It’s all about the currency, baby!

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, welcome back to your—well, I shouldn't say welcome back. I should say welcome home to you and Happy New Year. You were in— I like that. Welcome home. —four countries. Oh, my God.

Chris I lost count.

Scott Five, six countries over the holidays. You were in Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore.

Chris And now back to the UK. Totally, I gorged on travel. That's what I did over the holiday break.

Scott Happy New Year, man. Thanks. I was in one country, although I was in Indianapolis for a family funeral, which was... The middle of the country is different, dude. I mean, it is a different... You just learn a lot about... You don't learn as much as you learn in New Zealand.

Chris And it's somehow become vogue for people who have, well, I didn't grow up on the coast of Canada, I grew up in the middle too, but it's become vogue where to go to the middle. I don't really think I've spent much time in middle America.

Scott Yeah, it's a different scene. It's a different scene. It's definitely has a different kind of... Thanks for watching!

Chris Okay. Okay. So we know where to go on the road with our roadshow.

Scott Exactly. Indianapolis. We will come there. We'd love it.

Chris We'll throw that on the wall for like, you know, 2019 objectives or ambitions. Absolutely. A Midwest tour. Totally. Totally. That'd be awesome.

Scott So you actually have a – so which government right now – you're a poli-sci guy. Which government is less functional right now? The United States government where we have the Speaker of the House disinviting the president for the stadium and then he whacks her by saying, oh, yeah, Nancy, well, that CODEL, the congressional delegation, you're going to have to fly commercial. Thirty minutes before they're about to get on the military planes, he cancels the trip. So that's a –

Chris Great question. Which government is more dysfunctional? And, you know, let's just say, you know, a strong case can be made for both.

Scott Because Theresa May is an interesting place because she lost her Brexit deal and then now is one a vote of no confidence, I guess because a lot of people are scared of Jeremy Corbyn. That would be interesting. If Jeremy Corbyn was not head of the Labour Party, how different this would play out.

Chris I mean, the Brexit thing in the UK, It's just kind of weird when you kind of, you know, parliament takes votes. Because on the one hand, you've got people sort of on both sides of the aisle who hated Theresa May's Brexit deal, but for opposite reasons, right? Some people because they hate the idea of Brexit and some people because this deal doesn't deliver a hard enough and complete enough, you know, a clean enough Brexit that we thought that we voted for. So you had people on both sides of the issue

Scott And who would want to be prime minister until this is done? Because, like, this thing is going to kill, like, several governments until it's all sorted out. Because it's one of those things where there's no pop — it's a third rail kind of thing, right? You can't — you can't touch it.

Chris Like — And I guess — yeah. And I guess it's — just stepping back for a moment — I guess it's inevitable if we're going to, you know, record this in the middle of January 2019 that we're almost — We're almost doomed to just sort of having a sort of politics gossip shop because of what's going on on both sides of the Atlantic right now. But if I can go back to your original question, which is, you know, which side is more dysfunctional? My immediate thought is, you know, maybe I would say the UK. Yeah, yeah. Whereas right now in the UK, I mean, if Brexit goes through, that's going to be at least with this country for a generation, right? There's going to be at least like, let's say, a 25 year period. Where the UK is still in the midst of divorcing itself and kind of the post-divorce ugliness of disentangling all its institutions from the European Union. Which, you know, and kind of depends how you want to look at the world, but most social scientists look at things like economics and demographics and stuff like that and say that this is pretty clearly going to be a bad deal for the British people in terms of quality of life as we ordinarily measure it.

So the dysfunction in the UK right now could very possibly be sending sort of Well-being and welfare in this country in the wrong direction for the next 25 years. And I don't know if in the United States people are quite that gloomy about how long this dysfunction could play out in terms of its consequences. I don't know. What do you think about that?

Scott There'll probably be garden variety dysfunction instead of, but stuff that will still because of norms and rigorous democratic institutions, that the ship is writable, I think. There's some challenges, but I think that, yeah, I think that Trump... And who knows? I mean, it's interesting because after the Nixon imperial presidency, there was a lot of government reform in the 70s, right? And even you look at Jimmy Carter, like after Gerald Ford, there was this kind of like, hey, let's get a Southern Baptist peanut farmer, you know, like somebody that's like a decent guy. So I wonder, like, if the Trump kind of presidency is going to, if the country will look for something more virtuous, transparent. I mean, I feel like there's signs of hope despite the being a sort of global embarrassment right now.

