[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone this is Jeff today we're bringing you a bonus episode featuring audio from a Marcus event last week with Tyler and Katherine mangu Ward who's the editor and chief at reason it's a discussion of Tyler's book The complacent class it was a fun night you'll definitely want to listen in for the part Katherine describes as being Peak Tyler but there's plenty of other
good stuff in there too in other complacent class news thanks to all of you who rated and reviewed us on iTunes the podcast has really taken off in the last few months your ratings have been a big part of that I don't have any more free books to give away but please keep spreading the word it helps a lot so enjoy this audio from the complacent class event and we'll be back on
Wednesday with our next episode featuring Malcolm [Music] Gladwell thank you Dan and thank you very much uh to you all for coming here to be vaguely insulted by Tyler which is you know it is an honor and and you were right to to come in for that um so Tyler maybe before we get started could you talk a little bit about the series of books that you seem to be writing which uh are sort of uh well frankly which are
frequently insults to the people in this room uh or that sort of raise concerns about where we find ourselves politically socially economically that that you frequently don't hear elsewhere what you know what sent you down this road that that ends with the complacent class or maybe the middle of the road is only the complacent class I think of complacent class as part of a Trilogy
that I started with the great stagnation and the core question that's driving the work is what has gone wrong in American life so if you look at many different indicators since 1999 whether it's social indicators for lower income people real wages which for most Americans have been falling actually apart from the top few percent uh America is standing in the world in the 1990s there was such a a popular I
would say myth of progress that there would be 3% growth in productivity middle class wages would go up every year and almost every country in the world but North Korea would become more free and we've learned that's not how it works so how does it work and this piece of the installment is about how we As Americans are seeking more security and more safety and this is good for us
individually it's often rational so we don't let our kids play outside we medicate ourselves at higher rates we move across state lines less often our rates of productivity growth and Innovation even our rates of startups are down so individually it may be good for us but collectively actually it spells trouble that's like my elevator speech and by the way I'm used to interviewing people in this room your
turn the tables have turn yeah just wait I'm taking my revenge on behalf of anyone who you put in a tight spot I hope uh so one of the sort of themes in the book I would say is your cell phone your your kind of your online life versus life in the physical world and in particular your car uh and and I sort of see those two technologies as being somewhat juxtaposed in the eras that
they come from and the kind of world that they represent and so that takes us to our first poll question which is if you had to choose would you be most willing to give up your car or your cell phone and you all can vote on this question uh we'll see what you say uh via text now of course you cannot vote with your car so do your best there uh and uh while people are throwing their answers up on the board Tyler I wonder
if is that a is that fair to say that it's an either or or um you know how do we how do we even get to a place where those things seem to be in opposition if someone crashed their car through that wall right now over here I would want Julie to count that as one vote for the car I agree I I agree to your terms but the rates at which 17 or 18 year olds get driver's licenses they're down
significantly and this is a change say from the 1970s even though we're wealthier today and some of it's urbanization but I don't think that's the main reason young people live at home for longer periods of time some of their Ambitions are stifled by student debt but I think a physical space is what actually rules the world where you live who are your friends what is your commute like what's the geography and
topography of your country that's the real stuff and on top of that we've built this almost world of Illusion and information space where we move that information around at quicker and quicker speeds and it does something for us or we wouldn't do it but I think we're in denial about how much in physical space we're moving backwards we still fly planes from 1970 most commutes
have gotten longer trains have not gotten better in this country bus lines if anything have been dismantled Freer young people are wanting to drive so I think there's a point in our history in the future where physical space will reassert itself is the way I see it and will brush away the epiphenomena of all that information this is sort of in contrast to what I think of as the uh golden age of Science
Fiction Vision in which we become increasingly detached from physical space that we live in Virtual Worlds that we uh communicate virtually maybe that we live on our own planets or solar systems uh what do you think people were missing from that era why did that look like a glorious future and now it looks less glorious to you well there are different Golden Ages of Science Fiction
if you read most science fiction from say the 19th century up until maybe the 1970s it typically is under predicting how much things will change when you read science fiction since then more of often than not it's a dystopia it predicts Decay which may or may not happen and the idea that people are manipulating the physical building blocks of the universe that seems to
appear less frequently so it is in each case reflecting its time uh but early science fiction it does underestimate how much power we have over information you read azamov ey robot and even by like 2020 a computer you know it still takes up a room this big even though we can do all kinds of other neat things like have amazing robots somehow you can have a brilliant robot but the computer itself is in a
