hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I am sitting here in Arlington Virginia with the great Jerusalem dempsits formerly of Vox currently at the Atlantic Red across the entire world today we're going to do something different this show is called
conversations with Tyler but this time we're actually going to have a conversation with Tyler so now we start Jerusalem welcome hi thanks for having me we agreed to go away and read and then talk about three books so let's start with Ursula Le Guin the dispossessed the other books will be
Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels and Richard V Reeves of boys and men but Ursula Le Guin where do you want to start um well I uh I think I first read this book I think I must have been early high school and um I don't know if this is what you were like when you were early high school but
um I was very angry about a lot of things like it was hard to have conversations about anything to do with politics without getting very upset or angry and that's I think what I mean a lot of my peers felt at the time and I think reading um Science Fiction it's like a way of having conversations about
politics without having to necessarily feel that and so it actually felt like a real entry point into how to start having discussions without all of that sort of you know um I not that the emotion itself was bad but that it made it hard sometimes to have productive conversations if like
you were overcome by the things you were feeling so the dispossessed is great I mean I don't know we can start I suppose with the maybe a really basic plot summary do you want to do you wanna do that or should I well let me first say I also read it uh early in high school
yeah I was 13 or 14. and it was such a different reading this time around yeah so the first time I read it I didn't really like it I quite liked Ursula Le Guin wow but this one it was somehow too at the time too communal to me too utopian and of course I read it now it
seems almost the exact opposite of that but uh do you want to start with a very brief plot summary sure so um there are there are two uh planets that are relevant they're kind of close to each other one is home to sort of an anarchist separatist uh cell that moved away from the original Planet hundreds
of years in the past um and then the original Planet is sort of supposed to be more of like a capitalist um planet that looks a lot more like Earth and our main character is is a physicist who travels between the two trying to bridge the gap so I think that's like a broad summary
uh that makes sense to me you know this was published I think in 1974 reading at this time it seemed to me to be the ultimate anti-utopian novel that in fact the collectivist society you have to live together with other people who are strangers you can't rear your own children there's very little freedom of
expression people only get to eat two meals a day the way they talk about sex is not really very romantic you might say and it seems like a horror I can't imagine the first time I read it I thought well the queen is really on the side of the communal Society
the other thing that struck me on my later reading of the book is just how anthropological it is as a mode of presentation so as you know her father was a very famous Anthropologist Alfred krober at Berkeley Le guin's mother was a well-known psychologist so it's almost not Science Fiction it's
an anthropological investigation of Two Worlds that we call science fiction because we don't know where else to put them yeah I mean it's it's definitely um I think it's referred to as an ambiguous Utopia um the point I mean I think Laguna is pretty clear that she prefers the
um the anarchist world but doesn't shy away from the problems with it which I think is usually the issue with utopian um writing um did you disagree you don't think that that's clear I don't think she prefers the communal Anarchist world really I think she has greater hope for it but
she's telling us unless you come up with something new this is what you're going to get it's quite horrible the Terran uh I think Ambassador in the work he praises the the non-communal society uh Urus as the best of all the worlds that exist uh you know Earth or Terror has
also been destroyed something that sounds a lot like climate change so the only place that works at all is the one that's a consumer Society has a lot of gender inequality uh rampant income inequality and a lot of War I think part of Le guin's message which was very 1974 maybe more true Than People realize
today is you only get a shot at the good parts of the non-communal society by tolerating this pretty high risk of war that it keeps things dynamic in some way I don't know I mean the fact that she um gives the protect the protagonist is from the the anarchist world and
um he's the one who has kind of the major scientific breakthrough that everyone is trying to get their hands on and uh you know this is the fact that he hasn't returned to his home plan at the end he doesn't actually don't know if he actually lenses and is safe there I think it's like a clearer message of
um how dis I don't know I feel like a lot of the words that she used to describe the capitalist Society is quite disdainful um not that she thinks somehow that um you know that your her original world is perfect but it's like pretty clear to me that she doesn't think it's worth it
like she doesn't think it's worth it the pain the suffering everything that's hidden there I mean even the the property owner um who becomes friends with our protagonist is pretty upset with his like life there and I mean at the same time like there's this like larger point
that she's making which is that like you shouldn't expect any society even one that claims to be utopian even one that has a lot of your shared ideals to be satisfactory at any point but um I don't know I think it's it's pretty clear that she has I mean as you said Greater Hope for for the anarchist
Planet I've used chevek the protagonist the scientist that's pretty selfish he's quite a bit like Oliver what he really wants to do is travel yeah and one theme of this novel is that there are some things you can only learn by traveling and he learns those things he wants to
learn them he leaves his family the very last sentences of the novel make it clear he comes back empty-handed for all the talk about the scientific breakthrough I think he never has anything so there's never a part of the novel where it's useful or even revealed or published and when you read
throughout how the Breakthrough is discussed it sounds like nonsense so I think there's a bit of underlying maybe satire does he have anything anyway yeah I think this is a I think chronologically this is the first of a larger um uh series of of not of works that take place in the same universe and his
breakthrough is end up being extremely important later on for our future communications um the ansible idea later on I do think it's interesting that like the thing that he takes back is that it's important to have free flow of information that that's like very very um I mean he's obviously very frustrated
by that throughout his time at the University um but again like even back on the capitalist Planet like there wasn't free flow of information going on they describe all the newspapers is just lying and making things up like at the the the pers the other profession of the
University can't even really talk about um you know he feels uncomfortable sharing that he's dissatisfied with his home planet so I think there's this current here which is just like trying to really undermine the idea that there are these ideals in the in the um capitalist
society that are actually you know it's his rival Sabal who more or less makes him leave because he can't publish the idea on the communal planet and uh they all think he's a traitor for leaving you know they throw rocks at him one of the Rocks hurts his shoulder even
he wonders when he's coming back if they'll even let him back in or put him in prison or maybe even kill him so it sounds quite fraught to me so we're hearing about that planet or Moon rather from the vantage point of people who believe in it but once you see through their descriptions to me it sounds much
worse than even the Soviet Union yeah the Soviet Union you could keep your kids right that was just understood yeah I mean I think there's a there's a comment made by someone a woman that he um chevak our protagonist meets on um and his travels where she says that it's
it's better to have the um you know the conflict outside of your head than to have the conflict within yourself and that like when you are um uh when you are forced as they are in the in his home planet to never be able to kind of openly confront like the political
problems because the assumption is just like there is no hierarchy there is no government so there's nothing to confront um which makes it actually quite difficult to confront the very things that are um causing distress and they realize that the real problems are within all of their own Collective Minds
