An empty space?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good to see you again, my friend. Is it another week already?

Chris I thought I just looked at your face like a few days ago. I might need more time in between doses.

Scott Are we still recording? I am a lot. I'm like a shot of espresso.

Chris You're full on. Oh my goodness. So, crisis. I've run out of roasted beans in my coffee machine. Yeah, I'm going to have to get out today and buy some good artisanal roast beans.

Scott Oh, yeah. What kind of coffee maker?

Chris I mean, I'm a writer, right? So it's a big part of my ritual. You've got to sort of, you know, every now and then, it's a great way to procrastinate. And I've got one of those.

Scott I've got the pour-over right here.

Chris Look, okay, you're way above me. But I've got a great coffee machine. It's, I forget the brand, but, you know, I've got to grind the beans myself and tamp them down and fire them in there. And so it's like a 15-minute thing, right? Which is great if you're trying to procrastinate from work. It's like, well, it takes time to make. You've got to steam the milk and pour it. Actually, my latte art is getting pretty good.

Scott I was skeptical about the pour-over until I got one, because people would say the purists were so into it. But part of it is you're actually getting the fewest amount of material between the beans, the water, and your glass. There's just a paper filter. That's it. It's not running through things. It's not like... And I guess the little whatever the carafe is. But it's not going through like a bunch of pipes or things. So it's like you boil the water, pour it. It's a pure form.

Chris It is interesting as you travel around the world that so many cultures have their coffee culture. And a lot of... A lot of, I guess, North America has kind of been revolutionized by Starbucks and sort of the return of espresso-style coffees. You know, down in Australia and New Zealand, it is hard to find a Starbucks because there are so many independent coffee shops that people are loyal to that it's just hard for the mass coffee to come in. But then I think about here in Europe. I mean, there's Turkish coffee, which is totally different. Vietnamese coffee. Have you done Vietnamese coffee? With condensed milk. It's like really sweet. I'm sure it's not that good for you, but it does taste really, really nice. And then, of course, living in China for a couple of years, I mean, coffee has now sort of started to become a thing and really in the last

20 years of globalization, but it's still very much a tea place. You go to tea houses and you drink tea and you have tea in the evening with your friends rather than sort of coffee breaks in the morning.

Scott It's interesting, too, because you can coffee, like a coffee shop, you can, like, you don't, like, fire somebody over a meal. You fire them over coffee. Or, you know, you don't have a hard conversation over a meal. You have a hard conversation over coffee. Or you go on an initial date, if you're not sure, over coffee, because you can get in and out. You know, like, as opposed to a meal, which is much more, like, there's the comedy, the bonding of, you know, and it can go on a little while. Coffee, socially, you can move in and out quick.

Chris It would be interesting to talk to, you know, some sociologists about coffee shops or like anthropologists, because it also seems to me that, you know, depending what you're kind of curious about, finding the coffee shop where that community flows is kind of a good way just to, you know, get into the headspace of people. So, you know, if I go to coffee shops in sort of the area of London where, you know, all of the tech startups are, They're doing meetings in the coffee shop and they're doing job interviews in the coffee shop and they're comparing their Uber rider ratings in the coffee shop. Whereas if I go to, say, Oxford and a cafe there, you've got people doing their tutorials and talking about their books and marking their essays. All around the world, it's the same basic product, and it's kind of the same idea. It's a social space where you can nonetheless do your private thing.

But it's kind of on display, so you can see the different private worlds that people live in on display. If we had time, this would be a great, I was gonna say we could do a coffee table book on that, but would that be too meta?

Scott Yeah, you know that one Seinfeld episode where Kramer does a coffee table book on coffee tables, on celebrity coffee tables, and then the great thing is it's got legs, and the book actually becomes a mini coffee table. And then he goes on Regis and Kathie Lee, and Regis is like, this guy's bunkos! It's amazing.

Chris I gotta pick up a package downstairs, so I'm gonna, sorry. There he is. I'm back. I'm back. Amazon.

Scott Nice. I would be remiss to not mention, also, a recent interview I did on Give and Take with a guy, A.J. Jacobs, who's a pretty celebrated American writer right now. He's written for Esquire and GQ and a couple other places. Probably his most famous book, he did this book called A Year of Living Biblically, where he wanted to learn more about religion. So he just decided to try to follow every rule in the Bible, literally. And out of that, he started, he's like, you know, there's all these prayers, you're thanking, you're being thankful for things. So I decided to try to be more grateful and he wanted to thank everybody involved in making his morning cup of coffee. So he started with the barista. Thanks a Thousand Power, it's like a sort of superfood, psychologically, gratitude. And he has this great quote from some Benedictines that said, happiness doesn't make you grateful, gratitude makes you happy, which is a very interesting kind of thing.