room this big that doesn't make sense I wonder if you could talk about the idea that um and maybe maybe you would say this is just an outdated idea but people who um who see smartphones tablets and and general connectivity as the the means of production essentially right you have you have people like Mark Andre who are saying you know if you put the means of production in the form of
tablets and internet access into the hands of an additional billion people say how could that not unleash uh widespread Global productivity uh creativ and human potential what is he missing or maybe as you say it in your book um are pessimists undervaluing Tech Innovations how how does that how does that not how is how is Mark andreon wrong I had a debate with Mark andreon lately and I'm not sure it's proper for
me to speak for him but as I interpreted him he has come around to the more pessimistic view that enough things have gone wrong and the gains in the speed and quality of information trans transmission now P are so relatively trivial compared to the actual problems of the world uh and there have been estimates how much are we underestimating the productivity gains from say Facebook and internet
connections keep in mind we pay for those things they are in GDP you pay for your smartphone so there is consumer surplus from Facebook I'm not sure it's higher than the consumer surplus from TV in 1972 and when you make all the adjustments for undervaluation of the internet at least 2third of the productivity crisis at least seems to still be there I wonder if you could talk a
little bit about um about robot Panic while we're while we're talking ass them off uh and the the ways in which our anxiety about the future um and maybe the ways in which our complacency manifest in the conversation about Automation and and Robotics generally or artificial intelligence if you want to lump it in there in the back room before we started we were talking about why sex
robots have not come yet and how we know this true and it was my hypothesis that if they were actually here I would hear about them so often that I wouldn't have to ask or sex robots here yet that if you have to ask you know they're not I take an intermediate position on robots and automation I think it will be a real issue I don't think it is a huge amount yet but I think it will be like the Industrial Revolution
and this is often the libertarian citation to convince people it won't be that bad like oh this has all happened before people moved out of Agriculture into all these other sectors that's true but think what a mess the Industrial Revolution was depending whose estimates you believe but arguably English real wages might not have gone up for 60 or 70 years running does that sound a tiny
bit familiar we got Marxism from the Industrial Revolution so one can call that irrational or a mistake but when there's volatility people will latch on to some non-optimal ideas so I think in a funny way because of contemporary Politics the pessimists are winning a lot of these debates whether or not they deserve to it's just harder in the metropolitan area bubbles to say nothing is wrong I mean people were saying that
as recently as October early November but now for reasons which I think are actually intellectually unfair even though I think they're right the pessimists are winning most of these debates so since you started it and I want it noted that he started it let's talk I didn't mention the name yeah it doesn't it's like you can't you it's I know you prefer he who must not be named but
uh uh let's talk Trump for a minute uh you finished this book before the election and then uh I think you told me managed to sneak in a few edits once we knew the outcome uh that's that's right and you might say that you saw Trump coming but didn't see him coming quite so fast that's also right uh what what do you think it means that that Trump is now here for your thesis particularly
that there's a kind of institutional rot in this country and I'm not identifying the rot with Trump I'm saying Trump is a symptom of the rot Trump is not the rot that's a huge mistake to make even if you're against Trump if you think he is the rot I think that you're very badly misled there's something about our current mix of polarization and the feeling almost everyone has that they've
lost control and politics becoming more of a fight over a fixed pie that will lead to declines in the quality of governance at some point with or without Trump so he is a symptom uh if your emphasis is on getting rid of the symptom I think that's not looking deep enough the fundamental problem I think is a zero some politics plus more Geographic clustering Democrats in particular being so Keen to live next to each
other uh a the culture War really flaring up over issues of what kind of America is this and who has the right to say what and that all just seems to be getting worse and you know instinctively I feel if because of the internet and everything else the productivity were actually growing at 3% a year we wouldn't have any of this and indeed we didn't in 1996 let's talk a little bit about
immigration you sort of puit a role for immigrants here uh both as engines of dynamism but possibly and you'll s me this is an unfair characterization suboptimal engines of dynamism in some ways at least from the perspective of American culture uh what do you think that what is the implication there both in terms of our current kind of national rethinking about what our immigration policy is or should be um and also
whether a dramatic decrease in Immigration would change the Dynamics for for dynamism well today I usually think of immigrants as a whole as the one group of Americans who are the least complacent they are not the complacent class there are even some findings from social psychology that suggest immigrants may be more neurotic than average uh more driven sort of stranger
having a strange time Horizon where they care about the very distant future and the lives of their children and grandchildren they care about the immediate annoyances of the present that forced them to leave where they once lived but that intermediate 20 or 30e period where they're doing incredible adjustments very painful you know starting all over losing your status markers somehow they get over that so a