about what our social norms or rules that are um actually concerning them and I guess it just comes down to like I don't know from my perspective yes there can be a lot of things around social norms and rules um and uh things that are allowed to be spoken about that are um that can like
stifle and reduce freedom but like nothing can be more stifling than like the state itself creating violence against other people which we see on the capitalist Planet they're having a proxy war um there's like an invasion of another country which is meant to be a like allegory to Vietnam I suppose
um but even like there's a real present threat of danger and violence with chevek has not really felt um except in a brief fight that he has early on when he's like when he's a youth on his own planet and so to me it's just like yes there are serious problems but you know
but they do shoot at the more radical cynicalists on the communal planet right and then chevec realizes oh this is what our army always was about and there's this pretense that there's no government but in fact things are centrally planned by a computer I suppose and uh a lot of it just
doesn't really seem to be as it's advertised yeah you know again I very much thought that the first time I read it and now I wonder so if you think about you know shavik when he goes to the more capitalist planet his real self comes out so I think it's saying how men and women truly are with
each other it's very hard to change that socially so there's that woman he forces himself on you could even say he rapes her it's not a completed rape but he she's saying no no no and he keeps on yeah doing it in a way that is really well passed any boundary point
so it seems to me like anti-marxist and anti-blank slate that this is what people are like and it's how you're going to channel those impulses so I don't think it's I think it's ambivalent about feminism you what's your take well that like I mean first of all what happened he he
he gets drunk on his on the planet for the first time and and then he um sexually assaults this woman that he's friends with and I mean I don't think it's about blank slate it's that he's entering a society with different incentives and different rules and that in a society that's been very clear is
very non-egalitarian where he has an entire conversation with someone where you know they're very clear about you know the the lower assumption about sexism within just weeks he's able to understand and he explains to his friend that you know women here are they're just ornaments
they're always below men and you know she pushes back on this slightly but you know at the end of the day he's being influenced by the society around him I don't think something like that would have happened on his own Planet he would have been constrained um and so I think it's like hard to say
like one of these is blank slate or not I think both of them people are like clearly products of the institutions that are like pushing behaviors um especially the thing about growing up and that more sexually egalitarian alternative that inoculated him against those pressures right it's not like oh
he grew up in the nice communal Planet he learned to treat women like human beings with individual rights and then of course he can just carry that training with him which we would expect I think from a normal human even from a not so nice Society well I I don't know
I think it's like I think that's pretty clearly the case that that the incentives and how different people are viewed in a society um matters I mean we'll talk about Gulliver Gulliver's Island pretty soon but the behaviors that people I don't know engage in are going to be extremely
contextual like if there are no laws or if there are no rules or mores around treating women as inferior then I think it's going to open up a lot of um things there but also I don't really know if we should take Chevette to be some sort of like um you know hero as you said like there
are a lot of problems with this character so it's not really clear to me that LE Guin is is like valorizing this man in in many ways um I think he looks worse and worse is the story as the story goes on yeah but if it's not it's hard because I mean obviously Lagoon is a woman and um you
know it's interesting she chose to have her protagonist be a man and usually I mean that happens all the time but all of the women are technically pretty side and supporting characters um that seem to only in at least in chevex mind be pushing his own story arc forward but at the same time they are
and even like you know um the woman who he befriend and then later assaults um she describes her own agency as being secretly being able to like push Men Behind the Scenes to do what she wants and that becomes revealed to be you know kind of a farce in the society because she's not able to stop him obviously
from assaulting her uh and that's one of those things where I think ursulin is making a pretty clear comment that like yes there are there are problems on both planets but you know here is a planet where even you know this woman who's clearly very wealthy very well connected
can't stop this stranger from doing the very bare minimum of of not hurting her so I think that like she's making a clear critique of how them or women are treated under capitalism how they're commodified and even the people who realize that commodification end up
hurting them because I mean what is the same day that he gives this whole speech about how women are treated terribly in the society that he ends up assaulting her but you know none of that happens on his own Planet even though there are harms that women are facing all the time being
separated from their children not being able to make um choices uh similarly to men around their life and well-being but you know I think there's a clear difference I'm struck by the prison scene on an artist the communal Society it's early in the book and the children he's one of them
and he's younger they're playing at prison and just how rapidly they become tyrannical investigators and violent and abusive uh so again this idea that some vision of true human nature is just right there underneath the surface there's nothing about egalitarianism
that really changes it or is it about men because they're all boys yeah man awesome of course no but I mean I wonder if that's what she's saying is that it's not about human nature maybe she's making a comment about about male nature I think she is and left hand of darkness
which I assume you know the way you get peace is by having genders that only are capable of sex a small percentage of the time and the implication is that's the one thing you have to do that will get you peace and nothing else will work yeah you know neither capitalism nor socialism nor anything in between and I
think it's this 1960s Neo Freudian like Norman Brown Direction point of view that everything's about like sex and violence and conflict and how they fit together and she's in a way anti-utopian relative to the 60s that's how I read her yeah I mean one thing I thought about while reading this book was
people don't really write utopian literature anymore do you feel like that's changed oh there's so much I I see a higher proportion of dystopias yes as Peter Thiel has argued uh but the better things get if you're going to be interesting you have to actually create a lot of Destruction and
conflict yeah I mean value of utopia Topia trying to clarify what it is that you're trying to get to it's not meant to be we think that you know this form of society will necessarily come about because of my preferred policies or changes but just you know if you can Define what Eden is
then you can approximate it you know as close as you can get and I don't know it seems kind of sad to me that people don't really do that anymore because obviously even if I obviously thinks of things have gotten better on various measures but um I don't think anyone would describe
our current world as utopia and you don't really see that kind of Engagement I think there's a lack of cultural self-confidence that would be needed to do that and in that respect our world probably or the Western world is worse what do you mean well you look at cartoons from the 1960s The Jetsons
right like they have a flying car that's where the expression comes from they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 now 280 characters on Twitter that was not a joke I mean I watched that as a kid everyone took it seriously like okay I'm gonna get my flying car I
just have to grow up a bit yeah and the idea that you could just apply reason and Technology to problems and things in America would keep on getting better was a very common view and if you wrote a novel in that direction it eventually became boring but people wouldn't laugh
I don't know so I mean is the idea then that there's like or maybe there are other cultures who are writing Utopias I don't know you were the one who reads internationally I don't know of of any really yeah I mean you know like asimov's I Robot it's not a Utopia but things work out like oh
