. But we all experience that. We all experience self-doubt. We all know that at some point,
• 31:24
  all of this, all of it will be ground to powder and blown into the void. You get that point?
• 31:29
  One has to wonder for whom was that a tragedy? And that's core map. We're cracking you up.
• 31:34
  To the extent we're living in that kind of perilous existential circumstance and they're all trying
• 31:40
  to make sense out of it. Okay. Thinking about my ancestry and what my predecessors went through
• 31:48
  is perhaps not as important as whether or not I had two parents who loved me and raised me.
• 31:53
  And they may not have had a lot in terms of resources, but if they were attentive and they read
• 31:57
  books with me at night, that is a profound privilege. I'd say that's far more, there's far more
• 32:02
  privilege involved in that than any sort of preposterous microaggression, if someone might imagine.
• 32:06
  And I think it is profoundly disconcerting that we spend more time thinking about these
• 32:13
  kind of systems of oppression than the abstract. Then we do just the practical realities of
• 32:18
  our lived experience to the extent we use that phrase in a coherent way. If you have a parent,
• 32:23
  a loved one who's supposed to care for you, but who serially molest you, and that is the reality
• 32:29
  for far too many children. I wouldn't say half, but it approaches something like that. It is an
• 32:34
  absurd absurdly high number. Is that not one of the most consequential experiences of their life,
• 32:41
  one of the most formative? We look at the carceral population here in the United States.
• 32:47
  There's a tendency to think first and foremost about the racial disparity, but the commonality
• 32:51
  amongst inmates, the thing that they most have in common, likes the familial structure,
• 32:56
  relates to the fact that many of them didn't have father in their household. I'm not saying that
• 33:01
  fathers alone could prevent all crime, but the fact that there's some similarity that durable
• 33:07
  and that consistent across ethnicity and race suggests that there's a different sort of question
• 33:12
  that we ought to be asking. But do you think there's a certain motions can't be asked at once?
• 33:16
  I don't hear anyone saying the only problem is racism and family breakdowns are not an issue.
• 33:21
  I think it's actually hard. It can be really hard to do the thing where you pat your head and
• 33:25
  rub your stomach at the same time. And we've actually, I think, proven pretty reliably at this point
• 33:30
  that once we start to talk about this in terms of race, all of the crude generalizations
• 33:36
  tend to take center stage. And the essentialist talk and thinking becomes very important to
• 33:42
  everyone as well in ways that are profoundly reductive in ways that undermine the notion of
• 33:48
  human dignity in ways that I think obscure the fact that the individual is what is the kind of
• 33:53
  sovereign unit. I mean, that sounds great from like the perspective of like an iron-rand novel or
• 34:00
  like a, you know, in terms of the spiritual experience of being human. But the more the latter
• 34:05
  than the former nice. When black Americans have such a small share of the country's wealth,
• 34:13
  when their median like household wealth is so much lower and when they score behind on so many
• 34:20
  metrics like that, then it can't be that that community is intrinsically inferior at making money
• 34:28
  or intrinsically like so it's a legacy of the past. But it isn't binary in that way. And again,
• 34:34
  to the extent there's a legacy of the past, the way things metastasize as we precippregress
• 34:40
  forward, the way that they manifest themselves, it seems to me is far more important and more
• 34:47
  interesting to actually think about and try to redress than it is to say, well, you know, at some
• 34:53
  point in the past, this is a kind of butterfly effect, a privilege to social science, right?
• 34:57
  By that, that it was, it's that attenuated, like if you're in it, but I mean if you are, it is,
• 35:02
  if you are a descendant of someone who would, who lived through Jim Crow. Okay. Right. It's not
• 35:07
  ancient. It's not like, well, how can we possibly disentangle what the privilege and this advantage was
• 35:12
  all of the people from your grandmother all the way back were fucked over in a really, really
• 35:17
  rice assistive this, but this happens. People are fucked over for any number of reasons, innumerable.
• 35:22
  Most people throughout most of history have been subjugated. That is an absolute fact. It doesn't
• 35:28
  care about race or ethnicity or nationality. That is the case to the extent we are sitting here now
• 35:33
  in positions of privilege and power with preposterous levels of wealth amongst us, everyone in the
• 35:38
  room. Like that puts us not at odds with the experience of most black people in America. It puts
• 35:45
  us at odds with the experience of most people throughout history. The question becomes what do you do
• 35:50
  with that privilege? And whether or not it is appropriate for us to encourage children who say are
• 35:55
  enrolled at Yale or Harvard and who happen to be African-American, should they be thinking of themselves
• 36:01
  as victims of anything? I think it is not just obscene. It's beyond absurd. And that is literally
• 36:08
  what we're doing today. We're cultivating these notions of privilege and disadvantage. And we're
• 36:13
  talking about them in this categorical way that ignores, again, the actual tangible lived experience
• 36:19
  of individuals. Until they suddenly even use that phrase, it conjures images of people with this
• 36:24
  average experience of life. We don't have average experiences. It's the reason why I find things
• 36:30
  like the race and IQ debate like utterly absurd. I don't care what the average IQ of a particular
• 36:35
  group is. It's inconsequential. Groups don't have IQs. Individuals might, but groups cannot.
• 36:41
  There's a sense in which is inherently incoherent to discuss things in that way. And this is why,
• 36:47
  for me, it's not like, I don't enter into a debate like that and think, how can I prove to you
• 36:52
  that blacks don't have lower IQs because of their bad genes? It's not even raw. The question is
• 36:59
  malformed. What you're interrogating is a poltergeist. It doesn't make sense. I quite follow that. If all
• 37:06
  people with red hair had a gene that gave them breast cancer, if all people were with red hair,
• 37:16
  yes, right? Or if, well, not all of it, but it's already getting to the base. So if having
• 37:23
  red hair makes more likely that you were going to have the breast cancer gene, then wouldn't that
• 37:27
  make sense to divide society up and say, okay, red hair people need help. They need to get
• 37:33
  mammograms. It seems like there's a lot of things that we could be concerned about and we could
• 37:37
  divide society up and long and infinite number of accesses if we're concerned about that sort of
• 37:43
  thing, whether it's reading comprehension or health vulnerabilities of a particular variety. I can
• 37:48
  find what's the cross section of people who happen to have eczema in the world, like what percentage
• 37:54
  of them are black or white or Asian or whatever, an Asian of all of the racial categories. I don't
• 37:58
  know that any are more absurd than Asian. Although there are at all about that absurd. It just
• 38:03
  doesn't make sense. So again, for me, there's a big change. Why is Asian absurd? Because I
• 38:08
  think I have a sense of how absurd it is because we have rauded it. This is the prime.
