We're back in the Foxhole

again today with Robert Tracinski.

He's got a recent article on Discourse Magazine called

In Defense of Workism the Word in Quotes.

And I want to read what I call the subtitle.

The goal of public policy should be to

help people find meaningful work, not to help

them drop out of the labor force.

Rob, can you give us a broad

perspective on why you wrote that article? Okay. Yeah.

So the subtitle actually was written by the people of

Discourse, and I think it's a little more boring.

It gives that it's a public policy angle

on it, which is part of the article.

But I really want to go to the

deeper moral and psychological issues behind it.

There's been this in the last couple of years.

This term workism has popped up

and it's popped up as a pejorative.

I view it as sort of an updated version

of workaholic, but it's the idea of how terrible

it is that people are being encouraged to find

personal identity and meaning in their work lives.

And so the argument against workism, is that

it's unrealistic that most people's work is just going

to be drudgery and they're not really going to

be able to find meaning of fulfillment in it.

And it's really just a way to convince

people to slave away, to enrich the man,

to serve the corporate interests and the capitalists.

And the fascinating thing about this to me is it comes

from both the left and from the right, because from the

left, they have the old long standing anti capitalism.

I was going to say that's

primarily Marxist ideology kind of a. Yeah.

Mark had this weird thing where in the ideal society,

the famous quote is the ideal society, you'll be able

to be a literary critic before lunch and a herdsman

in the afternoon, and you sort of meander your way

through a bunch of different jobs.

Apparently specialization at the division of labor

was not something he was into.

And that you had this sort of casual approach

because your work wouldn't be tied to making money,

your livelihood would be tied to your work.

You'd be able to cash.

You just do whatever you want.

In modern parlance, in modern terminology, this

has turned into this movement that basically

says having the work is terrible.

It's all just drudgery.

And the real ideal is that you

should be able to live without working.

So I point out that there is a

push now for the universal basic income.

It's called a guaranteed minimum income.

It has different names over time because they have

to change the name because the old one falls

into distribute and they just revive the same idea.

But given a new name, it sounds fresh

and futuristic, but this is the idea.

We all get paid a certain amount of money every

month, no matter what, regardless of whether we work.

And we can all support ourselves on that.

And so in Switzerland, they were pushing this campaign.

This Ginormous poster just had a

record for the world's largest poster.

And the poster said, what would you do

if your income were taken care of?

And so it's very openly gotten to be with the UBI.

That the case used to have the sort of idea

that, well, it will liberate people to find better work,

and they still work, but they do better work.

And now it's become very openly no, the goal here

is that nobody would have to work at all, and

you'd be able to focus on things other than work.

Now, obviously, this doesn't work.

You project this for a whole society. Who is it?

Who is taking care of your income if nobody's working?

They don't think that far ahead of me. Exactly.

But the money is there. It's just there, right?

That's right. It grows on trees.

Well, I think what it really comes out

to, man,Ayn Rand picked this decades ago.

It comes down to you'll do something. Mr.

Rearden, as a seen in Atlas Shrugged,

what do you get counting on?

How do you think this is all going to work out?

And so he says, oh, well, you'll do something.

And he realizes that's it there will always be a guy

like Hank Rearden around who will do something and make all

the money and produce all the goods so that everybody else

can then spend their time on leisure activities.

But the fascinating thing to me is this

is also now coming this attack on workers.

And I've seen it also coming from the right.

And the reason is that they see work

as competition to the religious values as the

center and meaning of your life.

That's part of what there's been

this long sort of alliance between

uncomfortable alliance during the Reagan years.

The Reagan years is the high point

of this uncomfortable alliance between the religious

right and the free marketers.

And then we're also just fusionist movement where

we all work together because we're all against

the Soviet Union, we're all against communism.

We can work together.

But that has been coming apart.

And part of the way that's coming apart

is that the religious right thinks family and

faith should be the center of your life.

They should be what gives meaning

and purpose to your life.

And markets are secondary at best.

And so they've developed a more

sort of anticapitalist attitude, very much

like borrowing elements of the left.

And their idea is that they don't want anything

to compete with faith as the source of meaning

and purpose and value of people's lives.

Yeah.

So substitute worship of the state

for worship of the Church. Exactly.

The self shouldn't be subordinated to the state.

The south should be subordinated to the

Church, to the family, to tradition.

Didn't someone say a free man on his

knees doing his duty is a contradiction?

I don't remember where that quote is

from I think it was Ms.

Rand, but I don't remember, honestly. Yeah.

It doesn't ring a Bell for me.

I think I've heard it somewhere, but it

doesn't ring a Bell for Ayn Rand.

But anyway, I'm sure somebody in our audience

will look it up and let us know.

So I figured if there's anybody who's going to

make the case for work as having as actually

having meaning and value, as being a source of

personal identity and meaning in your life, it's got

to be the Objectivists, right? Yeah.

And recently, for various reasons,

I've been rereading The Fountainhead.

And of course, Howard Roark is making a lot of

appearances in my articles when I write about this stuff,

because it struck me that The Fountainhead is the place

where Ayn Rand deals with this issue of the value

and meaning of work, the centrality of work.

But she deals with it not on a political

or economic level, because more of that comes in

Atlas Shrugged.

But in The Fountainhead, she's dealing with

it on the moral and psychological level.

And The Fountainhead is all about Howard Roark

quest to do my work my way. Right.

And her original title for the

book was Second Hand Lives.