So, but it all started from his, he even talked to the people that made, designed the lid at his coffee shop, and the sleeve, which is called a zeffa or something, which is an ancient Chinese invention, I guess, for this sleeve that would keep things from burning your hand.

Chris The Chinese have claimed that one now too? Yeah, exactly.

Scott So it's just a fascinating book. It's a great read. It's like 130 pages or something.

Chris It's a fantastic book. It's actually really interesting. Oh my God, I'm going to get interrupted by Amazon again. This is going to happen.

Scott What is that? Amazon brought you a book titled The Empty Space? What is that book?

Chris So this book is The Empty Space by Peter Brook. Have you ever heard of it? I would be surprised. If you heard about it, it's from 1968. Peter Brook was, actually I think he's still living, this country, so the UK's probably like most famous, most celebrated theatre director. Oh, nice. And so this book is kind of like required reading for people in the theater world. I was having coffee, speaking of which, with this just totally extraordinary man named Rob Poynton, who is an improvisational artist and now sort of goes around the world working with people about sort of the principles of improv. And he recommended this book to me. Peter Brook, I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. I like that. That's deep, man. That's deep, man. So, yeah. So, I mean, there is actually a link between sort of that concept and the concept of, you know, wanting to see the chain in your morning cup of coffee. And it's sort of the idea of seeing, reframing how we see things, right, is kind of the basic concept. And I suppose what's really interesting about the story you told about this guy sort of retracing the supply chain, the entire supply chain of people involved in his cup of coffee, is that we've built an economic system Right, with like money as this fungible means of transaction which means that it is possible to break that chain of custody down into very small pieces so that if we want we only ever have to interact with the person who actually delivers, you know, pours the coffee to us.

And so that's kind of this sort of fragmented consciousness of how our world comes to us, you know, how my Amazon book comes into my door is a consequence of the economic system, of the money system. And it is interesting to kind of deliberately, but it also takes effort to reconstruct the connections in our own head of how interconnected very simple things in our lives are.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting because we're more interconnected in many ways than we've ever been globally. I mean, well, that's just a fact, right? We are exponentially more connected with the wider world than ever in history. People also feel isolated, fragmented. You look at the phenomenon in the United States of mass shootings. It's always these kids, usually guys, usually white guys, young, who feel just alienated. It's interesting with all the interconnection. There's also a seeming huge... People are starved for authentic human connection.

Chris Let me sort of tap into your experience base. I had drinks last night with a friend of mine and he's a successful tech entrepreneur, really interesting guy. And we were just, you know, it was completely aimless conversation for a couple of hours just catching up and Happy New Year and yada, yada, yada. And we were talking about sort of the impact of smartphones on our lives, obviously something that in his tech world they talk a lot about. And he gave some examples of people who... So one thing he said is he really appreciates that he had been sort of born and to some extent came of age before the smartphone, before everything was digital. And so that he goes through life... Having that kind of base of comparison, how the world was before, what the analog world looked and felt like to the digital world. One, that was an interesting point. Yeah, I really value, actually, despite the fact that sometimes we interpret it as we might be slower to pick up the latest and greatest things. I'm still not much of a Snapchat user. But what we do have, if we're lucky enough to be born a little earlier than the average millennial, is just a bit more context of what it was before and so what's changed. Anyway, he was talking about how, in his experience or his observation, that youth today, and I mean, these are very broad brushes, so it's wrong for half of the cases, I guess, but that youth today often, they struggle to navigate social contexts.

And so he gave the example of he and his wife on the holiday. They're sort of on a beach and there's a bunch of kids playing with like a soccer ball or something like that. And so there's a bunch of people on the beach, too. So they would frequently sort of end up hitting other people or interrupting them. And those people, when they came to get the ball, would, you know, politely, some of them angrily, but mostly politely say, you know, could you please play somewhere else or be careful? And he said, like, these kids, complete blank faces. No response, no engagement. As if they didn't know how to negotiate that social situation. And I thought, that's interesting. Like, I wonder if that's, you know, you talk about sort of the paradox between the connectedness and the isolation. And we talk about that as, you know, the technology isolates that.

But is it also that the capacity to sort of navigate social situations It does take practice, and there's just less need to engage in human conversations with people. And so we grow up just being less practiced at all of that.