Chris Yeah, and I don't want to, although maybe it's inevitable, I don't want to just dump into sort of a simple fallacy that, you know, Democrats good and Republicans bad. I mean... Michael Garfield, Jordan Peterson. And Democrats are there to remove the lines that should never have been drawn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I love that formulation that, you know, it's kind of like, you know, in a court of law that you've got sort of two opponents arguing different sides of the issue. And that argument does sort of bring out some, you know, deeper understandings of things. So where was I going with this? Just to say that, so setting that aside, you know, if I look forward four years, eight years, 12 years to the United States, it's hard not to see some kind of pendulum swing back in a different direction, right? You know, say, for example, a Democratic president after Trump, whether it's in two years' time or in six years' time. And if for no other reason...

Versus on this side of the Atlantic, there's no automatic stabilizer but Brexit. It's very much a kind of a one-way door. And if this country chooses to, well, they've already chosen to walk through it. If they actually do go through with it, people who want to go the other way are going to find that, no, the door actually only went one way, and now we're stuck on the outside. That's, I think, very different in terms of what the trajectory over the next 10, 20 years is going to be.

Scott It's interesting, because I've heard that some people in England want to do, like, another referendum. Like, let's do it.

Chris A lot of people do, yeah.

Scott It's sort of like, well, then does that, like, the argument gets is, does that delegitimize the democratic thing? And what do we do, best of seven? Do we keep getting it? You know, like, how many, like, but, you know, this is one of those things where, like, this is a complex issue that probably should have never been on a referendum, right?

Chris Right. And this is why, in the final analysis, what I say about what's going on here in the UK is, I think that it's just a total, what's the fancy word I'm looking for? Like, abdication of leadership? Yeah. All I can do is execute the instructions. And on the other side of the aisle, Jeremy Corbyn, who himself is probably a Euroskeptic. Well, he is a Euroskeptic. So there is an opportunity. There's a space for one of the political party leaders to just stand up and say, I'm not saying that this is right, absolutely, but I'm... Of, you know, are we in or are we out? Instead, because sort of neither of them is, no one's really clearly picking that up. You just have the commentariat, you know, recycling endlessly these questions about what did the referendum mean? And, you know... Was there foreign interference in the process? And, you know, what are the terms of the exit? Do they need to look like in order to, like, it is, you almost want to tear your hair out.

Scott So, okay, you know, the system is—and how things that, like, certain practices could have been abused, but they just weren't because of norms and traditions. We just don't do it that way until somebody says, why not do it that way? And so, eventually, there was, you know, populist— Thanks for watching. It's meant to have all these checks and balances. So it is meant to be not easy to do big things without a lot of consensus. But you see people that it requires a certain set of virtues, civic virtues, civic values and stuff to make a system like that work. It's like when Mitch McConnell denies Obama picking his last Supreme Court justice. There was nothing unconstitutional about that. It just is a question of norms. Like, do you want to be on the other side of this when this happens?

And Mitch McConnell points back to, and you could say right or wrong, Harry Reid didn't do it for the Supreme Court but was frustrated with Republican filibustering, so just change the rules so that you only need a simple majority for... These sort of frustrating moments are things that sort of undo democracy sometimes.

Chris So it's interesting. We'll have to send out a general call to our listeners. If someone is an expert on this or can point us to someone or a book, that is. Now I'm really interested to really get into, you know, right now and the kind of Brexit stuff and the, you know, government shutdown stuff as sort of a case study in highlighting some of the differences between parliamentary democracy and, I guess, presidential democracy in the United States. Because, you know, one of the things... Thank you very much. And you just turn your platform into legislation. You don't have some kind of adversarial process to appoint Supreme Court justices. You just choose who you want to put onto the Supreme Court when a vacancy becomes available. And it seemed, and this is where I sort of get curious about how does this really function in practice, but it seems that therefore norms do play a kind of self,

I don't want to put it, but like that just the norms of the system do weigh very heavily upon the government leadership in these situations. Because absent those norms, then what is there to distinguish this from an autocracy?