And it's about these people, like Peter Keating, who the

source of meaning of valuing their lives is other people,

the approval of other people getting the good opinion of

other people, doing what everybody else wants them to do,

being what everybody else wants them to be.

And in contrast to that, if that's not the

source of meaning, if there's a source of meaning

that's within yourself, how do you find that?

And Howard Roark finds that is my work, my way.

The actual process of coming up, of creating something, of

coming up with a new idea of building something becomes

is the central activity by which the self is expressed

by which your own vision of life is made real.

And so that's what really

she's focusing on The Fountainhead.

So I'm relying a lot on The Fountainhead and Howard

Roark because he provides such a great example of that.

Yeah, I agreed.

I was thinking earlier today, your article again, that this

phrase again, I'm pretty certain this is for Ms.

Rand thinking men can't be ruled. Yes.

And that's why they want everyone. Yeah.

Don't worry about it. Enjoy yourself.

We'll pay you something, we'll give you

something, we'll give you a pittance. Yeah.

I think that the welfare state and the universal

basic income, the big argument I've made about that

is really a plan for creating a permanent underclass,

because by taking people out of the world of

work, by giving them no independent sources supporting themselves,

no independent goals, no independent values that they're working

towards, it creates a group of people who are

basically living a dependent life with nothing to support

them except somebody else providing for them, and usually

the state's providing for them.

In this case.

And it creates basically a permanent group of people

who are used to being dependent, to having no

independent goals of their own, and then to just

being susceptible then to being told what to do

or to relying on whoever it is that's taking

care of them, to take care of them.

So, yeah, it is definitely it creates

a permanent underclass of purposeless, people who

are easily enough pushed around and a

permanent bureaucracy to take care of them. Yeah.

Again, I think since that's been in place since

1960s, in the last decade or so, again, we're

seeing with the walk away movement and things like

that, we're seeing that starting to crack, I hope.

What do you think?

One of the things that's happening I find fascinating is

that the Hispanic vote is moving to the right, and

this is a long predicted event that's finally happening.

And the main reason it's finally happening is that

the big wave of Hispanic immigration to the US

from 30 years ago or so, we had this

peak of people coming across the border from Mexico.

That big wave has sort of subsided.

And then what's happened is that what you mostly have

now, you have a lot more second generation immigrants here,

people who think their parents came over 30 years ago,

and now I've got a second generation.

And they're doing what immigrants have always done in

America, which is they rise up the ladder.

More of them complete high school.

More of them go to College.

They start businesses.

They prosper and they get better off.

And when they prosper and they get better

off, they actually become more conservative economically in

their outlook because they're running businesses.

They understand that the effect that regulations and

taxes have on their lives tax the richer.

When you regulate companies, you're not

just regulating somebody else regulating them. Right.

The other thing is that they want the American dream.

That's why they came here as immigrants.

They came here to get the American dream.

And as they start to get the American dream, they become

more susceptible to, more open to a party that wants to

pitch them on being in favor of the American dream.

Now I think the Conservatives do it very badly and

are doing it worse than they've ever done it.

But they're winning over votes.

Republicans are winning over votes because

the Democrats are basically the party

that's against the American dream.

I have a new piece up on Discourse.

Part one just went up today.

Part two is going up later.

And it's basically advice to the Democrats on I

think they need to save the Republic by becoming

a viable alternative party, giving us something that we

might actually possibly consider voting for.

And I think there's a little I'm getting

hints and nibbles and things like that.

There are some Democrats who

are interested in doing this.

I am trying to set up some interviews with a

few Democratic politicians who are trying to form a

center left or more reasonable version of the Democratic

Party, where the agenda isn't all dictated by Alexandria

OCASIOCORTEZ and the progressive left.

And so this is basically my suggestions for if

you want to put together a viable Democratic Party

agenda that would not be dictated just but not

to be a watered down version of whatever crazy

fever dream the far left came up with this

morning, because that's exactly what happens, right?

Yes, Alexandra says something and it's completely insane and she

has no idea how it's ever going to work.

But that sets the agenda.

And everybody else in the Democratic Party has to

say, well, here's a moderate watered down version.

So they have to come up

with their own independent agenda.

So I make a suggestion for that.

And one of the counter key points of that is

I said, people don't want handouts, they want prosperity.

And I talked about this issue of Hispanic voters.

They came here for the American dream.

If you had Democrats who actually embraced the American dream

and talked about the American dream, and we're in favor

of entrepreneurialism and people getting ahead and then rising up

in the world and not just touting, oh, here are

the welfare benefits we gave out.

They could actually start to win.

They could win those voters back to do a lot

better than they're doing right now, whereas they had the

most unpopular opponent that they could possibly wish for in

Donald Trump, and they narrowly won the election.

And they're going rocketing down in the

polls every day to pull themselves.

I think there's a bit of panic out there.

I think it's why you get these feelings.

It's a bit of panic out there that they

realize we had to pull ourselves out of this

funk, that the woke agenda is not winning over

the American people, that the American people only in

the last election, the American people only hated us

slightly less than the other guys I know.

Could that be the case then, for

new liberalism or Neo, the Latin word? Exactly.

Classical liberalism that you wrote a peace on? Yeah.

Before we started, you guys mentioned I've been doing a lot

of pieces at Discourse, and they've actually put me on a

kind of a regular column, a once a month column.