Scott Yeah, and I think especially for kids, it's interesting because I had this discussion after church. We were talking about, what would you do if somebody wanted to be baptized but wasn't a member of the church really? And I kind of err on the side of grace, inclusivity on that stuff. We were talking about, like... You're going to hell. Exactly. Not for that, but for other things. No, no, no, Scott. For that, too. For that. For that, too. We were saying how, like, one of these guys who's an elder at the church, a really interesting guy, was saying that, like, he's probably in his late 50s, I would guess. He said, you know, as a kid, he got so much confidence in public speaking from, like, doing readings at church. Because he said, you know, even if you were terrible at it, everyone's rooting for you to do well.

And just little things like that, like these, you know, if you're in a church or synagogue or mosque or things like that, they're one of the few intergenerational institutions, right, where you're actually with people that are not just your friends, right, or necessarily your neighbors. And yet it's also not just the mall, right? So there's more affinity than that. There's a connection. There's this sort of unity and diversity within that. And I think that kind of thing is difficult to replace. And I think these kinds of, you know, as we get more mobile, it's harder to find those kind of intergenerational communities where you have, also you have a sense of overlapping shared values. So you're more relaxed in the interaction.

Chris So intergenerational. So yeah, that's very interesting because one is just the general question of where do we learn today to navigate social situations? If it's true that a lot of the everyday interactions are kind of being automated away. I mean, I don't even have to talk to the taxi driver if I'm taking an Uber, right? I can just sort of show up. And you can, but you don't have to. But intergenerational communication may be an especially endangered species of social interaction. And I wonder, do you think, you know, there was just so much media coverage of these Covington school kids in D.C. and the encounter with these... Native American elders. I mean, was that part of what was going on in that story, or what do you think of that?

Scott Let's start with that. Yeah, it's interesting because that story is like, first off, it's the virtue signaling thing, right? The reason it's a story is because somebody tweets it out there, and then you are... If you're a liberal, you've got to show that you're in solidarity with this Native American elder, even though you don't know the whole story. And if you're a sort of conservative America and, you know, everybody, the media, the elite, everybody's against this kid. So we got to, you know, show that there's a whole story.

Chris So the event is almost irrelevant. It's what can we use this event to represent?

Scott Exactly. And it's funny because, like, with the virtue signal thing, like, it's so important that you—that people know, like, I made my voice—I showed everybody where my lot was cast, right? And so—and then, you know, it's just—it's still going on. It's funny because it's—last night, there were several news segments. I flip back and forth on different news channels a lot in the evening just while I'm doing things, and Fox News was running it, like, lead story a lot. It's because it's sort of— Why is this story important if you're a conservative? Well, it shows media bias. It shows anti-Trump. Oh, okay, right.

Chris And look how the narrative has been turned against them and unraveled and problematized.

Scott And you know what? In fairness, there was a – people did – We'll see you next time. I mean, and they're pretty talented, too. Like, you hear them on the street. They're really good. Like, it's not boring. You will not be bored. But they were chanting, like, homophobic things, you know, to the kids in the MAGA hats who were there, you know, at the pro-life rally, Catholic school. So then, you know, this, allegedly, the Native American elder gets involved, and, you know, he's trying to be a buffer or whatever, and the kid, I mean, it's just, so much of it is like... It's a bunch of people who all probably could have behaved better in a very stressful, high-intensity situation. And so you take a normal, complex, weird human interaction, and then you sort of make snippets and turn it into a narrative, which everybody has to say, well, I'm on this team with the protagonist and the antagonist. It's crazy.

Chris Thank you very much. You know, these moments of people imperfectly interacting with strangers in public spaces, I mean... They're happening, you know, millions of times, billions of times a day. I'm not sure that it's newsworthy, right? I think that it's ordinary life. I think that it's, you know, it feels like social pornography to watch.

Scott No, it absolutely is.

Chris And by the way, your government is shut down. Should you guys be talking about that?

Scott This is in D.C. where a lot of trash cans and stuff in these public sites are overflowing. It's crazy.

Chris So that is interesting, as you say, that what is happening in a lot of the news media and social media today is not in any sense an attempt to communicate all the news that's fit to print. It is searching for episodes that fit and support a narrative that I want to promote.

Scott Part of it is none of the normal human interaction, social graces, cues, things like that. Even these kids who don't have a lot of these maybe social negotiations, at least they just pause, right? They're not like, okay, oh, whoa, what do I do? But when you're on social media, it's like most of the time you're interacting with people that you don't know, right? Especially when you're really a terrible person. It's often people you don't know personally. You'd never say these things to their face. You would never talk in public this way, except with friends, with a few drinks out of your shot or something. And then all of a sudden, it's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You become that person. You know, it's funny, John Podhorowitz, who's an editor of Commentary magazine here in the States, an interesting guy, sort of center-right kind of guy, very good. He's a kind of never-Trumper, a very funny, interesting guy. But he was talking about this and how Twitter makes him a worse person. And he was saying, like, you know, Jim Acosta was saying something on Twitter on election night for the midterms, and he was saying something about, well, why can't we call it a wave? We called it a wave a couple years ago when the Republicans won, and Podhorowitz said, I tweeted back, well, things are different, and here's what was different. The statistics and the votes were different. And he said, I could have just stopped there. And then I had a sentence.