Scott Whereas, it seems in the U.S., like, well, you know, if you don't want me to do it, just... No, in a parliamentary system, though, you do have a... Like, it's easier to get rid of a prime minister that is really, like, going too far or doing things that are clearly massively unpopular. And it's easier to call for elections, right? Like, I mean, it's easier to... So, like, I mean, yeah, I think that, like, in a parliamentary system, you have to sort of... You get more power, but also... Thank you for having me. And Senate are different parties. And then the president is kind of partying onto his own, right? I mean, because Trump's not very ideological. So those kind of systems are intriguing because there's all these built-in checks and balances just by the nature of the institutions.

Chris Right. Well, so you're right. So I think somehow in the parliamentary system, it's like Theresa May goes too far and then you get... You know, the Skunk Works Committee within the Conservative caucus itself that says, you know, if we can get 45 or 50 members to agree, then we can start a process to, you know, we can push for a vote in confidence in party leadership and remove the party leader and therefore the prime minister. So there's a kind of check on your power from within your caucus. Whereas in the U.S. system, which seems so interesting right now, it's kind of like, well, the checks on my power become apparent through the adversarial process. So you want to stop me? Okay, stop me. You can't stop me? Okay, well, then I guess it's within my power, which was kind of how Trump was operating in the first two years of his

administration, and obviously the shift that he has not yet been able to navigate. Now that there is a genuine check on his power, it's like, oh, you can stop me. Well, no, I don't want you to stop me. And then it kind of grinds into this.

Scott And it's interesting, too, because some of the things that I think what some people would hope that the Republic, some people in the Republican Party would check some of Trump's excesses because they're different co-equal branches. But then there's this kind of like fear, like, well, Trump's pretty popular. What if we lose the base? So it's interesting because some of the way the government should have functioned, even with one party, didn't work because people in his party, even though they were in a different co-equal branch, just decided, well, kind of work like employees of the president instead of... Co-equal members of a branch of government that's meant to... So that's the challenge, like when people just were like, all right, we'll just work as top-down employees of the president. And then now you're saying the government looks totally different, right? Because the Democrats are sitting in the House and investigations are all these like things that, you know, Republicans just sort of did a wink and a nod when Trump was there.

Well, okay, like the Intelligence Committee, all this stuff. Like that's, I mean, some of the stuff, some of the scandals, like... The emolument stuff, like profiting while you're in office. I mean, they just got by with so little oversight. No, no, no.

Chris That's just good business.

Scott Exactly. I mean, I'm the president. I can run the greatest company and the country. There's no conflict.

Chris So I guess, I mean, all that you're talking about there sort of goes back to, you know, sort of from the founding fathers and their resistance to party politics because it creates this question, is your loyalty to the party or to the people, to the office, to the oath? And Mitch McConnell, Exhibit A.

Scott There's a guy that seems to have no values other than keeping the majority. Like, he likes running the Senate, right? Like, you can't... Like, you look at him and he does... I mean, he points conservative judges up, but you're not... You don't... I look at that guy as, like, such a creature of Washington. Like, I like my Senate. I like preserving my majority. I'm good at it. And that's what I like doing. Like, it's an... He's an intriguing guy because he doesn't... I'm not saying he doesn't have values or he doesn't... But he doesn't come across that way.

Chris Well, to me... So he's exhibit A of putting party first. And the shutdown is such a clear example of this. He says, well, I'm not going to put anything on the floor that the president's not going to sign. Oh, wait a minute. That's not your constitutional power.

Scott Yeah, the Congress could... If they have a two-thirds majority, which it wouldn't be that hard to cobble together, they could just override a veto and open the government.

Chris But that's the thing, they won't... And he's what, from Kansas? He's from Kentucky. He's from Kentucky, sorry. So he doesn't want to be the one who betrays MAGA Nation.

Scott Yeah, because that's the interesting thing.

Chris He's up for re-election, too. So there's all of that going on.

