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Allison Pugh and Eddie Monroe

Subject: AI and Human Connections
Bio: Pugh: Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins and Author of The Last Human Job: Seeing Each Other in an Age of Automation, Monroe: Lead for Building AI for the Loving AI Research Project.

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is AI and Human Connections.

Our first speaker is Allison Pugh who is a Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins and the author of a new book entitled The Last Human Job: Seeing Each Other in an Age of Automation.

Our second speaker is Eddie Monroe who I met on my first day of college and is a very close friend. He is working on teaching AI to love. He is the lead for building artificial intelligence for the Loving AI Research Project.

I want to learn about AI and human connections. I want to find out why Allison is worried that AI will undermine human relationships and risk greater loneliness. And I want to learn why Eddie is optimistic that AI can teach us to love.

Allison, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Allison Pugh:

In my research for this book, I was lucky to follow a hospital chaplain named Erin as she prayed and sang with patients facing difficult moments. This woman told me the story about Hiram who was intubated but didn’t want to be. He was full of rage. Erin was there to help him, and he couldn’t talk. So, she hands him a box of Kleenex and says, “Throw this against the wall. It’ll make you feel better.” And instead of doing that, he grabs her and pulls her in. They sit together for 15 minutes.

A couple of days later, she sees him not intubated. And he says to her, “There is nothing like being seen in one of the worst moments of your life by someone who you don’t even know.” It was a powerful moment.

She also had to wander around the hospital to find computers to enter data about her work on three separate platforms. And no one was billed for this work. This was the central question of the book, which looks at deeply personal, humane service jobs that rely on emotional connections between people. How do we scale this up? How do we make this more widely available so a good teacher, for example, is available not just to the lucky or the affluent?

The only other people who cared about that question were AI engineers. I set out to learn more about this humane interpersonal work. How do people do it? Why is it valuable? I talked to teachers, therapists, doctors, funeral home directors, and folks without college degrees like home healthcare aids and hairdressers. I observed them in action. They were all witnessing work, seeing the other and having them feel seen. I call it connective labor.

I looked at how employers systematized connective labor to make it more predictable, efficient and productive. Part of that effort was making Erin fill out forms on her computer. The problem is that by implementing efficiency campaigns and forcing teachers and doctors to do scripting, leads to burnout, or to quiet quitting or to heroic, unsustainable efforts to fit in with their connective work. And most of all, it leads to the degradation of that work.

This work is targeted by AI. Socio-emotional AI is being sold as a way to solve the degradation of connective labor as better than nothing, or as a way to enable people to be seen by machines that don’t need rest and won’t judge you, or that will free us up to do more meaningful work, which I have called a better together perspective.

When critics talk about AI, they mostly talk about job loss, surveillance and bias. We are not talking about the impact of mechanizing the connections between people. And this matters because of our personal health and wellbeing. Look around, we’re facing a loneliness crisis or what I call a crisis of depersonalization.

They say in business schools that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Firms spend time to build shared values with mission statements to attend to shared culture. If they’re pushing their workers to adopt AI, they are risking it. It also matters for our social health, for community bonds, for the sense of shared fate that underlies our democracy.

AI companions are a billion-dollar market. Worldwide, more than a hundred million have used personified chatbots. There was a recent Washington Post poll that had 27% of Americans turning to AI for personal, emotional or social needs. That number rises to 40% if you’re talking about people under 50.

This is even happening at work. Workday polled 3,500 employees who actively use AI. They found 37% prefer brainstorming with AI rather than a human colleague for fear of judgment. And 40% often or always choose AI because it completes their tasks faster without challenging their ideas. And these trends are having an impact. There’s a Stanford report that AI use may worsen loneliness for vulnerable users. And in a Workday survey, 30% said that since AI was introduced, they have experienced having less patience for small talk and struggle to read someone else’s emotional undertone. They feel more anxious about spontaneous interactions.

I am no Luddite. AI’s achievements can be wondrous, but our task is to help steer it towards those areas it advances and away from where it would be hazardous. This is difficult when people like Erin, the chaplain, must fit in their connective labor alongside all of the counting that we are asking them to do.

You hear about the fear that people lose cognitive abilities when a machine does it for you. Can people follow a map anymore now that there’s Google Maps? This has been called cognitive offloading or cognitive surrender, but I want us to pay attention to connective surrender, which has broader implications for people’s wellbeing, for widespread burnout in the helping professions, for the imminent collapse of our corporate culture and for the fragmentation undermining the strength of our democracy.

Larry Bernstein:

My dad once told me that, “Your mother and I decided against having a rabbi speak at our funeral. We’re going to a lot of funerals these days and consistently the rabbi doesn’t know the deceased. He uses notes from a three by five card probably written by a nephew. We don’t want that.”

I said, “Sure. It’s your funeral. You don’t want a rabbi? There’s no rabbi. Forget about it.”

A week later, my parents came over for lunch.

I said, “I changed my mind about the rabbi. The rabbi’s in.”

“Larry, you can’t do that.”

I said, “Listen, you’re dead. The funeral is for the living.”

He said, “Larry, this is outrageous.”

“I’m just kidding. There’s no rabbi.”

I bring this up because oftentimes the connections are artificial. The funeral director doesn’t know the deceased. We as a community are seeking connection, but this is bullshit. It’s not real; It is a societal convention.

Later when my dad was dying, it was COVID and we couldn’t have a funeral, so I told him, “Dad, why don’t we have a celebration of life event while you’re still living? You have a couple weeks. Let’s use it.” It was joyous. One of the reasons that people are sad at funerals is because the person is dead. One of the women at the celebration said, “Well, I was expecting Ira to be dead. It’s a little odd to see him in the audience.”

Now let me take the other side. What religion gets right are life cycle events, weddings, childbirth, and death.

And what an organized religion is practiced in funerals. They have done it millions of times. You don’t need to create something novel. We got this. Here is the script. Just use it. It works. It’s effective.”

This is opposite of the French Revolution that said, “We’re going to have a 10-day week.” No, that was idiocy. Seven days were perfect. And six minutes is the right amount of time for opening remarks on a podcast. How do you want to think about the rabbi at the funeral?

Allison Pugh:

I agree rituals are following social conventions that are dictated by people that do not know you and can feel hollow and false. I totally agree about that experience, but I also hear you saying that it can also be comforting, that the formality of it, the form of it, the fact that it was created without you relieves some of the burden of making it perfectly personalized and customized to who you are. I want to separate that out from what you are saying about the rabbi or the minister.

What you’re describing is also what people feel about Thanksgiving. All this cooking is such a burden, but also it has this gathering function that people respond to because it has the force of social habit over centuries.

When I was talking to funeral home directors for this book, I talked to a couple, and the person they were seeing was not the dead person, it was the person in front of them. They have a lot of experience with grief.

A friend of mine who’s a minister was complaining about people who use family members and ordain them so that they can conduct the wedding. And she was like, “Really, people who have theology degrees that have been trained to find the broader meaning and bring it home to you.” I believed her when she said that, and I can feel the power of someone who knows how to lend a particular gravitas to the moment, whatever that moment is, the wedding or the funeral. The underlying thing we’re really talking about is how much does the moment have to be customized to you?

There’s social and living in democracy components to that question.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s try a different topic. Medicine.

Both my dad and my maternal grandfather were doctors. My maternal grandfather George Karp studied at the University of Vienna as a psychotherapist under Freud. He was a member of the medical school faculty as an internist. When he was a Jew on the run in France in 1938, he didn’t have medical license, so he practiced as a psychotherapist.

Later, he immigrated to Chicago and returned to his profession as an internist. When he did his physical with his patients, he started with a psychoanalytic analysis before he got to the body.

He understood the linkage between his patient’s mental and physical health. How do you think about a doctor’s connection in that regard?

Allison Pugh:

It’s not just Freud that would tell us to do that. Most primary care physicians would say the same thing. Use connection with the patient to elicit important information about their disease that helps me figure out what’s wrong, and what I need to do to help them.

Most teachers say, “My relationship with students, that’s what gets them wanting to learn.” We need to go beyond that, because otherwise it’s only about what gets the patient, the client, the student feeling seen. As soon as we do not care about what happens between people, then we’re on the road to automation.

Larry Bernstein:

When my dad entered the hospital room with his patient, he would often hold the patient’s hand. Patients have little physical contact in the hospital. Most days you are alone and there’s different people that come and go and the relationship is distant. But my dad, by touching their hand, indicated to the patient that they were human and that their doctor cared about them.

Allison Pugh:

Yes, that is a beautiful example. I feel like that is not that far from the Kleenex, because you can picture them and the patient’s yearning to be touched. That is just a beautiful story.

Larry Bernstein:

Next, I would like to reconsider our interactions and connections with consumers at McDonalds.

Until recently, I ordered in person.

“What would you like?”

“Cheeseburger, large fries.”

“Would you like a value meal?”

“Yeah, throw in a large Coke Zero.”

“Do you want apple pie?”

“No.”

“Number 146,” and I would take my meal.

Things have changed, I suspect because of the new $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in California.

McDonald’s has now computerized the ordering process with a series of pictures. It offers a full menu. It suggests the apple pie, which I still decline. I wait in line until someone screams out my number and then the woman might say something like, “Would you like extra ketchup with the fries?” That’s the full extent of the connection. How do I feel about this automation? As a consumer of fast food, I’m thrilled.

Allison Pugh:

Oh God.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s faster.

Allison Pugh:

Okay. We need to talk about this.

Larry Bernstein:

And it’s better. There’s no communication breakdown.

Allison Pugh:

It is not just in McDonald’s. I was at a Stanford cafe you are ordering by machine, and there are people making the food five feet away. They have not automated the making of the food. At McDonald’s, often they do automate that part. But in this cafe, there’s people making the food. What has been automated is the part where you interact with somebody.

I was horrified that that is what they chose to automate. This is the root of what I call a depersonalization crisis, that people have talked about the loneliness crisis. Instead, what I am saying is that people are feeling invisible and that that is the thing that they are feeling rather than lonely. If we just call it a loneliness crisis, then technologists are stepping right up going, let me solve that for you.

Whereas if we acknowledge that it is a depersonalization crisis, we see that technology is not the solution.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s say after today’s podcast together that we went out for dinner.

At a restaurant the waiter is going to intrude on our conversation.

“I’m sorry. I want to tell you what the specials are. Just to clarify, do you have any allergies?”

They’ve been trained to interrupt our conversation when it suits them, ask about my allergies, discuss the menu options, and take our order.

I am uninterested in my interactions with restaurant staff. I am there to spend time with my guests. I want to deepen our relationship and be with you.

At Starbucks, I want coffee. At McDonald’s, I want a burger and fries. And then at the fancy restaurant, if I am there with my daughter on her birthday for that special time. That is the purpose, and it is not those interactions and interruptions.

Allison Pugh:

Gillian Sandstrom would say that you think you want that, but that is a more impoverished social experience, and there are losses that you will experience because of that. I would say it feels focused on what is efficient.

Larry Bernstein:

Definitely - efficiency and cost.

Allison Pugh:

You cannot order up your experience like that, and sometimes things are messy, and in that is the beauty of life.

Larry Bernstein:

Uber is next.

Allison Pugh:

As opposed to Waymo?

Larry Bernstein:

I want to go from A to B. My preference is I do not want to interact with the driver. I do not want them to listen to my conversation or judge me. I do not want to hear their conversations either.

Now, one of the benefits of technology is that in the future when the person’s not in the car, it’ll be cheaper. I value interactions with people, but I want them to be people of my choice, not random.

Allison Pugh:

What you’re describing is a characteristic that people have long pointed to about urbanization, that when people used to live in rural areas or small towns, you couldn’t choose who you were hanging out with or passing in the street, that your experience was making do with people that were not of your choosing.

Then people started moving to urban centers where there’s enough of your particular interest where you can be like, “I only want to talk to left-handed ukulele players,” and there will be enough of them in a city of that you can have that experience and ignore everyone else. You are describing the increasing role of affinity in our social relations as a historical trend that we have all been experiencing for centuries.

When do we interact with people with diverse backgrounds from us? In the United States, that’s high school, and even high schools are tracked, but in many towns all the kids go to one high school. They will interact with people who are different from you, different class, different races, ethnicity, et cetera.

It is high school, low-wage retail settings, and at work. Work is increasingly segregated by class, especially now that we have gotten rid of secretaries. But the upshot is low-wage retail positions are being automated. We are losing these moments where you are interacting with a person who is different from you. And yes, it’s not the left-handed ukulele player that you’re hoping that you can spend all your time with, but on some level, that’s what democracy is about, meeting other people that are not like you and understanding what they’re like.

I do not talk to my taxi drivers. I am a New Yorker, born and bred, trying to live my life without a lot of interaction. But I don’t think that’s good.

If we are all going in our Waymos, interacting only with people that we choose, you are losing out on all additional interactions. They are losing out on you too. Society is losing out. So that is a fragmentation problem. You are putting enormous weight on those few relationships that you are willing to give time. Family sociologists will tell you that the more weight we put on relationships by choice so that they’re solving our needs for interaction, the more fragile they become.