Acosta, do you want to be a clown for your whole life all the time? He's like, why did I add that? He's like, why did I have to do that? Like, I never would do that in real life, but it's one of these things. And then he's caught in this dilemma. He's like, you know, I don't think it helps us. And yet, how else would we let people know there's new articles and commentary or new podcasts or new things? So it's like, I don't like it for my soul, but my business requires it. The whole thing is an interesting phenomenon. I stick by this, too. I'm more and more persuaded by the point you make in your book, and you made it on the podcast a few weeks ago, that let's let it all burn. Let's see. Let's let it play out. Because I do think you're right. It probably shows where the cracks are in the democracy and the social fabric, because I think it's such a new phenomenon. We don't yet know what this is making us or who we're becoming, right? And I think...

That changes us, right? Where, you know, that now people born after the internet are, you know, there's this famous video that circulated with social media with this kid who was a new, not a newborn, but an infant who was playing with a magazine and touching it, looking for the magazine to like interact digitally because most of his time is spent on interactive screens. And so that does change us.

Chris So it's interesting. Yeah. I suppose that, you know, the last couple of years has been a lot of Hand-wringing around how do we regulate social media? How do we control social media? It's a valuable path of inquiry. I think there's undoubtedly going to be more of that. I know that the crowd at Davos is starting to grudgingly accept that there's probably going to be some legislative change to make privacy rights stronger. Thank you very much. But I also feel that we need to spend more energy taking advantage of the upheaval to dig deep into ourselves and understand how we are a lot more. I'm trying in my head to relate this to some of the public speaking I do and some of the work I do with corporate clients who are dealing with digital transformation. What's really interesting there is you go into a corporate setting and most organizations and the leadership of organizations think that this is a technology problem. We've got to figure out how to hire the coders and hire the IT staff and how do we retain these people because they've got to come in.

And, you know, where eventually I try to get them is to understand that the technology is actually the easy part. The hard part is changing the culture of the organization. Thank you very much. That is actually the challenge. That the technology allows smaller teams to do more work. That the technology allows people to not be in the office at the same time. Anyway, sorry.

Scott I'm not making any sense. No, I think that's right, though. And then you think about what things can't the technology replace. It's interesting because Jeff Bezos at Amazon, they had this, I guess the head corporate team or whatever, they had this time where when people are pitching new ideas, you have to submit a two-page single-spaced or something proposal, and everybody sits and reads it while the person's there and then talks about it. It's an idea, it's like, it's not a PowerPoint. Yeah, I read something about that, yeah. Yeah, which is interesting, I mean, because I think about, like, so I, right now, I'm in a very traditional kind of church context, and there's no, like, PowerPoint screens or anything like that, like, but I was, I've been in churches, I've served at churches where, like, it was in a warehouse, and it was hip, and it was full of young people, like, and I spent so much time, I used to preach longer, and would do those, like, elaborate PowerPoint slides, and thinking about, does my iPhone remote work, and all this, so And now I just, I don't think I was more effective as a communicator than I am now without any of that stuff. And I'm not a sort of Luddite, and I'm not a kind of, I think, I'm a techie kind of person, but sometimes you can't see in the midst of it, like, you know, oh my gosh, this technology didn't help on this part. You know, actually, there's certain things that it can, and there's other things that can really help, you know, that it can automate things that we don't need to do.

Which kind of can highlight if we're mindful enough, but that's the problem, right? It's exactly what you're saying. The anxiety is over the change of the technologies. We're all focusing on bringing the experts. No, no, no, that's easy where you have experts that are coding. That's not that, you know, that's, but the hard part is seeing the cultural changes and navigating them mindfully and seeing both the perils and the promise that the innovations bring. And I think very often you just don't have people thinking about stuff like that.