Scott The other thing, too, about Trump that's fascinating, right, in any other kind of political climate, right, that this would not be a big deal. Okay, border fencing for a laundry list of things Democrats want, or border walls will just... But the wall becomes so moralized because Trump moralized it and demagogued with it and said, we've got to keep these Mexicans, they're the worst people. So the wall became not just a functional thing, but it became a symbol. And so now the Democrats can't just cut a quick deal because he's made it into a symbol. So this should not be actual in any other normal presidency. Even though you disagreed with the party in power, you'd figure compromises, you'd get some stuff you want, you could give the president stuff he wants and you'd get a bargain. But Trump makes it hard to bargain with because he moralizes everything. So everything becomes this big drop-dead

And if you vote for the wall, it seems that you're voting for a view of immigrants, a view of nationalism, a kind of thing. So it's not just border. Nobody wants open borders, right? There's lots of different arguments about what's the most efficient way to regulate the border. But now it's into a thing that's different. It's like not only regulated borders, but a kind of nationalistic border, like the border is a symbol.

Chris So that's a great analysis because that clarifies for me what I mean, I read a lot of David Brooks and I listen to him on NPR every week when he sits down with Mark Shields. That's a very good point, David. But, I mean, so David Brooks keeps making this point, you know, they just should compromise. The Democrats should compromise. He ran an election on building a wall. He won the election, so therefore he should have, you know, get to build his wall. And that's kind of been his argument for the entirety of this shutdown. But you clarify

Scott Yeah, and that's when politics, which is kind of what we talked about last night, when politics becomes religious, I mean, when it's not just pragmatic things, it becomes this ideological religion and you can't back down, right? There's sort of either or, black and white kind of thing, and it just makes... And again, I think Trump has, it's not that Trump created all of it. I mean, there was a culture before Trump that allowed Trump to capture the Republican nomination, but he's certainly thrown gasoline on that fire. And again, the things of norms, just, you know, this is this guy, Ed Watts, like, you know, the border public. He said a lot of stuff that happened. It's just people that they just wouldn't do this because Rome really incentivized. It's just, that sort of changes the nature of political culture in a way that is, again, taking him out of the equation will help a lot, I think. But still, once you let the genie out of the bottle, it takes some time to put it back in.

Chris Listening to that argument, my mind is going back to Alasdair MacIntyre and after virtue. When we live in this context where there isn't some kind of shared virtue framework that weighs and imposes upon our behavior, then the whole sort of language of norms

Scott Yeah, because it's just like, it's interesting, right? Because the analogy is like people with Bitcoin, right? Crypto cards. It was like, I was like, well, Bitcoin, I mean... Oh boy, I'm looking forward to this analogy. How would we give that value? Because it doesn't really... No, how do we give our own currency? How does the euro have any value? How does the dollar have any value? Because we all decide it has value. That's what I'm saying. So it's the same thing with currency, like with political currency. The norms only have value when we buy into them as currency, just like the dollar. And then at some point, you could say, people are saying, we could do the same thing with blockchain, Bitcoin. So it's the same thing. Some of the norms only have the value that a functional currency does.

Chris That's great. You know, we're going to have to, in fact, I'm going to write that. I might have to write about that, the notion of devaluing currency and the varieties of currency that are being devalued or maybe revalued in society today. And thinking about sort of cultural change in the moment as a sort of devaluation and revaluation of currencies is a really interesting concept, I think.

Scott So the other interesting analogy I have, and I don't know if this is, like, related to me. I was saying something at my Uncle Chuck's funeral that he and my Aunt Vicki modeled something really well for me. I heard this guy, Louis Smedes, who was a psychologist, and he was a theological kind of person, too. He's died now, but he was a pretty regarded guy in the psychological field. He said, I've been married seven times to the same woman. And he said, any healthy marriage, basically... The people can't reinvent themselves. And my uncle Chuck and I did this incredibly well. And I think the same thing that Watts says about republics. They're adaptable, right? But it's like a marriage. There has to be this sense of, okay, we're working at it. It's a challenge, but we'll go in the death for the resurrection, for the rebirth. And when republics die, like marriages, it's like, well, okay, we can't go into the crisis or the issue or the problems. We can't adapt.

And we've got to get divorced. We've got to have a new relationship. We've got to swing or something. I don't know what the analogy is. But I think that's an interesting analogy along with currency. It's buy-in. It's a covenantal buy-in.