• 38:13
  It covers a lot of the universe and Japanese people and there are communities of very highly
• 38:19
  educated, very well-to-do Asia, especially if you include the sub-continent in a word Asia,
• 38:24
  it's a great stereotype. Just a little bit of interrogation gets you there. I actually think it
• 38:30
  works in the same way with the notion of blackness or the kind of African diaspora. All humans are
• 38:38
  part of the African diaspora. To the extent you're losing sight of that or we're trying to say,
• 38:43
  well, yeah, that's true, but what matters ultimately is the individual. I'm not suggesting that it
• 38:51
  never makes sense to think about ancestry. I'm not suggesting that there aren't particular populations
• 38:55
  that can be distinguished from one another on the basis of say their genome and on particular
• 39:02
  base pairs that are found. I am saying, however, that there is no common fact that I can point to
• 39:10
  about everyone who is self-identified as black. There's nothing that they all share in color.
• 39:15
  There is. There is though. There's literally nothing they all share.
• 39:20
  Well, there is, in the sense that we invent systems that treat them as the same. Then if they
• 39:25
  were, if they were in the South, on the slavery, they would all be trading the same. It's not quite
• 39:32
  the same. It actually mattered whether or not you had skills or didn't have skills. But the
• 39:37
  odd of them did that skills is nothing. And it mattered whether or not you were on a massive
• 39:43
  plantation and you were one of hundreds or you were on a small whole plantation where you were
• 39:47
  working alongside the slave owner, which was actually the experience of a lot, a lot of people
• 39:53
  who were enslaved in the South. No, but it might even be most. But I think you're doing a
• 39:57
  donkey chest movie, which is to say that the things that the people were doing, then like
• 40:01
  attending skills or working in roles, different. I'm actually, I'm actually, the question is,
• 40:06
  like, is the African, is the right is the race, so to speak, African in power here and it has my
• 40:13
  idea is blackness in coherent as a racial idea. And what you're saying with some justification,
• 40:19
  I think, is that it is in coherent. Yes. But the pro like black activists will say, the person
• 40:28
  who was trying to hail a cabin in New York City will get treated the same way on the basis of
• 40:32
  their black skin, regardless of where they're from. But it's also not true. Let me if I'm dressed
• 40:40
  in a suit with probably different than if I'm wearing Jordans and like big sweatpants or
• 40:45
  something like that. There are so many reasons why those fundamental laws, those immutable laws
• 40:53
  that are generally deployed to explain like the differences between our experiences of the world,
• 40:58
  just turn out to not be true. The way that you talk matters, the way that you walk matters. In fact,
• 41:04
  to the extent you're a black guy in Harlem versus a black guy in Queens versus a black guy in the Bronx,
• 41:10
  those are different kinds of black people. In fact, just being from a different block in one of
• 41:14
  those particular areas can make you a very different sort of black person. It could be important
• 41:19
  enough to kill over. So again, I just think that there is a universe of difference amongst humanity
• 41:26
  and the things that make us different from one another are as universal as the things that make
• 41:31
  us similar. Like that is the important thing to take away and that may not land for everyone
• 41:37
  right away, but it makes sense if you interrogate it. Camille Foster is with us. This is an
• 41:42
  uncomfortable conversation. There's a live stream of our around the world podcast marathon. Camille
• 41:47
  is the co-host of the fifth column and the interaglage of a tingle. If you're not subscribed to
• 41:51
  both uncomfortable conversations and the fifth column, you're a fool. So don't do that now.
• 41:56
  How did you come to these ideas? I remember the first time that we met at Huff Post.
• 42:00
  We ran the green room. I don't remember. I don't remember. I think it was
• 42:06
  a panel or something. I was hosting. You were a guest. We never met before. Somehow it came up.
• 42:12
  Somehow, you're being black came up. I might have said something like a Jew, a gay guy in a black
• 42:18
  life. You're just in the green room when I was joking. You were like, yeah, except I'm not black.
• 42:25
  And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Let's talk more about that. That's the friendship
• 42:30
  was born. So that was a long time ago and a provocative thing for someone to state,
• 42:39
  special stranger. Why? I don't know where it started. I do know why it started. And it's
• 42:48
  because it's an imposition. I'm a radical, a narco capitalist libertarian, although also
• 42:55
  primatist. So some people say I'm very wishy-washy. Perhaps I've become more wishy-washy
• 43:00
  at my older age, but I've always resented the notion that people could imagine that they knew
• 43:08
  what I was about and what I thought, et cetera, just by looking at me. You can't. And you probably
• 43:14
  don't know. You may have some ideas based on the kinds of sinkers that I wear, the sort of music
• 43:19
  of this until something like that. But you don't really know me. And I think that
• 43:25
  began a kind of exercise of searching. And there is actually the subhead of the piece that I
• 43:30
  wrote in Tangle is who made me black and why. And I think that that question was the
• 43:39
  beginning of the journey to try and understand like how these identities were forged and whether
• 43:45
  or not it was valuable to me at all. At some point in the in the piece I mentioned the conversation
• 43:49
  I had with Henry Louis Skates some years ago. And over the course of the conversation, he said
• 43:54
  something along the lines of there is many ways to be black as there are black people. And
• 44:00
  when I heard that, I immediately thought to myself, well, to the extent that's true,
• 44:04
  this notion of blackness becomes incredibly vague. Almost to the point of like obviously being
• 44:11
  irrelevant. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that. If I can be black and completely my
• 44:16
  own way, why don't I just be my own way? In fact, I am my own way. And that is just universally true.
• 44:22
  I mean, you and I, we don't talk weekly. We don't even talk monthly. But like, there is a camaraderie
• 44:28
  and a kinship here that is undeniable. And we understand one another in important ways that other
• 44:35
  people wouldn't get. The race is an obstacle to that. It can be. I mean, I like yours in my house.
• 44:43
  There's a lot of us who are just holding on. There's a lot of us. No black person will enter
• 44:48
  the Zet Households Camille. That's just that is a rule that I have. So kill me.