Chris So I guess that's part of what we're trying to do together with these conversations. I really feel that in order to do some of that stuff, we need to somehow zoom out. You've got to have somehow the ability to step back. Okay, that's the paradigm, or that's the way things are. And sometimes, I mean, with deep technological change, you really have to step back pretty far in order to identify the kind of meaningful context in which things were that now needs to change. So, you know, stepping as far back as saying, oh, okay, you know, so much of the way we work was conceived for an industrial model. Right. And you have to step pretty far back before you can sort of abstract to that level and say, oh, yeah, right. I mean, everything from unions to offices to suburbs over here and people commuting in the morning to meetings and a lot of it. There's still a lot of military DNA in how the classical workplace is organized, the kind of security that we expect to have in that workplace. So much of our present conception of work and of our personal relationship with technology is rooted in an industrial paradigm. Which, I mean, that's what's being overturned, right? And so then the question is, how do we rethink a lot of things for, you know, some post-industrial paradigm? For a world where, you know, certainly the economic world is much more about, you know, I used to say it was sort of a knowledge age, that we're in this transition from an industrial age to a knowledge age. But now I recognize the problem with that is in a world with AI, knowledge isn't really all that...

That is really sort of what the engine of economic progress and therefore what so much of our other social systems like the education system and welfare system and political system is going to be oriented towards is how do we build learning societies.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting because Plato, and I think it's in the Phaedrus, right? Yeah, he has this story where, like, the king of Egypt is, people are showing him all these things at court, and the god, the god of invention or something comes before him and shows him writing, right? And says, this is going to make everybody wiser, this, that, it's going to make everybody such better thinkers. And the king of Egypt says, no, it's not going to make anybody... There's this irony there. But I think he's trying to think critically about how things like a technology like writing, which all of us are saying books are amazing, right? But there is something about writing.

Chris You think about— Well, you lose the kind of the oral context and communication. And if I can write something to you, then I don't have to be physically present to you to make that argument. You don't have the opportunity to respond to me in real time to my face, right?

Scott Yeah, you don't have to internalize everything. Yeah, you have to—

Chris Yeah, exactly. So the same thing we were talking about is how, you know, is digital technology, do we have fewer and fewer opportunities to learn how to navigate social situations? I can imagine Plato saying the same thing about writing.

Scott Right, right. And there's always, you know, it's interesting because I know my childhood phone number, 609-582-1184. I don't think I could tell you my wife's phone number because it's programmed in my phone. I do know my own phone number because I have to put it into a lot of things, but I don't know. Is that a loss that I can't memorize phone numbers? Thank you for your time. Like, there's no easy answer to most of them. And most of the time, we'll get it wrong a lot of times before we get to any kind of equilibrium.

Chris It's also interesting. So, wow, we're really bouncing all over the place, which is great. And somehow we're going to weave it all together.

Scott We intended to get to, like, the headlines, but we did get to Covington. So that's our first kind of headline. That's right.

Chris Covington was interesting. And we might still get to the headlines. You know, so we kind of do have this conceit when we talk about technology. And it can be, you know, sort of like physical technology that we usually imply when we use the word technology, or it could be cultural technology like, you know, the Me Too movement. But we have this conceit when we talk about technology that we can ask ourselves, you know, should we adopt it or not? By the time we're asking ourselves that question, it's already sort of with us. And it's really, I think, it becomes more of an audit exercise or an accounting exercise. It's useful and interesting to kind of log what was gained and what was lost with the adoption of this new technology. But probably we should be honest with ourselves that we're not doing that accounting exercise in order to then decide

do the benefits outweigh the costs and therefore we're going to keep it or not. No, we're going to keep it. I mean, we came up with fire, and we're like, well, there's a couple big things it does that are so useful that we're all going to keep using it.

Scott Evolutionarily, technology, I mean, we're cybernetic by nature because of our brain development stuff. We're storytellers and cyborgs. Technology, even before we can actually digitally put nanites in ourselves, but technology becomes such a part of us. I mean, it's interesting because, you know, One of the first books I ever read by Nietzsche, I think, was The Genealogy of Morals, which blew me away. But, you know, it's interesting. Genealogy, he's not trying to say, here's a systematic accounting of morality. He's saying, here's how our morality... How they have organically come to... Yes, and he starts with philology, right? And looking at good and bad versus good and evil, and why these language choices make a difference. And really, good and evil is more like strong and weak, or noble and not noble, and he goes... But I think that that sort of genealogical account of this stuff is much more helpful, because you're right, I think it's... To do it in a way that's value-laden in a heavy-handed way, like, tries to be... You're right, because we just don't know enough. Oh, I did get it right. The Isle of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Yeah, so basically he's saying you only get wisdom in hindsight. The insight comes after the experience. And this is Hegel, right? He's a historicist to the degree that he thinks that the ideal is working itself out in historical process, but it's only looking kind of retrospectively that you see all the truth in the midst of these contradictions and historical turns.