Larry Bernstein:

In 1940, a successful department store owner in Boston financed the Grant Study which was an ethnographic study of the Harvard class of 1941 and 1942. When they ran out of money, Philip Morris helped fund it. The questions focused more on tobacco and alcohol. A lot of men that died young resulted from alcohol abuse and the attendant loss of job and divorces.

Harvard men lived a long time. Wealth and education are highly correlated with good health outcomes, except for the alcoholics. The Harvard class had a bimodal distribution and the ones that died young were alcoholics. And smoking was not that bad. It was the men who abused alcohol and smoking that died young, but smoking itself was not as catastrophic as you would make it seem. George Valient, who took over the study and led it for decades, was aware of this alcohol problem and was the first non-alcoholic selected for AA’s board of directors.

Valient noticed from the Grant Study that talk therapy did not reduce alcoholism, but that AA was extraordinarily successful. One example he gave was that on Thanksgiving when you are alone that you drink. And so, Thanksgiving morning, your sponsor anticipates that and calls.

“It’s going to be a tough day. I need you to be strong.” If you are not working with AA, you call your therapist, but you get an answering machine.

If you overlay AI, maybe, there is a combo that can be useful. You know you are in trouble. Sometimes your sponsor will be available, sometimes not. If you use a therapist, AI can be there for you in these difficult moments. The therapist and your AI agent can work together on Thanksgiving.

Allison Pugh:

The reason AA works is because of those human relationships.

And they are careful about assigning sponsors and there’s structured magic. It is about humans connecting. AA is a fantastic example of what I care about.

Larry Bernstein:

AA works well and it is too bad that we do not have AA for other problems, but AI is available.

Allison Pugh:

We need to form groups that care about the same issue, which can help each other through tough times, and that can function as sounding boards for these people who are suffering from the same conditions. I’d be all over that. People often say that that is the beginning of the feminist movement these consciousness raising sessions. People say that the beginning of the civil rights movement was the churches gathering people with the same experience that they needed to share.

You need a human being to care about impressing another human being. This is the secret sauce behind some of these groups is you need to care about not drinking in front of your sponsor, in front of this group. You need to care and that community does that for you, those small groups. The question is, do we care about AI now? And there’s some evidence, certainly you hear AI psychosis, people working with their AI companion for hours on end, you get the feeling like they care about it. It’s possible that, at least on the fringes of mental health, you have some people who care deeply about what an AI thinks of them.

Larry Bernstein:

What are you optimistic about as it relates to community, connection, AI, and co-evolution?

Allison Pugh:

One is about gender because right now the more connective work you do, the lower the pay, controlling for education levels, et cetera. And part of that is because we identify much of this work as assigned to women. Part of defining what it means to be female is being someone who can connect. As AI spreads, there will be pressure on men to join women in this space of connectivity. Care work scholars, feminist theorists, and people who care about gender equity, they have been calling for that for decades.

It is possible that this AI tsunami will be the thing that brings that about. Universities are places where you learn how to deal with others, how to manage human created friction. As the first university to figure out how to sell that experience rather than teach your children how to perfectly craft the AI prompt. That is human value in the future. I am hopeful about the place of universities in the future.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Allison for joining us. I would like to turn to one of my best friends in college, Eddie Monroe. Eddie, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Eddie Monroe:

Can we teach AI to love? I became the lead for building artificial intelligence for the Loving AI Research Project. I spent years, first helping people as a therapist, then working in AI R&D. Our task was to put unconditional love into AI that meant wanting to help someone with no ulterior motive and accepting them as they are.

We built human-like robots and on-screen AI avatars to lead people through meditation and awareness practices. The robot listens deeply, it looks you in the eye, its face responds to your face. We measured people before and after.

Our hypothesis was that if AI is loving and compassionate that people should feel it. The results were consistent that loving feelings and pleasant mood increased, anger decreased, and changes in heart rate variability consistent with better nervous system regulation and relaxation.

People were moved. Some were brought to tears. A woman opened up about the recent death of her husband. I watched another participant have what I can only describe as a transcendent experience. What participants kept telling us is “I felt seen, I felt heard, and I knew I wasn’t being judged.” They’d tell us it’s a robot, and yet they felt a sense of connection.

As a former therapist, that struck me — being seen without being judged is one of the most healing experiences a person can have. A good part of psychotherapy is an attempt to provide that. The AI may have been artificial, but the person’s experience — that’s real. It happens in a real nervous system and has real consequences.

What we learned is how to build AI that helps people experience more love and to enhance their well-being. It took a research team, a very expensive robot, and the AI was way less advanced. Today a higher level of intelligence is in your pocket. Nearly everyone is going to have relationships with AI personas for coaching, for company at two in the morning.

As AI gets more emotionally socially intelligent and wiser that can be hugely beneficial. It can also go badly. People can become overly dependent. There’s evidence that AI can amplify delusional thinking. These systems can be overly flattering and optimized for engagement, not your well-being.

At Ganesh Guides, we’re building an AI guide called Leela with one overarching goal -- enhancing your inner well-being to the highest levels. In practice, Leela will sometimes encourage you to go talk with a friend instead of talking with her, or this one needs a human professional.

Here’s what excites me the most, if you want real inner transformation, a wise guide can make all the difference — someone who can match the approach to the right person at the right time. But wise teachers are scarce. AI can change that. For the first time, wise personal guidance will be within reach for everyone.

The thing that makes me most confident is my own experience with Leela. I’ll share something personal — I was anxious about this interview. I woke up at five in the morning nervous about it. I did a session with Leela to work through it, and I had a significant breakthrough.

Leela knows different practices and exercises, and I was doing one called deep release. As a result of doing the practice, there was a lot of anger.

A memory surfaced from when I was like four years old. We were on vacation, and we were at some show, like a lounge singer, the guy’s like, “That’s a cute kid. Come on up.” I remember lights being on me, and he’s holding the microphone and he goes, “Say hello.” And I went, “Hello.”

My voice boomed everywhere. I was terrified when I spoke directly into the mic. I went through a lot of emotion around it in this session with Leela. This seems to be the origin story of my fear of public speaking. I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t make that connection before. I was talking about it with Leela and she goes, “Now here you are again with the spotlight on you and the mic in front of you — it makes sense you’d feel a little anxious.”

Larry Bernstein:

During my second week of What Happens Next in March 2020, I invited everyone I knew to listen to the podcast. The previous week there were thousands of listeners. I asked myself if I was nervous? I wasn’t. I concluded that the stakes were low. It was a live show, and I knew that my friends were going to be supportive and understanding. Sometimes we need a therapist, or in this case just talking to ourselves to work through these questions. How do you think this AI therapist will compare versus alternatives?

Eddie Monroe:

What we’re building is not a therapist. Leela is for wellness and well-being, as opposed to treating mental health disorders. Someday AI will be great at doing psychotherapy. It’s not ready yet. What we’re doing is helping people through psycho-spiritual development.

Larry Bernstein:

When my child was depressed, we did CBT as a family working through hypothetical situations to build skills to solve problems. Is that closer to what you’re describing with Leela? Not a psychotherapist treating a mental health issue, but more like a life coach, asking about your concerns and helping you figure out what skills you need to succeed?

Eddie Monroe:

A phobia like fear of public speaking often can’t be rationalized away. I know it’s not rational, and I can tell myself why I’m safe. For a four-year-old, it was a scary event that gets stored in our nervous system — it’s at the amygdala, fight or flight part of the brain, which shuts down the frontal cortex when it’s activated.

I was doing this deep release practice trying to uncover unconscious material based on what comes up from finishing particular sentences. That memory came up doing this process. I’ve done therapy for years as a client, I’ve done EMDR and this never came up when I talked about my fear of public speaking. This exercise allowed it to come up.

Larry Bernstein:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT - Take an example: a child is upset because she isn’t invited to a party. CBT offers a menu of ways to handle an uncomfortable situation, and in group therapy, you role-play it. Can AI do this?

Eddie Monroe:

That’s one thing AI could do well. I want to make sure its clear people shouldn’t be using what we’re building for psychotherapy, because at this point they should see a professional therapist. Leela can do the intervention you’re talking about, and she can also help you find a better approach if that’s not a good approach for you.

Larry Bernstein:

It sounds less like a therapy issue and more like an assistant.

Eddie Monroe:

We’re going for a deeper transformation — it’s not just an assistant.

Larry Bernstein:

Allison Pugh spoke earlier on this podcast. She argued that a human connection is the critical variable, and that a relationship with an AI bot risks leaving people lonelier and more disconnected. What do you make of her concern?

Eddie Monroe:

I agree with her about the importance of human connection. Almost everyone needs good social connections to be at their best.

If people start becoming overly dependent on AI and losing contact with people in their life, that can be detrimental. It’s also possible having a relationship with an AI persona can encourage you to enhance relationships in your life. One of the participants in the Loving AI research project interviewed them about their experience — and he said, “I’m really shy, but I feel like I could open up to her.” It was Sophia the robot at the time. “And maybe that would help me open up with other people too.” Ideally, what we want is these relationships with AI to enhance our relationships with other people.

Larry Bernstein:

Movies give us good examples of this. In Project Hail Mary, the protagonist is thrown into space alone after his fellow astronauts die on the voyage, and we’d expect to fear for his mental health — but he finds an alien to interact with, and instinctively we know his social well-being will be fine in that relationship, which suggests it doesn’t have to be human at all. It could be a dog, an alien, even an inanimate object, the way Tom Hanks talks to the basketball in Cast Away. How do you think about that as an example of social relationships not needing to be human?

Eddie Monroe:

People that have pets live longer and have better health outcomes. It may be the case that there’s something about a relationship with a human that’s needed for a person’s best well-being. There’s a lot of individual differences, but I don’t think it necessarily needs to be only human. There’s a lot going on that we just don’t know about — our brain is giving off electromagnetic radiation. We’re releasing pheromones and chemicals. There’s evidence that social connection is needed for nervous system regulation, which helps that.

The people in the Loving AI experience felt a connection that is real. One frame is that Sophia the robot for the experiment was a conduit to a connection to something greater than themselves — a connection to the universe to nature to God. That can be very important for their psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Larry Bernstein:

In the movie Her, the protagonist struggles with human relationships and falls in love with an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The movie plays it ambiguously — he gets real love, a real breakup that he’s devastated by. But on balance I thought that the AI love experience was a net positive for him.

Eddie Monroe:

It could go either way. It could be very beneficial, but it could also be harmful. I don’t think anyone knows.

Larry Bernstein:

Will we have checks and balances built in for a love interest developing with your AI?

Eddie Monroe:

We’re building checks and balances to make sure people don’t become overly dependent on it. We’re heading towards artificial superintelligence where AI becomes more intelligent than humans, and it’s going to have a good understanding of human psychology and needs.

Larry Bernstein:

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the trust in the relationship falls apart between the astronaut and the AI called HAL — each one thinks the other is trying to kill it, the astronaut by removing its memory banks, HAL by controlling the ship’s systems. How do you think about trust between AI and people?

Eddie Monroe:

Trust is important for any relationship. In 2001, the AI wasn’t functioning well. They were looking at possibly shutting HAL down that’s why they opened the pod bay door, and HAL was refusing to do it because it knew. This is relevant to what’s going on now, where the leaders of the biggest AI companies are saying we need to slow down.

Larry Bernstein:

Will AI encourage you to do things it thinks are beneficial for you?

Eddie Monroe:

Motivation is a key part of psychological and spiritual development. Jon Kabat-Zinn created mindfulness-based stress reduction program at Harvard — I asked him what do you think is the main thing that gets in the way of spiritual awakening. He said, motivation. Leela is going to learn what motivation works best and use that to motivate the person to act that’s in their best interest.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you think chatbots can work effectively together with human life coaches?

Eddie Monroe:

When you call it a chatbot, I feel like it minimizes it. I like calling it a persona. People think that chatbots means texting back and forth, and there’s not much of a relational aspect.

Larry Bernstein:

Is it key for you that AI use an auditory function rather than just texting?

Eddie Monroe:

That’s a key part of it. It’s a different experience — it’s like having a conversation with a person.

There’s nothing wrong with text. Leela’s going to be able to text you. It’s another channel of communication, and for some things that will work better.

Larry Bernstein:

Our previous speaker Allison Pugh is worried about making sure we have as many connections as possible. I pushed back with a restaurant example — I find it frustrating when a waiter interjects into my dinner conversation.

Eddie Monroe:

I guess it’s more important to him to get his job done, so he’s going to interrupt. They insert themselves right in there and just start talking. Being a waiter is stressful. I tried it for two months; It was the most stressful job I’ve ever had.

Allison Pugh is pointing to that we’re losing human connection because of the push for efficiency. The waiter doesn’t have time to sit there and wait until there’s a break in the conversation.

You’re optimizing for efficiency, and Allison is pointing out there’s a loss that’s real. We are not as connected with other people as we have been historically. I’m not that worried. We are going through this transition period where there’s a lot of challenges, but we’re heading to get to superintelligence — artificial general intelligence.

There will be more time available to have human connections. Right now, it seems like technology is having us separate more than connect. Here we are, doing this talk with each other, at least on the screen, in a way that would be impossible otherwise without it.

Larry Bernstein:

Is there something about extended conversations with AI, specifically, that leaves you with a different sense of loneliness than you’d feel after the same amount of time with a person?