Chris And it's renewal. So what is the mechanism of death and renewal, of circularity, of cyclicity, and a kind of recognition that for anything to sustain in the very long term, then it needs to have that mechanism. The law needs to have that mechanism, social institutions need to have that mechanism, because we go through such profound change. I mean, just think of... The history of Western democracy over the last 2000 years, I mean, what democracy is today is a profoundly different thing than it was in ancient Greece. There are still some sort of recognizable core elements of sort of the will of the people governing, but it's also completely unrecognizable because we are in so many ways unrecognizable. And it's really interesting. This is an argument that Thank you for having me. Is that kind of every 80 years or so, the dynasty would end and a new dynasty would come to power. And so the cyclicity was through revolutionary change. And that's fascinating.

Scott It's a difference. Yeah, we can't fathom that kind of cyclicity that it would work that way. That's that's fascinating.

Chris But it's interesting that that idea is already starting to enter into the kind of the, you know. And yet, you know, maybe that in itself just reflects how hard it is for us when we're seized by a present crisis to kind of step back and appreciate the durability of society. This is pretty random and aside, but it seems suddenly relevant. So I've just been watching this pretty good Netflix documentary about Robert Kennedy.

Scott I thought you were going to say R. Kelly.

Chris I liked R. Kelly.

Scott It's tough. It's tough. It's a tough. Yeah, he's got a great voice.

Chris I liked Gotham City when he had like the kids choir in the back. Gotham City. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway. No more kids choirs. Lost a lot of fame. Oh, my God. Oh my God. But think back to the time of Robert Kennedy. His brothers assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. He's assassinated. The Vietnam War. I'm sure you had so many people in American society at that point. Well, you did. I watched the archival footage in the documentary. You asked them, what's the state of the country? And they're just shaking their heads. We live in a country where you cannot run for president without getting killed.

Scott Have you seen that show on Hulu with... Oh, shoot, who's the actor? No, it's escaping me. But it's based on a Stephen King novel, and it's called November... What day did Kennedy die? November something, 1963? So it's basically this guy... Oh, it's Franco. James Franco is the main actor. This guy who owns this diner has a time machine in the back of his diner, but he can only go back... Every time he goes back... He's got to go in a certain period of time, so he can't just keep fixing everything. He's got to start over every time he goes back. So he figures out that the one thing that would fix all the world's problems is saving Kennedy, because Kennedy would have saved MLK and Bobby. So finally, Franco gets back and saves Kennedy, and it ruins the country. Like, we lose to the Russians. So then he goes back and fixes it so Kennedy gets killed, so that everything's like it was way worse with Kennedy living.

Chris So what we do know, I don't even know where we're going with this conversation, but it's really interesting. I mean, what you do know is that within a democracy, because there is mechanisms for people to participate, When there is a moment of crisis, you do get a lot of people standing up and kind of saying, okay, yeah, I'm going to take part in this. You've got a lot of leadership in American society today, and I would say also in British society around this Brexit issue. Here, I think not in the political class necessarily, not in the political leadership, but within society. A movement that's called the People's Referendum. And it's basically outside of the political parties, but people who are organizing the campaign to say, we want to have a second referendum, for example. The original Brexit referendum was largely a movement driven by the political fringe and a populist movement. So I suppose within the reactions that we're seeing today... How many people are going to run for the Democratic nominee against Trump? Oh, gosh.

Does the Constitution mandate a limit? And why are they running? Because they feel like, oh, I'm seized by the issues facing the country, and it feels important. I've got to set aside other goals, and I've got to do this. Even if I wasn't thinking of doing it yet, the urgency is such that I have to do it. And that, I think, is a logic that is inflaming a lot of people on both sides of these issues. And so maybe the renewal is kind of built in there. So that's the optimistic argument. And then I guess this book, The Mortal Republic, would argue that, well, sorry, optimists.

Scott Well, he would say that the decline of the Roman Republic was not inevitable. He thinks it's a series of decisions.

Chris But survival is not inevitable either.

Scott Right, right. It's a wink and a nod here, a compromise, a sort of acceptance of this petty corruption this year that eventually undoes the thing. So I think about something you said that I want to reaffirm your whole thing about social media. Let's let the thing burn to see where the holes are.

Chris Let it run amok.

Scott Yeah. And I think that's right, actually. And I think that if we're committed to... The democratic republic that has democratic practices, if we're committed to that, it's not just a means to an end but an end in itself, then we should trust it's adaptable and that we can rise to these crises if we eat our family dinners together, if we stay connected through the culture of the thing that's not just a means to an end but an end in itself, but it becomes a means to an end. Then, inevitably, it'll be dispatched.