you elect the robot president he's a pretty good leader different weird things happen yeah but you hold it all together even though at a micro scale all the laws are violated and today I consider it a kind of fictional story well the AGI is going to destroy us all
is obviously you know beyond dystopian that's the end of everything the people are like la dee da there was some Investment Bank I think they issued investment recommendations and they said oh the stock will go up this stock will go down and by the way there's a 40 chance the world will end in 10 years
and then they started talking about currencies yeah without missing a beat and our world to me seems like that yeah I mean I guess there have always been people preaching Doom even people amongst like technology technologists not just like luddites or people who are
very religious or finding themselves in Cults but um there's usually I don't know I again my the bulk of my like literary reading has been like 20th century um literature and so it's something that is very interesting when I read modern day to see that kind of a shift if you were to sum up what makes the
dispossessed to you an interesting novel I mean how would you put that um I think that you know are and the ambiguity about what I mean clearly between you and I about what laguena is trying to tell us about these different systems is actually extremely valuable I find that you know um
what was what's really good about science fiction today if you're reading like you know if you're like Ted Chang or you're reading um uh what is the children of men who wrote that book oh I know who you mean yes yeah that's a bit older isn't it as a book yes but I mean like just in you
know last couple decades um you know they're really really good at World building and being very very particular about the um you know making the world as realistic as possible and how they would get there um Le Guin doesn't like dispense dispenses with a lot of that and just tries to get you to a point
where you can actually engage with the ideas that she's working on I don't know this is I find like very valuable with science fiction that Logan writes is that you can have um I don't know it becomes very possible to actually engage with um questions of uh right and wrong in
this such a different context that she does bring Earth in the mix at the very end um so yeah I think that's what's valuable about it what about you I like how it continually subverts my expectations which a lot of Science Fiction doesn't do even if it's
conceptually strong this is societies are believable in some very real way shevik is a lead character is quite interesting and strong and ultimately unlikable in just the way you know I might want to look for and the theme of parallel worlds has interested me for a long time so it has
all those things it's well written yeah it's very much a novel of its time but in an interesting way and I partly identify with that time nostalgically so to see how people frame the issues of gender and War and capitalism back then I actually feel those Traditions have
been somewhat lost and forgotten and this book is trying to pull us back to them I think it's also very interesting to see I mean we talked about them as parallel worlds but the way that the capitalist World Views this off plan is this kind of like declining mining Outpost that like sends them what they
need and it's like almost like a mining colony is how they think about it oh sure in prison right yeah exactly so I mean it's it's it's obviously we're starting with his perspective of growing up there but even that is challenged by um laguan too at some point where you're
like oh is this even are these parallel worlds or these different countries and what's also interesting about it too is it started me thinking like you know right the travel book I guess we'll talk about Gulliver's um uh travels uh soon but you know the travel but kind of presumes a level of
like alien that is still left to be like discovered and what's wrong remarkable is that the two plan as they refer to each other as aliens all the time and there's like some differences in physicality even as well that they describe but they've only been separated for a few hundred years and they've been
in trade with one another and in communication with other the entire time and obviously there are some um real like you know uh there are some real uh you know barriers to engagement with one another but the speed with which they view each other as alien and not like human is
very interesting because if someone were to you know uh who come to me from South Africa I would not view them as like a full alien person but to me that's like I think a very um weird shift the notion that you never Escape your prisons prison being a recurring theme in the novel and no
matter how hard you try to hold away the other you never Escape it and you're always imprisoned both by yourself your own institutions and by your relation to that other I thought the novel was quite good on and ahead of its time yeah um the uh the only walls on the uh you know cap
the anarchist plan are the ones that surround the um the space travel the better the launching pad or whatever it is um and that's like something that said very early on but then you like discover throughout the book how much there are all these other sort of like quote unquote invisible walls that he's kind
of discovering and that's like made very very explicit at times sometimes maybe too explicit but um you know yeah I I don't know I think it's also just like a lesson in how much uh you know you have to have another to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself uh he's alone
for a really long time and when he's doing his studies at the beginning or at the in the middle of the book and he can't get this these like scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to and um it's when he starts interacting with other people and making rebuilding those bonds with other humans
that you do actually get these breakthroughs um so I think that's you know also another uh point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is is important we can jump around and come back of course but tell me on your first read what struck you most about Gulliver's
Travels it was very readable I did not expect that I know that I mean people talk about this like I mean I think it's been built as a children's book sometimes I don't think it's a children I read it as a kid how old were you I don't remember I would guess 10. okay very honest I
might have been an Abridged Edition I don't even know or remember anymore yeah I mean it's very readable I mean like the actual sentence level it's like not very difficult to understand what's going on which um you know it's written in 1700 that's like pretty remarkable
um but you know I guess I guess what got me is just how I I don't know I was saying this right before we started this show but I can't tell if I like satire or not after reading this because um the book is you know Gulliver uh coming across these different um people they're all Fantastical it's
kind of like fantasy in that way um and you know he's he's satirizing The Human Condition he's also satirizing you know travel novels at the time I suppose um as as you know either being full of falsehoods or being fixed on and really um trivial matters or things that are uh
just not that important or observations that are not relevant to a reader back home um but I just I I think I had trouble figuring out whether or not I find this sort of writing um that useful I find modern satires to be very funny and interesting sometimes like obviously I
like you know it was a fan of Stephen Colbert when he was doing that bit but as a long lasting tool for understanding other people um and other times I find it kind of a barrier because how are you going to understand fully the context like I can get the very obvious points that he's making about
humanity and it's like drawbacks but I think that you probably miss a ton um and you know I did some like reading of the relevant contextual history but even then it feels like would it have been more useful to have a Jonathan Swift Just straightforwardly I mean he's prevented from doing so at the time um
say his views um but then I also think it's a question of length like a modest proposal which is an essay this is very spherical essay where he proposes people just like eating babies as a solution to I guess too many um too many children um uh who are in poverty and you know
that's very clear and obvious what's going on there but I think that in a lot of this length I don't find it super long lasting I read this as a novel of ideas satirical in Parts but not to me it's not fundamentally a satire that dwindles away and every time I read it I have a
different take on it so I think on my fourth reading of it this is past that I thought well this is Atari being anti-modern and skeptical of the science of his day that's a pretty common reading it's not my reading anymore on this reading which is maybe my sixth or seventh but across