Chris And then so, you know, an interesting question then becomes is, so, okay, accept all that. And then what is sort of the good life? Or what is the right role? Very different questions. For people, you know, in the moment of transformational change. I mean, is it to kind of step back so that we can have some wisdom about these processes and a kind of... Not fatalism, but a kind of acceptance and a reflection to try as best one can to not be swept up by, but to thoughtfully adopt technologies. Or is it about... Get down into the moment, into the intensity of the moment. Pick up a banner and join the fight. Interestingly, who was I listening to? I can't remember. It might have even been Pod Save America or something. Yeah, maybe it was. A couple of these ex-Obama staffers are talking about how their view toward politics has changed over the last few years. And, you know, what I, they didn't use these words, but what I really heard from them is, is the last few years of politics, sort of what they saw as the obstructionism of the Republicans in the last couple years, the Obama administration, now the Trump presidency, it has really weaponized their conception of politics. That, you know, the idea of working with people across the aisle.

And kind of says, whoa, okay, we really got to think about what we're doing here. This long-term is not going to lead us the way we need to go. We need to do X. We need to be collaborative. We need to think long-term about the state of liberal democracy in the West or blah, blah, blah. You're just going to lose.

Scott It's funny, though, because that's like the American constitutional system is set up to incentivize, compromise, collaborate. It's set up to disincentivize winner-take-all stuff, right? So it's funny because at one point then do you jettison the system because it's not a system that serves that spirit well. That you just dispense with, especially norms that flow from the system, because the norms or cultural norms are developed for a non, when most people realize it's not all winner take all. And for the system to work, you have to realize you're going to win and lose some days. And accepting that reality is part of the real politic in the system, right? So then it gets back to the currency thing, right? At what point do you say, this currency is not spendable anymore?

Chris So we got a few minutes left.

Scott I'm gonna look at headlines and see what jumps out at me. All right, I'll do the same thing. I'm looking at CNN breaking news. Of course, we got Roger Stone was arrested here in America. Roger Stone famously, as he said on Bill Maher once, I'm your favorite because I'm the guy with two dicks, a dick in the front and a dick in the back. Because Roger Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, which is, that ought to be indictable all in it, you know, by itself. But he, of course, is the link to probably the WikiLeaks stuff and the Trump campaign and the Democrats' emails and all this stuff. Like, it's not, you know, so he's been indicted on multiple counts. And probably indicted on multiple counts because Mueller thinks this guy has... A link to any kind of conspiracy with the Russian government, the information troll farms and things like that, and the Trump campaign.

Chris You know, there was a great article in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was a week ago, that talked about the case for impeachment. And it was, you know, it wasn't, it was, I thought, a very fair article, like not sort of, you know, the raving Democrat who demonizes all Republicans, but kind of trying to take the Constitution's view of if we strip away the hate on both sides and just look as dispassionately as one can at the evidence. And his argument was that the House has a constitutional responsibility to begin impeachment proceedings. And whether or not it's feasible that the president would be convicted, that's the wrong question, because then you're asking a partisan question. But if what you're trying to do is sort of be faithful to your oath to the Constitution, that this is part of the oath, that if there are serious allegations and there's some evidence that Andrew Johnson.

Scott Andrew Johnson, okay. Yeah, Andrew Johnson, who it was said about him at the time, no matter, somebody said, no matter how bad a man you think he is, you usually find out he's worse. He's worse, wow, okay. So, yeah, wow, ouch, that hurts. And was not convicted.

Chris Yeah, right. So impeached but not convicted. And so this article's argument was that – but what the process does do, one, it makes this question and this inquiry kind of a focus of national attention. It surfaces – A lot of evidence that otherwise wouldn't surface. If there is a serious concern that for whatever reason, whatever dimension, there's an illegitimacy of the presidency, it also tends to stall the presidency in the sense that the most valuable resource that an administration has is its time, and these proceedings take up a lot of their time, so they get less of other things done. Now, depending whether you think, you know, what you think the credibility of the allegations would be, you see that as a good thing or a bad thing. And likewise, you know, whether you're sort of a Trump supporter or a Trump hater, his other argument was that historically impeachment proceedings, whether they convict or not, they're kind of the death knell of that politician's political career. Unless you're Bill Clinton. Unless you're Bill Clinton, although he actually, in the article, he addresses that because it's the obvious counter-argument, and his argument there is, well, that's actually the example that proves his case, that that was a case of, you know, it was such a blatantly partisan process.

