The Exchanges

Q You used to read a few important books. You called them, I think, quake books. And now you read many more books, almost disposable. Like, why the change?

A When you're young, it's quite easy to read books that will shake everything you know, and those are the quake books. So for me, you know, a quake book was reading Friedrich A. Hayek. A quake book was reading the early science fiction I read in my life. A quake book was reading John Stuart Mill's autobiography. And because you don't, your worldview is, is not as formed, books have an incredible influence over you. Uh, then as you get older, say, you know, by the time you hit 40, I don't mean that you never change your mind about things. You're changing your mind all the time. But it's very hard for something to have the impact, say, like the first time you heard Beethoven, or the first time you, you know, picked up Shakespeare. It's just not possible anymore. So you read more history books, you read more biographies, you read more for particular facts, you read for a kind of entry into cultural anthropology of different places or different industrial sectors. And what reading is, uh, changes. And books do, in a way, become more disposable. Like the books I still own, Or, you know, Homer, Shakespeare, some basic works of economics, and I'm not ever going to give up those books, but they're not necessarily the books I'm reading now. I do reread them sometimes.

AI assessment note: “as you get older... it's very hard for something to have the impact”

Q You also wrote a book called The Complacent Class, um, which kind of highlights that there's a lot of changes going on, which get a lot of attention, but our reaction to those changes, um, is sort of neglected. Can you expand on what these changes are and how our, you know, seemingly well-intentioned decisions today, um, may not have the desired effects?

A Well, the key idea behind the complacent class is that Americans have become quite risk averse. Uh, they move around the country at much lower rates. They're much more paranoid about how they raise their children. They medicate themselves at higher rates. Our economy has less churn. It's less dynamic by many different measures. Rates of productivity growth have been down outside of the tech sector. So a lot of these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational. Like, it's, it's good to be safe, right? Stress is, is, is a bad thing. But when our society collectively makes this decision, there are ways in which we're all worse off because we live in a much less dynamic country. Our rate of economic growth is slower. It's harder to afford the federal budget. Uh, we end up with a screwy politics. Those are the basic themes of the complacent class.

AI assessment note: “these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational”

Q and traffic problem. Is that something that solves itself? Because we know in the, you know, the next 20 years, there's a high probability of self-driving cars coming on the scene, and we can assume reasonably that that will alleviate some of the traffic problem, maybe not fix the roads, but Is that problem worth solving now, or what would you have people, how would you think about that differently?

A Well, I would have government price the roads during rush hour, or in some places such as Manhattan, maybe price them almost all the time. One encouraging sign is outside of Washington, Route 66 into Virginia. They're now charging tolls, and at rush hour the toll can be as high as 30 or 40 dollars. It sounds terrible, but without the toll you couldn't really use the road at all. It was just a big parking lot. So London has applied a congestion charge going into the central city. It has worked. Singapore has congestion charges for its roads. They have worked. In this country, we need to do the same thing. Self-driving cars could make the problem worse, you know, because you'll send out your car or your vehicle on all kinds of errands. Oh, go to Whole Foods and pick me up some smoked salmon. I'm hungry. And there may be fewer people on the road, but the people that are there could be in much slower traffic. And it's so hard to get new roads built. There's environmental review. There's homeowners groups. Uh, it's very, very difficult in a lot of parts of the United States.

AI assessment note: “Well, I would have government price the roads during rush hour”

Q What are your rules for reading? I mean, do you read cover to cover? Do you, how do you, after you pick up a book, what's your process like?

A Classics I read cover to cover. Uh, almost by definition of a classic. Uh, most books I don't finish. Very good books I finish. Maybe one book in 10 I'll finish. But I don't mean that as any slight to the books. You've always got to think, Well, you know, chapter seven in this book, is it better than starting a new book altogether? So much of my reading now is shaped by my reading for my own podcast series to interview guests. So I just interviewed Matt Levine of Bloomberg, and he writes on law and finance, but when he was an undergraduate, he was a classics major. So I reread quite a bit of Horace, you know, the Roman essayist and poet, to try to get into the mind of Matt Levine. So that, more than anything now, drives my reading. Reading To understand other people I'm interviewing.

AI assessment note: “Classics I read cover to cover... Most books I don't finish.”

Q advanced copies, preview copies, review copies, and chuck them in the lending library right by my house, which probably has, you know, it has more books coming out before they're actually out. People must love being around there. Um, one thing that you said a while ago was that you read fairly quickly and you said to read quickly, you should read a lot. What did you mean by that?