Now, I do other pieces in addition

to the column, but my monthly column

for them is called The Neoclassical Liberal.

So it's basically the idea of saying, let's

try to take classical, classical Liberal ideas, the

ideas of the free marketers, the Liberals in

the 19th century, since Liberals in the Henry

Hazlitt sense, let's take those ideas and then

also reach across to the, quote unquote neoliberals.

And the neoliberals are the sort of relatively market friendly,

relatively sane center left people and try to find some

way to influence them and make common cause with them

and get them to adopt a better agenda.

Because when you think about it, this is a

50 year process here in which you had basically

the far left hippie counterculture that came up and

sort of took over the Democratic Party circa 1960,

1968, 72 somewhere in there.

And ever since then, they've been sort of struggling with

the fact that, okay, we have a more sane and

moderate group of Democrats and a more sane and moderate

Democratic base, but we have these basically insane academic types

taking these ideas, preposterous ideas from academia, and then demanding

that the party has to fall in line, and that

becomes the Democratic Party party line.

And that's that conflict within the party.

It happens to every political party that Republicans have

had the same thing in various forms over the

years with the religious rights, wanting everybody to fall

in line with whatever their crazy new ideas.

So the Democrats are really struggling with that.

And I think what happened in the last ten

years or so, especially in the last ten years,

is that the far left sort of on campus

woke faction of the Democratic Party became extremely dominant.

And I think you're starting to see a

little pushback and backlash against that to say,

wait a minute, let's come up with agenda

that's not entirely dictated by these people.

So I'm not super optimistic they're going to be able

to do that, just as I'm not super optimistic about

what the Republicans are going to be able to do.

But I'm glad that some people are trying.

And part of my goal is to say, let's try to reclaim

the idea of liberalism from the left and create that idea.

There's another alternative.

And the most promising thing I see right now

is that party identification of the two major parties

is lower than it's been in a long time.

People want an alternative.

They want to be independent, and

outside of they're not signing on.

I saw a great poll the other day that something

like only 30% of voters want either Donald Trump or

Joe Biden to run for President in 2004.

So it's like, well, that makes sense.

That's a real sign of sanity there that

two thirds of the people realize, two thirds

of the public is sitting around thinking, can't

we do better than these two guys?

I know what you mean. Believe me.

I'm going to jump back.

In your case for neo classical liberalism

article, can you outline a bit what

you meant by cost disease socialism? Oh, yeah.

So cost disease socialism isn't my coinage.

It's something that came from the neoliberal side of

things, but it refers to student loans are a

great example where the government goes in.

And it's really a version of why for years have

been writing about what I call the paradox of subsidies.

This is the idea that government goes

in to subsidize something because it thinks

people really need the education.

People really need to be able to go to College.

They need higher education.

It would be good for them.

We'll come in and subsidize it, and then in the

process of subsidizing it, they end up pouring so much

money into it that they make it more expensive.

And this is the classic case of student loans, where

like two thirds of all student loan and federal money

grant money that goes into higher education, about two thirds

of it gets swallowed up by the education bureaucracy, by

the administration of the school, and ends up basically just

driving up the actual cost of tuition and making it

harder for people to afford College.

So they need more subsidies, et

cetera, in this vicious cycle.

And that's sort of what cost disease socialism is

the center left attempt to grapple with this.

The idea that the government comes in to provide you

with something and ends up just making that thing more

expensive and meaning you need more subsidies to get it.

And they're doing this with they're talking

about doing this with Daycare federal daycare

subsidy that would make Daycare more expensive

and less affordable for the average person. Right there.

The goal is to drive out private mom

and pop daycare, to have government control. Yeah.

And that's part of it is that we're going to

try to cover funding for daycare, but then we're going

to put all these new rules about who you have

to hire and how you can do it.

And so the mom and pop daycare place that

somebody might have been sending their kids to before

suddenly that you can't run that anymore.

And so you have fewer

providers and more government subsidies.

And what do you think is going

to happen to the price of this?

It's going to keep going up.

And that's what they've done with health care on there.

Obamacare is arguably I think it's a great

case of that where there's huge government subsidies.

But what that means is now nobody can afford to

do what I used to do 20 years ago as

a freelancer before all this came in, I used to

buy my own health insurance and I got better insurance

for less money that is available today. And okay, great.

There are government subsidies now, but you've made

it so that it would be utterly impossible

for anyone to afford it on their own.

Yeah, but you've got this choice of health

care plans, all administered by the government.

So it's not really a marketplace of health care.

Like I said, plans are generally worse than what

I used to have, higher deductibles and all.

I used to buy a higher deductible health

insurance because I was 20 years younger, right?

Yeah.

I was a lot less likely to use

my health insurance on a regular basis.

And it was basically there.

If I got hit by a car and I got hit by

a bus and needed $30,000 in medical expenses, I wanted to be

covered, but I didn't want to be covered for every little thing.

And so it was really easy to get

a high deductible insurance that was relatively cheap.

Well, the Obamacare insurance is really expensive,

but it's also a high deductible insurance.

So I have a bigger deductible that I used to have.

It covers less of my regular day to

day expenses, and I'm paying more for it.

And I'm thinking how only the government could

come in and help you by creating set

out to help you and create that situation.

This goes back to this issue of Work Ism Too,

which is that one of the things I came up

with in this recent article that really struck me.

I've written before a little bit about

this fantasy of this guy who wrote

a whole book called Star Trek Economics.