very strange discount function but I think the problem is immigrants Silicon Valley and some of these super productive native born Americans have have created a new America pretty rapidly and it's other people often lower skilled who cannot assimilate into that that's the actual assimilation problem the immigrants in a sense assimilate so so so rapidly into some notion of the slightly earlier America
it's many of the rest of us who are having trouble assimilating not so much in Northern Virginia but in the country as a whole talk about Mobility for native born Americans that was a piece of this book that I I found particularly interesting was you know we're sort of having this National Obsession right now with the idea of of income mobility and whether people are moving between
classes but you tie that idea to to physical Mobility to the willingness to to sort of pick up stakes and go and you actually say um you ask readers to ask themselves if your family had been in America for a few generations and you are ambitious are you really considering moving to a region of the country with very few immigrants how about West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky probably
not and the fact that you would be so confident in your reader lack of interest in moving to Eastern Kentucky as to sass them in that way in print uh speaks a lot to the to the ethic of of of you know staying in place that that is I think increasingly dominant in America uh immigrants can't do all the moving around for us but uh why why have Americans stopped moving around just as an aside I'll first Note I been doing a
lot of media for this book maybe 30 different Outlets not picked by me you know picked by them we've reached out to everyone but with possibly one exception all of those 30 or what you would call like Coastal bubble media sources that I can write a sentence like that and they react the way you do they're not like I live in Eastern Kentucky or everyone wants to come here no one has had that response but I mean
here's what the data say moving across state is an i about 50% lower than it was during the period 1948 to 1971 and some of that is age but even age adjusted it's much lower and the main factor seems to be there's less of an economic reason to move say to Detroit or then to Houston you have more service sector jobs the notion that a dentist in Columbus Ohio picks up and moves to
Denver because that's where the teeth are it's just not that big a force and also with cheaper travel people are used to Flying and there's the internet you can figure out earlier in your life where you want to live which of course is Fairfax Virginia we all know and then you camp out there for 27 years as I've done not that I'm complacent I took that quiz you know and that's you know we're
surrendering to physical space and even within where you live the likelihood that you can stay at home and order out and get Uber to bring your food Amazon to bring your books the internet to bring your entertainment and Netflix streaming to choose which great movies you have a chance of watching and which not that is contemporary Innovation staying at home I I'm just really for it like I
just love staying at home but that's why I also took the complacency quiz and got like a embarrassing score uh so really quickly let's do our own quiz embarrassed is itself interesting right well but but I actually think that does sorry first we'll do the quiz and then I'll be embarrassed uh so uh next question in the last five years how many different states have you lived in
answer up on the board team um no I actually let's talk about that a little bit I mean the idea that you would simultaneously do all of these interviews where no one would be even remotely bothered by the idea that of course no one wants to live in Eastern Kentucky and at the same time that we should feel dimly ashamed of the idea of sitting on our sofa and having you know robots and low-wage workers bring us all
of our Goods um what's at work there there's something about how media treats books so media Outlets that might take what you would call broadly a more you know trumpy in perspective uh they do cover books but they cover different kinds of books they're probably more likely to cover you know Bill Bill Riley's biography of Jesus than say the media Outlets I've been talking to is that a
real book real book is one of the best selling books of the last few years You Know How It Ends [Laughter] right but I think you know the big sort in this country has gone far enough where if you're living in Washington New York on the one radio show I you know the comparison was Arlington and Arbor Michigan or Santa Monica they're all more alike than they used to be and I've gone to all of those over a course of
years multiple times and you know part a big part of this book it's actually me making fun of me so I always put the little Stussy and digs into books so the dedication of this book to the rebel in all of us now maybe a little bit I'm making fun of you but mostly I'm making fun of me the rebel writing a book is not that rebellious a thing to do not for St Martin's press
right you know I could have thrown a Molotov cocktail with the complacent class written on the cloth or something uh but there's a way in which you know we try to come to terms with how our own lives have evolved and partly this book is that this is a very complacent response to complacency and in the writing of the book I'm making fun of myself non-com responses to complacency though end in fires I mean I
you know I think I I guess what I'm asking is uh are you not also complacent about the virtues of complacency and of course you address that in the book but you know there's a sort of toward the end when you say well you know there's a lack of a kind of strong positive vision for the future that's driving us or a loss of faith in the American experiment or or whatever uh you know as I was
reading those passages I immediately just have like wild marxists in my mind and uh or at least like crazy hippies and so I guess what I'm wondering is you know you're joking about your own complacent response to complacency but isn't that the best response but of course you would say that wouldn't you you know it depends how I did on that quiz and I'm not going to tell you uh it really would be best if we