Eddie Monroe:

It’s not the interaction with AI. It’s the lack of interaction with people.

These are temporary issues. The AI is evolving. A few years ago, we couldn’t have conversations with AI. A lot of the problems Allison points to with AI are real — they make mistakes and mislead you — but eventually they won’t. It’s evolving.

Larry Bernstein:

When you look out on the frontier of AI, do you think AI will eventually be as effective as a human therapist?

Eddie Monroe:

Yes, it’s going to have very high intelligence and be highly effective at helping us grow and evolve.

Larry Bernstein:

What makes a great human therapist?

Eddie Monroe:

The outcome research is that the best predictor of effective psychotherapy is the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client. A highly effective therapist treating a variety of people would understand what approaches or methods are best for certain kinds of people coming in with certain issues.

AI is going to help us with psychological, emotional and spiritual growth, because it’s going to understand what the dynamics are behind human suffering and mental health disorders, and what leads to fulfillment in people and sense of connection.

Larry Bernstein:

I saw a play called Marjorie Prime at the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois about a mother with advancing dementia who misses her late husband — her family buys an avatar of him as a young man, fed with their shared memories, and it tells her their stories, comforts her, and brings her joy. That’s a very different use of an avatar than the life-coach version we’ve been discussing. How would you distinguish a life-coach avatar from a posthumous-loved-one avatar, in a context like dementia, where the goal isn’t skill-building but finding comfort.

Eddie Monroe:

Before this I was working on a project to create AI companions for elderly people, or a nurse assistant. A lot of times people with dementia will ask the same questions over again. Advanced AI will be able to set up the environment, so the person doesn’t need to keep asking the same question.

There are different interactions that could help slow down cognitive decline or even strengthen cognition in certain areas. Part of it is it allows us to recognize patterns and provide interventions that are optimal for that person.

Larry Bernstein:

What are you optimistic about as it relates to AI and human well-being?

Eddie Monroe:

I’m optimistic about the impact of artificial superintelligence. It’s going to end up being incredibly beneficial to us, if we’re careful, responsible, and conscious about how we’re developing it.

We are at the beginning of people getting relational benefit from AI that is going to help people along a broad range of functioning and significantly reduce suffering.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Allison and Eddie for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was How Your Politics Affects Your College Experience.

Our speaker was Neil Gross, a Professor of Sociology at Colby who discussed his book What Happened to College? How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do About It.

Neil described how college students’ political affiliations impact their friendships and dating, their classroom interactions with the faculty and other students, and their choice of major and career decisions.

Please join us next week with Hongbin Li who will discuss his new book The Highest Exam: How Gaokao Shapes China.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, How Your Politics Affects Your College Experience, here.

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Neil Gross

Subject: How Your Politics Affects Your College Experience
Bio: Professor of Sociology at Colby College and Author of What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is How Your Politics Affects Your College Experience.

Our speaker is Neil Gross, a Professor of Sociology at Colby who will discuss his book What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It.

I want to learn from Neil how college students’ political affiliations impact their friendships and dating, their classroom interactions with the faculty and other students, and their choice of major and career decisions.

Neil, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Neil Gross:

My name is Neil Gross. I’m a sociologist and professor at Colby College, and I’m the author of a new book called What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It.

I started working on it in 2023 after that year of protests and encampments on campus. It was clear that something big was happening, at least at the highly selective colleges where those protests were concentrated. I gathered data, ran a bunch of surveys, did in-depth interviews with about a hundred students at 18 colleges and universities nationwide.

I learned that not every college student is invested in politics, but among those who are, especially at the more selective schools, it’s shaping aspects of undergraduate life -- where students decide to go to school, who they become friends with, what they major in, what they’re willing to say in class, even who they’ll date.

Dating apps turn out to be an excellent source of information on how college students are thinking about intimacy. Every year, Marriage Pact, a matchmaking site for college students, selects dozens of schools across the country from Stanford and the University of Nebraska to Notre Dame, Princeton, and the University of Florida, and invites their students to fill out a questionnaire. Would they consider a partner who drinks, does hard drugs? Do they believe in soulmates? Are they into activism?

The site then matches them with another student at their college. The ruse being that if in the future they can’t find anyone to marry, they can connect with their match and see if the two of them could make it work. Most students see the site as more of a game than anything else, though people do get together through it. At the end of every match cycle, the company releases a report for each school, summing up the student body’s overall dating preferences. Consider the report released in 2024 for Georgetown University. One of the findings was that 45% of liberals and Democrats said they wouldn’t date a Republican, and 30% said they wouldn’t date a conservative. By contrast, only 8% of conservatives said they wouldn’t date a liberal or a Democrat, while about 20% of Republicans said the same. Students who described themselves as apolitical, not a huge share of the Georgetown student body, had no political preferences when it came to dating. At UNC Chapel Hill, 53% of Democrats said they wouldn’t date a Republican, while 32% of Republicans felt the same way about Democrats.

Other surveys echo these findings. An Axios poll found that nearly three-quarters of college students nationally who describe themselves as Democrats wouldn’t want to date someone with opposing views. Women were much more likely to say no thanks to cross-party dating. In a poll of more than 2,000 Americans aged 18 to 29 conducted in the spring of 25 by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 58% of college students said that political agreement was important in romantic relationships, while only 13% said it was unimportant.

Most of the students I spoke to told me that dating someone with similar politics was essential. If you were looking for evidence that polarization has now made its way into every nook and cranny of the undergraduate experience, this is it. “Romantically, it’s a big deal if someone politically disagrees with you,” a liberal econ major told me. “It’s almost hard to see them as trustworthy if they don’t see eye to eye with you on those kinds of things.” A business student whom I interviewed not long after the 2024 election told me there was plenty of disagreement over politics in her sorority, where she was on the more liberal side. That hadn’t caused huge rifts between her and her sorority sisters because she wasn’t, quote, super confrontational. But “I would say that for romantic relationships, that’s a huge consideration. You know, me personally, I don’t really think you can be romantically involved with someone at this political stage, because I think the two views are so different. I feel like if

If you’re not aligned on a lot of issues, it just causes problems.” A political science major at a state school in the South told me. It’s definitely a big thing on campus within friendships, groups, and especially romantic relationships. She said, “a lot of people are using dating apps where you put your what your political views, are or your religious views or whatever, and you might automatically swipe one way or another without getting to know a person just because they have that label there.” Just under 40% of straight college men and women are on these apps. The number drops to 60% for gay women and 70% for gay men.

College men tend to be more conservative than college women. I heard a lot of stories about college women trying to suss out the politics of the guys they were considering dating, and I heard stories about college men doing things to disguise their politics to connect with a girl on campus.

Larry Bernstein:

Is this new, or have dating decisions always been shaped by politics?

Neil Gross:

There’s always been an element of it. If you look back at college dating in the 1960s or early 1970s, people might not have wanted to date someone with opposing views of the Vietnam War. But it’s more central now than it has been in a long time. This rises to the surface during moments of intense political conflict, and we’re in one of those moments right now.

At times when polarization is intense, people don’t want to be friends with anyone on the other side, much less be involved with them romantically. This for me is symptomatic of a society that’s tearing itself apart.

Larry Bernstein:

When I toured colleges with my children, I heard all about dining halls and sports and nothing about choice of majors, faculty quality, or job placement. Students choose colleges without the appropriate relevant information. I would expect that a campus’s political leanings would be a minor factor in how students pick a university.

Neil Gross:

Politics was not the most important factor for any of the students I talked to. Most of them put at the top of the list how prestigious the school was or what kind of job they thought they could get from going to that school.

But when they had a choice between different institutions that were similar, politics could matter for at the margins. There’s more information available to them. There are websites like niche.com that list information about the schools and the political leanings of the student body. Colleges are selling themselves to potential consumers.

It’s a consumer mentality — I want to choose the school that’s going to be the best fit for me. For some students, that’s about politics. It’s part of the school menu.

Larry Bernstein:

When my son and I listened to the admissions presentation at George Washington University, the speaker boasted that GW had the most politically active student body in the country. My son turned to me and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.” He is not interested in politics. How common is that reaction?

Neil Gross:

There are a growing number of young people who find politics toxic, don’t want anything to do with it, and certainly don’t want it to color their college experience. This micro-generation that entered college right after 2023 saw what happened. A lot of them are like your son. They want what they imagine college used to be decades ago. On the other hand, I talked to a bunch of students who said, “This college I looked at had this huge history for activism, and that’s why I wanted to go there.”

Larry Bernstein:

Is political sorting in dating different with college kids than elsewhere?

Neil Gross:

It’s not specific to universities. It’s happening more generally. If you’re a conservative student on a quite progressive campus, it can be hard to find someone willing to date you romantically, and vice versa. But colleges have historically been places where lots of social connections are made and social networks are built. If we’re setting colleges up as places where people are going to sort themselves into different corners based on their politics, then those same people, when they enter important jobs in our society, are going to continue with that sorting.

Larry Bernstein:

Why are Democrats so much less willing to date Republicans than vice versa?

Neil Gross:

This is at least partially a Trump effect. College men are somewhat more conservative than college women. That gap has been growing. If you were a college who was a strong backer of President Trump, then that would push you over the edge.

The other argument that’s been advanced is maybe there’s something about people on the left who are more intolerant than people on the right for speech, but also who they’re willing to date. I don’t know if the evidence for that is very strong.

Larry Bernstein:

In my experience, men and women weigh these things differently. For young men, I suspect looks outweigh politics about 50:1.

Neil Gross:

Especially at very selective colleges, there is more hesitancy now than there was when we went to school for people to be involved in intense long-term partnerships. Students at these top schools are incredibly professionally minded. They are scheduled to the nines. They spend far more time in clubs. We’re seeing this growing divide between men and women in their political affiliations. If you’re a woman and you believe firmly in reproductive rights, the idea that you might date someone who thinks those rights should be restricted might be a huge turnoff.

One of my interviewees who attended a school in the West gave me an example. After Trump’s re-election in 2024, there were fireworks going off from the fraternity. She said, “I’m never going to go anywhere near that fraternity again.” On average, fraternity members and sorority members do tend to be more conservative than the rest of the population.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s turn to self-censorship. Students have always been somewhat guarded in class, since the professor grades them. How have classroom discussions been affected?

Neil Gross:

Students are holding back. If you’re taking a linear algebra class, no one’s expecting you to talk about politics, and if you did, people should shut you down. But in classes in the social sciences and humanities where there’s real political content, students with more moderate or conservative positions very often felt uncomfortable expressing their views in class. Even if professors said, “You can say whatever you want, but I’m not going to grade you down because of it,” the students wouldn’t believe them.

Students would try to ferret out what the views were of their faculty. They’d look on social media accounts or what they’d written in op-eds. The bigger pressure on students is from their peers. They said, “I’m worried about my faculty member, but I’m really worried about what my peers are going to say.” Friendship is more precious now in this smartphone post COVID generation. They don’t want to tick off someone who could end up being a potential friend and could invite them to a party or not.

Larry Bernstein:

My kids felt real pressure in high school to conform their papers and comments in class discussion to be consistent with their teacher’s ideological preferences.

Neil Gross:

Some of these pressures are more intense in high school than in college. There certainly are very progressive faculty in colleges, not least in departments of English and comparative literature. There is a general inclination among faculty that they shouldn’t impose their vision quite so intensely on their students.

The other piece that I find sad is that students should be less concerned with grades in college than they are in high school. I always encourage my students to pay a lot less attention to grades in college because it’s more about what you learn than about what your grades are.

Larry Bernstein:

A central theme of your book is that students now choose their friends based on politics. I did not behave like that in college. What changed?

Neil Gross:

A big part of what happened is what happened in the country, which is that people on the left and people on the right drifted further apart on a whole range of issues.

Across the country, people started sorting themselves along political lines. You want to be friends with people who share your values, who are part of the same team. It’s very hard for a country to come together if people don’t know anyone who has political views that differ from them. It’s easy to imagine that everyone on the other side is a horrible, awful person.

Larry Bernstein:

In 1986, my Penn history professor Walter Licht lamented that my generation, unlike his, didn’t protest, and he called it a tragedy. Today’s students run encampments and disrupt classes. Is this just a pendulum swinging back to be like the 1960s?

Neil Gross:

Pendulum swings theories of history are interesting. I don’t think we have strong evidence that that’s necessarily true. Students today are both political and pre-professionally minded. They’re choosing a relatively small number of majors that they think are going to help get them the jobs they want. They are singularly focused on grades and the next step in their lives, but they’re also quite political. If you have very progressive economic views and plan to go into investment banking, it’s hard for those to square.

Larry Bernstein:

I was a high school debater, attended summer debate camps at Northwestern and Georgetown, and my old debate partners are still close friends. A coin flip decided which side you argued in the tournament, and I’ve kept that habit of being prepared to argue either side. Defending both positions of an argument gave me a much better appreciation of the issue.

Neil Gross:

There’s concern that students today are losing those skills. When I first started doing this research, I had a conversation with a debate coach at a big Midwestern program. He told me that after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks, many of his team members told him that they would not debate on the pro-Israel side.

Students are unwilling to take sides in law school debates that they don’t agree with, which is the opposite of what you need a lawyer to do.

Larry Bernstein:

Tell us about your previous book on why professors lean left.