I think he called The Truck

and Amics or something like that.

But it's this idea of taking Star

Trek as his inspiration and he's taking

the Utopian Roddenberry version of it.

Like in the future, there'll be no money and everyone

will be well off, but nobody has to work.

The whole economic system we run as a

sort of weird utopian socialism, which is glancingly

referred to here and there in the franchise.

Well, this person takes it seriously and says, oh,

yeah, we can do this because we're going to

have such great high technology that we'll have the

replicators and we can make whatever we want.

So therefore, we're a post scarcity society and

everyone can be provided for without the need

for work or trade or commerce.

And the thing that struck me about it in this

one, though, is that in writing this article about work

ism, is I realized that if we were ever to

get to the Star Trek future that's projected in science

fiction, imagine that literally centuries of dedicated work that's going

to be required to get us anywhere close to having

Warp drive and replicators and all this amazing technology that

they show in the TV shows and in the movies.

And so there's this weird sort of techno utopianism

that imagine we're going to have socialism with all

this amazing high tech, but they don't even think

about what kind of work ethic is required to

get us anywhere close to that.

Yeah, the merciless dedication of completing a task that's

the other thing I point out is one of

the things I like about the Star Trek series,

or at least the Next Generation version of it

especially, is that everybody in there is actually there's

supposedly no money, but everyone in there is actually

really dedicated to their work.

And that's what makes it interesting.

And by some of my favorite episodes are

the ones where it's like Geordi La Forge

spends an hour solving an engineering problem. Right.

And they make it exciting

and interesting in the process.

That's basically the idea that you have to

have that attitude of work and solving problems

and new technological ideas and building the future

is exciting and meaningful and interesting.

It's a source of identity

and meaning in people's lives.

And why wouldn't it be?

Because you're talking about building the future.

You're talking about creating new things and solving

problems and basically taking on all the problems

of human life and solving them.

Of course, that's a source of meaning

and identity and value in people's lives.

How could it not be? Exactly.

Let me Echo then RoyK, obviously one

of my favorite heroes my whole life.

But the way that Ms.

Rand describes just the philosophical aspect of work

should be the central purpose of your life.

Can you expand on that a bit for the audience? Okay.

We talked about it all the show so far,

but let's keep going there, if you don't mind. Yeah.

Now, of course, one of the things

people object is what about family?

What about other aspects of your life?

And I'm living proof you can do both.

It's not an either or choice.

I've got kids that I love spending time with my kids.

It doesn't mean I don't work.

And also when you think about, you know, I love my

kids and I spend a lot of time with my kids.

They're very important to me.

But I want them to grow up

to be independent, purposeful people who are

not living the lives of Pampered Aristocrats.

I'm not working so they can live

the lives of Pampered Aristocrats who will

spend their time on meaningless trivia.

I want them to also find work

that they will find meaningful and enjoyable.

And when you think about it, work

is the substance of human life.

If you just sort of back up at the highest

level and look at what is human life all about?

Human life requires the creation.

Everything we eat, everything we have, the clothes we

wear, the houses we live in, all the tools

we use to travel or to learn.

All of those things have to be created.

They have to be produced.

And all of human history is a process of

people working hard to discover and create and build

and figure out how to produce all of these

things and produce them constantly making progress, producing more

of them, producing better things, making life easier, making

it, increasing the range of our action, increasing where

human beings can live from the tundra, crossing continents

and going over mountains and surviving in the tundra

that's all of human history has been.

That process that is the essence of human

life is you're out there in nature trying

to figure out how you can produce and

create the things that are necessary for life.

And this is a vast, open ended process, too, because

you start with the caveman and you get all the

way up to modern society with medical care and skyscrapers.

And I was going to say ocean liners that's

even out of date supersonic airplanes and all that

we have or about to have today.

And then, of course, you can project beyond that.

We talked about the Star Trek future

and then now we have this.

We can go and we can have replicators and work

drive and we can explore strange new worlds and seek

out new life and new civilizations, et cetera.

So it's this process that is the essence

of human life from the very beginning of

human life and is so open ended.

It's been the process of human life

over essentially 100,000 years, and we can

project it going into the future.

So there's so much to be done into, to be created,

and that is the central activity of human life now.

It doesn't mean there are other things that we do.

I'm a great fan of two biggest

hobbies are my kids and music.

I'm an amateur pianist.

I like to play classical music, so it's

hugely valuable and hugely important to me.

The central thing is that the activity of life

is to build and create and come up with

new ideas and make new things, and everything else

is given value and made possible by the fact

that you were doing that one central thing. Great. Yes.

And also there's a philosophical issue here too, because

we talk about the needs of human life.

There's the needs of food, clothing and shelter.

There are the immediate physical needs, sure.

But because we reach those, we provide for

those needs by means of using this incredibly

complex consciousness that we have, this conceptual consciousness,

it's incredibly complex and advanced.

The needs of that consciousness also create a whole other

set of needs, a whole other set of psychological needs

that are really basically, these are the things that you

need because you've got this really complex brain.

And this really complex brain has requirements of

its own that you have to feed, things

you need to do to feed it.

And that's why we need companionship and romantic

love, and that's why we need it's part

of the reason we need family life.

I mean, family life comes from the fact that we're

not like animals where you care for the kids for

six months and then off they go, a child reaching

the humans have this because of our big brains, we

have this immense period of growth and development that's required

18 years plus with higher education.