many years like I said first reading I was 10 or so I think it's actually a novel about slavery and in some ways it's Pro science so the episode where he goes to laputa and Legato he meets all the weird projects from the circle you know we would call them Venture capitalists the plot to
live forever they don't know have your brain hooked up to different devices uh the form of artificial meat you could take it as a satire on Silicon Valley today and it's ridiculous clearly it's ridiculous in Swift's eyes even though some of it has happened or will happen
the version of you know we call now chat GPT the books that write themselves but that scientific Society it's the only one where there's not slavery so when he goes to the lilliputians they enslave him when he's the little figure you know a robbed ignag they enslave him they
make him entertain them it's on and on and on and he gets tired after he begins to hate it and then the wynonyms enslaved the yahoos and at the end they tell you know Gulliver who's a stand-in for Swift perhaps well we're either going to kill you or enslave you you have to get out of here because in a in
a Planet of the Apes like fashion you could lead a Revolt of the yahoos against us and that too is based on slavery and caste and it's only the scientific Society where people are curious and wacky and nutty where there's no slavery at all and it appears the most ridiculous the
least well ordered the one most based on dreams and fantasy Swift isn't in my reading not quite endorsing that but just saying like look give this a break it's not as crazy as it seems at least these people are running off with some other set of projects and not just brutalizing each
other so that's like my seventh reading of the book but that didn't occur to me on any of the earlier readings so I'm not sure how hard to push that yeah it's hard because I mean if if a Gulliver's is standing for Swift which I'm not sure about um you know he spends very little time
there he like kind of gets out pretty quickly um he seems you know kind of he finds it kind of ridiculous he describes the Endeavors as you know kind of straightforwardly but in a way that like is very clear that he does not find it like a useful pursuit of time it's almost just like these people have
um no grounding reason um and they're just sort of doing Randomness I mean the way he describes like the books that write themselves is literally just a bunch of random words plates being moved around and stamping in different directions I mean it's not it's it's there's not even supporting
sort of thoughts behind it so I don't know I mean you're correct that that is the only one without it's like uh explicits like slavery in it but at the same time he spends so little time there relative to the other you know the first edition of Gulliver's
Travels there's a frontist piece and a picture of Gulliver it's typically interpreted as Gulliver looking a lot like Swift I don't think that means per se he's a stand-in but you're at least supposed to wonder that he is I view Gulliver it's just a super curious person every time he gets home
basically within two weeks he seems to have a nice wife as a family he's got to go off again and he's learned it's dangerous but he can't resist in that sense he's like shevik you read this you identify with him his troubles but I think if you step back and ask is he really a nice person
not so obvious no I mean he abandons his wife and children at the end he finds him disgusting right because they're not you know horse-like enough for him yeah um I don't know I think with shevik I don't I'm not sure if with um Gulliver I had a hard time deciding whether or not
he was smart or not because he would obviously be extremely like like self-possessed when he would come across a new either the giant species or the very tiny people like when he comes across and you you can say all their names really well but I feel like I can't I'm not none of us is that it's
small people um so when he comes across to small people like you know they he wakes up and he's been bound by all of them um and he's able to free one of his arms and then has this thought like you know after they shoot some arrows at him and it hurts like they're around six inches
tall each but I guess it's like a good hypothetical how many six-inch people would it take to subdue a person but you know he has like he's very he has his wits about him enough to be like I should just not present myself as a threat and then again when he comes across the other groups he's very quick
not to present himself as a threat um uh interestingly the only people that he doesn't do that with are the yahoos at the end um where uh those are the humans of the planet but he've used him as beasts and by this point I suppose we're supposed to expect that the uh the the like
Gulliver has a very low position of humanity and Swift has a very low um estimation of people but you know at the time you know he just he's he does the weirdest things like he pees on the queen's tower to to put out the fire because he's so much larger than the tower but then it becomes completely
unusable because like why would she want to live in this home that's been just urinated upon and it becomes a problem for him at the end um and he keeps again going back out there making decisions that end up with him deserted it and I'm not sure what the rates of you know being lost at CR
at this point but it just seems like 100 you know it's kind of wild with him so I don't know did you think he's supposed to be smart I think he's maybe a reflection of the human condition that he is smart insofar as he's deciding to do nothing or to exercise options or to wait like I'm in
this new Society I don't know what's going on I'm not going to try to take all the small lilliputians and crush them that would be a mistake it turns out in fact there was probably some way they could have poisoned him or done him in so all the times he just plays wait and see it eventually works out okay
whenever he has impetus he basically goes off into another misadventure yeah and almost eyes tortured enslaved whatever so I think it's a kind of Pascal's version of Pascal's commentary on mankind that the fundamental problem of The Human Condition is we just can't sit still in
a quiet room and that's what Gulliver can't do either yeah I mean so by the end I mean he is so enamored of the the horse society which he views as um so full of reason and so full of uh you know goodness and does not even have I think words for for lying because why
would you communicate to lie the whole point is to explain and and get across ideas um to one another and he's so disgusted by his own like species that he faints when he's told he has to go back he then I think he considers or he attempts suicide when he's being taken home even
though the person who's helping him is displaying all of the virtues that he's just said he loves about the horses they're they're giving him their clothes off their back either giving him money they're transporting him all the way back to England um and he gets back to his wife and she
Embraces him and he faints again because he's so disgusted by her and you know I you know I again obviously it's it's it's it's it's a satire it's extreme but even by the end he's meant to still retain this extreme disgust towards Humanity because of this experience with
the horses but like the whole society is like not good like they're enslaving a bunch of people yahoos who are probably descendant from Europeans right yeah but I take Swift to be quite critical of the winning news and there he's being satirical and he's so over the top in
his praise that you just start thinking like come on and it's a bit like have the problems in the communal society and the dispossessed are revealed more and more well the horses it turns out they have this gas system like how light or how dark a colored horse are you and today certainly in Swift's time it's
obviously you realize what he's talking about and they don't make any progress unlike the scientific societies which at least try to make progress all they're good at is poetry they're entirely conformist and I think he's just saying this is how things would
have to be for these supposed utopian Visions to be realized maybe it's a commentary on Thomas Moore and other such writers to get to a Utopia things would have to be like this truly communal and that would be horrible because the communal Society is wonderful at oppressing each other
and I think the best you can do for now Swift and even Gulliver is actually the family unit I mean is Gulliver happiest in the family unit I mean he's not but that's maybe the best you can do he's so Restless at the end of the novel we're never told does he feel a need to go off
again he did it a bunch of times with always bad results and you don't get any feeling that he's been cured of his Wanderlust right I don't know I mean I think um obviously the novel ends and we don't know if Gulliver has any more travels or anything like that um but at the same time it's I mean I