Chris Because it's just inefficient. Right, exactly. It's such a roundabout way of getting to the end.

Scott Yeah, yeah.

Chris If I can see the end, let's just, you know, cut through the, yeah.

Scott I don't have the perspective that it's worth it being an end. Again, this is Ed Watts' point. Publics are adaptable. It takes time, oftentimes, especially when there are things like with technology. You've wrote this in The Age of Discovery. There's just so many things that are so new in degree and kind that it'll take a while to adapt. But it's adaptable. I mean, human beings are really good at evolving and changing, and we could, if we're not chronically anxious. It's the chronically anxious moments that lead to the autocracy and the sort of, just get any means to the end.

Chris But if we can sort of stick together... And I guess, I mean, and important recognizing that chronic anxiety maybe is a psychological state, but it's not just a subjective thing. No, no, it's physiological. And there are all of these objective sort of conditions of our lives that make it easier or harder to navigate anxious moments. Like, you know, think about the 800,000 sort of federal workers who don't have a paycheck. And it's an incredibly... This is a sort of anxiety-inducing context to begin with. I have a job, but it doesn't pay anything. And so what kind of choices are you grappling with at every moment except when you somehow distract yourself from thinking about it? Do I have to quit my unpaying job to get another job? And then all of the things that I lose because this is sort of a short-term versus a long-term thing.

Scott And that's one thing because you could see how the paycheck comes back. But when you think about people who have – where all the economic opportunities like migrating to the coast here in urban areas and you have people – and think about this. When driverless cars are really honed, when the technology is great, and they have driverless 18-wheelers.

Chris I talk about exactly that point in some of my keynotes. I'd have to look up his name. We'll throw it in the show notes. There's a great series of researches by a Harvard economist on the labor market with this. He looks at total labor market share of jobs, and he's got this wonderful quadrant of kind of We'll see you next time. The kids in school and provided healthcare for the family and your home and you had the attainment of kind of the American dream with the big white fence and stuff like that. And those are the jobs that are being hollowed out right now by automation. So what is the rung to middle-class livelihood in the future? It's a really difficult question.

Scott Eric Yang, man. Eric Yang is this guy running for president. He's an entrepreneur, Asian-American guy, running for the Democratic nominee. I mean, he's likely not going to win. What? I had never even heard of him. Yeah, he's not going to win. But Google him. His interviews are amazing. But he's the only one talking about this stuff. He's the only one talking. He's talking about basic income. He's talking about all these interesting ideas. Because he's thinking, like, not just the next election cycle. He's thinking the whole century and what inevitably is going to happen. How do we... Sorry, you need to tune into this podcast, people, because we're trying. We're trying.

Chris No, we are. Well, I mean, we started to grapple with some of these issues at Basecamp Toronto in November, and it's going to be, I mean, part of the intellectual work we're doing in bringing people like Eric, we'll have to get him to come to the Basecamp in San Francisco or something. Thank you very much. When Nancy Pelosi disinvites Trump from the State of the Union, and then his reply was to yank away her military jet so she can't go to Afghanistan, that's when my hand just falls to my head.

Scott This ain't Roosevelt and Churchill here.

Chris Exactly. These are taxpayer-paid positions. These people who are like, okay, we've got to have a meeting and figure out what petty thing we can do. In retaliation for this. And that's where the focus is. When you sit in the control room, you know, the machinery of government with all the biggest levers of your society in your hands, and instead of working on these problems, like automation, like climate change, like demographic transformation, like all of these things, this is what we're doing.

Scott Hey, let me just say, let me just say, here's a great lesson learned from this. Pro tip. If you elect a reality TV star as president, don't be surprised if the government looks like a reality show.

Chris Well, but hey, the ratings are awesome. It's not boring. It's not boring.

Scott But it's, yeah, sometimes I want a little more boring government these days.

Chris I remember, I remember like, you know, roll back to the Obama years. No drama, Obama. Like, you would have, like, I remember when, like, he appeared on whatever that guy was, like, Between Two Ferns.