So because of our complex brains, it gives us

a whole set of new complex needs, requirements of

our consciousness, like art and family and love.

But these are all still tied to the fact that

we have this complex brain so we can go out

and solve problems and build things and do things.

And it's tied back to the fact that the

fundamental reason why we have this complex brain that

creates these complex psychological needs is because of the

need for productive work, the need for creating things.

Agreed.

Let me give a couple of examples of that.

I mean, today's culture you have

Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson.

They're bypassing NASA, if you will. Okay.

We'll get space shuttle up for 50,000,000,001 flight.

Elon Musk has for 50 million.

He's got three dozen Rockets going almost all the time.

Yeah.

I'm currently waiting very impatiently for Starlink.

They have the chip shortage at them.

I'm on their waiting list for the

satellite Internet from Starlink, which is good.

I'm waiting very impatiently for it because all

the other options are not so great.

Yes, I can't wait to see that

here in Connecticut or wherever I live.

Hopefully it will be nationwide soon

enough to probably be worldwide, though.

Yeah, it's there.

It's just they can't produce the dishes fast enough.

But that's a great example of the practical result of being

able to launch dozens of satellites all the time is you

could put up a bunch of these small Internet Internet satellites

that cover the whole globe and deliver high speed broadband to

everyone without having to have to have a land connection, which

Unfortunately, I'm too far out in the 6th to be able

to get at my house.

So I'm really hoping that this comes soon.

But this is the sort of thing that this

tremendous productive it's the open edgedness of this, that

there's always something new that you can create that

goes beyond what we have before.

And with this option in the future, you could work

wherever you want in a way, the gig economy.

Could you comment on that recent attack

on the freelancers and the gig economy?

But you could sit wherever you want and work for

whoever you want, but now you should be labeled in

the Union and in a certain class of work.

How has that played out?

All right, I know all about the gig

economy because I've been a freelancer in one

form or another for a very long time.

And I just was saying the other day

to someone that I think I overreacted it.

I said, I've been working on the

Internet since before there was an Internet.

I am literally as old as the Internet.

The Internet started in okay.

But what I can say is I was working on

the Internet since before there was a World Wide Web.

So the World Wide Web, the

Hypertext links and all of that.

Before that, there was AOL America Online or

there was email and things like that.

They were used in that chat

groups and things like that.

But the World Wide Web, I put on my

best Jimmy Stewart voice and say, well, why, when

I was a kid, the Internet didn't have pictures.

All we had was text.

So the modern Internet of the HTML and the

visual interfaces and all that, that was 1995.

I've been working on the Internet since before that.

So I know all about the gig economy.

And it is literally true.

I live outside of in the middle of nowhere in

central Virginia, and I'm able to do that because 30

years ago in my line of work, I would have

had to be in New York or DC.

You have just no choice.

You have to live in one of those two

cities because that's where the media companies are, and

that's where you go into the office.

And I don't go into the office.

I haven't gone into the office in 20 years.

So the Internet has actually made it possible

for people to work freelance, to work part

time or to work for a company remotely.

A tremendous amount of flexibility and freedom that

people have, which I very much appreciate.

And now there's an attack on Freelancing.

Now, this started with in California, they

did a bill called Ad Five. Right? Bill five.

And they passed this.

And it was supposed to target Uber.

And the idea of, oh, well, Uber is exploiting

its workers, and to protect those workers, we're going

to put them out of a job.

It's a typical sort of left wing thinking. Right.

And so they pass this law basically saying if anybody works

for you for in a certain capacity or for too many

hours, etc, you have to hire them as an employee.

They can't be a freelancer.

And the amazing thing is they wrote this thing to

target Uber, and they seem to have had no clue

what the effect they have on anybody else.

And suddenly there were and I knew some of

these people, there were freelance writers in California who

all their work dried up because there was this

limit that you could do like 35 pieces of

articles a year for somebody.

And if you did more than 35 articles a year, then

you had to be an employee, they had to pay you

more, and they had these benefits and all those other things.

And now 35 articles is actually a lot I

don't know that I have anybody for whom I

write more than 35 articles right now, but that's

for my articles are big, longer articles had a

whole bunch of people who are freelancers, who are

doing small articles like summaries of you work for

a court reporter publication, and you did little summaries

of court cases, little one or 200 word summaries.

And there were people doing hundreds of those a

year, and suddenly they were out of work.

Out of work because it didn't comply with AP Five.

And you had waiters think of

a typical Hollywood type of situation. Right.

The aspiring actor.

Well, what does an aspiring actor work?

What does that mean?

It means you wait and you like, and if you're

an aspiring actor, you want the flexibility of being like

working for a caterer where you can say, well, I'll

work this job, but I can't do that job because

I have to interview for a part.

I have to audition for a part.

So musicians and actors like the flexibility of being

able to work in a job like working for

a caterer, doing it freelance because it gave them

the flexibility in their schedule that they needed.

And then suddenly they found they couldn't do it because

if you were doing too many of these freelance work

for these people, you would get shut out.

And really what this was all

about was protecting the unions.

It was hurting people.

And so they did this at 85 in California.

It was a disaster.

They had to come back later and try to fix

it and put they didn't get rid of the idea.

They didn't decide this is a bad law.

We should just get rid of it.

They did what they usually do, which is, oh,

well, we'll create some exceptions for the people who

are yelling at us the most and for the

people who are freelance writers, they're sympathetic enough for

the College educated, Liberal, College educated, left wing progressive.