don't know if Swift is making a commentary on you know the only way for these I mean he's actually largely not that imaginative about the structures of society from place to place like there's there's always some sort of like oppressive King usually except for the you know the the final Society there's
usually there's like just very weird bizarre punishments that they're being meted out they're I mean obviously there he's kind of disadorizing just how ridiculous many of our own Customs may look like that's the you can't escape your prisons point that I think is in Le
Guin very well and in Swift very well I did not find the time with the um scientists or the universities to be as um I honestly set that aside quite quickly because it was such a small part of a book to me um and so when I look at the rest of them he's you know you have this king
that's threatening to just drop an island upon his subject if they are you know disobey you have um other bizarre articles of impeachment that are laid against him because someone in the court doesn't like him or something like that so most of it seems like kind of just a rebuke of
royalism and like quartz which of course Swift time zone I think that faction is inevitable is a striking perspective from a 2023 vantage point so the whole notion of cancel culture and that's in Swift you know there's the people who open their eggs with on the side of the big end or the little end
and they're willing to go to war with each other uh that to me is very 2023 or at least 2021 or is that just a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture since it's just the same thing we've always been doing I think it's a rebuke of the idea of Castle it's always been with us a
faction is inevitable which I take to be one of Swift's main points all the more clear when you read his directly descriptive writings like his actual policy pamphlets he's obsessed with faction it's a common theme in early 18th century writings oh Britain you know Ireland at all
full of faction and this is our fundamental problem and the other Eternal Verdi in Swift I think is war and you see that in the different travels so in his own time it's basically a war every few years the Dutch the Spanish the French something none of it to us now makes any sense and
I think one of the things Swift is showing us with these very odd societies their Wars to us make no sense and he's saying the wars of his own time from any future of vantage point won't make any more sense either and that I thought he did very effectively yeah I mean he's a pacifist in real life
um so clearly that's where he's going with this you know I was interested I was really interested I couldn't tell um whether he viewed women as better companions than men in this book or because I mean in his own life he has I I it's unknown I think whether or not
she was his uh um they were actually romantically involved but he has like a female companion that he's at least has a friendship with for a long time um and uh you know in the book I mean his the the person who treats him kindly in basically each place is like a woman you know um there's this little girl
that takes care of him when he's tiny compared to the giant people and she makes sure that his he's safely being carried around she actually like cries when he when she knows he's going to be you know taken away I mean this happens again and again um but at the same time he like
describes like women as kind of like you know grotesque and like very bizarre things happen with with him and the giant uh uh uh uh land and I don't know what did you kind of think I've read quite a few of his letters to Stella who's the woman you're talking about uh they they seem really quite
affectionate not at all misogynistic I do definitely think they had sex they use the word coffee maybe they were just drinking a lot of coffee but they use it in such artificial ways yeah I think that's their stand-in word for doing it and uh that it's he views the man as the war
makers and the troublemakers yeah I mean but he didn't love Queen Anne either right he writes that satirical pathlet that instructs you in fashion is a criticism of Queen Anne so maybe it's about incentives there too men are in the positions to make trouble yeah
and I don't know like he's obviously I mean this is a what's interesting what this is written I mean he's writing it as a like a letter to a reader he addresses the reader multiple times in it um what did you think how do you think that he views the reader oh a bit of weary resignation fear that the
reader is as trapped up in the silly factions of the time as the reader probably was but actually with some sense of hope and I read Swift as a great humanitarian he was extremely skeptical about moral progress and he thinks to evaluate all these other institutions you need to
understand the skepticism about moral progress so keep in mind he's from Ireland and the richest like quote unquote most advanced Society of his time is Britain and Britain is treating Ireland very badly he frequently refers to that as slavery he calls it slavery and he always wants to be giving the
Irish a better deal so I don't think he's entirely pessimistic but he doesn't see the progress in front of him very surface level with the reader it's interesting because he will he'll say things like obviously this will bore you but then he'll just tell it to you in extreme detail like I mean things about
like what he's eating or you know what he very bizarre anecdotes always about his bowel movements yes which he's obsessed with that in many of his works oh really what is the what is behind that psychologists have speculated it was an actual psychological syndrome but of
course we don't know I don't know I thought it was it was I couldn't tell if it was again I've not read travel novels of this time and it's clear that you know there's some sort of like form to the genre that he's um you know kind of making fun of at some points in the book where you know
he's just like you know readers of these kinds of novels he'll like he'll like say that and then he'll like juxtapose that with a dear reader like as if you're supposed to be different but then he'll provide you with the exact same things as if he doesn't actually have
that high of an opinion of you um as a reader all the talk about excrement and piss and all that it's definitely a swift thing and you see it all over yeah just how he was yeah but I mean even beyond that where he he had there's from this one passage where he goes into detail
about the types of food that he was eating and then he was like well no one's interested in that but it's you've written this as like you know this is the letters like you didn't have to include that so that kind of indicates to me this level of kind of derision for the reader that he feels like this
reader is going to be interested in these mundane details that um you know aren't actually important to the broader story or moral or message of the book um and so yeah Swift himself was abandoned by his mother in his early childhood for a while she went off to England probably to work and we don't
really know what happened to him during those years but chevek also he's upset throughout his life that he felt and indeed was partially abandoned by his parents for a lot of his early years so the sense of alienation in both cases this obsession with the question who are the we you
know for shavik is it the Both Worlds is it just my world do I really belong in the other world for Swift how much should I identify with these strange beings creatures societies that are enslaving me with whom should I identify he's alienated from his family for sure
he keeps on leaving them but where exactly does he find his people it's pretty clear that he never does and I think maybe part of it is just in both of these novels that none of these men would not be happy anywhere like in any context that that maybe that's a part of what's going on here is that
there's not a society that would make shevik happy when he's amongst the communitarians he's frustrated by um by the strictures they put upon him but also he's frustrated with his friend critiques them and he's angry at him and they get into a big fight over it and
then Gulliver everywhere he goes he has some sort of critique of one place he doesn't is a place where he's treated terribly um and it's like unsustainable for him to stay there um and you can't actually imagine him providing anything of use to that world he's literally just like an oddity that
gets you know uh pushed out every once in a while like these kind of dinner parties and part of it to me seems like you know it's I don't know to me it's like kind of an indictment of of this sort of uh like traveling in order to find yourself or find something important or true
um because you know in many ways Gulliver does not end up like more enlightened by the end of the book chevek ends up right back where he was his entire kind of goals to when he was moving their team like naive in hindsight um I think that there's like maybe slightly that's a little bit too um too