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Like, and you get so much criticism for, oh, that's so unpresidential. Or, like, appearing on, like, he would appear on, like, late-night talk shows. Yeah, yeah. Like, occasionally, right? Like, oh, that is so unpresidential.

Scott None of those people on Fox News say that anymore about Trump. No, nope, nope, nope.

Chris And, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a big, big difference. I mean, and probably, you know, the next president of the United States is going to maintain at least some of that transparency.

Scott Yeah, like every Democratic nominee is announcing on Colbert.

Chris In the United States, I think, is undergoing just a radical transformation through the Trump presidency. And that is, I think, a really important point of distinction from a lot of the rest of the democratic world. I mean, you see, you know, the Trudeaus and the Mays and Macron maybe more like, you know, being a little more social media savvy, but not legislating through social media.

Scott Yeah, I mean, Trump sort of fast-forwarded us. I mean, people were gradually adapting to it. I mean, Obama was looked at as incredibly savvy in his operation and stuff. But Trump has sort of put us in a time machine ahead. And again, I think the promise of that is maybe we'll get some equilibrium. People are like, okay, how much of this do we really want? We want some of this accessibility. But also, we don't want the demystification of the office to make it think, well, anybody can do it then. Because anybody can't do it.

Chris Well, so that's really interesting. Demystification. And I think, I don't know, that'll be something to see with the next president, with the next administration. Is there a conscious effort to reintroduce some mystery and majesty into the office, or will it be seen as that is now an anachronism?

Scott And also the death of, I mean, Tom Nichols, I've had him on Give and Take before, and I think he's going to come back on, but he's a kind of never-Trumper. He's written a lot, getting a lot of, he's writing a lot of stuff now, but he wrote this book called The Death of Expertise. And it kind of, I mean, I think, hopefully, that some of the pushback to some of the populism will be, oh, hey, experts aren't all bad. It's actually nice to have people that know things once in a while. The funniest thing is Ben Carson, right, says, I can't be health and human services director. I wouldn't want to do that because I never run a government agency. Well, you ran for frickin' president. That's running all the agencies. Then accepts being the housing and urban development director, which he has no experience in. At least he had medical experience. It's just amazing. It's amazing.

Chris Yeah, the point of, like, I can't. I can't imagine I can run Health and Human Services, but I think I can run the country. Exactly. I could run all the agencies, though. Yeah, there really should be some kind of... Like, it should be a pretty sober thing. And, like, it's a massive act of ego, but it should also be... One should have a clear answer for oneself. If you're going to run for highest office and you're effectively saying, I think I'm the most qualified person in the country... Thanks for watching.

Scott Part of the long primary process is the presidency is such a high-powered office, right, constitutionally. So in the past, I think generally, the long primaries in both parties weeded out people so that at least even if you didn't like George Bush or if you didn't like Bill Clinton or you didn't like Reagan or you didn't like Obama, at least they were generally presidential, like in sort of character and competency. Some more than others, but Trump has obliterated that. A character and competency. So then you're like, how did the system fail this badly?

Chris Right. And interesting. So this is, I mean, not a profound point, but just goes back to our earlier discussion about some of the similarities and differences between parliamentary and presidential democracies. And so in a parliamentary democracy, I mean, yes, the actual election season is very short, but the primary season Because it takes you 10, with rare exceptions, it takes you, like, Macron is a big exception. And without going into the weeds, you could argue there's something structurally about the French democratic system where it's possible for outsiders to very quickly form alternative parties, but... Boring, except for nerds like me, but... In the United States, it's almost, the one thing that both parties can agree on is a mechanism to stop third parties. Well, right. And there is a kind of, I think, allure to the big ego that I can have my cake and eat it too. I can build a tech behemoth, and then when I'm bored of that, maybe in my 40s or 50s, I can run for the presidency and have my cake.

Whereas in parliamentary system, you kind of have to make an early choice. You can be rich or you can be powerful, but it's kind of hard to do both unless you were born with the rich, because getting powerful is a career choice.

Scott Yeah, it's what do they say? Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans fall in line. Because there is a sense in which Republicans much more, like in history, if you run and lose in the primary, it's almost a badge of honor. When you lose in Democrats, you're kind of done, right? But there's something about that in parliamentary system. Right, you do your time. And so there's an internal process of weeding out leadership. It's less romantic, right? It is less romantic, yeah. It's not a popular polling kind of thing. It's an internal system.