The freelance writers are

sympathetic enough constituency.

We'll create a car vault for them and loosen the

regulations on them, but we'll keep them for everybody else.

Well, now what they've done is they got something

called the Pro Act, and it's something like protecting

the right to organize URL that is now being

pushed through on the federal level that is going

to do all the things that AB Five did.

It's going to do it on the federal level.

And it's like they just do not learn at

all from the experience they had with 85 or

rather, maybe it's not that they didn't learn.

It's that this is what they wanted.

They wanted people to be in more control, to be

working in a more controlled way, a more regulated way,

a way that would be under the under the hand

of the government, rather than being this sort of independent

gig worker who's deciding their own hours and deciding their

own line of work and doesn't have to go through

anybody else to set it up.

And I think that's really what it is.

It's a war on the independence of

work, thinking people can't be ruled.

Let's take a nosedive here.

I've noticed this, too, and it kind of scares me.

Tucker Carlson, endorsing the

agenda of Elizabeth Warren.

You would think that those two

would be a bitter enemies.

Well, what's been happening is it's

part of a wider thing.

And Tucker Carlson is the

most prominent is very prominent.

It's a top rated show. Oh, yes.

I don't want to do a great term.

They've come up with now called nut picking.

You can always find a crazy person

out there who's saying something really insane.

And there's this tendency of reporters to say,

oh, there's some right wing, some Republican legislator

in Ohio, some backbench guy in the Ohio

state legislator says something really crazy, and that

represents the views of all Republicans and could

do it on the other side, too.

I just saw something similar to that from

the right about or left some guy.

Exactly to the backwater Democrat, or can you

believe this College Professor at podon University said

this outrageous thing, and therefore that represents everything

that the Democrats stand for. Right.

I don't want to do nut picking, but with

Tucker Carlson halfway to show on Fox, hugely influential,

and he is at the leading edge of influence

of this sort of nationalist conservative outlook.

And very much he's trying to take the

right and turn the right against free markets.

And that's why he sort of actually had this thing

a couple of years ago where he took a speech

by Elizabeth Warren and said, this sounds great.

This sounds like Trump at his best, that we're

not delivering everybody over to this corporate agenda.

Now, the anti corporate attitude on the right is coming

from the fact that a couple of big corporations like

Google and Twitter and some of the Facebook, the big

media companies are hostile or semi hostile.

They're supporting woke political ideas.

So therefore, the attitude here is if somebody's

not on board with us politically, and therefore

we should be attacking them and taking away

their rights and taking away their freedom.

So if big corporations aren't and this has been

a problem, this is not a new problem.

It's been a problem.

I think Iran Ran said to install Patterson ones like

in the 30s or 40s, we're going to have to

save capitalism from the capitalist because you had these big

corporations that were sort of cow towing and trying to

Curry favor by signing up for a big government agenda.

It's just nothing due.

It's not like this just happened. Right.

But the nationalist mindset is basically, if you aren't supporting

me politically, if you aren't supporting our side to politically

keep us in power, then therefore we will use the

power of the state to punish you.

And so they've taken that in this sort of

anti capitalist direction of we need to start punishing

corporations because they're not paying wages high enough.

You could support a family.

Actually their complaints, they're not paying wages high enough

that you can support a family on one income

because this is the traditionalist thing, right? Yes.

True.

Women belong at home, and therefore we should force companies to

pay men more so the women can stay at home.

I call the TV Land economics. Right.

They've watched too many 50s sitcoms or whatever.

Yeah, they used to TV Land used to be a cable TV

show that had all these sitcoms from the 50s and Leave It

to Beaver and Father Knows Best and that sort of thing.

And that Leave It to Beaver thing of the father

who works in some sort of vague kind of job,

who's the breadwinner who goes to work and the mom

who stays home and vacuums and pearls. Pearls.

That's right.

Juke Cleaver was very good.

She was very pretty.

This was vacuuming of pearls.

It's kind of this joke like,

oh, who would ever do that?

But you have to also realize that the vacuum

cleaner was like your new technology at the time.

I did some research for an article on that.

I looked up adoption of these various different

household appliances and Leave It to Beaver was

made just at the point where widespread adoption

is a vacuum cleaner was becoming like an

over 50% of households kind of thing.

And when you think about it,

you could vacuum and Pearl.

That was the great thing about a

vacuum cleaner is all this backbreaking work

of dusting and cleaning and sleeping.

It was a lot easier when you had a vacuum cleaner.

You didn't have to break a sweat so you

could do it in a house dress and pearls.

So vacuum incidental, it's kind of a

joke, but it's not incidental to this.

It was a result of

this incredible labor saving devices.

Now, those labor saving devices would also, shortly thereafter, make

it a lot easier for women to go back into

the workforce and to take jobs and have the double

income families, especially as the kids get older.

But it's this weird thing where the Conservatives, the traditionalists

have this thing of wanting to wind back the clock

to progress is all well and good up to this

certain point, at which point everything should stop and we

should permanently stay in that situation.

But I think it really comes from

the fact that this is this sort

of Tucker Carlson nationalist conservative thing.

What it's really being driven by is the fact

that this is the thing I keep returning to.

I think it's hugely important that

people haven't quite figured it out.

I haven't quite taken it on board is that

over the last 30 years, basically religious belief has

collapsed and America is rapidly becoming a secular nation.