• 44:55
  But no, you're right. Absolutely. And I've long felt also, I mean, how do you feel then about
• 45:00
  like community and sort of because of like blood and soil, right? And like, you know, heritage and
• 45:05
  like pride, like gay pride and like JD Vance has pride in Appalachia. I don't know. Like, you know,
• 45:12
  everyone kind of, they're wearing a moment of sort of ownership and solidarity. And
• 45:19
  and my history has been as like a ruthless cosmopolitan, globalist elite, right? I mean,
• 45:25
  you know, I'm swanning from Copenhagen to New York to Sydney and have more in common with you
• 45:32
  and my friends in London than I do with many people who live in my own city. Sure. And I just
• 45:37
  thought that's fine. It seems that for a lot of people, that kind of disconnect is not fine.
• 45:42
  Well, I think a lot of people don't have access to it to begin, which is the first challenge. Although
• 45:47
  interestingly, you know, in a world where we're so hyper connected, there's a sense in which
• 45:52
  we could have that. That could be something we strive for. And I wish that it would be.
• 45:57
  I have plenty of intimate local connections. And I've got my immediately media family. I have
• 46:02
  very close friends on both coasts, which is around very grateful for and around the world.
• 46:07
  And then I have this kind of broader community of people who are similarly positioned like they
• 46:12
  work in media, they're globetrotting, they work in industry. I am grateful for all those
• 46:18
  connections that I get it. I think there's something about the kind of crudeness of the assumed
• 46:25
  familiarity and unique familiarity that is that comes along with the kind of like ethnic
• 46:32
  and racial solidarity that has always been a bit great into me. I've had this experience. The
• 46:38
  woman I married is a girl who was a girl that I started dating while I was 16 years old. And
• 46:43
  you've been together for 20 odd years now. It's very good. I got her before she knew she could
• 46:48
  do tremendously better. Although I think I've measured up a bit, not improvements at age.
• 46:54
  But you know what? I deployed that joke and I feel really good about it. I'm thinking about
• 46:59
  Tracey and I forgot where I was going. Oh, you were talking about how you what solidarity you find.
• 47:05
  Oh, and the sort of the Ozette solidarity. Yeah. And I would have this experience routinely
• 47:11
  where I would meet people and they would say things about our wife. Oh, she's such a beautiful
• 47:15
  black one. And they meant it as a compliment. But I noticed the qualification immediately.
• 47:22
  And began in some cases to correct people when I didn't think it would be too
• 47:27
  injurious, but maybe you might enlighten them. But if you can just stop a beautiful woman. Yeah.
• 47:33
  That's more of a compliment. And I think about my favorite artist, Marvin Gaye and Donnie Halfaway.
• 47:39
  And I've heard them describe and even describe themselves because Donnie Halfaway has
• 47:43
  this song to be young, great, and black. You're actually just one of the greatest pruners
• 47:50
  ever to walk the earth. Like the qualification isn't just unnecessary. There's something of a
• 47:56
  slight in it. And I know what people mean. But genres can do the work that you're trying to do.
• 48:02
  And black music isn't a genre in my estimation. Like that is Lenny Kravitz. And it's
• 48:09
  Delos Ol. And the guy from Booty in the Blowfish. Darius Rucker. But what is that even me? I don't
• 48:18
  know how to make sense out of that. So it became not merely an inconvenience and not merely a source
• 48:25
  of frustration. It was an incumbrance to actually recognizing the real meaningful diversity
• 48:32
  that I encountered in the world and the way that I wanted to not just relate to myself,
• 48:38
  but relate to others. And now that I have kids, as you do, I think a lot about the way that other
• 48:44
  people will relate to them when they meet them. Well, they meet Leah and Cohen and imagine them
• 48:48
  as these type of beleaguered, disadvantaged children who need special attention. Or do they see
• 48:55
  them as singular individuals appreciate that they come from loving homes that they are children
• 49:00
  of privilege. And that one of our projects on Tracy and I is to make certain that they don't
• 49:05
  become little assholes because of it. We want them to be grounded and thoughtful and empathetic
• 49:11
  and to see themselves as part of a broad, unbelievably diverse human family that they have an obligation
• 49:17
  not to other people who look like that, but to the rest of the species in terms of just doing
• 49:22
  something good in the world, something worthwhile with your time. And this arrives back at something
• 49:27
  you mentioned earlier, something you can be proud of. And for me, pride is not a matter of unearned
• 49:35
  things. Like you can only take pride in things that you actually do that that merits. Yeah. Yeah,
• 49:44
  I did that. And I can be, I can, I can imagine that this is something that is kind of worthy
• 49:50
  of being applauded. And I can also recognize that my circumstance made possible for me to do that.
• 49:56
  And other people may have circumstances that make it harder for them to. And I think that there's
• 50:01
  something enobling about that. I think unearned pride on the social and kind of group solidarity us
• 50:07
  and them that I've only ever seen that even in the best manifestations, there's be something that
• 50:13
  is either support for us or actively destructive. And the best manifestations would hopefully be
• 50:19
  oil-up gay guys that buggering each other during cry week. But that would be the main
• 50:28
  some of my Jamaican families watching. Yes, I understand that they're just, they actually are
• 50:33
  congenitally homophobic. That is a problem. It's in the music. It's in the water. Let's talk
• 50:38
  about being redacted. Yeah. Okay. Old Americans are just genetically homophosed. But it's interesting
• 50:45
  isn't it? Because the prime thing is an understandable reaction to generations of being told that
• 50:51
  you should be ashamed of something or having been applauded, right? And I'm glad you say that
• 50:56
  because I don't want to be seen as like castigating everyone who expresses pride in the same way
• 51:02
  that I would someone who was expressing like white supremacist notion. Right. But
• 51:06
  yeah, I mean, it comes in the 60s and 70s during civil rights and even 80s and 90s, it was
• 51:12
  understandable that minorities that were fighting for their civil rights would go too far and
• 51:19
  be overtly proud. Well, you're going to make me ashamed. I'm actually going to be proud. Yeah.
• 51:24
  But then once everyone basically gets on the page, same page is saying that it's cool. You
• 51:29
  can live your life out of you want to. It does seem a bit like your time portal has opened up
• 51:35
  to 1988. Yeah. When like I see gay pride in 2025. Yeah. I don't, I don't want, yeah. Everyone,
• 51:44
  everyone has lived on, baby. Like you're just calm down. I mean, unless it involves us having sex,
• 51:49
  I'm just changing and just interesting. Well, I wanted to tell you why I brought you this and now.