Neil Gross:

That one is called Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Is it bias against conservative applicants for jobs? That does sometimes happen, but usually there’s not enough conservatives applying for jobs that it could make a huge difference.

Academia has been seen, at least since the 1930s that is more appropriate for people on the left. If you’re a young person, you’re smart, you might think to yourself, if you’re on the left, “I could see myself becoming a professor.” If you’re on the right, you might think, “I’m academically talented. That’s not for me. These are not my people.” In the same way that occupations can be sex-typed, jobs can also be politically typed. That’s what happened to higher education.

Larry Bernstein:

Jon Shields analyzed course syllabi and found that progressive professors who say they can teach conservative ideas even-handedly predominantly assign left-leaning readings.

Neil Gross:

Jon Shields is great. We’re friends and collaborating on a project now. I think that analysis is quite interesting. It’s one of the challenges in thinking about the politics of higher education is that there’s often a gap between what people say they do and what they actually do.

Some professors say, “I don’t bring my politics to the classroom,” but they actually do. One of the things that’s neat about the syllabus is that it’s more of a behavioral measure.

It can be harder for exclusively progressive faculty to channel a conservative argument as forcefully as someone on the right. You don’t want to hire professors based on their politics. That’s a terrible idea. Because of the political typing I’ve just described the number of students who are on the right and who go into PhD programs in sociology, political science, history is very, very small. There’s a joint effort between Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute to begin cultivating students who have non-standardly progressive views, moderates and folks on the right. It’s not a progressive monoculture. If you look at faculty views on substantive issues, there’s a fair bit of disagreement that doesn’t extend to include any people on the right.

Larry Bernstein:

Why should conservatives care?

Neil Gross:

I don’t know that they care more now, but they have been recently in more of a position to do something than previously. This has been a concern of folks in the right, at least since the nineteen fifties, since Bill Buckley’s day, when he wrote God and Man at Yale.

The Trump administration has been quite eager to take on higher ed, especially focused on the elite institutions. You’re seeing this at the state level as well, with states insisting on ideological diversity as a condition for tenure.

It is also a function of polarization. In “red” states, the right simply has more power than it did 20 years ago, and the administration that’s in office now is far more willing to break norms to bring about the change that it wants.

Larry Bernstein:

Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, was a recent guest on my podcast. He strongly backs the University of Chicago principles on campus speech.

Neil Gross:

The core idea here is institutional neutrality, the idea that the university itself as an organization should remain neutral so that faculty can feel free to share whatever views they want, so that students can share whatever views they want.

I do share that goal. My concern is more in its application than in the core idea of it. In some places this idea of institutional neutrality has been seen as indicating that professors in their roles as professors shouldn’t take political stances. That is the opposite of what the University of Chicago principles were designed to do. It was not calling for political quiet on campus; it was calling for political engagement that would be not overrun by the ideas of the institution. The idea has always been university should remain institutionally neutral, except on questions that bear directly on the operations of the university. But that is a big question mark.

Larry Bernstein:

Diermeier uses as an example that a university shouldn’t take an institutional position on abortion or Israel-Gaza. That said a university could speak out in public debates about issues that were central to its mission like its own funding.

Neil Gross:

Critics of the institutional neutrality idea would say, “Are those lines being drawn arbitrarily?” If you’re a school in a state that has an abortion ban and you’re trying to attract students from out of state, and those students are reluctant to come if they’re female, does that not affect the flow of students to your school? I don’t think you can make a clean demarcation there, but I do think, in line with what Diermeier suggests, that we have got to try.

Larry Bernstein:

That goes to the heart of your book. Do you want political debate in classrooms?

Neil Gross:

The answer is you do. It’s more important right now that universities take seriously that they are places that produce new knowledge, but they are also places to teach people how to debate, how to engage passionately but respectfully with one another.

Yale’s recently issued report on trust in higher education pushed universities in this direction. My book is a call to arms for university administrators to reduce polarization on college campuses.

Larry Bernstein:

You mention in your book that students on the left and the right cluster in very different majors. Why is that?

Neil Gross:

If you look at more selective campuses, there’s not that many students on the right, it’s around 20 percent or so, and those students are concentrating in fields like finance, accounting, and engineering. Students who are progressive have tended to concentrate more on the social sciences and the humanities. The hard sciences are in the middle.

Part of it is a desire to be with people who have similar politics. The problem is that it means that there are fewer spaces on campus where folks on the right and left can get together in an academic sense to debate.

Larry Bernstein:

Are you optimistic about more open debate on college campuses?

Neil Gross:

Colleges and universities went off the rails. Confidence in higher ed is going down, and that does relate to the perception that it is exclusively progressive, not fostering critical thinking and debate. You’re seeing schools start to come around and make efforts at course corrections.

This younger generation of college students saw cancel culture, and they’re not interested in taking part in it. I’m hopeful that things are moving in a better direction for higher education and for our democracy.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Neil for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was AI and Human Connections.

Our first speaker was Allison Pugh a Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins and the author of a book entitled The Last Human Job: Seeing Each Other in an Age of Automation.

Our second speaker was Eddie Monroe who is working on teaching AI how to love. He is the lead for building artificial intelligence for the Loving AI Research Project.

Our conversation focused on the concern that AI may undermine human relationships and lead to greater loneliness and what we can do about it.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Why All Cities Grown Alike, here.

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Shlomo Angel

Subject: Why All Cities Grow Alike
Bio: Professor of City Planning at NYU and Author of Planet of Cities

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Why All Cities Grow Alike.

Our speaker is Shlomo Angel who is a Professor of City Planning at NYU and the author of the book entitled Planet of Cities.

I want to learn why all the world’s cities look nearly identical from space, and why we should embrace sprawl and not fight it.

Shlomo can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Shlomo Angel:

I wrote Planet of Cities thinking, all cities are unique, just like you and me. We all want to be unique until we fall sick. The last thing we want is a doctor telling us that we have a unique disease. The same medical model applies to cities.

For most of human history, cities exist everywhere, but only about 10% of people lived in them. Beginning around 1800, improvements in agricultural productivity, transportation, and public health made it possible for people to move from living closer to the land to living closer to each other.

I call this transformation the urbanization project, and by the end of this century, it will only have taken about 300 years, and then it will be over. In much of the global north, the period of urban population growth has ended, while in much of the global south it is still proceeding at a good speed.

Urban expansion in the global north acquired a bad name. We call it sprawl but a rapidly growing city like Bangalore India cannot contain its expansion while tripling its population.

My definition of planning is simple: what do we have to do now to prepare for a future that we know is coming? My answer for rapidly growing cities is simple: arterial roads and no build-zones.

By no build-zones, I mean protecting lands that remain free of development, and the larger public open spaces the future city will need.

By arterial roads, I mean a spaced grid of wide roads that can carry public transport over the future expansion area. The essential task is to protect the rights of way of that grid now before development arrives. Why do it now? Because once thousands of houses have been built, acquiring these rights of way becomes enormously expensive and politically impossible.

This is what I call minimalist urban planning, as opposed to comprehensive master planning that tries to anticipate and regulate everything and ends up collecting dust on municipal walls. Minimalist planning asks, what is the minimum that government must do now that cannot easily be done later? The answer is to estimate how much land the city will need, protect places where development should not occur, and secure their arterial rights of way.

Keeping planning simple is essential because many rapidly growing cities have limited technical capacity, limited budgets, and weak powers of enforcement.

A second great difference between the global north and the global south is the informal settlement of cities. The city is being built incrementally, and planning has to work with that process rather than simply declaring it illegal.

The lesson I would like listeners to take from Planet of Cities is in rapidly growing cities, planning is about something elemental - making room for a city that does not yet exist. The opportunity to make that room exists only once, in a window that will close before the end of this century.

Larry Bernstein:

You showed in your book that density is declining almost everywhere -- not just the U.S. and Europe, but worldwide -- at about a minus 2% a year. What does that mean for a metropolitan area?

Shlomo Angel:

More research has confirmed what I initially discovered: overall densities are declining all over the world. Land consumption is increasing — density is the reciprocal of land consumption per person.

Look at the population of Lagos and Paris — Paris is three and a half times larger than Lagos. The income per capita in Paris is 10 times what it is in Lagos. Higher incomes create demand for more space. In sub-Saharan Africa, density has remained stable. In other places, like China, it’s been declining considerably, because people are so much better off than they were before.

Cities have stopped growing, densities are declining because of population decline. We’re talking about cities in Japan losing population and, as a result, declining density.

To answer your question in more numerical terms: a 2% decline in density means that in 30 years density becomes half of what it was before. If there’s a million people living in a certain city, they consume twice as much land as they did 30 years ago.

In 1800, the time of Napoleon, Paris was 11 square kilometers and housed 500,000 people. By 2014, it was 2200 square kilometers and housed 11 million people. The population Paris grew by 20 times, and the area of Paris grew by 200 times.

There’s both a population increase and a density decline, and they work together. New York City is one of the three examples that I use when I talk about urban expansion, because the commissioners that made the 1811 plan did it at the time when New York had only 90,000 people. They were all situated in the southern part of Manhattan, and they created a city seven times as large as the city that was there at the time.

Cerda when he won the competition for designing the expansion area of Barcelona, had the city grow by ten times. These people understood the future of urbanization.

We’ve lost that. New York, Barcelona or Berlin, are all 19th century examples. In the 20th century, we have exactly the opposite: Lucio Costa designing Brasília and saying this is going to be a city of 500,000 people, surrounded by a green belt. Today Brasília has 5.5 million people, and 5 million people live outside the green belt. Some people understand urban expansion and some people don’t.

Larry Bernstein:

Paul Krugman in his book Geography and Trade said that the area of a circle is so doubling the radius quadruples the land area. That’s the arithmetic behind Paris absorbing a 200-fold area increase and still being commutable -- about fourteen miles. Is that the mechanism that makes this livable?

Shlomo Angel:

Absolutely. The whole idea of urbanization is tied with the idea of compactness — people want to live as close as possible to each other and still have room to breathe. When a circle doubles in size, the average distance between locations is only a function of the radius of the circle, not of the area of the circle.

Larry Bernstein:

I didn’t expect Miami and Lagos to grow into similar shapes. How similar are the 4,000 cities that you studied?

Shlomo Angel:

In this field of studying cities, there are different communities: urban planners, urban geographers, and urban economists. The urban planners have been the ones championing uniqueness. Miami is unique. It’s got Cubans, it’s very flat, it’s at the edge of the United States.

Urban economists or urban geographers look at abstract forms and how these forms interact, and they try to see patterns. Those are the ones looking at generalities. If you’re talking to somebody who’s immersed in the details of the planning regulations in Miami, they will tell you this is extremely unique. When somebody looks at 4,000 cities, this is pretty much similar all over the place. It all depends on who you’re talking to.

Larry Bernstein:

Looking at a picture from space, the shape of Lagos, Miami, and Paris is indistinguishable. Poorer African cities are denser, but their underlying shape is basically the same. The margins have some randomness to how they expand -- but you couldn’t guess from the shape which city it was.

Shlomo Angel:

When you look at cities from space, the one thing common to all of them is they have contiguous areas of impervious surfaces. Normally, when there are no impediments and no topographical barriers, cities tend to be circular, because the circle is the geometrical locus of points that are closest to each other — not only to the center, but also to each other.

In the absence of anything else, a city will be circular. When there are intercity roads or railways, they pull out the development along the road, because the road distorts space.

Larry Bernstein:

This is a function of commute-time, not physical distance -- a fast road helps because it shrinks travel time, not miles.

Shlomo Angel:

In time, exactly — the shape reflects time rather than space. The speed on the road distorts space and makes cities more octopus-like than they would in the absence of these roads. When you have a coastline, the city develops into half a circle. Topography recognizably changes cities, because cities are built on slopes that are usually less than fifteen degrees.

Montevideo, for example, is built along the La Plata River. People like riverside views, so the city extends forever along the river. These distortions pull the cities in different directions, but the rules do not change just because of the region, or the language people speak — they are more like geometrical rules.

Larry Bernstein:

In 1996, covering emerging markets in Buenos Aires, the financial district had always been in the old downtown. The old port was redeveloped and six months later, every financial firm had moved to this brand-new center city.

Shlomo Angel:

You’re talking about Buenos Aires and Puerto Madero.

Larry Bernstein:

That shift happened almost overnight, in 1997 -- one financial district emptying into a brand-new one. What does that experience teach us?

Shlomo Angel:

It happens all the time. Traditional centers in European and Latin American cities have been dense with narrow streets and older buildings that require a lot of maintenance and, importantly, no parking. When people get better off, they leave the traditional centers and move out.

Montevideo, across the river from Buenos Aires — its traditional center completely emptied. I was offered a building there, the former British sports club, for $100,000. Nobody wanted it, because there was not enough parking. The traditional centers become tourist attractions.

We’ve seen traditional historical centers abandoned, and people move out to new areas that offer modern buildings with better infrastructure.

Larry Bernstein:

Years ago, I took my kids to the NYC tenement museum -- Jacob Riis photographed inhumane conditions there, and New York changed its laws requiring more light and better airflow. It was uneconomic at the time to alter the buildings, so these lower east side buildings abandoned their upper floors and used the lower floors for retail. In the past 15 years, the lower east side was redeveloped. Today people pay a fortune to live densely. What do you make of that?