much in the in the dispossessed world because you know we know later on that his his um his connections end up being the foundation for a really important technology technology that connects um you know space uh different planets but at the same time like you know what
was the point you know but still shavek and Gulliver they're the two people who who know things that no one else knows even reading about it you can't really understand what it was like and it's raising the question you know the ancient Greeks are not knowledge is everything like how true is that really
what does it get you what does it get anyone else what does it get your spouse both come home empty-handed as I think I mentioned before and they don't neither seems happy at the end but they had to do it perhaps I think I question whether they needed to travel to get the knowledge because you
know shevik is really pushed out of his framework of viewing his own society as utopian um by a friend who has this sort of realization never travels is within that you know Community the entire time he just Witnesses his own um you know his own inability to get you
know his own research done he Witnesses a childhood friend of theirs gets sent to a insane asylum because you know he's kind of ridiculed after he does kind of a subversive musical performance or theater performance and to me you know like that knowledge was there
and I don't know I mean you're obviously a big proponent of travel but I don't think it makes people happier at the same time you don't think he makes people happy not on average okay some people it clearly makes happier uh there's a desire to do it and you're unhappy if you don't satisfy that desire
but on average people are happier at home I strongly believe this well well is it because you think they travel badly no it's in the nature of travel what do you mean where creatures of comfort whether we like to admit it or not and that's also partly a theme in Gulliver's Travels
and when you're traveling you're discovering all these new exciting things but say if I went to Eritrea I would in fact be quite uncomfortable there'd be a much higher level of background stress maybe two-thirds of the value is both the anticipation and the memories afterwards and it's still worth doing I
want to go to avatria uh but no I won't be happier when I'm there or even when you're back I will be glad that I went but that's partly investing in the memory and the experience I wonder then I mean to me I've always had this opinion that most people oh would oh hey
I think a lot of people don't travel well for what they want to do I agree and then they end up getting like you know sucked into doing things that would not actually make them happy and there are things that like in many destinations that would have possibly made them happy but that's endogenous
but sure but yeah but the other thing is more like I don't know like there's this there is I feel like a large cultural message that you're not going to understand yourself if you don't like go travel in some way and like because of the ubiquity of that message especially
in I don't know in the US in another like Western societies um especially when my friends like went to I have friends who have like gone to study in in Europe like it's very push is an idea there um you know part of me Wonders that like you actually are happier because you could at least say that you have you
fulfilled that cultural norm you don't get embarrassed by saying I don't have a passport or I've never been outside the country which you know maybe it's harder to understand yourself if you travel a lot knit in a good way perhaps right but you might rather have more questions than
answers understanding yourself is a kind of answer and if you just think I want the kind of life where I have all these open questions that bug me I would say go travel well then why do you tell everyone to travel I want them to have the kinds of lives with a lot of open questions that bug them but if they're
unhappy or don't you think that might make them bias them against the sorts of openness that you there's plenty of inertia keeping them from traveling so I don't feel like I'm misleading them the behavioral bias is not to travel so if I nudge them I I feel it's a better world
even though it's maybe not a happier world yeah well I mean I think that if you were to buy the idea that I don't know happier is like just a kind of a hard metric because you know am I happier if I'm more satisfied or more well-rounded like I'm not really sure right it kind of depends on how that
actually takes the route but you know at the same time it's just like many of the things that I've gotten from really like productive travel experiences have also been analogous to sorts of experiences when I read very very good books or like I hear a very very smart argument or
something like that and those are much like lower cost things to attain and there are like millions of those versus you know I don't know it's obviously costly I think in part we travel to read better if you've been to a lot of places there are many more things you can read and they make sense to you if you've hardly
been anywhere so much stuff like I went to Kiev in 2019 coincidence but now when I read about what's happening there it really does make more sense to me I don't pretend I figured it out at all but I would have very little idea without that trip well what do you like what particularly did you learn
just like visually understanding what city looks like well partly that but when I read say well the ukrainians have been quite fierce in defending their country I have an emotionally Vivid image that matches up with what I felt when I was there like how people talked
about what they did in 2014 and so on uh just a lot of it makes sense the geography makes sense uh it's religious importance to some of the Russians make sense many things well I feel like this is a particular way about how you travel I think many people when they travel end
up staying within very like similar social groups or like even only with Americans or the people they're traveling with and have very little interaction with um you know like people and learning about their lives in any kind of meaningful way I did hang out with an economist there so maybe I'm not
that different now you mentioned this idea of men who just can't be happy no matter what and that brings us we can Circle back to the other books as well but our final book Richard V Reeves of boys and men you should do you should do an overview of what this book is about I'm very bad at
overviews as a reader I'm so selective and focused to me the main point of this book and to be clear listeners this is not an overview but it's simply that for men a lot of elasticities are zero so there's that anecdote about the free college program in Kalamazoo Michigan a
lot more women go no more men go just zero so at least for some public policies the gender split on who responds to it is going to be immense and I vaguely knew that before but this book made that clear and Vivid to me that's a big contribution there's good evidence for that there's a lot of other
different things in the book but that's my key takeaway what's yours so the book kind of starts off with um this kind of presentation of an idea where you know people have worried in recent decades about the plight of women and now we need to also add to that the plight of
men modern economies it kind of relays a bunch of statistics around you know um College completion rates or how well people um you know male students do in um in Academia but also even in earlier in like kindergarten or throughout um uh their education and then it kind of
provides a few prescriptions um the most you know there are a couple ones that are pretty well known by this point whether it's you know paid leave for fathers or it's um uh you know hiring more male teachers um but the one that's like kind of different is red shirting the boys just
basically having a presumption of starting boys one year later than girls in um kindergarten and you know you know I find I found the book I don't know it's hard because you know saying this to you before we started this but you know most of the book is trying to
convince you that the idea is a very heterodox um idea that we should like care about men as well he addresses most of the time I mean Richard Reeves he's at he's a Brookings so a lot of his audience is obviously going to be at least Center left um liberal um and so he spends most time he's
addressing them and kind of excoriating progressives for having this large blind spot of men um and I don't know it just feels like this is actually not engaging with a lot of work that's been done to talk about um how men suffered or patriarchy I mean one of the a very very old feminist
critique of patriarchy is that men are going to be harmed just as much not just as much but um are going to be harmed um even though patriarchy is going to privilege men in many ways um it talks about the fact that men are alienated as fathers they don't get to have that caring Persona that they're a