• 51:53
  It was about we have to turn it all up. All that, all that baby oil is there for a reason.
• 52:01
  No, yeah. It seems like it seems like of all of the things that you could be proud for. Why are you
• 52:05
  picking the most frankly uninteresting? Yes. Like not only the one that you have any control over.
• 52:12
  But the most boring. Like I sex is great. I love and enjoy it with a particular person and you
• 52:18
  may love and enjoy it with 15 or 20 particular people. But there are other things that are worth
• 52:23
  talking about. Yeah. And my particular fetishes and interests are literally not a matter of pride.
• 52:30
  They just aren't and they shouldn't be. They don't need to be. And again, I think drawing that line
• 52:36
  and making that distinction, I've generally found something to be really powerful and beneficial
• 52:43
  and even liberate. You live in an extremely woke social justice part of the country by reputation.
• 52:50
  I do. Certainly by reputation. I've had some experiences in that. And what are those experiences?
• 52:56
  Well, I can remember I've actually lived in on that coast twice in recent years and it just
• 53:03
  it is a long story. But there was a time in summer of 2020 when it was still a little not
• 53:10
  summer of 2020. This is maybe spring 2021 where I'm walking my dog in Tiburon. And I come across
• 53:16
  was that that's outside. It's just outside San Francisco. Yeah, it's beautiful, wonderful place.
• 53:20
  These are wealthy, critique. Yeah. Sort of semi rural towns. You say on the outs.
• 53:26
  Good. Yeah. Yeah. It comes. This is in Marin County. It's one of the beautiful places on earth,
• 53:30
  certainly in New York in the in the United States. And we're both walking our dogs. We walk past
• 53:35
  each other. We kind of say hello. And we have a kind of casual interaction. And she says something
• 53:42
  to me along the lines of it's so terrible what's happening in this country, something like that.
• 53:48
  And kind of apologize to me almost like presumably on behalf of white people. Yeah, Megan,
• 53:54
  you did a white girl. I was so flummoxed by it that I didn't even say anything in the moment.
• 53:59
  We just kind of kept walking my dog in the loop being such as it is. We ended up passing one
• 54:04
  another again. And when I saw her, I said, you know, I was just taken like I I'm doing fine.
• 54:12
  I live here. I'm doing pretty well actually. Do you need help? And she there was a moment
• 54:20
  where she just kind of policy. She said, I'm sorry. Like I just got here. Not only knowing
• 54:25
  any of this works. I just, you know, it's like, yeah, I do, I do know. And interestingly, that
• 54:32
  interaction is consistent with a lot of my interactions and Maria County. When people discover
• 54:39
  that I look a particular way, we don't have particular views for whatever reason, not all the time,
• 54:47
  not even 50% of the time necessarily. But a lot of the time, I'll get a like sense of relief
• 54:52
  and a confession that all of this seems very strange to me, but I don't know who I can talk to
• 54:57
  about. And I do think that that is perhaps contributed to the, to the weird kind of ideological
• 55:03
  craziness that is kind of taken over different parts of the country. And certainly a place
• 55:09
  like San Francisco where when we, when it was time for us to send our kids to school out there,
• 55:14
  I mean, I've only kept them in private Montessori schools. I've gone and some of them are pretty
• 55:18
  terrible too, because the ones I've been associated with other Montessori increased spilt kit.
• 55:22
  Yeah, that Montessori, it's been a huge unlock for my kids, I think.
• 55:25
  Right. Like Leah is still in Gwe, Cohen is beginning the fraud as well, because he's three just started.
• 55:33
  But yeah, I mean, you go to the schools and they are, these havens of political propaganda,
• 55:38
  like murals of like people engaged in Black Lives Matter protests, like kind of visibly
• 55:44
  trans person, the caricature of a visibly trans person and a massive pride flag. And this is
• 55:50
  an elementary score. They're not thinking about fucking each other. They shouldn't be in pre-K.
• 55:56
  And I definitely see, you know, boys and like dresses and stuff like that at a regularity
• 56:04
  and frequency out there that is a bit surprising. Gender dysphoria is a thing undoubtedly.
• 56:12
  It's also the case that you've seen a profound spike in a number of cases.
• 56:17
  And it's hard for one to imagine that that and the fact that it seems to kind of vary regionally,
• 56:23
  it isn't a consequence of some kind of cultural dynamics that we are encouraging or not,
• 56:30
  without oftentimes thinking about the consequences of what this might mean for families,
• 56:35
  for our politics broadly, for society at large. And I think it is of a piece with the kind of
• 56:41
  broader identity conversation that we've been doing, whether it's about race or any number
• 56:47
  of other things. I mean, it is amazing, isn't it, that people, that, you know, people who,
• 56:51
  well-meaning people, who put up a poster of a Black Lives Matter, my trim of the transgender kid,
• 56:58
  would, if they would hear about a school in the South that put up for 10 commandments, lose their
• 57:05
  shit, or that put up, you know, a picture of a traditional white heterosexual family or something.
• 57:10
  Like, we all have models of things we aspire to, and things that we think are good. Yeah.
• 57:15
  And, you know, if Jesus is your, then you think that that's just as good as a, you know, transgender.
• 57:20
  Yeah, yeah. It's incredible. Yeah, I guess no one sees the indoctrination that they have.
• 57:27
  Yeah, well, it's the same, it's the same presumption, like fundamentalist presumption of the truth
• 57:34
  of your belief set that animates that, like, we'll get, that's terrible.
• 57:39
  Yeah. This is how it is. Yeah. And the notion of there being this kind of pluralism that we
• 57:43
  ought to be aiming for as the actual noble goal is, is lost on them. So how have you dealt with
• 57:50
  teachers and like, you know, in the context in which you're trying to raise your kids? Yeah, why?
• 57:55
  That they probably fund. I mean, even the first, the first thing I did was just choose schools,
• 58:00
  well, and I've been very fortunate in that regard. The first was, I mean, I, my kids had done to,
• 58:06
  but higher ground is a network of Montessori schools. And for a while, and so further recently,
• 58:11
  I was like formally a consultant to them on like various identity related issues. So you can
• 58:18
  imagine that they, they were a little bit more thoughtful. But even the current school,
• 58:22
  my kids are enrolled in now. I remember beating the head of school and we had a conversation.