Now, I don't think it's not majority secular yet,

but I think the poll came out just recently

that the number of people who are either atheists

or have no specific religious belief, that's now more

of the population than evangelical Christians, not by a

large margin yet, but still.

Yeah, 30 years ago.

I remember that when I was a kid and I

first decided I'm an atheist, it made you a freak.

You were totally an unprecedented phenomenon

in the Midwest in 1984.

It was not a widely held viewpoint,

and so it's become much more common.

We are now getting more to the point

where it's like one third of the country

is basically secular and non religious.

A third of the country is vaguely

religious, but not that into it.

And there's only a third left

who really have strong religious belief.

And that's a huge change from just a few decades ago.

And I think that's what's happening is that the

religious right types are freaking out because of that.

They realize they're losing the culture, they're losing the

dominant position they had in the culture, and they

could 30 years ago in the Reagan year.

Of course, they could say, oh, we're

the moral majority, we're the silent majority

who have these religious places.

They're under attack by these elites and universities, but

we have the majority of people behind us, and

now they're realizing they can't really say that anymore.

And I think they're in panic mode.

And so what they become fascinated with is how

can we use government and the power of government

to arrest the slide of religious belief, to shore

up religious belief by giving it government support?

And that's what's pushing a lot of the nationalists is

this idea that we tried having this alliance with you

free marketers of libertarian types, and it didn't work.

Religious belief collapsed.

So therefore, we need to now have the government coming

in and putting a thumb on the scales and supporting

our traditional views and supporting our religious views.

Right.

They're playing the victim card as well then, too. Yeah.

Well, also, I think too, they're indulging in a very

destructive fantasy, because if the problem is that the majority

is no longer shares your religious views, how do you

think that giving power to government is going to be

used to promote your religious views? Right.

Because you can't get a majority of people behind

you tearing down these limits on government and giving

the government more power over the realm of ideas.

You're really just creating more power that's going to

end up in the hands of the other side. Yes.

So it's really great that you're creating all

these new powers that can be used by

Bernie Sanders and whoever comes after him.

And Bernie is a little too old right now.

All this power that we used by President Caesio

Cortez ten years from now, I think she comes

eligible in 2004 to run for President.

Just to keep that in mind that you said 2004.

You mean 2024.

I think she actually becomes eligible

to run for President that year. Yeah.

Just in case you ever wanted to not go to

sleep, just keep that in half late one night.

Something will prevent you from going to sleep.

Just roll that thought around in your head. Yeah.

Now I've lost some altruders.

Yeah.

Maybe we could go ahead and point out a

great piece that Rob you have done here on

how do you pronounce that Australian publication?

Yes.

Could you tell background how you did that when somebody

was writing a piece on rent and then you okay.

So the great thing about this, I

just sort of broke into Quillette.

I've been occasionally sending the pitches over the years,

and I think I didn't get in contact with

the right person and didn't hear back.

And then I finally got somebody there who started

publishing some pieces by me, and I did one

late last year on a different topic.

And then not long after that, they

had a piece that came out.

And I've seen worst pieces on Iron,

but not a lot of worst pieces.

It was kind of a sloppy sort of random thoughts

about Iron Rand kind of thing that was highly inaccurate.

And I thought I said, well, I've got this

contact now, Colette, I'd like to pitch on something.

I said, you know, I could do a

rebuttal of this piece, but the piece is

not really good enough to deserve revoke.

The guy was really fascinated with the

article was about supposedly Iron Rand.

It was very light on the actual content of our

ideas and very heavy on biographical details, most of which

were taken from these sort of disreputable sources with axe

grind in order to make her kind of look bad.

I thought, well, that's not

really why bother answering that?

So I said, you know what, I've had a

piece I've wanted to send for a while on

basically Iran Rand's answer to our age of wokeness.

What is her answer?

What is the thing that she

offers as an alternative to that?

So I said, tell you what, I'm

just going to pitched that to them. And they took it.

And I think a week or so, a couple

of weeks after that other piece was published, they

had mine in which I basically talked about.

The piece I did in Discourse is kind of a

follow up to that one about the piece about work

is it was a follow up to that one because

I pointed out that the problem with our woke age

is that people are finding meaning and value in their

lives in the wrong places because they don't have someone

showing them the meaning and value of productive work, of

creating and building and coming up with new ideas.

And specifically, I referred to a somewhat influential study

that was done a few years back, about ten

years ago, there was a couple of sociologists who

sort of broke things down as they asked.

They classified different societies based on this question

of what is it that gives meaning and

value in your life and what gives you

social status in a certain kind of society?

They say, well, hundreds of years ago the predominant

thing was you had an honor society where it

was your honor, your reputation, your social status and

position that gave meaning and value to your life.

And that's why you had a culture of dueling, right?

Because if somebody insulted you, that was an attack

on your honor, your honor had you defended at

all costs, then you had a culture of dignity.

And so think of like Frederick Douglas or

Martin Luther King, where you could be attacked

in prison, enslaved, you could be treated unjustly.

But that didn't fundamentally affect your

internal sense of your own value.

And in fact, it might even increase your value

in your status in the eyes of others because

you maintain your own internal sense of dignity.

And then that's been replaced by a culture of victimhood

where it gives meaning and value to your life.

And what gives you status in the eyes of others is your

ability to claim to be marginalized or to be a victim.

And that's what the sort of woke culture is.

Everybody has to find some way.