A I read nonfiction very quickly. I don't read fiction very quickly. Maybe I read it a little quicker than most people. Uh, the more you've read, the more you know what's coming in the books you're reading, so the easier and quicker it is to read them. So, like, if I read a book now, you know, I'm 56 years old, I started reading when I was three. If someone asks me, well, how long did it take you to read that book? The correct answer is 53 years. It doesn't matter what the book is. You're bringing to bear your last 53 years of reading on the book, and most of your reading Your understanding results from your prior investment. So that's the way to read well is, uh, you know, stick around on this earth and keep on reading. That's by far the best advice, I think. Keep at it. Stay alive.

AI assessment note: “the more you've read, the more you know what's coming in the books”

Q What don't you like about the recent ones?

A I think they're ok, but of course they're Disneyfied, both literally and figuratively. They feel less serious. There's so much repetition of themes. The idea of suspense about the story is drained away, and maybe story suspense is just hard to pull off in 2018 with social media. But, like, when I saw Empire Strikes Back, the second installment, which I guess now is called Part Five, and when Darth says, Luke, you know, I am your father, everyone watching it was shocked. This was an incredible moment. I don't think we can do that anymore. Like, what could they tell you now in installment number, you know, 19 when it comes along that really can have any kind of equivalent meaning? Like, oh, I'm, I'm the third cousin of, you know, Darth Sidious. You know, who would care?

AI assessment note: “they're Disneyfied, both literally and figuratively. They feel less serious.”

Q Do you think the nature of how we sell things will change?

A Of course, it's much harder to get everyone's attention. Most of all, people who have high incomes because there are so many demands on their time, but there's your email flow, there's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's being texted. And that's just the beginning, you know, virtual reality may be coming. Television is much better than ever before, so it's a far more competitive environment. A lot of media companies, of course, have lost out, so it rewards people, Who in some way are authentic, or, or dedicated, or can target a niche, and, and do something really interesting. You see this on television, like, what are the top best shows? They're not really quite mainstream products. They're the reflection of some kind of individual vision of a director or creator, like The Sopranos or The Wire, and they, they have some kind of cultural currency, but you can't just put slop out there anymore. You know, it's not 1974.

AI assessment note: “Of course, it's much harder to get everyone's attention.”

Q It's, it strikes me as odd that the pace of change, uh, perceptually at least has picked up. I mean, I don't know what it was like to live in the, the 1900 or before. Um, we've become resistant to More resistant to change despite the acceleration. Can you expand on that?

A Well, I don't think it has accelerated. So think of my grandmother who was born, you know, very early in the 20th century. Uh, most people didn't finish high school. There were no antibiotics. You know, there really weren't vaccines. People didn't have cars. Radio hadn't been invented. Uh, flying was not something people did, and you can go on and on and on with the list. Then fast forward, 50 years later, uh, when she's 50, in the 19 fifties, every one of those things is completely different, and what America looks like physically is not that different from the America we have now. So every area, everything has changed for her. Now, I'm 56 years old. If I think of my life now compared to when I was a kid, you know, age five, Uh, computers are like one huge change, but a lot of the rest, you know, I live in a house that's from 50 years ago. I cook in a quite old kitchen. It's not a problem. Uh, I don't feel I'm really missing out on anything. My car is safer and better than, you know, cars 50 years ago, but it still looks like a car. Uh, someone from back then could drive one of today's cars. Someone from today could drive a car back then without even needing any new advice or instructions. So a lot of the world in this country, change has slowed down.

AI assessment note: “Well, I don't think it has accelerated. So think of my grandmother”

Q Can we geek out on that for a second? Like, how do you see that playing out? What type of jobs are going to Um, lose out. What type of people, um, are going to gain, and what could we be doing now that would allow us to better position ourselves?

A Well, think of old-style manufacturing jobs. You work in a factory. You didn't need a college education. Sometimes you didn't even need a high school education. You had to work pretty hard and apply yourself, but those jobs built a middle class that was great for America, but that's mostly a past era. So if you think of current and future jobs, you need to work with information technology, you need to work with software. Those technologies, they change all the time, so you need to retrain yourself, say, every three to five years, and retraining yourself is very hard for a lot of people. So the skills you need are both, ah, a lot of things you were never taught in college, but had to learn on your own anyway, and then you need to stay current. So the people who have a very strong work ethic, who are very conscientious, They will do extremely well in that new setting, and people who are good at tech, the other group of people who will do well are those with wonderful people skills. So there's always room for sales, for marketing, for management, including in the distant future. Computers will not be doing that for us anytime soon. And I think in terms of practical advice for a person, you need to ask yourself, like, am I a tech person, or am I a sales, marketing, persuasion manager person? And be one or the other. If you can be both, you know, that's someone like Mark Zuckerberg,…

AI assessment note: “ask yourself, like, am I a tech person, or am I a sales”

Q What do you think will replace them, or do you think nothing will replace them?