That he actually developed into a sympathetic character through the proceeding because it was so blatantly partisan. And so that is the kind of cautionary tale, that if you go into this with a blatantly partisan agenda, then you run the very real risk and the reasonable risk of creating a sympathetic character in the presidency. But if you are faithful to your constitutional duty and you have a kind of dispassionate

Scott It's interesting because De Tocqueville says of America that they kept some of the aristocratic values, but took them not in the government or in nobility, but just in civic culture. Some of the best of the aristocratic nobility stuff you tried to just make in the culture. And this impeachment thing, like even Nixon, who is a pretty nefarious character in many ways, but... Even Nixon, he had a commitment to government institutions, even though he was a pretty selfish and could be a shady guy. And the shame, he just, like, he had to resign. So after Clinton, Clinton's kind of like, look, this is sex. Everybody lies about sex. You know, I'm doing a good job. And I don't have, you know, the shame I can, whatever, shame. So now it's kind of like we're in the post-shame thing, where this is where I think Trump's probably thinking, I'll beat the rat in the Senate. Fine, impeach me. I, uh...

Again, some of this sort of high-mindedness that the American constitutional framers assume would implicitly be in the office, you just can't... See, this is why you need a royal family as the head of state. They don't have the nonpartisan kind of, you know, they can hold up the aristocratic ideal. Because, I mean, increasingly, I think that gets harder for that kind of ethos to infuse the system at all points.

Chris So I have, so looking at the headlines, I guess my meta question about the news.

Scott Before you get meta, I can ask you a question. Before you go meta, let me ask you this. You down with AOC?

Chris Interesting. So that was going to be my second question, maybe. Because, I mean, it's very clear. So I'm looking at the Fox News website right now. I mean, they're trying to take her down now. I mean, she's only two weeks into her public office life. So what is the fear? And it seems to me that they must have some kind of algorithm that says these are the people who are threatening. I don't know that they want to take her down.

Scott I think they want her to be perpetually elected in that liberal district, because always be a liberal and better get a charismatic person who says they're sympathetic to socialism to have to... As a source or symbol of what to be angry about. Like she's great for Fox News, right? Like they couldn't dream of a better person that energizes the Democratic Party.

Chris Because she epitomizes the wrongness of that side of the aisle.

Scott Right. Absolutely. And the fact that she has all these Twitter followers, it gets more, we're owning the libs, look how dumb they are, they all follow this, they'd vote for her for president, this is how dumb the liberals are. I mean, it is, she is their wildest dream come true.

Chris They can pour all their hatred into her.

Scott Yes.

Chris So that in the future, to activate all that multidimensional hatred, they only need to say her name.

Scott Yeah, AOC. You down with AOC? That's it, man. Enough said. Yeah, that's it. So that's tough. It's funny, though, too, when everybody said 70% income tax on the top tax bracket. You know what it was under Eisenhower? I mean, of course, the communists, Eisenhower, right?

Chris It was like 90, wasn't it?

Scott It was 92, I think.

Chris And it's also the top tax bracket. I don't know what the specifics of her proposal is, but that's probably like, what, $10 million or something like that.

Scott So if you earn over $10 million, then you pay 70% of... It's a little lower than that, but it is like... And you only pay that on whatever puts you above the bracket, right? That's right. So if it's like $5 million, you don't pay 92% on everything before $5 million.

Chris You pay it on the upper limit. And frankly, if you're pulling in $10 million of income a year, you're not really going to miss much more of it. I need to get some tax economists in the room around me. I'm fine with that. That's fine. I would be more skeptical of what are the unintended consequences of a tax bracket like that, because probably what happens, I mean, it's already happened, but what happened even more is if you're earning $10 million a year or more, you can also figure different ways to pay yourself that money, like as a dividend or into your partnership or something like that. And so instead of reporting it as income, You report it as dividend or you reinvest it inside the family company or whatever, right? I mean, there'd probably be so much legitimate tax avoidance that would take place to not recognize your annual income over 10 million as 10 million.

Scott It's interesting because there's Elizabeth Warren.

Chris Rich people are good at this.

Scott Well, you can afford to be good at it. It's interesting because Elizabeth Warren has this proposal that a wealth tax where if you're over $50 million, your assets... No loopholes. You're just like, over 50 million assets, you pay 2% a year on the amount over 50 million. And if over a billion, you pay 3% or something. Which economists that she's worked with says would generate $2.7 trillion in 10 years of revenue. That's an interesting, because there she's targeting not the 1%, but the super rich. So, I mean, again, America is so kind of against this stuff, like, I guess maybe because we're founded on a tax, you know, rebellion. It's tough, but it's amazing to think that we did have 92% top tax. And we had that, right? You built the federal highway system, the GI Bill, built the middle class after the war. I mean, when we had that sort of more stratified tax, more progressive tax system, it was some of the best years for... For economic growth and for wealth distribution, just an economy that generated a really burgeoning middle class.