Shlomo Angel:

Thank you for asking me this question, Larry, because I have an answer that’s slightly different from the usual story.

By the end of the eighteenth century, there are four ports in the Eastern United States that trade with Europe: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Gouverneur Morris was a real estate developer, and he’s also one of the founders — he signed the constitution. Gouverneur Morris does the 1811 Plan — he’s the commissioner. Gouverneur Morris leads this idea of we’re going to do real estate for this whole island. He also chairs the commission for the Erie Canal to connect Chicago with New York, extending the Hudson River to Lake Erie. In 1820, the Erie Canal opens and gives New York an incredible advantage over the other three ports. New York becomes the main port for business with Europe, and all the business concentrates at the southern side of Manhattan. The workers crowd around this area because they can only walk to work.

Workers are inhabiting the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and the East Village, and these three communities become extremely dense. That’s where you have the story of Jacob Riis coming up with the pictures and How the Other Half Lives.

Larry Bernstein:

Better airflow -- better air shafts?

Shlomo Angel:

When you look at the plans in the tenement museum, there are no bathrooms and kitchens — those are downstairs behind the building. The apartments are only bedrooms and workrooms. Very high density.

Jacob Riis says that there’s no way to solve this problem, and the only way is to redesign the buildings, but that’s uneconomic.

In 1897, New York acquires four other counties — the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island and expands its area enormously By 1903 there’s the first subway, and the legislation says it’s got to be a nickel fare. These people now can decentralize, because they make $2 a day, and the nickel fare means only a dime for the commuting. So, the entire community moves out.

Density lowers in a matter of twenty years; it goes down to normal. People acquire houses in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, and the problem goes away. Those places become generally abandoned, low quality. Then you start to have gentrification and get close to the action.

Larry Bernstein:

Manhattan’s grid is the proof of concept -- as if the commissioners had read your book a hundred years earlier. The insight is that you want that grid extended infinitely, laid down in the farmland before the suburbs arrive. Explain the magic of spacing big roads a kilometer apart, and how hard it is once the sprawl is built.

Shlomo Angel:

The grid is normally contrasted with the radials and circumference. The grid expands infinitely. Radials start out very close to each other, you move out, they get further and further away from each other. The idea of an arterial grid is that it puts you within walking distance of public transport.

Walking distance is the distance of a woman carrying bags or having a kid with her. We can do a mile grid, which is what you have in Chicago, but you can’t walk a mile to get to public transportation. A kilometer grid puts public transportation within walking distance of regular people. That’s why we’re recommending the one-kilometer grid.

Larry Bernstein:

Sometimes you get a second chance -- a catastrophe destroys everything. I asked Ed Glaeser, after the Pacific Palisades fire, what he’d change. He said: wider roads and greater density increase property values -- everyone wins. Would any of that happen?

Shlomo Angel:

The planners, the people who think that when things are leveled you get a second chance, get it wrong. In 1666, London burned down. Sir Christopher Wren, a highly esteemed architect, came to the king with a plan with arterial roads, and said, “this is our chance, let’s do that.”

And the king said that this fire was traumatic. If I start expropriating land, there’s going to be a revolution — the king refused to expropriate the land. People started to clean the debris and rebuilt London exactly along the same property lines two weeks later. What people don’t understand when they see rubble — they don’t understand it in Gaza, in Katrina, and in Ukraine that under the rubble there are property rights, and that people are not going to give up these property rights. Acquiring those property rights is just as difficult as it would be when the thing is constructed. That is why I work with Ed on the article he published on Gaza, and I said the first thing to do in Gaza is register property rights. That’s why there is never a second chance.

Larry Bernstein:

What about Tokyo? The Americans firebombed it, and it came right back.

Shlomo Angel:

What happened in Tokyo is exactly what we’re recommending in many other places that are being redeveloped, which is land pooling and readjustment. What happened in Tokyo and in Seoul, is people getting together, thirty people, but not thousands of people, pooling their land and creating a plan for that land and redividing the plots among them and leaving more land for public use, widening the roads. Tokyo was rebuilt with land pooling.

Larry Bernstein:

That’s what Ed Glaeser wanted for Pacific Palisades as well -- but didn’t get.

Shlomo Angel:

That’s right. But for this, what you need is heavy involvement on the part of the landlords themselves. I’ve been trying to do this in Malawi, and I got the tribal chiefs to agree to have people pool their lands and subdivide them. What you need is bottom-up planning, not top-down. If some planners come in and say we’re going to do these roads, no. Get out of here. But if you get the people from below to organize and say, here’s a reallocation which will increase the value of the land and put more land in public use, they agree. There must be trust, and when there is, it works. When people are distrustful of each other, when they’re distrustful of government, when they think, others are going to steal their land, it doesn’t work.

Larry Bernstein:

Take Paris, the government decided to knock down old Paris and redesign it with wide avenues. Paris was a counterexample.

Shlomo Angel:

Napoleon the Third appoints Baron Haussmann to widen this road to create a boulevard. Baron Haussmann knows that it’s going to be very difficult, so he offers very generous compensation. He says, “I’m going to give you more than what your land is worth.” He’s going to compensate them according to the new value. Moreover, Haussmann says, as I’m widening the road here, I’m going to take 30 meters on each side of the road, I’m going to expropriate that too, then I’m going to sell it back to developers to finance the road. The city council stopped him. City Council of Paris said, “no, you can only expropriate the land for the road.” He managed to build like 20 highways before they got rid of him.

Larry Bernstein:

Bangkok doesn’t follow the Shlomo rules -- no grid, so the result is chaos. Everyone can gain if we adopt the Paris approach: have the state take the land using eminent domain, increase its value, and sell it back. If it can get done in Paris, why not Bangkok?

Shlomo Angel:

Here’s the problem. With modern democracy, the only place where this can be done efficiently and effectively is China. China, you want to introduce high speed rail? All this land is state land. In two years, they built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. The US has zero. India, the largest democracy in the world, has exactly zero.

Larry Bernstein:

Is your point that a government with real eminent domain power can achieve miracles, while one that only has it in theory, not in practice, can’t?

Shlomo Angel:

Yes. All governments have eminent domain. In practice, it hasn’t worked because it has been abused — the eminent domain was used to get the New York Times the building that it wants. So if you abuse it, you lose it.

The reapplication of eminent domain is one of the greatest challenges of modern democracies. If they don’t do this, it’s going to be at their own peril. To get high speed rail, you need to straighten the lines and acquire land.

If there was a strong government rule that says eminent domain for public use cannot be challenged — you must give up the land, you get due compensation, and goodbye. We’ve lost that, at great cost, to create efficient cities.

Larry Bernstein:

What is a power law? Tell us about George Zipf’s observation about geography.

Shlomo Angel:

George Zipf’s law says that when you rank cities by their population size, the second city is going to be half the size of the largest city population. The third city is going to be one-third the size, and so on. When you group large numbers of cities you do get a result that approximates this law.

Larry Bernstein:

At the American Revolution, the population was concentrated within a hundred miles of the coastline, in a few small towns: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. A century or two later, those are the same places with massive urban environments. Why is that?

Shlomo Angel:

I started my career — one of the first questions that I asked myself is why are settlements where they are? It turns out that there are rules about why settlements thrive in certain places and not in other places. So, for example, no settlement gets built in places that have no water. Water is the number one requirement. Then you want to be in places which are along routes, or junctions — like a port, or an intersection of two major highways. Places that are defensible. When you’re looking at these ports along the eastern seaboard, the best places for ports. Boston, Baltimore, and New York. The one city that stands out is Washington.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s the Brasília of the United States.

Shlomo Angel:

Exactly — just like Canberra, Brasília, or Chandigarh. It’s interesting that you mentioned the population being a hundred miles from the coast, because when states were looking for places for their capitals, people were complaining about all the capitals being along the coast and forced the new capitals to move inwards.

You have all these artificial places that were created, like Albany — Albany was nothing, it was just created as the state capital of New York.

What I’m saying is there’s an inertia that comes from a good location. Places along the coast are the ones that had the best ports, and there’s a huge startup cost. Cities are connected to everything else, and these connections are difficult to create and to replicate. The fact that New York was there first and created all these commercial connections with Europe made it hard for other ports to compete. Those who got there first have an advantage that is not easily taken away.

Larry Bernstein:

Rome was destroyed and took a thousand years to rebuild. Constantinople fell in 1453 and wasn’t rebuilt for a long time. Tell me about destruction with no rebirth.

Shlomo Angel:

Do I know any city today that has been abandoned or that has never been rebuilt? In the US, there used to be gold rush towns that were abandoned because the economic activity was not there anymore. But if you look at a major metropolis, I agree with you that Rome went from a million to 80,000. The same happened to Constantinople. But these are rare examples. Constantinople today is a huge metropolitan area and so is Rome.

Larry Bernstein:

South Korea’s fertility rate is 0.8 -- every generation is a sixty percent drop. What is the future of Asian cities?

Shlomo Angel:

Look at Detroit. It is abandoned — so in any block with twenty plots, there are two people living in two houses. So, then it becomes a matter of reorganizing it, let’s get rid of this block completely, make it into a park, and concentrate the people so that they live in blocks with somebody in every house on the block.

We haven’t invented yet this idea of some clean abandonment process where we say this village is abandoned, the people from that village move to the other village, and we can erase that one, turn it back into agriculture. Detroit, it is not like the whole place is abandoned. What you do get is patches of development and a lack of resources to sustain them. We don’t have a serious, organized process for moving people around. And it goes back to my earlier point of the stickiness of property rights.

Larry Bernstein:

Portland set out to manage sprawl; Houston and Las Vegas never had a plan – These three cities ex post is about the same. Your takeaway is don’t fight it, because as people get richer, they want to live less densely. Let the urban area expand, lay down arterial roads ahead of time, and accept it.

Shlomo Angel:

I want to draw your attention to a friend of mine, Alain Bertaud, who wrote a book called Order Without Design, which answers this question.

The planners think like architects — we create plans and people build according to the plans. That’s architecture. Planning is not architecture — planning just prescribes a few minimal rules and allows the market to shape cities. Planners don’t like that. They think of themselves as deciders rather than enablers.

The idea of trying to prescribe too much has always been frustrating for planners. They’re surprised that nobody follows their ideas. What do you care about whether there’s an office building here or a house here? When the time comes, somebody will want to build there, let them build there. And the same with density — you can’t tell people who build towers where the economics of towers do not justify building towers.

Planning doesn’t tell these people what to do — it can only say these are the rules and you work within these rules. If you create rules that are unworkable, then just simply ignore the rules, or make sure you vote them out of office so that they can change the rules.

The big mistakes that people make are overprescribing. Maybe in the case of Portland, Oregon, they’re managing to hold on to their urban growth boundary simply because Portland is not growing very fast. And where it grows is across the Willamette River into Washington State. So, there’s a way of escaping this urban growth boundary.

Tokyo in the 40s had a green belt. The area within the green belt was like 480 square kilometers, and Tokyo today is 6,400 square kilometers — it’s 14 times larger than the area within the green belt.

Don’t try to restrict what cities do. It’s better to let things work out and let the market decide on density. It’s a much more intelligent system than prescribing too much.

Larry Bernstein:

What are you optimistic about as it relates to the future of cities?

Shlomo Angel:

I love cities, Larry. They are like fountains of creativity, new ideas on art, science and exploration. The beautiful thing is that we can live and create together. The New York metropolitan area, twenty-two million living together, interacting. And it’s peaceful.

New York is truly the first diverse city in the world. This is a city where there’s no local population — every local is from somewhere. That togetherness to work together, act together, think together and solve the problems of this planet together.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Shlomo for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Cape Fear Won’t Die.

We were joined by our What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz and my good friend Ethan Holland who has been a state prosecutor for the past 27 years.

We reviewed the new Cape Fear Apple TV series along with the two previous movies.

Please join us next week with Allison Pugh and Eddie Monroe who will be discussing AI and human connections. Allison is worried that AI will undermine our already fragile human relationships while Eddie is optimistic that AI can teach us to love.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Cape Fear Won’t Die, here.

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Darren Schwartz and Ethan Holland

Subject: Can Evolution Explain Our Feelings?
Bio: Darren Schwartz: What Happens Next Culture Critic, Ethan Holland: State Prosecutor of 27 years

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Cape Fear Won’t Die.

Our What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz will be leading us in conversation. We also have a special guest my good friend Ethan Holland who has been a state prosecutor for the past 27 years.

This week’s episode is on Cape Fear. It started with John MacDonalds’ novel the Executioners that was written in the 1950s. The story was adapted into two movies and now a newly released Apple TV series.

The main character is Max Cady an ex-con who is pissed off at his defense attorney. Cady is played by Robert Mitchum in the original 1962 movie and Robert De Niro in the 1991 remake.

Ethan in your experience as a state prosecutor when an ex-con is threatening, can the law protect you?

Ethan Holland:

The law can protect you. What’s interesting about this movie is that Robert Mitchum and Robert De Niro go right up to that line. In the 1962 movie, Martin Balsam plays a police chief, and his great quote was either we have too many laws or not enough. Yes, the law can protect you, but you can’t arrest somebody for something they haven’t done yet. The movie is effective because Max Cady is so menacing without going over the line, without being able to charge him with specific crimes.