could maintain complacency but I think we've reached the point where a lot of people people are now realizing that's not possible so there are different attempts to explain the decline the decline and the quality of our governance like oh it was all an accident or you know something intervened with the election but I think those are missing the point it got as far as it did in any case and it's best
understood as an endogenous response to the way things used to be not working anymore so I would love if we could just keep on being complacent I sometimes say you know Medi mediocrity is what's underrated it's pretty excellent but in so far as we end up losing control I think it will actually have been the complacency of say the two previous decades that will largely be at
fault not that I want to get rid of it that was like Oscar wild as an economist right there the mediocrity underrated line uh let's talk about some of your scenarios for a more Dynamic and chaotic future because I thought you know you gave us this kind of list of bullet points at the end of the book and I was like Tyler here's book four like keep going um in particular uh I think the the idea that um African immigrants
might be a source of dynamism uh was something that I would I just wanted to hear you talk more about African immigrants who come to the United States they have higher rates of finishing College than native born Americans uh and they've done fairly well and I think if you look at Africa as a very populous continent and a continent also that is generally not that well-run serious governance
problems whether countries wanted or not immigration from Africa will be one of the biggest issues I wouldn't even say of the future I'd say especially in Europe it's a huge issue right now so there's a way we can do it where it will work well uh and it's my hope we do that and I think African and also Chinese in migration already have had significant impacts on this country but I think
those are big stories looking forward uh before I came in here Brian Kaplan slipped me a 20 to ask you about how people should have more children uh and whether and whether that how that might come about well they should we don't really know what it's like to have many decades of a of an advanced Society of wealth with a shrinking aging population what we see from Japan which
I think is working fairly well for Japan which is one of the most highly ordered societies but I don't think it's encouraging I think Japan is cooperative and orderly enough and has managed its expectations very well there's still a high quality of life there I don't feel this country could manage the same kind of transition to just ongoing shrinkage so this is one case where we already know the technology for solving
the problem right we just have to do it and I don't mean with the robots so we need we need to tax the sex robots and in Hidden non-transparent ways increase uh birth subsidies I would say I mean that's what I would favor because I think the alternative is a political economy that a country whose founding story is growth will not be able to handle the other one in here which uh I you
know I I think could be a controversial part of this book was your you're pointing to the widespread anti-depressant use as a a contributing factor to our complacency and on some level of course that's obvious you could imagine people might become more complacent when they take drugs that help them be happier with their situation in life uh again I guess I would I'd be interested to just hear you talk
about how the upsides don't outweigh the downsides or vice versa and of course it's individual versus society in many cases but um you posit that there could easily be a scenario in which anti-depressants fall out of favor and are replaced by alternative medical processes that address the problems of depression without tranquilizing Americans let me give you a time machine
and send you back to Vincent Van go I have a lot of things I need to fix and you have some anti-depressants to make him better what actually would you do should you do could you do I mean we really don't know maybe he would have had a much longer life and produced more wonderful paintings but I worry about the answer to that question uh and I think in general for all the talk about diversity we're
grossly undervaluing actual human diversity and actual diversity of opinion and ways in which people which are not generally they can be racial or ethnic but they don't have to be at all ways in which people are actually diverse and obliterating them somewhat and this is you know my to villy and worry and I think we've engaged in this massive social experiment of a lot more anti-depressants
uh and I think we don't know what the consequences are I'm not saying people shouldn't do it I'm not trying to offer any kind of advice or or lecture I'm just saying from is not official medical opinion talk to your doctor about from a social point of view there were a few books you know talking back to Prozac big debate at the time then we lost interest in that debate somehow we
decided we weren't going to argue anymore about being complacent how can we create a sense of urgency without creating a sense of panic do those things necessarily come together the word necessarily makes me hesitate we're not able to right now and all these radio hosts ask me what how do we get out of this what's your cure what's your fix and I have a list of things I would do which are pretty close
to what you can read about in reason magazine but I don't think that's the answer to the right question I think the right question is why have people lost interest so much in doing or even seriously debating these options and that I think is ultimately a psychological question and I don't think we we will recapture the urgency until it bites Us in the bum and we will have to to solve pressing
problems which at this moment are not really yet on our doorstep one of the things that you could of course read about every month in reason magazine is the uh the current state of the federal budget and you talk about this in the book a little bit uh in particular the fact that so much of the of our government's spending is um is pre-programmed that it's it's not something where even shifting political