Chris And you have kind of rare exceptions. Macron is maybe a rare exception. Although, okay, pause. Just to say, one thing that's very... I don't know if our listeners even care about this, but one thing that enabled Macron to become president was, you know, there was a candidate in one of the mainstream parties who, like, just before the election, this massive scandal came out and completely tanked his electability. And then so suddenly he became electable.

Scott And then you had Le Pen, right? I mean, who was kind of extreme, too. I mean, like, the options on the landscape were kind of...

Chris And Trudeau, yes, like rapid ascendancy to leadership of the Liberal Party, but would not have been possible if his father hadn't been prime minister. And hadn't been like a kind of, you know, Truomania prime minister, because he was a bachelor when he was in office and all these different things.

Scott You imagine dating when you're the prime minister.

Chris Oh, yeah.

Scott Well, that's like what Love Actually, was it Love Actually?

Chris Yeah, that's right. Did you watch it this holiday season?

Scott I didn't.

Chris I confess I did. I think we watched it on one of the flights.

Scott I've started watching The Bachelor, though, and I feel like my soul dies a little each time I watch it, but I'm fascinated in how it completely reaffirms my belief in total depravity is the human condition. It's just so awful. The Bachelor, I mean, you Americans...

Chris We'll see you next time. And then depending on their sexual orientation, there are four kind of candidates for them to choose from. Have you seen this one? And they're in these like transparent, these like translucent boxes. And what happens is, so round one, the boxes are lifted to the point where you see their pubic region.

Scott Oh my gosh.

Chris So you see like these naked men's penises, if the contestant is looking for a male partner, or you see these women vaginas. And then with the host, you kind of go around and you evaluate each of these genitalia and you decide who you want to eliminate based on that. That's round one. And then round two, it raises it sort of to the neck level.

Scott So you could get to a terrible-looking person who has scraped below the neck.

Chris Yeah. Oh, gosh, I'm going to watch this. I'm going to watch this. And then we'll put it in the show notes. I can't remember the name off the top of my head. But in the final round, then there's, like, you're down to two contestants. And or like two possible choices and they're completely naked. And then there's like a kind of Q&A interview round with the one contestant who's making these selections. And for this final round, they also take all their clothes off.

Scott Okay, you're right. The Bachelor is Puritan now. This is Victorian. Yeah, okay. This is much more intense.

Chris I guess what's interesting is that, and this is on cable television here in the UK, but it's hard. You have to give it to people. That takes balls to say, here's a concept, let's do this. But it's kind of like, to bring it full circle, the abandonment of norms within our political systems. Once you abandon the norm that, well, we can't show Like, explicit nudity on TV.

Scott There's this great part in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity where he's talking about virtues and vice, and he's talking about lust, and he says, you know, can you imagine, he's talking about strip clubs, and he says, can you imagine how strange it would be, how disordered we'd think if you'd be in a nightclub and as slowly a curtain would come up and slowly you'd see a turkey and potatoes, and you wouldn't want to eat it, just stare at it. And I'm thinking, yeah, we have entire networks now. He's trying to make a fanciful analogy about a disordered sexual desire or something. And it's like, no, now we have these whole things where people just want to watch food. It's amazing.

Chris So I think we should probably, for the sake of our listeners' ears, wrap this one up.

Scott Yeah, we've gone from the health of our democracy to how bad is television, which I'm intrigued. I'm going to watch the show. I'm going to find it and watch it.

Chris But, you know, believe it or not, so my mind, I guess, is pretty twisted. So for me, the common threads through all of this, you know, one of these key words is the word that you used, is currency, right? So what are the currencies in society that we are devaluing and revaluing? And I think that you can apply that question to, you know, what is happening on British cable television. As equally as you can apply it to what is happening in US presidential politics. And then I think that the other big, big question that we've grappled with is renewal versus collapse. And how do we know whether whatever is imminent and somehow wise in the deep architecture of society is leading us on a path of renewal versus... Leading us to some kind of collapse.

Scott Well, my friend, it's good to talk. Welcome back. Yeah, welcome back, and we'll be getting our more regular recording scheduled to our listeners, so look for another episode next week.

Chris Take it easy, Scott.