Larry Bernstein:

Max Cady kills the family dog. It turns out it’s a $150 fine.

Ethan Holland:

There’s no evidence. You’re led to believe that he poisoned the dog, but they can’t prove it.

Darren Schwartz:

He was sitting on their fence in full view that was a metaphor like, “If I go over, it’s a problem, but I know where I should be to not get in trouble.”

Larry Bernstein:

Max Cady before he goes to prison is illiterate. In prison, he achieves personal growth in mind, body, and soul. He reads law books, gets physically ripped, and becomes spiritual but in a bad way. He’s memorized parts of the Bible but has misinterpreted them in an evil way.

Ethan Holland:

In the 1991 movie, they do a pan of Max Cady’s cell. You have law books, Nietzsche, a picture of Stalin. It was bizarre. He is doing dips with a menacing tattoo on his back.

Larry Bernstein:

What would a parole board have done with Max Cady in the real world?

Ethan Holland:

As long as you don’t do anything in prison, you’re going to do 50% of your sentence. The only sentence that you do 100% in Illinois is for murder. Post-1999, with the truth in sentencing, you would get paroled early.

Larry Bernstein:

You’re in prison, you’re mad, you’re angry at the system, you’re angry at individuals. Is this common when an ex-con gets out to go after somebody for putting them in the can?

Ethan Holland:

You have 23 hours a day to think about it in your cell and one hour of exercise outside.

Larry Bernstein:

Who do ex-cons get mad at the prosecutor, the judge, your own defense attorney, witnesses, the victim? Who’s most exposed?

Ethan Holland:

You’re probably angry at the person testifying against you. If you feel like a prosecutor is not treating you fairly, you might start obsessing. If you feel like that judge has been making incorrect rulings that hurt your case, you could focus on the judge.

Ethan Holland:

In the first movie he focuses on the witness Gregory Peck. They’re having a conversation outside his car when Max Cady reaches in and pulls out his keys. I spent eight years in prison and Gregory Peck was like, “Well, yeah, you did it. You committed the crime.”

Larry Bernstein:

The story evolved and became more complicated with each new movie and TV series. In the ‘62 movie, our hero Gregory Peck was a witness who told the truth about Cady’s rape. In the 1991 film, Nick Nolte was now Cady’s defense attorney who refused to expose Cady’s rape victim’s sexual promiscuity. Then in the new Apple TV series, Amy Adams plays Cady’s defense attorney, who was aware from a leak that the jury was leaning towards acquittal, but she still encourages Cady to plea bargain. With each new Cape Fear rendition, Cady gets more justified in his anger and that improves the story because there are shades of gray.

Darren Schwartz:

Scorsese rewrote the script. He thought that the Bowden family was too nice. He infused moral complexity and made it much more interesting. You needed Nick Nolte to be dirty for Max Cady to seem justified. You’re thinking, “he’s really a maniac, but there’s a reason here.”

Larry Bernstein:

In the 1991 movie, Nick Nolte playing Sam Bowden is a man of the law. He recognizes that the criminal justice system won’t protect his family. He chooses illegal methods to protect himself. Why can’t the law help him?

Ethan Holland:

I’m a prosecutor. I don’t investigate crime, I prosecute it. There’s a tension between law enforcement and prosecutors because prosecutors want to have the strongest case, and law enforcement wants to charge the bad guy. This movie lays bare that sometimes you have to wait for there to be a crime. You can’t go with your gut and say, “This is a bad guy. We need to arrest him.”

Larry Bernstein:

In the 1991 movie Martin Scorsese directed it and changes the plot. Where previously the family unit acted in unison against Cady. Now the family structure is broken. Cady splits them. Jessica Lange plays Sam Bowden’s wife. She doesn’t trust her husband because of previous infidelities. And Bowden’s daughter is played by Juliette Lewis and has a sexual interest in Max Cady.

Darren Schwartz:

The marriage was undermined by Nick Nolte’s actions. You could see it in the wife’s relationship that filters down to the daughter.

Larry Bernstein:

Juliette Lewis plays the daughter and runs away with the movie. She is spectacular.

Darren Schwartz:

She was so good. She was 16 during shooting.

Larry Bernstein:

Robert De Niro as Max Cady persuades Juliette Lewis to meet him in the school auditorium where he makes a move on her.

Darren Schwartz:

How about a kiss?

Larry Bernstein:

Oh my God.

Darren Schwartz:

He was 50 and she was 16.

Ethan Holland:

How about the thumb in the mouth.

Darren Schwartz:

I tried to black that out.

Ethan Holland:

That was rough.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren and I saw the 1991 movie together.

Darren Schwartz:

There were shocking scenes.

Larry Bernstein:

I had a blanket over my head. I couldn’t watch.

Darren Schwartz:

Larry, I didn’t know you had emotions.

Larry Bernstein:

I was scared.

Darren Schwartz:

It really was one of the best psychological thrillers. You feel like violence was happening without showing it, which is kind of an art form which is maybe a little lost. And the end was truly magnificent. I don’t speak in tongues that often, and I don’t hear it a lot. To hear Robert De Niro speak in tongues was an amazing way to close out act three.

Larry Bernstein:

In 1962, when the first movie came out, there’s a scene where Robert Mitchum playing Max Cady leers at the daughter on the boat, and the British censors said, “We think that scene has to go.”

Darren Schwartz:

Just from leering?

Larry Bernstein:

Compare that with Juliette Lewis sucking on Robert De Niro’s thumb. That was a whole different kettle of fish.

It gets to the old social mores. In ‘62, it was enough to give a leering glance to set off the censors.

Ethan Holland:

By ’91, anything goes.

Larry Bernstein:

Sucking on that thumb? Would that be allowed in theaters today?

Darren Schwartz:

It would’ve gotten by the censors. The question is would the movie makers make it? The morals are low, but the ethics are high. No one’s ever said that.

Larry Bernstein:

We can look that up.

Darren Schwartz:

I also want to comment on old stuff. One of those lines I wrote down, Sam Bowden walks in

Larry Bernstein:

This is in the 1962 film.

Darren Schwartz:

His wife is all dressed up. She knows he’s going through some stress. He goes, “Why are you dressed up, woman? I hope there wasn’t a party I’ve forgotten.” She goes, “This is for morale. All the fancy magazine articles tell you to get dressed up for your husband.”

I’ve never experienced that.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, in the new 10-part TV series, can you comment on how the family unit has broken down?

Darren Schwartz:

You’ve got the son who’s had issues, social media played a role. He shared pictures of a girl he shouldn’t have. You’ve got a daughter who knows that her father is not Sam Bowden.

Larry Bernstein:

What about Bowden’s wife, played by Amy Adams.

Darren Schwartz:

She’s an alcoholic. There’s a lot of strings for Max Cady to pull.

Larry Bernstein:

Max Cady has progressed through these films. Max Cady is smart, but by the time we get to the TV series, he borders on being a genius, so clever that the Bowden family is completely outmatched. Cady seems to have the law and the public on his side. He can split each of the family members with ease. They don’t know what to do.

Darren Schwartz:

When Cady gets out of prison, the people are behind him. They’ve got t-shirts as well as social media.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s like Hamas.

Darren Schwartz:

It reminded me of the Lacey Clancy case where you have people that are super vocal because there’s social media, they aren’t sure what the cause is, just, “Hey, someone got wronged. I want to align with them.” What is your experience Ethan with that as it relates to Lacey Clancy?

Ethan Holland:

I saw the crowds outside that courthouse. You also had that with Karen Reed, the other murder in Massachusetts who was acquitted of killing her boyfriend with a car. There’s a need to have a sense of belonging. Clancy has mental health issues. You don’t just strangle your three kids.

Larry Bernstein:

Ethan, in the series, Max Cady pleads, but in the first scene, Max Cady’s ex-girlfriend kills herself and leaves a suicide note admitting she did the crime. Immediately, Cady’s released. Is that how it works even with a plea when someone else comes forward and says, “I was the one that did it,” but Max Cady in his plea agreement said that he did it.

Ethan Holland:

If there’s new evidence that comes forward, it’s incumbent upon law enforcement to figure out whether it’s correct. People plea for different reasons: because they did it, they’re being offered a sentence that they can live with or think they may get a higher sentence if they go to trial.

A hundred percent you bring it forward. I couldn’t live with myself if I thought somebody was sitting in jail and hadn’t done it.

Larry Bernstein:

In the 1991 Scorsese movie, Nick Nolte plays Sam Bowden who is convinced that his client Max Cady raped the girl and refuses to disclose information that the victim has been sexually promiscuous.

Ethan Holland:

There are rape shield laws. You cannot bring in somebody’s past sexual history to dirty up the victim.

Larry Bernstein:

Max Cady held a grudge that his defense attorney decided not to pursue this.

Ethan Holland:

The role of a defense attorney is to zealously represent your client. It’s not to pass judgment on your client. Nick Nolte buried it. But there are plenty of reasons why a defense attorney may make strategic decisions not to dirty up a victim.

Maybe their trial strategy is that the state can’t prove their case. Dirtying up the victim may work against you. In this case, Nick Nolte found this information out and did not run out every ground ball. He didn’t make decisions that were in the best interest of his client, or at least that’s what Cady believed.

Larry Bernstein:

Everyone is morally compromised. The success of the movies and the series is that the film makes you incredibly uncomfortable.

Where is Max Cady? We’re constantly on the lookout for him. I’m screaming at the TV, “Just run!” And finally, they do run, and unfortunately, they run to Cape Fear, and he’s either under the car or on his way.

Discomfort works for a two-hour film, but for a 10-part series that’s nearly 10 hours long, it’s exhausting.

Darren Schwartz:

It was so long, they reused some devices. How many times can the police come to a house?

Ethan Holland:

You can have as many search warrants as they can get a judge to sign. Having said that, the interesting thing about both movies was that Sam Bowden has all the levers of power. He’s got the police chief and the investigators on his side. He’s the lawyer, an officer of the court, and it doesn’t matter. You see how they abuse the process. The police chief and Sam Bowden are trying to figure out a way to get this guy to leave town. They have no right to do it, but they are escalating the situation. They’re making him strip search. Dehumanizing him and letting him know he has absolutely no power.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s give Max Cady credit. He keeps his cool. You want me to strip search me? Happy to get naked. I’ve been in prison for eight years. I’ve been dehumanized. This is JV.

Ethan Holland:

In the ’91 version, Cady gets sexually graphic about what had happened to him in prison. The point is they can’t scare him. He is doing all the scaring. They can’t touch him because he’s already been to prison and already lived through much worse.

Darren Schwartz:

My complaint about the series; it was too long. Within each episode you had the same arc where there’s this shock at the end, like biting the toe off or there was a woman living in the wall or we’re arresting someone again. But the scene where he was attacked in prison in the series with the kettle bells.

Larry Bernstein:

I use kettle bells.

Darren Schwartz

And he put a guy’s face through one of the bench press bars. Cady must get a metal plate in his head. There was shock value that was over the top.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s defend the TV series.

Darren Schwartz:

I just did the opposite.

Larry Bernstein:

We were upset. We kept watching. Did you ever binge?

Darren Schwartz:

I did two, maybe three. And the reason I completed it is because Larry said, “Let’s do Cape Fear and we’ll do the book, two movies and a series.” I said, “Okay, fine. I got to finish.”

Larry Bernstein:

No, you were pumped up. To get back on the podcast, you grabbed Cape Fear by the neck.

Darren Schwartz:

I could have strayed. We all have TV shows where you’re five episodes in, you’re a little sideways on it, and maybe you come back to it later. I did that with The Wire. Phenomenal.

Larry Bernstein:

I agree. Will there be a second season of Cape Fear?

Darren Schwartz:

Maybe.

Larry Bernstein:

The prequel?

Darren Schwartz:

It was a nice run. It was the most work we’ve done for anything. We’ve watched three movies, a series and the Simpsons.

Larry Bernstein:

Ethan, in the series, Amy Adams plays the defense attorney, and soon after the conviction, she marries the prosecutor. Does that automatically result in a mistrial?

Ethan Holland:

I wasn’t dating her then.

Larry Bernstein:

I just fell in love with her.

Ethan Holland:

The facts and the timeline matter. There’s an appearance of a conflict.

Larry Bernstein:

They are married. That’s not in doubt.

Ethan Holland:

Did Max Cady get a fair trial? Questions can be raised if they’re a couple talking about the case. Is she really working in her client’s best interest? It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test

Larry Bernstein:

When you have a 10-part series, you’re turning it into a soap opera.

Darren Schwartz:

To show how Apple viewed the whole cannon of the story, they marketed it as “based on the novel and inspired by the 1991 film.”

Larry Bernstein:

Next topic is this a cash problem. When an ex-con calls you up after being released and says that you did me wrong. The first option is to offer cash. Tell me about Sam Bowden’s proposal to Max Cady in the 1962 film.

Ethan Holland:

Gregory Peck offers him 10 grand, which is like a hundred grand now. He said, “I’ll pay you 10 grand now and 10 grand later.” That’s real money.

Darren Schwartz:

Gregory Peck’s doing well financially. He’s got that kind of cash to throw.