winds can make much of a dent um is that would you rate that one of the more fixable or less fixable uh conditions of our complacency because I myself go back and forth on whether that's a solvable problem I don't think that's a solvable problem so as of 2020 by some estimates the parts of the budget on automatic pilot basically the parts that make our government a giant
insurance company you didn't know you live next door to wall state did you uh they'll be 80% of the budget and even in President Obama's late budgets uh disc AR spending in real terms was slated to decline uh in terms of our willingness to invest in our future there's different judgments on infrastructure when the engineers issue that report card I think they're exaggerating the decline but overall I
don't feel it's impressive in the way that a lot of our country's other achievements are and I think we've simply decided we're going to spend almost all of our money making ourselves safe and and we'll end up making ourselves much much less safe because of that decision we even borrow some of the language of previous government Ventures that were high risk to describe things that we're
now doing to make ourselves safer right we have the the cancer moonshot that's that's probably the the one that comes to mind um do you think there's a gap between the rhetoric and the reality here I mean I I do I do think we are frequently talking about a Manhattan project for this or a moonshot for that are uh you know we're we're we're sort of eager to talk about the things that we do either as governments or as as
corporations in rather Grand language um when the gains are to safety efficiency and comfort when we cut past all the rhetoric I think in the last 15 20 years we have actually had two grand projects so earlier Grand projects atomic energy interstate highways winning World War II winning the Cold War they were big deals we've had two one is tying together all human beings with cell phones and
smartphones and the internet and that's been a smashing I hesitate to say success because maybe the effects are mixed but in terms of how well we did it and how quickly it's been an incredible success and even with the regulation being so complicated we actually didn't screw it up like your cable and cell phone bills could be lower with a bit better system but still it's what we
have more or less works the other was the war in Iraq which obviously was a complete non-success uh that was a grand project the notion that you know we can in some way remake the Middle East now whether you think it had no chance or we chose you know a uncomplacent project for our complacent people whatever your take is I would say clearly a total failure very destructive so we have this one
information-based grand project I'm not sure what's next it depresses me when I hear like the Dem Democratic platform I don't mean this in any kind of partisan way but it it seems to me like if I were more of that point of you it would all sound so small to me and I think that's one reason why the other you know who lost none of it was that exciting and then the focus was on personality emails
other you know issues and so you have one candidate make America great again another talking about the successes of the 9s both of the you know two of the oldest candidates we've had in a long time if not ever and hearkening back to the past and uh you know I didn't see a lot of really forward-looking ideas when Trump talks about rebuilding America it's fixing tunnels and bridges that's
like a 1930s idea it's not even a 70s idea you don't hear about the smart grid uh it's about fixing tunnels and bridges so very depressing do we not hear about the smart grid because the American people could never figure out what the smart grid was and whether they were supposed to be for it well Mo many of them are for smart not sure they're forrid that's a good point but the ones who are for smart
maybe you could try explaining to them what the smart grid is because they're for smart right you just have to sell them on grid right so we're halfway there great uh so did you write this book about how Americans are complacent and maybe our best days are behind us because you're old and grumpy I don't think I'm grumpy I actually take this to be a pretty optimistic book it doesn't sound
optimistic because it's saying the bumps are right before us now get ready for some real pain and volatility right that's not optimistic but the book is also taking a broader perspective you look at American history as as a whole and think about like what was the quality of government actually like in our very earliest years it was terrible uh what were things like during and immediately after the Civil War or
during the presidency of Andrew Jackson or during the Great Depression or Richard M Nixon or the riots and violence of the 1960s and we got through all those things to some wonderful complacency so in a funny way I'm actually calling for a new next generation of complacency and saying it's going to be good and telling people to hold on don't let the bumps freak you out out like we've been
through this before we've seen this movie and if either you're relatively young or maybe you came to this country as an immigrant and all you've seen were the 80s and 90s and parts of the aies maybe short of the crisis what's going on now will feel so strange and out of character to you like where's the America I knew and loved but I think that's completely wrong this is America
the things you don't like about today the bumps were about to hit that's much more typical the 80s and 90s are these weird outlier decades so I'm actually uh a confirmed Optimist but in a strange perverse way yeah I like I like it that you want to you want to Corner the market on optimism and pessimism simultaneously it's quite clever actually um so for people who are uh not annoying radio hosts that
want you to solve the problem but instead are just interested observers of the problem as it is happening right now uh what What story did you read in a newspaper this week that made you feel once again that your thesis was correct well there's a new book out called Jack and Henry it's about Jack Henry Abbott and uh sorry Jack and Norman Norman maor and Jack Henry Abbott Norman maor of course the famous