• 58:26
  He was, he was great. He was given us the route about the school. And at some point,
• 58:29
  stopped him and I said, look, I'm going to ask candidly about the political landscape here.
• 58:35
  Culturally, this area tends to be this way. And it's not important to me that the teachers or
• 58:40
  anyone on staff share my values. But I am curious about how you navigate these things. And interestingly,
• 58:46
  in that case, he says to me, I don't know if you're aware of a great new piano in Jonathan Hyde. They
• 58:50
  wrote this really great book. And I just, if you can stop there, actually, I don't know if you
• 58:56
  Google me or what, but that's a great answer. We'll be fine. And the school is, the adventure at
• 59:01
  that school is actually been quite good. But we did have an issue in towards the end of January.
• 59:08
  And in February of last year, when MLK day came and Black History Month came, and they were
• 59:14
  talking about grace in school. And I actually sent an email just before MLK day to just share
• 59:22
  with the teacher, look, I get that this is going to come up totally understand. Great.
• 59:27
  You should know that my daughter has never been race and does a think of herself in that
• 59:32
  particular way. And I just want you to have some orientation towards our unusual views. And I
• 59:40
  just shared that stuff in the email. And lo and behold, when they did have a conversation about
• 59:45
  this stuff, and certainly in February, at some point, the class sang, lift every voice and sing
• 59:50
  together. Leia came home and she was like really uncomfortable. She felt singled out. She is the
• 59:57
  only person in her class who has hair exactly like hers. And she's not even the darkest person in
• 1:00:02
  her class to the extent such as matter. But she felt singled out. Like she didn't imagine herself
• 1:00:09
  as a white girl with blonde hair and dual eyes. But she did just imagine herself as a member of
• 1:00:14
  that classroom community. And she isn't a party to the history that's being discussed. The notion
• 1:00:20
  of white people perpetrating Jim Crow or slavery or anything else, even at the time they didn't do
• 1:00:27
  it collectively. Certainly today, there's no continuum of culpability. Like the kind of social
• 1:00:33
  alchemy that's necessary for us to even imagine that that's the case is part of the problem.
• 1:00:39
  But we kind of casually engage in that stuff. And I think what I ended up doing was just draft
• 1:00:44
  another email to the teacher. And she and I and Tracy had a call. And it was even now I get
• 1:00:50
  like goosebumps thinking about it. It was like a really rewarding experience. We had just a
• 1:00:55
  thoughtful exchange of perspectives. I know my children aren't horribly harmed by the fact that
• 1:01:01
  they were introduced to these ideas in a context like that. And lead it just out there just
• 1:01:06
  once the vice of the teacher. Can you say that? She is blonde hair. I was. That's interesting.
• 1:01:11
  And yeah, we had a great conversation. Look, I will say this. One, I think she's wonderful.
• 1:01:16
  I do understand that it could have been difficult if you were to raise the same kind of concerns
• 1:01:20
  and precisely the same way that I did. And that's true. It just is that it can be harder for
• 1:01:26
  someone who doesn't look like me to make the same arguments. Yeah, I would have assumed
• 1:01:29
  our racist. If I said I'd go one you emphasizing, you know, the crimes. What made me? Yeah, maybe,
• 1:01:35
  but I didn't even, but again, I didn't say it that way. Like what I said was different. I made
• 1:01:40
  an affirmative case. Yeah. And the affirmative case is about the dignity of my children. And the
• 1:01:44
  fact that my children don't self-identify that way because they don't need to because it doesn't
• 1:01:49
  make sense to. And I think there's just something very different about the kind of public
• 1:01:55
  prejudices. It wasn't that white person can't say that because a white person, if a white person
• 1:01:58
  says, my children don't identify as a race and we don't want them to, the response will be,
• 1:02:04
  well, that's all well and good. But unfortunately, you have been facking people over for centuries
• 1:02:08
  therefore. It would be, you know, you, it would be, but the counter, but you would be countering a
• 1:02:14
  very bad argument. And it seems to me that the fact that it's a difficult case to make to some
• 1:02:19
  people for whatever reason, whether it's just hard to understand or because this, this kind of
• 1:02:23
  sophisticated, rhetorical infrastructure that people deploy to try to force you to get along,
• 1:02:28
  to go along with it. I mean, you're still making a good argument. It's still a better argument.
• 1:02:34
  And I think it is far superior to the kind of reactionary anti-woke vibe that exists,
• 1:02:40
  especially on the right these days and that is embodied by, you know, certain people who push
• 1:02:46
  like critical race theory ads and all sorts of other things, who imagine that they can get the
• 1:02:51
  bad ideas out of the schools via prohibition. And I don't imagine that I can get the bad ideas
• 1:02:57
  out of the schools or out of people's heads, but what I hope to do is offer a more inspiring
• 1:03:03
  perspective, a, a meaningfully beneficial affirmative vision of the world that I want to live in and
• 1:03:12
  that I hope my children can live in and I think we ought to live in together. And I just think that
• 1:03:17
  is, that is better. And it's better to have that disposition than, than one that says, or use the
• 1:03:22
  force of government to make people do things the way we want them to. I mean, also just on an
• 1:03:27
  interpersonal level, the idea that it's better to live in a society where everyone is constantly
• 1:03:32
  training on M shells about the way they talk around each other, like you're anecdote about walking
• 1:03:36
  the dog and been carrying that woman. It does make me sad for kids today when I think about
• 1:03:43
  growing up in a pre-work lefty Bohemian neighborhood in a progressive city where I had a
• 1:03:51
  Sri Lankan friend and I had like, and it was diverse, most of the world from Asia somewhere,
• 1:03:57
  but as you say, that's a very complicated place. And the idea that today, that something would be
• 1:04:04
  made out of those differences, would it wouldn't be like the whole point at that time in the 90s,
• 1:04:11
  was if you turn down the volume on all that stuff, if you don't pay any attention. Yeah,
• 1:04:15
  don't mention it at all, just like, you know, that's just not something that is salient.
• 1:04:20
  Tonight, it's salient at it. Oh, it's almost like, I mean, it's almost shocking,
• 1:04:26
  like how different it is. And for people who didn't add growth in the 80s, like when I think about
• 1:04:31
  my childhood, I think about Michael Jackson, and it doesn't matter if you're black or white,
• 1:04:36
  it's only that if you were to make that in 2020, like, that's white supremacists.