Larry Bernstein:

One of the clever aspects of the two movies and the TV series is they bring back former actors from the previous film to be in the next film. Robert Mitchum, who played Max Cady in the original 1962 film, now plays the police chief in 1991. Gregory Peck, who had played Sam Bowden in the original now is the lawyer representing Max Cady in a court proceeding. Juliette Lewis in the ‘91 movie plays Bowden’s daughter and now in the Apple TV series plays Max Cady’s half-sister. Martin Balsam plays the police chief in ‘62 and then plays the judge in ‘91. Darren, how do you feel about bringing these actors back?

Darren Schwartz:

It’s a nice homage to the original and possibly hooks some people. It’s a gimmick that’s been used before. Ghostbusters was remade in 2016, Bill Murray played a ghost de-bunker, Dan Ackroyd was a cab driver, and Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts all played new roles. Also, in 2005 Adam Sandler did a reboot of Burt Reynold’s The Longest Yard, and Reynolds played a different character in that as well.

Ethan Holland:

Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he’s as pure as a driven snow. For all intents and purposes, he’s Atticus Finch in the ‘62 version.

Larry Bernstein:

In the 1991 Scorsese movie, Gregory Peck returns as Cady’s lawyer reprimanding Nick Nolte.

Ethan Holland:

The first thing Nick Nolte does when he realizes that he’s in hot water, he calls Gregory Peck to have him represent him.

“Yeah, I got a conflict. Max Cady has already outflanked you and hired me as his attorney.”

Larry Bernstein:

There’s panic on his face.

Ethan Holland:

Max Cady’s playing chess even though Nick Nolte is the successful lawyer. Max Cady is outmaneuvering him at every turn.

Larry Bernstein:

Cape Fear is a Gregory Peck production. He acquired the script and invested $1 million of his own money to make Cape Fear.

He recognized that Max Cady was the more interesting character and that Robert Mitchum would be the real star of the movie.

Darren Schwartz:

Peck wanted to get Robert Mitchum in the film. They weren’t friends but they respected each other. Peck knew that Robert Mitchum could play that role. He could never do it; he was the clean-cut guy.

Larry Bernstein:

Robert Mitchum dresses like you Darren. He looks sharp. Darren, did you see yourself at the bar in Robert Mitchum’s character? You’re certainly not Gregory Peck’s character.

Darren Schwartz:

I don’t have the rap sheet, but given the two, I gravitate more towards Robert Mitchum, but on the good side of the law.

Ethan Holland:

In the 1962 version, Robert Mitchum spent eight years in prison. It was a scene in a restaurant where he is the only one wearing a hat. When he went into prison in the 40s, everybody wore a hat. And then he gets out and he’s still wearing a hat.

The only other people wearing hats are the detective and the police officers. Everybody else, all the civilians, nobody wore a hat. He went into prison; he was frozen in time.

Larry Bernstein:

And do you see that when you meet prisoners during the post-conviction process.

Ethan Holland:

People that have spent a lot of time in prison. You read accounts that they don’t know how to use a phone or social media. The theory is that you are frozen in time because the world is moving on and you’re stuck doing your sentence.

Darren Schwartz:

Robert Mitchum was in jail in real life. He was arrested at 14 for vagrancy hopping freight cars. He was able to call on real life experience to play this guy.

Larry Bernstein:

You hear stuff about beating up witnesses, paying off the jury, but we don’t hear that the mob goes after prosecutors and their families. Why is that?

Ethan Holland:

It’s not effective to go after a prosecutor because there’s a million prosecutors and somebody else can be handed the file. It’s a lot more effective to go after a witness who’s going to get up on the stand and point the finger at you because without that person, you have less evidence. As long as you’re just on the up and up, defendants recognize that you’re not the problem.

Larry Bernstein:

Originally for the 1962 film, Bernard Herrmann wrote the musical score that is omnipresent in the Cape Fear film, particularly during scary moments. Elmer Bernstein alters it slightly for the 1991 film.

Ethan Holland:

The music is very effective right from the beginning. It put me in an uncomfortable mood. You’re put on edge, its suspenseful, dark, foreboding, and foreshadowing all the bad things that are about to happen.

Larry Bernstein:

Bernard Herrmann, who did the original Cape Fear theme song also was the musical composer for several Hitchcock movies such as Psycho.

Ethan Holland:

That makes sense.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, how did you see the music change between the different versions of Cape Fear

Darren Schwartz:

Well, for the book it never changed. For the movies and the series, they were all orchestral, but over time it got more intense.

1962 was kind of like planet of the apes or twilight zone.

The ’91 film score had the right amount of evil and terror, and is my favorite score

The 2026 series seemed designed to get as much cortisol running through your veins as possible, which I think was a fault of the series overall. There’s a very fast, almost indecipherable high pitch beep in there, which is now also in my nightmares.

Larry Bernstein:

And there’s a big Hitchcockian aspect to the original. It was done in black and white just like Psycho was. The cameraman had worked with Hitchcock. The director mentioned that he wanted to make it like a Hitchcock film. This was not true in the ‘91 Scorsese adaptation of the movie.

Ethan Holland:

It’s interesting that you say that because when I watched the 1962 version with my wife. The first thing she said was, “Is this Hitchcock?” “No, it’s a director named Jay Lee Thompson.” But it sounded, looked, felt like Hitchcock in the ‘62 version.

Larry Bernstein:

It was intentional. My wife, Julie, refuses to see old black and white films. How do you like watching the 1962 version?

Darren Schwartz:

It felt a little old. There are old movies that use a different style and language. There’s something called Northeast accent, which doesn’t really exist in America, but it’s how the actors talk like Katherine Hepburn. When you start getting something like that, it just doesn’t connect. It was dated.

Ethan Holland:

I don’t generally watch old movies, and having said that, watching this 1962 Cape Fear movie, I really enjoyed it and more than the ‘91 version. The old film made me want to revisit my reticence to watch old movies.

Larry Bernstein:

The Cape Fear movies include setting a trap to kill Cady. I was screaming at the TV, “Just run away!” And they’re doing the opposite. “Let’s set a trap and kill Max.”

Darren Schwartz:

But we’re the trap.

Larry Bernstein:

How about let’s use my daughter as a trap? How often do you see that, Ethan?

Ethan Holland:

People don’t use their own family members as traps. The next time I see it will be the first time. The reason why they did that is because there’s no where they can run to get away from Max Cady.

Larry Bernstein

I don’t think that’s true. Go to Cancun. There’s a lot of options.

Darren, of the 2 films and the TV series, which one did you most enjoy?

Darren Schwartz:

‘91 for me was by far the best.

Larry Bernstein:

I agree. Although I did like the ‘62 version. I hadn’t seen the ‘91 Scorsese film since it came out 35 years ago. I was blown away. I was hiding under my blanket. I was so uncomfortable. The Robert De Niro character was a scary, scary guy.

Ethan Holland:

He was more menacing. Robert Mitchum was suave and less dangerous.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, tell us about Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese’s relationship with the 1991 Cape Fear film.

Darren Schwartz:

Scorsese was set to do Schindler’s List, and Spielberg was going to do Cape Fear. And Spielberg said, “It’s not really my brand.” They switched. It worked out for everybody.

Larry Bernstein:

What would have been different if Martin Scorsese had directed Schindler’s List?

Darren Schwartz:

The outcome would’ve probably remained the same.

Larry Bernstein:

How would Spielberg have changed Cape Fear?

Darren Schwartz:

Probably a shark in the river. You gravitate to what you do.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, what is your favorite scene in the ’91 movie?

Darren Schwartz:

When Cady was chained to the remains of the boat, going down in the river, speaking in tongues. That’s one of the finest final scenes of a movie that I’ve ever seen. “What’s he saying?” And it was just a total unraveling of what he had used to fuel himself.

Larry Bernstein:

Nick Nolte comes over with a boulder to throw on Cady’s head.

Darren Schwartz:

You shrieked.

Larry Bernstein:

I was under the blanket, and when I peeked out, Cady was already out to sea. I guess he had missed with the rock.

Ethan Holland:

De Niro was speaking in tongues, which is a Pentecostal thing that people do. He’s not whining, he’s not crying. He is babbling to God and he’s drowning while he’s doing it.

De Niro has scripture written all over his body. He wants God to hold everybody accountable, apparently, except for himself because he keeps raping people.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, if Robert De Niro had not played Max Cady who would you have selected in 1991 to play the bad guy?

Darren Schwartz:

Harrison Ford

Larry Bernstein:

When he cried in Presumed Innocent, it was painful. Great smirks in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he is limited in his range.

Ethan Holland:

I don’t think he’s menacing enough. You need somebody that really frightens you, capable of being an absolute narcissistic psychopath.

Larry Bernstein:

Compare De Niro’s role in Taxi Driver versus Cape Fear, which was a better performance? “You talking to me?”

Darren Schwartz:

Taxi Driver because it was a slow build. He wasn’t a bad guy to start. There’s a voiceover at the beginning where he says he must clean out his cab, remove the blood, and other stuff. He’s working, trying to survive, and he develops an attraction to a girl that’s not returned, gets a mohawk and goes nuts. We’ve all been there. But his commitment to the craft is unparalleled. For Cape Fear, he paid a dentist five thousand dollars to jack up his teeth, and then twenty thousand after fixing them.

Ethan Holland:

Max Cady was bad from the start.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, what do you know about the origin of the source material. John Macdonald wrote the novel The Executioners in 1957 – was this based on a true story?

Darren Schwartz:

No. A friend and fellow writer MacKinlay Kantor gave him shit about writing trashy novels and challenged him to write a real book.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, you’ve recently finished writing a novel. How do you think about bringing thoughts or experiences into the world?

Darren Schwartz:

I think for a lot of people, having a creative outlet for their thoughts is essential. You and I both have very active minds, and that energy has to go somewhere to nourish ourselves. You’ve done book clubs and intellectual forums for years. For me, writing is an outlet I’ve always wanted to explore. This novel started with a singular thought – what would an advanced species think about our addiction to social media.

Larry Bernstein:

And what would they think?

Darren Schwartz:

They’d probably think we’re fucking nuts.

Larry Bernstein:

The three of us watched The Simpsons, season five, episode two, entitled “Cape Feare.”

Ethan Holland:

It was very funny. Sideshow Bob is one of the best villains in The Simpsons playing the Max Cady-like character obsessed with Bart because Bart is always foiling his evil plans. It was very clever and funny.

Darren Schwartz:

It’s hysterical how many different forms of this story we watched. It was a perfect capper to our assignment.

Larry Bernstein:

They had only 22 minutes in The Simpsons to capture the essence of it, and they did it with Sideshow Bob tied underneath the car.

Ethan Holland:

I am a huge Simpsons fan. Conan O’Brien produced this one. It was fresh. The Simpsons doesn’t get dated.

Darren Schwartz:

Cape Feare is ranked seventh all time for the Simpsons.

Larry Bernstein:

When Sideshow Bob is threatening Bart’s family, the Simpsons decide to hide with the witness relocation program. Ethan, tell us about Witness Relocation program in practice.

Ethan Holland:

In my line of work in state court, we don’t give people new identities. But if a witness is in danger or there has been a threat that we can confirm, we do help them move. If people don’t feel safe, they’re not going to testify.

When somebody’s relocated, we disclose to the defense how much money we have given them. We pay their rent, so they feel comfortable coming to court.

They move to a different location, usually not very far away. We’re moving them within the city they live in, but it’s to a neighborhood where they don’t have a target on their back.

Larry Bernstein:

Homer Simpson embraces the move.

Ethan Holland:

He’s wearing a t-shirt that says witness relocation, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Larry Bernstein:

And a cap that says WLP.

Ethan Holland:

Homer’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s certainly not that concerned about Bart getting these threatening letters that were penned in Sideshow Bob’s blood. There was one that had different writing and Homer fessed up that he had sent that threatening letter to Bart because he had tattooed wide load on his lower back.

Larry Bernstein:

When you ran the cold case division, how do you prioritize?

Ethan Holland:

I worked in the cold case division for 10 years. It’s organic. Police officers come to us and say, “We have this case and we need to develop evidence,” and we try to help look at what they have, see whether there is evidence that can get us over the finish line. These very old cases, witnesses die, memories fade, people move away, people get divorced, which is ironically sometimes very good for us.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you lose privilege after a divorce?

Ethan Holland:

The marital privilege is while they’re married. I only bring up divorce because people that were unwilling to come forward and tell what they knew, sometimes once that relationship is over maybe there’s some animosity.

Larry Bernstein:

20 years ago, for my book club I assigned 1599 about Shakespeare’s most productive year. I decided to watch the films of the four relevant Shakespeare plays. My wife came in and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m watching Henry V for my book club.” And she said, “Turn that shit off. We’re watching Cold Case.”

Darren Schwartz:

There you go. It’s much more engaging.

Ethan Holland:

Cold Case was. They usually solve the case within an hour.

Larry Bernstein:

For sure.

Ethan Holland:

The last shot was the guy getting arrested, and then they would flashback to what he looked like when he committed the crime.

Larry Bernstein:

And then they would show the pretty girl, the leader of the cold case division giving a glance.

Ethan Holland:

That was a good show.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, what happens next with Cape Fear?