castigated for showing emotions that these things are going to have real harsh effects on them of course feminism is primarily concerned with the plight of women um but I think that the the equivalence there is what's what's not that he's saying that those are you know that
they're the same level of harm but that the harm is of similar type feels um like incorrect right because the things that were happening with the women's movement are things where there are legal barriers or you know physical barriers barring them from accessing Academia or accessing the job market or
voting or from even being free and walking around in society and the things that he's identifying that are barring men are not they're no laws saying men can't go to college there's no like admissions actually there's like affirmative action for men like it's trying to push men into college
um because otherwise all colleges in the US and much of the West would be female dominated um more so than they are already and so part of me is saying okay if we've identified that these two things are actually quite different in kind then the question is like these responses
have to actually engage with the cultural pushes not just the like institutional pushes and he's this one line very early on which I find pretty bizarre where he says conservatives say you know men should be more like like you know the old school fathers and progressives just say you should be more
like your sisters and both of these are wrong but like you know we tell women all the time and like some of these are good lessons like you know you should try to salary negotiate men do it all the time we tell and that's like a very productive lesson that a lot of women
learn and have like transmitted amongst themselves and we tell them be more assertive don't uh in in conversation and you know don't let people interrupt you and these are all very important cultural lessons these aren't like these are norms that have been expressed and
have allowed women to do well and workplace I mean even lean in by Cheryl Sandberg is an entire book of this but with like in this book there's no question about like you know should men be given lessons as well like hey like the reason why you're doing better in school at a younger age if you're a girl
is usually because you're more willing to sit still you're able to you know sit around and do the work and um you know reading is the big place where there's a Divergence he talks about English scores a lot and there's nothing stopping men from Reading you know it's like it's like one
of those things where I feel like there's like a complete abdication of any kind of idea that there should be some cultural shifts around what you should be telling young boys to do I don't know Richard Reeves at all I'm not saying these are his views but when I read a book like this I can tell you
where my mind runs and maybe there is even some chance he can't say everything he might think the core message as I read it again not saying it's his intent but just men and women are more different than we had thought and I was already someone who thought men and women were pretty
different so if I pick up that message he's really saying men and women are pretty different more at the margin than I had thought the policy recommendations but everyone thinks of them they're sufficiently predictable and Anodyne that there's an alternative reading
where even if you think they're fine ideas you dismiss them a bit and you wonder if he's not just saying there's not actually a way to solve that problem to Circle back to the other books especially Ursula Le Guin on the capitalist Society of uras men are clearly in charge and dominant
and they're only men are scientists and it's a society based perpetually on war somewhere on the globe and the notion that men do well in Societies in relative terms when there's a lot of war and it's better to get rid of War but when you get rid of War just a lot of men won't do that well because
they're not well suited to that kind of society uh that's the alternative reading that to me is more on the table than arguing about the small do we start the many or later which I'm not opposed to I don't know but just uh maybe we're just better off shifting into a society where a lot more
men do worse and you know suck it up and take the net gain of less war I just I actually think this is incorrect for a couple reasons one is that you know he makes a comment that I think is meant to like fly under the radar very early in the book which he's only talking about
um CIS heterosexual men um and like obviously like most studies are only going to to focus on that because you don't have high enough numbers but what's interesting is that there is some research showing that these gaps disappear with gay men um and that on educational fronts
they're doing as well as women and that to me is just like I mean obviously there's like questions about you know better build heritability and uh um you know uh the genetics of it but at the same time it's like there's like this idea that like men just cannot succeed in the society is also not true
given that you know even within the United even within the world that we live in from country to Country um men are able to be less violent in certain contexts and are more balanced in other contexts or you know into tuitions matter clearly some classes of men like there's a distribution some
need some form of War others become Mark Zuckerberg obviously do incredibly well there's a kind of sublimation or re-channeling where certain male instincts get put in other directions and that these people just have incredible lives but in terms of the whole distribution
you know wherever gay men may fall in that maybe it's the case 20 25 percent of men uh in a society where there aren't that many manufacturing jobs very few active Wars that you might go fight in gang Warfare is not a thing I'm not saying that's good for men it's clearly
more destructive than just sitting at home and watching porn or you know smoking weed but nonetheless there's some cultural Vigor from the subset of men that is just Zapped and we're not getting back and uh once wondering how much do we need to write that off I I just I'm a strong believer that I
mean obviously there's always going to be outliers and but like as Reeves mentions multiple times in his book like even though on average men may experience X or Y or C traits whatever there's like remarkable overlap of the genders like there's tons of women who are quote-unquote more aggressive than
men than there are uh than men and other men or um you know so or are above the mean for or median for uh male aggressiveness or things like that and I think my question is like yes maybe there are like a tail you know tail uh risks going on but at the same time you
know incentives matter a lot like the fact that there are a lot of men um who are wealthy and white who are able to you know uh escape this like quote-unquote masculinity trap just indicates that like there's institutional things that you could do to affect large portions of the
population and I don't know I largely I found his prescriptions like for what to do at the end like pretty Anodyne but I found redshirting the boys to be like not very well like thought through in many perspectives I don't think he devotes any time to what it would look like to have a class full of 14 year old
boys and 13 year old girls or um what kind of like dynamics that would create or how that would affect women's educational outcomes so again maybe you're right and because he doesn't spend much time on that he's actually more making kind of like a larger cultural message but I don't know I
think that like we're entering a time and maybe like the through point of all these books as you mentioned is just like this question of what is base Instinct and what can be actually mediated by political or Economic Institutions um you know we're entering a time now
where people are like spending a lot of time talking about the heritability of traits and what that means and you know um I feel like to become that fatalistic about people would require a lot more action on like very low hanging fruit that we know we haven't done on policy
matters but in Gulliver's Travels of course we neutralize the destructive Tendencies of men by having them do science even if it's silly and having them build these dream worlds where you can supposedly maybe you're actually visiting them but it's at least the fantasy that you're
visiting these dead ancestors and talking with them which is also in a weird way a little bit like some of the chat GPT models and their offshoots I feel like this is a very like low opinion of men that is like being described by um but if you if you think that's what all these authors are sort of getting at
then it's and that it's kind of intractable it's I don't know do you agree with swift about the difficulty of moral progress that's difficult I agree that it's difficult I don't think that I think he's much more pessimistic about it than I am I mean given how quick the gains