• 1:04:42
  No, that was my childhood. Yeah, and I bought into it, like fully, and as I've had an
• 1:04:48
  opportunity to kind of test the spirit, so to speak, to slip perhaps for a little bit into my
• 1:04:54
  Protestant evangelical upbringing, like, I find that this is just a better way to think about
• 1:05:00
  the world. It seems more consistent with a richer, more thoughtful appraisal of history,
• 1:05:07
  and of the just kind of nature of being, and the experience of meeting people and recognizing
• 1:05:13
  that diversity isn't happening to look something different than one another. Diversity is,
• 1:05:19
  almost it's inherent. My experience of the world of yours, even if we go up in the same household,
• 1:05:23
  but the same two parents are going to be different in important ways. And finding ways to navigate
• 1:05:30
  that difference, to recognize it, places to celebrate it is important, but it's harder to do
• 1:05:37
  if we began to only refer to diversity in this narrow, myopically shade obsessed way.
• 1:05:44
  So I was like, you don't agree with the claim that work was essentially just a bunch of good ideas
• 1:05:49
  that went too far. I think the, I think even people who are on, you know, who feel like the whole
• 1:05:55
  thing was a little bit crazy. I like, it's in the tradition of civil rights, people wanted the
• 1:06:00
  right thing, who doesn't want justice, and yes, it might have been a little bit too censorious,
• 1:06:06
  and we probably shouldn't have canceled as many people or been quite as hysterical as we got,
• 1:06:10
  but it was all for good cause. It sounds like you think that the whole conceit was
• 1:06:17
  flawed or a minority. I think the motives
• 1:06:21
  doing something about, you know, injustice at that fundamental level are certainly laudable.
• 1:06:28
  I think that the project was deeply misguided. There's a kind of Harrison Bergeron
• 1:06:36
  quality to it almost. Harrison Bergeron being the short story by Kurt Vonnegut.
• 1:06:43
  The story itself is that you could create this world where everyone is equal.
• 1:06:47
  And he takes it to this kind of absurd extent where people who are stronger have to wear like
• 1:06:52
  weight vests and stuff like that. And actually my business partner, a guy named Chandler Tuttle,
• 1:06:58
  made a short film called 2081, and it is an adaptation of Harrison Bergeron that you should
• 1:07:04
  totally go watch or just find it and watch it. Actually, it features its preposterous. He did
• 1:07:08
  this film as an NYU film student. He managed to raise enough money to hire the coroner's
• 1:07:14
  quartet to do original scoring for it. He cast army hammer and is the lead in this thing. And this
• 1:07:20
  is before army hammer was a thing. And the rest of the cast is like similarly star studded and
• 1:07:26
  it's beautiful. Oh wow. And this thing now, like they play it in classrooms, but it's like just
• 1:07:31
  a great rendering of the story. So people should go found that if they're unfamiliar and read
• 1:07:34
  the Vonnegut story too. But there's a sense in which if you want equitable outcomes where
• 1:07:41
  everyone kind of has the same thing, like you can arrive at that in two different ways,
• 1:07:45
  you can raise the floor so everyone is able to achieve more or you can lower the ceiling.
• 1:07:51
  And you get equality either way. It's just a kind of equality of deprivation and suffering
• 1:07:59
  is totally acceptable. It's as good if equity is your standard. And it seems to me that addressing
• 1:08:05
  ourselves to the tangible deprivations that people experience in their lives on an individual
• 1:08:12
  basis, like doesn't just accomplish the ostensible goal of people who can't claim the care about
• 1:08:20
  racial justice. It actually does it much better. You're dressing yourself to actual tangible needs
• 1:08:30
  and you're recognizing that we all have needs that someone can be born into a family of enormous
• 1:08:35
  wealth and be miserable and unhappy. I often think about Anthony Bourdain, who someone I never met,
• 1:08:42
  but who like so many people around the world, like I was a big fan of his work. And in my estimation,
• 1:08:47
  he had the best imaginable job. He goes to the finest places, meets the best food, and does it
• 1:08:55
  alongside the best imaginable people. And that he got paid a fortune to do it. And he killed
• 1:09:02
  himself. Like whatever the circumstances there, there was a desperation, a real palpable desperation
• 1:09:11
  and a hurt and a need. And I wrote an update about that after he died actually making that point,
• 1:09:17
  exactly that point. I'm not not surprised at all saying you can be you can be happy in a wheelchair
• 1:09:22
  or miserable on a mega young all that matters is what's going on between areas.
• 1:09:26
  There's a Milton quote, I think it's from Paradise Laws, like the mind is its own place and can
• 1:09:32
  in itself create a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. And I think about that a lot. And it's part
• 1:09:38
  of like was like mindfulness, regiment that I have put in place, which in large part is actually
• 1:09:45
  due to Sam, who we will only refer to as Sam again. And I told him actually last year, I think I
• 1:09:50
  was with him in Annika, his wife, who's wonderful at Ted. And we were just going between some venues.
• 1:09:58
  And I told him explicitly, I think that app like saved my life. And it's weird because we never
• 1:10:03
  really talked about it much. And I knew Sam kind of in this kind of public capacity, but with
• 1:10:09
  respect to his public commentary on religion and the various social issues, but not really like the
• 1:10:17
  and even the kind of anti religious stuff, the pro atheist stuff to put that in the affirmative.
• 1:10:26
  But I hadn't really paid much attention to the mindfulness stuff. And it's the mindfulness stuff
• 1:10:30
  that just unlocked something for me. It gave me a kind of robustness and resilience that I
• 1:10:36
  didn't know I needed. And it actually equipped me before a really, really difficult period.
• 1:10:40
  Did you just start doing his daily meditations on the app?
• 1:10:43
  I did. Yeah, I started. And it's they're the daily meditations, but the app also just has this
• 1:10:48
  robust kind of library of lectures and talks. And I was listening to a lot of those and still do.