writer uh who is himself a violent fellow and in 1981 he arranged for the release of a violent convict named Jack Henry Abbott and a few months after Jack Henry Abbott was released uh he stabbed someone in a pizza parlor because they wouldn't let him use the men's room and if you read Jack Henry Abbott's Memoir which ended up published through the intermediation of Norman merer he was an
incredibly violent guy and showed few signs of really having reformed himself and during this time he was idolized not by a majority of Americans but by a significant cross-section of America large enough that judge could be convinced to let him out and give him a second chance now whether or not you think that was the correct decision it's really impossible to imagine this happening today so that's one newspaper
story and I read the book the other is I was reading about Brazil and pensions in Brazil are a huge chunk of GDP they're over 12% of GDP Brazil not a wealthy country but it does more to give people pensions relative to to where it stands I believe in any other country except some of the oil you know principalities and you've got to ask yourself the question Brazil being
obsessed with pensions how safe has that made Brazilians from crime from joblessness from poverty from volatility it hasn't so Brazil is a more extreme case of something we will be going through an effort to invest as much as they can in safety in a manner that is precisely counterproductive I want you all to brace yourselves for the most contrived segue that has ever happened in the history of interviews
speaking of not being able to use the bathroom in a pizza parlor let's talk about Yelp uh we have a poll question for you when you are deciding whether to go someplace new you check an app like Yelp always most of the time sometimes do you like that pizza parlor bathrooms you would probably be able to read about it no one would have to get stabbed this is why we're so complacent um um so talk about the the
impetus behind this question which is uh that we have so many tools that make it so that we are uh much more rarely negatively surprised that might be one way of saying it um they feel like a good thing it feels awesome to never get stabbed in a pizza parlor and to also go on fewer dates that are disasters uh talk to me about why I should be less enthused they are a good thing I write an online
dining guide myself that you know a few of you know but you know in the last maybe year I've actually made a vow and I've been happy with it and My Vow is in most maybe all instances when I'm looking for a place to eat in a you know a new city or a place I'm visiting that I won't use the internet I will rely on meat space alone go into a neighborhood walk around use what I know or think I know and find
somewhere and I feel I've done pretty well with that and again I'm not saying it's a better method for most people you know it probably isn't but we need to have more people doing that to replenish the stock of knowledge behind what is online there's a tendency that online knowledge it's a bit parasitic and there's more hurting there are more kind of bubbles more intellectual fads uh
more like hate waves on Twitter uh social media attacks so there's something about the virulence the co-movement the bubbliness of human opinion that seems to get worse on the internet and to reclaim some of our reality we need more people going out there in physical space turning away from that information and of being real again in a somewhat old-fashioned way it doesn't
mean you have to go out on more bad dates or if you you know if you were single that you would have to but someone has to so and someone asked to so do you think that a pizza restaurant that denies bathroom access to murderers is likely to have better or worse Pizza than the typical pizza restaurant just checking oh worse Pizza obviously but the dating Point's a very good one because we're not that far from a
future where all of your dates their quality will be measured in advance they'll be asked to supply genetic material and I know these evaluations are not currently that good but in some future those who don't Supply the inference will be negative and you will be quote unquote perfectly matched no one will have a second chance uh I think it it'll be kind of strange measured meritocratic society that few
people will actually be happy with and that's where we're headed with dating too everything about you will be measured your credit score your number of Twitter followers Google already does this somewhat I don't actually think it's better past some margin I want to get back we're already married so we we don't well well but then aren't we going to regret that we we did our marriage in
this way before we were so carefully sorted I mean you're saying people won't be happy but I I I wonder if uh I wonder if people will know they're not happy right this is this is the first thing my wife did was Google me we met online and she looked at my Vita and she saw the word libertarian and she thought it meant liberal which actually it does smart lady and she decided she would date me so I got
lucky uh but again the algorithms would never have let that happen as never would have let it happen I think there can be too much information in systems of matching is another way to put it uh do you believe in American exceptionalism absolutely I'm a strong believer in this the mix of diversity energy history vision and size and religiosity of this country gives it something special that I don't see
anywhere else in the world able to match you mentioned a couple places in the book about how smaller countries that uh are are uh parasitic on larger countries sort of dynamism uh and that the erosion of that in the United States is a cost not just to us but to the world um but you also use it as evidence for that for um the fact that models of other countries that Americans frequently
point to may not refute your various thesis um what's the country that people most often point to to tell you that you're wrong like oh but Tyler what about Finland they have a word I can never pronounce it properly but it's h y g g Huga thank you something like that it doesn't mean exactly complacency but it's closely tied to complacency now I'm not an expert on Denmark uh but I think it's more