have been in my own lifetime around moral progress um so you're with Stephen Pinker more or less um I don't know I mean Pinker I mean like I I I think that there have been obviously a lot of you know economic gains that have been made over you know the last century and like you know it's
very possible um to um I think that ideas are very very powerful and that in general that pers over time um it really matters if those ideas are true or can be persuasive and as a you know I'm you know a classical liberal and like I think that like it's true that there's equality
um um across people and so I think those ideas end up winning out time and again because they're just unsustainable one needs to set up societies that don't work that way um they'll be beaten by other societies that are more egalitarian um that can take advantage
of other people and so I think moral progress like goes along with kind of the economic progress I think those are the inextricably linked and so you end up beating out other other countries it may be moral progress is just feminization a view that Mill flirted with right once we give women if not
quite an equal share of influence a much greater share they're less inclined to want to fight that's a good thing maybe more risk-averse on average given the destructiveness of War that's a good thing uh but perhaps it's the same process to some extent and now with birth control
it appears permanent this higher influence of women right there's not no simple change that's going to reverse it anytime soon I don't I mean I think it's hard because fem uh like moral progress and um feminism were you know inextricably linked at a time where there was like even more kind of
like tons more gender based violence or things happening in the United States and so of course moral progress had to point in the direction towards more liberation of women in that direction the idea that it's just you know that that would be totalizing seems um incorrect I mean it really depends on
the structures that are then set up once women are Freer but you don't you can't get around sort of like biological sexism in some ways like the fact that women um you know have these I mean the cost of the wage Gap are largely explained by the cost of having children and what
happens after you have kids um you know people are having fewer and fewer children um but I also think that there's like counter-cultural reactions to that and then people I could see having more and more children responds um and so I think it really does depend on what happens with technology around
um increased freedom from that work like I mean the idea that we'd have artificial womb seems so far outside of my current technological Horizon but you know at some level like you know being pulled out of the workforce and being in many ways potentially have like your
health care disabled long term seem like things are such permanent facts about being a woman right now um if you end up having kids that you know it seems hard to get to a level of moral progress where you have kind of like equality of the genders there just by summing up across all three
books if you think like what did we actually learn by reading these thinking about them talking about them how would you put that or maybe we don't know yet um I think it's interesting to me because when I think you suggested Gulliver's Travels and I'd suggested Le Guin and then you suggested Reeves
Reeves yeah and I had not thought about these three as having very many connections before I like sat down and started reading them again um and I think one of the things that's very interesting all the time is we're having the same conversations in so many different contexts over decades over
centuries and in ways I can if you're like in a good mood can feel very unifying right you're just like wow like I'm just like every other person that's out there I'm like Jonathan Swift we're all wrestling the same questions um Le Guin um all these people Reeves um
but I think it can be very like maybe it's a knock against moral progress that like the same questions are being debated over centuries it doesn't matter the format it doesn't matter the you know the style it doesn't matter the background of the interlocutor it's just like we're just forced into this one
kind of circular Human Condition um so I think that's kind of my large I was surprised by the amount of overlap in themes honestly along those lines one of my key lessons would be everything is much more connected with other things than you think at first even now I keep on
revising that upwards as I read more things the same is true of travel uh going to a lot of different places you appreciate each one more you learn something about it by virtue of the fact that you've been to other places even if it doesn't make you happy you get this neat form of knowledge
uh travel is a form of knowledge as a key theme in leguin and Swift comes through to me all the more on these readings and I feel the lack of that a bit in Reeves I get that he's writing for which press for Brookings he works at Brookings I don't expect him to go off to some
distant country and start doing field work but that's what feels to me is missing the kind of thing that Alice Evans is doing in her writings on gender which is going everywhere trying to learn things in a pretty speculative way that is not exactly a randomized control trial but I
think she's maybe more likely to get somewhere than these smaller investigations so travel as a mode of knowing has gone up in my eyes and it's something I think we should talk about think about read about travel about all the more often I mean I think it's interesting because on
on one end like I agree there are sort of like non-tangibles that you learn from the sort of you know the speculative fiction on one hand also like the travel that we're talking about here but at the same time like if you're trying to affect things in concrete terms so I think re I mean my opinion
Reeves is I mean he wrote I think article for the Atlantic where the excerpt was just about the one policy prescription of I'm keeping boys um back one year and to me it's like you know I think it depends what your theory of changes like is your theory of change
that like sort of whatever you can do to um illuminate these like broader ideas or truths that you think you've discovered about the world and however you can make those things entertaining and accessible to as many people as possible is how you actually affect long-term change or is it sort of this
like here is a very succinct argument about how you can actually change you know a very clear policy problem that I currently have a problem with and you know obviously you want both of those things existing in a society at the same time but it I think it's a very unsettled question about which one of
those things gets you further I agree it is striking to me if I go to Singapore or New Zealand and I talk with policy people usually the first question they ask is what do other countries do if you're in America well that question might come up but in policy circles it's not usually
the first question and certainly at the Electoral level if anything it might be a negative so I'd like to see that be a bigger question I wonder sometimes if it's just about um America's so big we have two neighbors that's like bizarre most countries have like so many neighbors and are much
smaller and so the proximity to them is so much larger that you're used to kind of that spread and our states kind of function like this right like you see it's one of the most interesting things that I realize is I do a lot of reporting at the state level and at the
local level and like the amount to which one state taking an action increases the likelihood of its neighbors like engaging with that question is just remarkable to me like even if a major like if California does something that's much less impactful to New York than if New Jersey does something or if
Massachusetts does something and so similarly I think that's like the part of the problem with with uh with the US engaging with other countries I mean at the same time I've done some infrastructure reporting on the researcher Alan Levy at the American Institute like very much complains often
about how transit authorities don't pay attention to how other countries are building infrastructure much more cheaply than we are especially you know rapid rail and it's like it's a problem across sector so like the US doesn't look at anyone like if you look at like
the UK they don't look at Spain and Italy even though they have like lower Transportation infrastructure costs um because why would you look at southern Europe it's absurd you get to you know Spain and you get to southern Europe and other areas they don't look at East Asia
um they don't because as a model even though those places are often much better at building these infrastructures so it doesn't seem like a uniquely American problem it just seems like we have fewer neighbors to look at Jerusalem dempsis thank you very much thank you glad to be here