• 1:10:57
  And I would just spend hours and hours and hours in the app. And it
• 1:11:01
  it alongside adopting this regular habit of like waking up in the morning, not just meditating,
• 1:11:08
  but also like reading something like beautiful and profound for 20 to 30 minutes,
• 1:11:13
  often much longer than that. It completely changed my life. They're like reoriented me. And it is,
• 1:11:20
  I've said a number of times now, like the single best thing I ever did for myself or my family was
• 1:11:26
  just like going on that journey and essentially finding these tools that I needed to be able to
• 1:11:33
  navigate, like really, really challenging stuff. What do you read for 20 or 30 minutes? Do you find
• 1:11:37
  something in the app? No, no, this will be just anything that has been important to me or that
• 1:11:44
  is kind of part of the Western canon and is celebrated more recently. I spent over the last two years.
• 1:11:51
  I've reread everything, Kormac McCarthy's uva, every read a bunch of my favorite Shakespeare books,
• 1:11:57
  Harold Blooms, who's a literary critic, is someone whose work I really love. He wrote this
• 1:12:03
  really big book called Shakespeare and the invention of the human. And yeah, I just like find
• 1:12:09
  stuff in there to read. Cleary Suspector is become a real obsession of mine in the morning, you say.
• 1:12:15
  In the morning, but not only the morning, now in the morning, like I spend most of my, to the extent
• 1:12:20
  I'm reading and we read a lot given the kind of stuff that we do. These days, it's often mostly
• 1:12:26
  literature. And for a very long time, I didn't read fiction and I wasn't really reading classic
• 1:12:31
  literature. I'd had done that in the past. I would occasionally read, say, a sci-fi book or something,
• 1:12:37
  but most of my reading would just be technical stuff or a book about some social, political
• 1:12:43
  phenomena. And I got out of the habit of reading just beautiful things that demanded something
• 1:12:49
  of you and gave you a different way to think about the minutiae of everyday life. And
• 1:12:55
  yeah, I've never turned to that as well. I couldn't, I realized you're in COVID that I couldn't
• 1:13:00
  read anymore. I couldn't, like, during COVID, my brain was so fractured, like, the brain novels,
• 1:13:04
  like follow the thread for long enough. And so I wish I'd actually done that then.
• 1:13:10
  Yeah, exactly. Well, that's right. And so then I ended that, that ended. But how, I mean,
• 1:13:14
  I'm amazed you would be one of a very small fraction of fathers of young children who
• 1:13:21
  find the time in the morning to read the 20th or 30th. I get up really obnoxiously early.
• 1:13:26
  I get actually living on the West Coast is very valuable. Right. Because I still work with people
• 1:13:31
  who are mostly on the East Coast. Right. So for a long time, I was getting up at like 4.30.
• 1:13:35
  When I was still working at Founders Fund, I mean, I'd be at the office there at like 5.30 in the
• 1:13:39
  morning. Right. So I'd have to get up pretty early to get a workout in, do all of my stuff in
• 1:13:43
  the morning and then get to the office. And the first several hours of the day, I was essentially
• 1:13:48
  doing some of my other work for other jobs. And then the rest of the day would kind of transition over.
• 1:13:54
  So yeah, just carved out the space. It was a priority. But it also just became something I would do
• 1:13:58
  with my kids. Like Leah is precocious. And much to my wife, Shagrin, I started introducing her
• 1:14:06
  to more demanding stuff. So we read Call of the Wild or listen to it together for the first time
• 1:14:13
  in pieces on car rides to school, starting around the timeshoops like four and three quarters.
• 1:14:18
  Right. And she doesn't get all of it. But you know, there's something, and there's actually
• 1:14:22
  an Emerson quote that I can't remember now that will definitely come to me later. There's something
• 1:14:26
  about really beautiful prose that even if you don't quite understand it kind of washes over you.
• 1:14:33
  And you you can kind of feel the meaning. And I would see her get this far away look. And she
• 1:14:39
  would just kind of stare out the window of the car and be listening. And I wasn't sure how much of
• 1:14:46
  it she was getting. But we would just talk later. And she would talk to me about Buck and Spitz
• 1:14:50
  and why Spitz was so mean. And it's just, yeah, there's it's doing something to her. And for me,
• 1:14:57
  I think a lot about and I'm actually curious about your experience. I know there's supposed to be
• 1:15:01
  interview in me or something, but like I was introduced to that book in sixth grade by Mr. V.
• 1:15:07
  This old school teacher who could stream and yell when we were being obnoxious and we were
• 1:15:12
  regularly, but he also had this incredible habit of sitting. I'm going to buy my get emotional here.
• 1:15:18
  She would read to us allowed in class. And I remember him reading, called the wild and the most
• 1:15:24
  dangerous game. And it was just a profound experience and probably the most important experience of my
• 1:15:33
  my elementary school education and my entire education to be honest. I think about it all the time
• 1:15:39
  and wish I could like find Mr. V and talk to him about that. But I do find like the introducing
• 1:15:44
  that stuff to my kids and reading it with them again and being able to do it at a much younger age.
• 1:15:50
  Like I feel like I'm giving them like the cheat codes in a way, you know, like my parents,
• 1:15:56
  you realize when you become a parent, something you should have known all along,
• 1:16:01
  that your parents are just fucking kids who got big who are trying to figure shit out. And they're
• 1:16:05
  like trying to manage all of the things and they don't know what they're doing. And they're
• 1:16:08
  probably going to fuck up more things than they get right. And they will be blamed for it
• 1:16:12
  mercilessly because that's what we do. But I get an opportunity to improve upon their mistakes
• 1:16:18
  because they did a sufficiently good job. And yeah, I just find it's so rewarding to be able to
• 1:16:24
  try to give it to her in a sequence that is better than the one that I got it in. And I think I'm
• 1:16:32
  seeing, you know, she can be in a real asshole sometimes as children can. But I think I'm seeing
• 1:16:37
  the dividends from it. And it's wonderful, you know. So I don't know. I don't know if that
• 1:16:44
  resonates, but I suspect it probably does. It does. I'm sorry. Why do you find it? This happens now.
• 1:16:50
  This is why I am. Moynihan would make fun of me. Why can't you find this to me? Huh?
• 1:16:55
  Don't find this to me. I'm confident Mr. V has passed away. If Mr. V is still alive, yeah,
• 1:17:00
  that would be extraordinary. I mean, maybe I'll do school. I could. I could. I probably should.