Chris Yeah, there's a lot of research on this now. I think maybe economic consensus is a strong word, but I think it's a no-brainer for a lot of people, the research. Basically what happens with extreme income and wealth inequality is that the money in the economy starts to stagnate. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

Scott Leavenworth, Kansas. My wife grew up in Kansas. She said Leavenworth, Kansas, where the big Leavenworth federal prison is. She's like, that whole town's economy is based on Leavenworth federal prison. Like, all the Caribbean stores, the grocery stores.

Chris And it's the dry cleaners and the cafes and the groceries and, you know, and so... And so the multiplier effect of almost a million people who aren't getting their paychecks and then aren't spending it is significant to the point that you've now got economists coming out and talking about, we can see the impacts of this shutdown in GDP growth statistics. Well, you can flip that and say, what if 10 or 20 million workers in the United States economy were getting the equivalent of a paycheck and a half each paycheck? And you would see the multiplier go in the other direction. So I get the arguments. I think that what's interesting about tax policy is it sounds so boring, but it is actually in some ways kind of like this core profound question that a society has about how do we share the burden and the benefits. And so, I mean, it starts the conversation for people to stand up boldly and say, I want to have a very different model of taxation. But it's going to be the work of to bring that in the same way that it took, you know, a couple of generations to get some kind of movement towards universal healthcare.

I mean, it takes cultural change to get there, and it's not clear – it's not clear right now anyway – that it'll be possible to organize public opinion against the resistance, against the already well-organized resistance to that kind of tax policy change. I mean, it was great – AOC was on – On the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Everybody still just calls it the Colbert Report. So she was on the Colbert Report. And, you know, even he is like, so like this tax thing, is that like, how is that going to affect me? Like, I'll be able to avoid it, right? Exactly, exactly.

Scott Okay, so you down with AOC, possibly. You're maybe. You're being cagey about AOC.

Chris You know, so I haven't spent a lot of time looking at what she's doing and how she speaks. I've seen her speak a couple of times. And I mean, she sounds, she's articulate. Yeah, yeah. She's articulate. She's an impressive, confident, self-possessed woman. And that in itself is powerful political currency.

Scott Absolutely.

Chris You know, certainly within the Democratic Party right now. I think she's been put on the House Oversight Committee. Which is a sexy position for the next couple of years, right? Because they're going to be doing, they're going to be speeding people, right? So there was... There was clearly some recognition from the party brain trust that this is somebody who, you know, we need to put in position to continue to build a track record and credibility because, you know, Republicans want to demonize her, but I think it's pretty clear that Democrats want to lionize her and, you know, probably can see at some point in the future she's going to be one of their lions to go for a Senate seat, to, you know, run for high office, whatever.

Scott On a completely other end of the spectrum news-wise, do you know what Alex Trebek's one regret in life is, he recently said in an interview? So you know what?

Chris So we're totally on the same wavelength because I saw that headline. I'm still on the Fox News website. I don't know where you found it. And I haven't read it, but apparently it's just in, so break it to me.

Scott It's not meeting his wife sooner. They've been married 29 years. And he says, well, you know, although she's younger than him, so it wouldn't have been legal if he had met her very much sooner, but... But he says, you know, like, we've had our challenges, and then we have our really beautiful times where we're just so blessed to know that we're in each other's courtyard. And he and she says the key to Alex Trebek, Jeopardy's host, is to understand he's got a great sense of humor. He takes his job very seriously, but won't take himself too seriously. He's also youthful. He's just an intelligent human being. Part of Alex's staying youthful is his staying curious.

Chris I've got a potential Alex Trebek connection. He does some kind of public conference talk thing in Ottawa or Toronto each year, and it's possible that I'll be appearing there this year.

Scott Oh my gosh, you're going to meet Trebek.

Chris Would you like me to get his autograph for you?

Scott I love Trebek. I love Jeopardy. I like the guy. I like Jeopardy.

Chris I think it's cool. And talk about resiliency. How long has Jeopardy been on the air?

Scott Oh, decades. He's so interesting. I've heard him interviewed on Howard Stern a couple times, and he's just a fascinating guy. He's just such a cool... He's the kind of guy you'd really just want to sit and have a glass of wine with and chat. I mean, he seems like a fantastic human being. And some great wisdom.

Chris I will have the glass of wine and the chat and let you know.

Scott And I think he's right there. Something about curiosity, right, is good for the soul. Gratitude and curiosity. Like when you're continually curious about the world, I think it does keep you young because you're thinking and reflecting and, you know, curiosity, man. Hey, that's a good message to take into the weekend. A good parting note. All right, my friend. It's good to talk and we'll talk again next week.

Chris Always good, Scott. Take it easy.