possible Denmark could stay complacent forever than the United States states can uh they have other mechanisms of order and have an easier time adjusting to slower growth than say this country so you know the degree of complacency a society can afford it's going to vary a great deal across different physical locations I think we're going to take some questions from the audience now you
can queue up by the microphones here um I remind you to phrase your question in the form of a question this is such a smart AUD audience you guys I know you can do it I have faith in you I will give everyone a trophy if you do it short with a question mark at the end ready go hi I'm Rebecca craft I read a good bit of the book uh not having a lot of time to get to get that um taken care of not having an advanced copy anyhow
one of the one of the trends that I see you know having a kid and having to see that child uh you know you know get settled um is is the issue of um of real estate costs and you mention you know so one of the trends you mentioned is the um is the urban is the the spiraling real estate costs in urban areas being something that you know that that you know has become a disincentive to moving
there so and I don't didn't see anything in the list of the you know what's going to happen in the next 20 years um about what might happen to that that trend of um of of real estate cost um imbalan to put it nicely what what do you think's going to happen there in a later chapter in the book I say it's probably going to get worse so homeowners real estate owners they want to restrict building to
keep up the values of their properties they're a dominant winning political Coalition almost everywhere and I suspect this will spread to Atlanta eventually to parts of Texas and more and more American cities will be you know locked up in terms of what it costs to move there and try to be mobile now that does not have to be the end of the world if for every Atlanta that locks up
we have a new Chattanooga as the next Rising Phoenix we can live with that but I'm not sure that our rate of rising phoenixes uh is going to be as fast as our rate of locking up cities so far the rising phoenixes are lagging behind next um uh my name is James henred I'm a retired historian and I tried to place your book uh in a cont text that I understand and you may be familiar with the work of the two
Slingers um on cycles of American politics and what they outline is very similar to your big schema that things reach a certain point of stasis stagnation and then you have to have a breakr and they see this happening regularly so that's one part the other part I see is um a work by hair Bok uh that ended in his definition of a servile state where uh people um um accept um uh complacency and different
ranks in society because of the security that it gives you so that's where I sort of see your book in intellectual terms uh and what I I guess I want to ask you again although you may already have answered it is is there no way to get out of it in a creative way without having a a catastrophe it sounds to me as if you're in sort of a hegelian philosophical position here and I wonder
if that's one you want to affirm everything you're saying is exactly right the biggest proximate influence on this book is toille but also hagal you could even say some ideas in the ancient Greeks but I read Bell cile State when I was 14 so that's been an influence on me you know Schlesinger I view is derivative but a smart guy uh I don't have any kind of rigid cyclical view that oh it looks
like a sign function and you know 17 years after the peak this happens I just think you know we had a view where progress was not quite guaranteed but viewed us locked in in a certain way and people are now much more open to the idea that successes contain the roots of our later failures and I'm trying to to flesh out those mechanisms uh the fact that these ideas are so old actually should again make us optimistic
we've been through this before it's not a guarantee we'll get through it again but it actually suggests that just because we're not used to the pain it doesn't mean Americans and Humanity don't have the capacity to survive it but a creative way to like you know do the side step and haha fooled you this time no I don't think it's there and the response to the election of our current president
I feel has just been more polarization uh I have not been a supporter of that individual but I don't find the response of a lot of the opposition uh very heartening it seems to me to suggest we're going to keep on spiraling and it will continue to get worse for a while go ahead so my name is Tyler Fischer in so far as uh many actions of complain complacency are good for individuals but
bad for society does that mean that this complacency is a public good and if so what's the impli implication for solving that Collective action problem well complacency is a private good A bit more volatility is the public good and you know in my last answer I guess I'm predicting we're not really going to get to the optimal level and the higher volatility will be forced on us in ways we can't control at all so uh
I mean that's where I stand I was kind of naively optimistic in the 90s I didn't think everything would go the way I wanted I just thought we'd have steady growth and the kind of scenarios you read about in the Wall Street Journal oped page would more or less come true and the world would have ever Freer trade and they'd it sort of be like what the magazine The Economist hoped for but
a more libertarian version and it would be pretty stable that seems much less likely to me now thank you go ahead you talk about um racial and socioeconomic segregation growing and recent years in the book and I was wondering if you can talk about does that lead to Greater complacency and are there certain groups that benefit from this and certain ones that suffer more than others well the people
who live in the nice neighborhoods obviously they're the ones who benefit by keeping out whoever it is they want to keep out the increase in segregation as I see it is mainly driven by income so it's not about racial animous per se it's not about some of it's about education per se but mostly it's can you afford to buy in this area and that as a secondary consequence will give you in