Someone is talking about how I saw something

else recently about somebody talking about advising kids

on their essays for your applications to universities.

And to get into the elite universities,

your essay has to be all about

your victimhood, the hardships you suffered.

And these are mostly upper middle class, welloff,

kids who have had pretty easy lives and

talk about the Hoops they go through to

develop this narrative of being marginalized and being

a victim and having all the hardships they've

gone through because that's what being asked for.

And so in response to that, I said what I'm

Rand offers is the idea of a culture of achievement

where your work and your achievement is what gives meaning

and value to your life and status in a society.

I think that's radical because it goes against

it really is like an alternative to both

sides in our current culture war. That's true.

It is radical, right.

You have the woke kids who are so

in need of victimhood, they have to search

for microaggressions, which are by definition insignificant.

Right.

If it's micro, micro means small.

If it's a microaggression, really, it

is by definition not important.

But you have to inflate it out of

importance because victimhood is what gives you value.

But at the same time, I think you've gotten

that same victim mentality on the right that, oh,

we're victims of the elites in Washington, DC.

You're victims of the cultural elite.

We're being punished on Facebook.

And Meanwhile, the top ten most shared stories

on Facebook, they were from Ben Shapiro and

guys like that, conservative sources, right? True.

We're being persecuted by Google.

We're being persecuted by this and persecuted by that and

also creating this thing where meaning of value comes to

your life, from owning the lips and from being a

culture warrior who's constantly in online battles against the other

side and how trivial and unimportant all of that is

compared to the idea that you could be going out

there building the future.

You could be going out there trying to figure

out how to create Warp drive or take something

more realistic, how to create a flying car, or

how to create autonomous self driving.

We're still working on self driving cars.

They're not quite here.

I think that's when they just started in San

Francisco, self driving cabs just recently, but they're still

not really quite there for prime time Europe.

They are already with trucks.

Self driving trucks. Oh, really?

Over long distances.

Yeah, I know that trucks were actually one of the

things we considered one of the first applications for it,

because driving on the highway is a lot simpler than

driving on the streets of the city.

There's a lot fewer things you have to keep track of.

That's true. Yeah, that makes sense.

And actually the big thing, by the way, I want to

give you a heads up on so coming from an agricultural

state, John Deere is now selling a self driving tractor.

Oh, my goodness. Good deal.

They went all in on this and pursued the technology.

And now that's coming out.

And of course, a self driving tractor is

actually the easiest form of autonomous vehicle because

you're in the middle of a field.

There's a lot less stuff in a cornfield.

There's a lot less to keep track of than

even you don't have to worry about other drivers.

You don't have to worry about

pedestrians for the most part.

So I think it's going to be one of the

first places we see widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles.

Is the farmer looking on his smartphone to

see, how are my tractors doing today?

Yeah, exactly. Wow.

I just harvested a whole bunch of corn

while back in the barn doing something else,

and the tractor is out doing it.

That's going to be a huge productivity boost,

and it's going to be one of the

way that the future really arrives, that the

autonomous vehicle future really arrives here.

But that's the sort of thing we should be building

and the sort of thing we should be doing.

And all this time spent fighting the culture war, I

mean, a lot of people are getting the message from

either the left or the right that going on social

media and fighting the symbolic battles of the culture war.

That's where the action really is.

That's what really gives meaning

and value to your life.

And of course, it does.

It's actually in the wider scene of

things not very significant at all.

That's true, Robert. That's true.

I guess the overall lesson is, no matter

how bleak it looks, there are intellectual and

cultural currents that are not only fighting that

bleakness, but surpassing it with incredible achievements.

And the lesson I like to keep in mind, especially

for objectivity when you feel in despair, is to realize

that the vast majority of people are actually living by

our value, the values we espouse on a daily basis.

The vast majority of people are actually out

there, and they're working, and they, for the

most part, finding value in their work.

And they want to grow.

They want to prosper the woke people.

And the culture warriors are this tiny fringe really, of

like 8% of the population, but they're 90% of the

traffic on Twitter, but they're only actually 8% of the

population in reality, in the real world.

So the thing I always see as the hopeful

message for objectiveness is that what we're simply doing

is advocating an explicit form, the implicit way that

most people are living their lives.

Most of the time we just need to convince to

bring that message to them in a way that convinces

them that this is how I'm actually living.

This is how this is.

This is what is responsible for all the

good things that are happening in my life.

And I could make things go even better if I

knew that explicitly and we're more consistent in it.

One of the reasons we created this podcast. Exactly.

Yeah.

Robert, it's been great having you.

I really appreciate your time.

It's always a pleasure, I guess.

Martin, are we downloaded in 50 countries now?

What's some of our stats?

So, Robert, you have a worldwide audience.

Let them know where your web presence is. Yes.

That's one of the first rules for the gig economy.

That's right.

Always engaged in self promotion because nobody else

is going to promote you for you.

Nobody else is going to promote you. All right.

So the main thing is I switched my newsletter

over to substance so it's Krishinskyletter substant comb.

I started a substant in 2004.

It was just like 13 years before substac existed.

Finally now they've created a platform that

works better than whatever I cobbled together.

So I've gone over there.

So transistulator substant.com.

You can also find my columns at discoursemagazine

which I think is discoursemagazine.com by the burkata

center of free market think tank and I've

been writing a lot for them recently. Very good, Robert.

Thanks for Manning the foxhole with us today.

Enjoyed it. Thank you, Smith. Take care.