• 1:17:07
  If it's that profound that you think about it all the time, absolutely. Even if he's dead,
• 1:17:13
  then he might have kids. Honestly, just to say, just one, you know, this is something, you know,
• 1:17:18
  that stuff touches people. I mean, when you feel that powerfully about something that it's worth
• 1:17:23
  sharing it with the people who, because he doesn't, he doesn't know. I mean, you hope that on some
• 1:17:27
  level, he, he's aware that he knows. There's no way to know for sure. I mean, you hope you make
• 1:17:31
  a difference, but when you actually do when you're through and when it actually changes someone's
• 1:17:35
  life, yeah, you should, you should tell him tell him or his family at least. Yeah, I feel the same
• 1:17:40
  way about literature. I mean, I just think that it's a one thing that along with meditation or being
• 1:17:50
  more contemplative or taking more time for walks or, you know, appreciating the majesty of the
• 1:17:55
  cosmos that we all know that we did more of our lives would would be radically better. Yeah,
• 1:18:01
  but that fucking email needs to get sent and the launch needs to get made and the accountant needs
• 1:18:07
  your spreadsheet. I think that we apply the word to need to lots of things and I think for better
• 1:18:14
  and worse, I have a different relationship with the word need and I'm much more likely to attribute
• 1:18:21
  the need to the literature and the meditation that I am the email, which may make me a less good
• 1:18:28
  collaborator and for that, I'm sorry to all of the people with whom I work in my various professional
• 1:18:32
  capacities, but also I think it also makes me a better collaborator too because I'm doing the
• 1:18:38
  stuff I need to do to be meaningful present in the moments where I need to be present and yeah,
• 1:18:45
  might take me a little longer to reply, which actually might be part of the reason why I was a
• 1:18:49
  bit of a wash out in like Silicon Valley when I went there for my time because I just there's a
• 1:18:54
  sense in which everything is like immediate and instantaneous and move fast and break things and
• 1:19:00
  one, I'm like doing content like the development period between doing documentary series
• 1:19:07
  is can be substantial and in some respects, you're waiting for the right inspiration to strike
• 1:19:13
  in the right moment to strike and the right constellation of people to come together and you can't
• 1:19:17
  necessarily force that and I feel the same way about this book project that I've been working
• 1:19:22
  on for like three years. Yeah, I think books that are changing in all sorts of ways. Unsurprisingly,
• 1:19:30
  it's becoming more of this like the you know Moby Dick, I've only read it myself in like the last
• 1:19:37
  year. It's fascinating and it's not what I thought it was, but there's a chapter in there,
• 1:19:43
  the whiteness of the whale that I think about a lot and to the extent I'm writing a book about
• 1:19:49
  identity and race. It's a hell of a lot more like that chapter in the book than it is like anything
• 1:19:56
  else that gets written about various social science things. So, well that's good. I mean,
• 1:20:01
  that's in my mind. But that's not going to be my thing, yeah, right.
• 1:20:08
  I mean, there is a lot of, I feel like we are at a point where everything that there is to say
• 1:20:12
  about wakeness and I mean, I was with this as well because people have been asking me to write a
• 1:20:16
  book for a few years. I don't know what I'm going to say. What I would say that isn't,
• 1:20:21
  that like Yasha Munk and Coleman Hughes, like I haven't said, you know, like, yeah, it's like,
• 1:20:26
  yeah, yeah, we kind of get that. So coming out of with a little bit more sprinkle of pixie dust
• 1:20:32
  that comes in some spirituality and some humanity and some sort of universalism is also a nice
• 1:20:36
  way to go. Just lastly, look with a wrap up here, but I'm enjoying this thoroughly. Do you think
• 1:20:43
  that you're on the winning side? Like it has the decline of like, I'm the long term. Not like the
• 1:20:49
  six months term, but like the 50-year term, I must kind of wonder about like the world that our kids
• 1:20:55
  will live in. I do not rage. I ask myself that question a fair amount and I wonder about it too.
• 1:21:05
  I'm also necessarily an optimist. Like we live in the world that MLK helped to create for us.
• 1:21:12
  And he had no idea at the time. And certainly at the time, at the moment, he was murdered,
• 1:21:18
  couldn't have known that this is what it would be like. And for all intents and purposes, it is not
• 1:21:24
  just better. It is profoundly better. I think what's urgently important to keep in mind is that
• 1:21:30
  there really is a forever war that the kind of forces of the forces aligned around the notions of
• 1:21:40
  human dignity and the kind of species-wide solidarity and human freedom and free speech.
• 1:21:50
  There are some of us who are fighting for those things. And there will always be a universe of
• 1:21:55
  people, perhaps even more people who either don't appreciate how important those things are or who
• 1:22:01
  are just completely opposed to those ideas winning out. And we will forever be in contest with them.
• 1:22:08
  I don't think bad ideas ever die completely. They retreat for a time and you have to push back
• 1:22:13
  against them. And I at some point in the past had imagined we'd fought certain battles and we won
• 1:22:19
  them. And that's what made it even more shocking at moments when it feels like we're retrogressing
• 1:22:27
  and certain kinds of bad ideas like the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the resurgence of race
• 1:22:32
  realism, and in many respects, even the kind of modern incarnation of the kind of identity obsession
• 1:22:39
  on the left, those things have thrown me for a loop at different points. And in 2020, and that summer
• 1:22:45
  of 2020, it felt like the entire world had suddenly arrived at exactly the wrong ideas and all of
• 1:22:52
  the stuff that I thought about how we should relate to one another wasn't just in decline.
• 1:22:57
  It was inexorably just going to the bottom. But I realize in the moment that the most important
• 1:23:05
  thing to do is to keep making the argument, to keep trying to persuade people, and that ultimately
• 1:23:11
  the difference between us living in the kind of world that we do with all of its attendant
• 1:23:16
  freedoms has always been a function of people who are willing to try to work for a better world.
• 1:23:23
  Emerson trying to give these lectures and kind of cultivate a certain kind of broad mindedness
• 1:23:30
  of Thoreau writing about Walden and hoping that he could make people care about the natural
• 1:23:35
  world more and how important it is to living a fully realized life. And I just want to contribute
• 1:23:44
  to that in whatever small way I can. And it may just be a matter of planting an aphorism in the
• 1:23:49
  minds of a half dozen people that will serve them well in a dark moment. But fuck, I'll take
• 1:23:55
  that. That's fine. Camille, I always feel smarter after talking to you, but now I can also feel
• 1:24:01
  more uplifted and more good. You're a beautiful person. Thank you for being on the show.
• 1:24:06
  Thank you. I appreciate you Josh. Thanks man.