some ways more segregation Say by race which we're seeing but I don't think it's more racism and I think it's limiting the possibilities for Mobility there's a lot of evidence from Raj chedy and others that mixed neighborhoods are better for Mobility we have many fewer mixed neighborhoods I think mixed neighborhoods are better for your politics uh we're seeing now these like two Erica is the old joke from the 70s
like oh you know Richard Nixon can't have won I didn't know anyone who voted for him who was the McGovern supporter who said that kale yeah exactly we're back to that you know so many years later so that's not good go ahead hi Josh Windham so it's the end of your life and you lived a complacent one should you regret it I think if you've lived an optimal life there's actually a lot of regret at
the end of it so the best path for a life is not regret minimization it's something else and people assume that your deathbed perspective has this unique or special vantage point but you know it's when your your faculties are at their weakest your memory of what actually happened is at its worst you're not responsible for any of it anymore the core Economist prescription like internalize the externalities like don't
ask me as I'm about to pass away that guy will say [Laughter] anything so I hope I'm full of regrets on my deathbed y'all we just reached Peak Tyler I don't even we're going to take another question but like why bother [Laughter] honestly so you mentioned ideological diversity and how immigrants are more neurotic and how that can help on average they might be right but have you
considered like other forms of neurodiversity and how people who are different in other ways like uh autistic people and how they can help with this complacency oh I have a whole book on that called age of the inore uh which I would just recommend for you to read and that's a book about how people who are neurologically diverse are actually our best Hope For Fighting complacency because some of them are in
some critical ways much less complacent and are just like powered by this incredible automatic motor and furthermore they thrive in Information Society and a way they did not in the old Styles associated with physical space so I'm very much in tune with your message uh read my other book and I will say actually I read that book and uh not to like give Credence to every joke
about Libertarians but it has influenced the way that reason magazine does HR we hire more weirdos basically and it wasn't com it wasn't like we were super normal to begin with but um but I actually think that is I mean you know it's a it's a solution that's appealing because it's something that's internal to our society already that doesn't require a clever sneaking out from under the question or a you
know giant influx of immigrants in theory the solution is already here sort of you need people who see the world differently even if it means they don't really know how to work their microwave oven go ahead hey there Mike Bley uh I have uh I think that the two most interesting areas in which complacency can manifest itself is in technology and politics so of my two questions would
you rather answer about technology or politics which would you rather talk about bundle them into one question what's that bundle them into one question oh wow oh man um this isn't going to end well oh they're two different I I'll talk about technology if that's all right then um the the question that I have is um that you know when I think about complacency as it manifests itself
in technology I'm kind of always drawn to this image regarding um the American philosopher Mike Judge and his seminal work idiocracy if you're familiar uh you know or or or also as in Wall-E just the big screen that that completely removes you from anything that you would have to do or or think and and kind of roots you to to where you are um so my question is was complacency an abject inevitability
with the The Arc that technology was always going to take whether that's as Extreme as as this you know console that that that brings you in and and gravitates everything of your life or something like um like the internet one of the the the criticisms that's going on with just Google's seeming Direction for the internet which is that that the the internet as it exists is always going to only relate to you and really
keep each of us in our own individual bubbles yes next thank you oh I don't have anybody there next on this side oh I'll ask questions I love moderator tyranny um so we actually are almost out of time but I I'll I'll throw in one last question which is um I wonder if you could talk a little bit about uh about your next book can you tell us what's coming next is it part four or are you
on to a new category of problems new category of problems there's something about trilogies threesums people find the number three very reassuring they find it reassuring in their complacency and you know my the middle book in the trilogy was called average is over so should I now write a book average is still over average is back again no the next book will be a defense of American Business against its critics
and an honest examination of what American Business is good at doing or sometimes not good at doing like when is it crooked is the financial sector too large how much is business ripping us off what an American Business is broken uh that will be my next book all right you heard it here first you probably didn't hear it here first you probably read it on Tyler's blog first oh really
this is breaking news first breaking news all right so now you're the first two have asked oh see uh you can get the current book for sale in the foyer you can also I think we're having a book signing is this true so you can get the uh the John Hancock of uh of Tyler on whatever surface you would like um thank you I wouldn't put it that way no okay on a very narrow set
of surfaces made exclusively of dead trees somewhere in between yeah uh thank you very much for coming and thank you for your excellent questions thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show