A I wouldn't quite say nothing. I think our daily, our daily flow is replacing them. And the daily flow, again, has some pieces from newspapers There'll be a lot of local reporting on blogs or blog-like entities, and if you want to find it, it will be there. So if you uncover a scandal about some local official, the world will find out. I'm, I'm reasonably optimistic about this, but I don't see why you should bundle it all together, like the classified ads, the sports page, the local news, the international news. Like, who really wants that as their bundle? When you think about it, uh, it's, it was always crazy. And in a way, thank goodness we've moved away from it into something more efficient for the user. I don't want that bundle. And this is like five, five books bundled together unless it's like a five volume set, five different books. No, I pick and choose the books I want. News is the same way. It's only natural.

AI assessment note: “I think our daily, our daily flow is replacing them.”

Q And do you think that becomes the natural kind of seesaw of life where, uh, you know, we, we, we start to lose our positioning, which creates an urgency, which kind of revives us, and then Is this a natural or is this a, like, a different sort of cycle?

A I think it's a natural process, but that process of revival can be very volatile, very painful, very disruptive. If you look at American history as a whole, uh, we have somewhat of a nasty history. We have these decades, the eighties and nineties, where we had so many victories and triumphs and things felt so nice. Crime rates fell internationally. Communism more or less went away and we're used to those decades, but they're not our historical norm. Maybe in some ways we're going back to the America of the late 19th century. With a polarized politics, uh, screwy media, uh, you know, in some ways, higher levels of violence, and, uh, more dynamism, too. Like I said, I would personally rather live in the more complacent society, but I also realize it cannot last.

AI assessment note: “I think it's a natural process, but that process of revival can be very volatile”

Q up fighting with your spouse over a bed or something, and I, I think the context was you like the bed, 10% better, uh, and so you fight about it, and you win, and you're a bit happier, but it costs you a lot because your, your spouse is unhappier. Can you expand on how we can think about this, and how we should bring that to our own relationships?

A Well, this gets back to epistemic modesty, and not just with your spouse, your children, your friends, But you know, in fights, both people can't be right all the time. On average, maybe you're right half the time. I would say on average you're right less than half the time because there's so many fights where both sides are wrong. So trying to be right or establishing being right or proving being right is usually a mistake. Most of the time you're wrong, and it's hard to keep that in mind if you have a disagreement or fight in the workplace, but it's true. Most of the time you're wrong in this fight, and if you can carry just like 10% of that realization and internalize a bit of it emotionally, I think you can do a little bit better. No one, like, can really, truly believe that. Like, we all actually think we're right. But you can sneak a little bit of it into your consciousness.

AI assessment note: “this gets back to epistemic modesty, and not just with your spouse”

Q What do you mean, the wisdom to knowing how to defer, or when to defer?

A Well, you can Google to such a high percentage of the world's information, and again, this is pretty new. So when you know how to judge the quality of something on the internet, sometimes said, you know, the internet makes smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. So it gets back to average is over. Like which category do you want to be in? Be epistemically modest, but also be a critical reader. And just having a general knowledge of how to evaluate sources, getting back to being generalist versus specialist. If you're going to be a generalist, one of the best things to be a generalist in is evaluating the quality of sources in your Twitter feed, online, everywhere. That is so important, and it's skyrocketing in significance. Most people, they're not getting that much better at it.

AI assessment note: “Be epistemically modest, but also be a critical reader. And just having a general knowledge”

Q I think that's a pretty big victory. Do you have a mental state before you read the book as in like, this is my position, and then after a book you maybe disagree with and view how your position has changed?

A I don't know. I think I'm more blasé than that. Like, there's a pile of books on the floor, and probably my wife thinks the pile is too large, but if I put them away, I'll forget where they are, so I want the pile to be smaller, and I'm, I'm more focused on very mundane things than, like, the grand ideological struggle of our time, whatever. And, uh, you know, to focus more on the mundane things maybe is also helpful for reading the books, because you don't get too caught up in being offended, or like, oh, I've heard this person isn't, like, doesn't know this or that, and I can dismiss them. There's an intellectual move, which I call devalue and dismiss. And, uh, you know, try not to do devalue and dismiss. You learn much less. And it's always justified, right? Uh, again, unless it's Magnus Carlsen playing chess or maybe a computer program playing chess, you can always devalue and dismiss. Oh, that person, he didn't, you know, understand this event 10 years ago, you know, he or she doesn't know very much. Always possible. Don't do it.

AI assessment note: “I don't know. I think I'm more blasé than that.”