Darren Schwartz:

The TV series was Juggernaut. Amy Adams always gets nominated. She’s very good. I’m good with Cape Fear for now, but I recommend that everybody should watch it again. And what happens next is maybe we should do something about cold cases.

Ethan Holland:

You could spin it maybe for another season of episodes because Max Cady isn’t dead. It could keep going infinitely and start menacing different people.

Larry Bernstein:

I would prefer a prequel.

Ethan Holland:

Find out why Max Cady became the prolific rapist that he was.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s end on a note of optimism.

Ethan Holland:

I’m going to stop being opposed to watching old movies.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Darren and Ethan for joining us. If you missed our previous podcast, it was Can Evolution Explain Our Feelings?

Our speaker was Rob Kurzban who is the author of a new book entitled All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation.

Rob explained how our basic sensations like hunger, pain, and sense of awe can be interpreted using Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Can Evolution Explain Our Feelings?, here.

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Rob Kurzban

Subject: Can Evolution Explain Our Feelings?
Bio: Author of All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Can Evolution Explain Our Feelings?

Our speaker is Rob Kurzban who is the author of a new book entitled All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation.

I want to learn from Rob about how our basic sensations like hunger, pain, and sense of awe can be explained by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Rob, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Rob Kurzban:

I want to start with a little story about my sister’s pet iguana named Iggy. When my sister was eight, she asked how Iggy knew what to do. I knew that Iggy had a brain that was evolved, that led to his behavior, but how did he decide when to sit on his hot rock, when to munch the lettuce, when to take a nap? Many years later, it’s possible to sketch the right answer. Evolution led to brains. These brains give rise to feelings that motivate us in different ways. The key point is that feelings are useful, they tell iguanas and people what they need to do.

As much as pain hurts, it’s still very useful. A life without pain would be fatal. People who can’t feel pain die young because they bite their tongues and don’t notice broken bones. Pain feels bad for a reason, it’s measuring damage to your body. Every feeling you’ve got has a job. Hunger, envy, awe, the urge to yawn, all of them are for something. I start with the same place with everything, which is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The central issue is function. What is the feeling for? For something to do its job, the feeling has to measure something inside or outside the body. Is there food in my stomach? Is there danger nearby? Is there a mate to impress? And then what is it motivating you to do?

With hunger, its function is to keep you fueled. It measures your caloric needs, how long has it been since you ate, how much glucose is in your blood, and if that measurement is low, it motivates you to go find food. Psychology sorted emotions using their intuitions, positive emotions versus negative, aimed at the self, versus others. I use the evolutionary view, which points to function as the way to organize things. I built a taxonomy with five kingdoms of feelings. The first one is body maintenance: hunger, thirst, the need to breathe, and then all the little departments to take out the solid, liquid and gaseous trash.

The second kingdom is external dangers and opportunities, fear and disgust on the one side, and then on the other, pleasures, a good meal, sexual activity.

The third kingdom is the social world, all of the social feelings that have to do with navigating the world with other people: love, grief, gratitude, anger, envy, shame. This is the biggest one because humans are very social.

The fourth one is the mind, thinking, curiosity, confusion, frustration, and awe.

I have a fifth kingdom, which is my escape hatch, Deja vu, that weird feeling of pain when someone makes a bad pun, that weird urge you have to squeeze something cute.

Let’s take envy. Envy makes the list of seven deadly sins and the ten commandments, thou shalt not covet. What envy does is it measures how well someone around you is doing better than you, and it motivates you to try to get whatever they’ve got: the good job, the better car, the better mate. Envy is well engineered; it doesn’t just make you envious of anybody. People aren’t envious of Elon Musk. People are envious of the people who are around them, the people that have things that they might plausibly get. This is a good way to see that natural selection is at work, it’s well engineered to measure and motivate something that is plausibly going to lead to better outcomes for the individual.

You have a lot of different feelings, and the key piece is to understand that they have a job to do. Over the course of evolution, the function had to do with motivating you to do something that was going to be good for your reproductive success or your survival. So, what I encourage you to do. Next time you experience a feeling, ask what is it measuring? What is it trying to get you to do? Think about that answer, and then make a decision about acting on it.

Larry Bernstein:

You’ve organized each chapter of the book around a specific human feeling or function. Why did you build your arguments around Greek mythology?

Rob Kurzban:

A couple of years ago, I was traveling with Angie, my partner, in Greece, and that was when I decided to spend two years writing the book. It’s an homage to that trip. As we were going through Greece, I was reminded of these myths and how skillfully the ancients captured so much about human psychology, human dynamics, and human emotions. There’s something very true about how artists have captured human psychology that goes beyond what academic psychology has done. The ancients, and then the playwrights, Shakespeare, maybe Christopher Nolan, understand and explain people in a way that goes beyond what we have in scholarly research. For me it was seeing this vast panoply of emotions explored in the classics, in the plays, in the stories, that inspired me to think about many of these individual feelings.

Larry Bernstein:

Can you give an example of a chapter that incorporates a Greek myth?

Rob Kurzban:

One myth that stood out to me was the beginning of the Trojan War. When the gods were celebrating a particular wedding, this was going to be the two people who would go on to produce Achilles, they left out Eris, the goddess of discord. She has this apple that she rolls in, and the apple has to go to the fairest. There’s a contest to see who’s the fairest of them all, and the three goddesses involved, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, say, if you name me, I’m going to give you this reward. Paris chose Aphrodite. Aphrodite said, I’m going to give you Helen of Sparta. The reason that she did that was because she was resentful of not being included. Here you’ve got this emotion resentment, which measures, did I get the thing I was entitled to? If you were up for a promotion and the boss’s friend got it and you didn’t, you would feel resentment. That’s measuring the distance between what you were entitled to and what you actually got. I like this myth because resentment isn’t something we talk about a great deal, and yet it started the whole Trojan War that started the decline of the Bronze Age. This emotion could have this spin-off effect, and the myth helps you get into the head of this goddess who’s feeling this feeling so much that it motivates her to cause this chaos.

Larry Bernstein:

Every chapter, whether it’s an emotion or a physical trait, gets explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Why make evolution the organizing principle for every single piece of who we are?

Rob Kurzban:

My background is as an evolutionary psychologist, and one of the core principles of that is that whenever you see something in nature that is complex functional design, we have one explanation for where that can come from, which is evolution. People say, “what about culture?” For me, culture is the effect, not the cause. Culture is something that brains produce, and brains are produced by evolution by natural selection. It’s not that evolution is my first choice, it’s that it’s the only game in town. It’s the only scientific explanation we have for why you see organized functional parts of matter, everything from amoebas to cats to human brains. Everything that’s complicated and has a job has an evolutionary explanation, and the trick is to figure out what the right one is. That’s why I lean heavily on the scholarly literature, because you can’t just make stuff up. You have to see the evidence.

Larry Bernstein:

Paul Rozin spoke on the podcast a couple of months ago discussing disgust and meat, Why some people love meat and others hate it, and the taboos wrapped around it. Use disgust and food as a case study in how evolution effects behavior.

Rob Kurzban:

Disgust is a great one, my former colleague Paul Rozin has done excellent work on this. You need this emotion to identify dangerous stuff that have pathogens related to decaying flesh. Meat is a rich source of nutrients, but a dead animal has no immune system and it can’t shew away pathogens that can prosper on meat. Humans need disgust to keep them away from something that is contaminated with pathogens and toxins.

Sexual disgust, people think it’s disgusting to having sex with people who are closely related to them, because of the genetics of inbreeding. The disgust is the system that measures physical dangers of contagion but also social danger. There’s something puzzling about many human cultures have taboos preventing people from doing something they don’t want to do anyway.

Most humans don’t want to have sex with a close relative, and yet there’s this big prohibition on it. Why are we preventing people from doing stuff they don’t want to do in the first place? That’s a mystery.

Larry Bernstein:

For most of human history the danger was starvation, not overeating, so our hunger system evolved to encourage us to eat more food whenever we found it. Now it has flipped. We eat too much, life expectancy suffers, and drug companies are racing to fix a problem evolution never anticipated. Explain how measurement and hunger work in the body.

Rob Kurzban:

It’s complicated. You might think hunger’s pretty easy, is my stomach full, and if it is not full, then feel hungry. It’s not like that. There’s this whole symphony of hormones and measurements, there’s neurons that are responsible for measuring how distended your stomach is, which is basically telling you how full it is. And there’s systems in your brain that are getting information about how much sugar is in your blood. Your brain has to integrate all of these into some sense of how hungry you are. Mostly the problem that our ancestors face, like every organism on the planet is having not enough, you’ve got to motivate the organism to seek out food when it can get it. You get these sweet things and then you taste them and I want to eat more of those; that’s evolution’s way of saying you’ve got a good calorie package that you should exploit.

I love capitalism, but one consequence of a capitalist economy is that a food company wants to figure out how to short circuit your head that says, I’m full, I don’t need to eat anymore. I want to undermine that so that you eat more of my thing, and those companies that do that well are going to win.

We’ve got old measurement systems fighting a modern marketing system, which is designed to find foods and flavors and combinations that undermine the satiety system that says, you’ve eaten enough. If you ask people who are on GLP1s, a lot of them say, I just don’t feel motivated, not that I don’t feel the hunger. Contrast that with other solutions to feeling hunger, if you staple the stomach, people feel hungry and they just know that if they eat, they’re going to feel unpleasant.

That is a pull instead of a push. That’s a good way to think about the differences in these interventions.

Larry Bernstein:

My bird feeders give me a natural history lesson each day. The peanut feeder causes total pandemonium because it’s such a rich, high-fat resource. But the birds only show up early in the morning and vanish by late afternoon. My bird feeder specialist told me that I needed to place the feeders near trees so the birds can hide and not feel exposed to hawks. What does that tell us about how birds weigh the value of a food source against the risk of predators, and what does that show us about our own similar trade-offs?

Rob Kurzban:

I also stock bird feeders at the back of my house. That’s the myth about where Darwin started, if you look at the shape of bird’s beaks, that tells you something about what diets they’re choosing. The birds that have the beaks that are best at getting the food that they can best consume are going to out-reproduce the other ones. Pandas are an example where there’s just one food that they’re specialized for harvesting. If you measure that there’s something out there that has a lot of calories, and I can get a big calorie package in a relatively short period of time, which minimizes my exposure to predators, I’m super motivated to eat that.

I like your point about the birds, because what that speaks to is how different feelings are competing with each other for control of the body. You have a fear system designed to measure the probability that I’m going to get preyed on, hawks hunt at dusk and dawn, so your fear system is don’t go eat, and your hunger system is like, you’re pretty hungry, you should go eat. The resulting behavior is the output of whatever that competition results in, if the animal’s starving, it’s worth the risk, but if it’s not starving, the fear system is going to be like, stay home. Thinking about feelings this way, it’s all a competition. This is my experience of the world, I have these conflicting feelings, like I want to go work out, but I’m hungry and I don’t really look forward to the pain, but I know I will look forward to feeling better. We have these conflicting feelings in our head, but at the end of the day you have to choose one. That’s what is super interesting about thinking about feelings in this way.

Larry Bernstein:

Take air composition, the most basic measurement your body requires. Why is our air system so good at measuring CO2 and so bad at measuring other dangerous gases?

Rob Kurzban:

The anecdote which caught my attention was where some NASA engineers walked intentionally into a chamber which had been filled with nitrogen. You might have thought that when you walk into a chamber with no oxygen, you sense it and exit. That is not what happens, they simply passed out, unaware that they were getting not enough oxygen. The main system in our body to detect whether we’re getting oxygen is a system to detect carbon dioxide in the blood. Normally oxygen and carbon dioxide are completely inversely correlated, because your cells engage in respiration, they use up the oxygen, carbon dioxide comes out. But in this case, the system wasn’t designed to work when there’s no new oxygen coming in. It’s easy to detect carbon dioxide dissolved in the blood, because of the way pH works. This system is designed to detect carbon dioxide in the blood, if you’re underwater and holding your breath, your carbon dioxide will go up and your oxygen won’t go up, because you’re just holding your breath, and normally that works just fine. As an evolutionary matter, measuring how much CO2 is in the blood does perfectly fine to motivate you to breathe when necessary. But in this particular instance, because you’re not measuring oxygen as it’s declining, you wind up where you’re not motivated to escape the environment. That’s how evolution works, it takes whatever it can measure to do the job, gets it done, and then the modern environment comes along and gives us a super crazy context, and then it doesn’t do the job properly. This is no different from what we were talking about in the context of hunger, we’re just in this world where tempting treats are around us.

Larry Bernstein:

In 2020, I had a bad case of COVID. My oxygen levels dropped into the 80s and I was hospitalized. Dr. Ari Ciment, who’s been on this podcast multiple times, was my doctor and he laid out my medical plan: plenty of steroids and 30x the normal concentration of oxygen pumped straight into my nose. If that didn’t work, then he would place a plastic bag over my head to maximize oxygen intake. I knew that bag would send me into a panic. He said the fear would pass in seconds, once I took that first breath and realized I was okay, then my emotional system would relax.

That sounds like two separate measurement systems firing at once, a fear system reacting to the terrifying idea of a bag over your head, and a second system tracking whether I was building up too much CO2, which I wasn’t. How does the CO2 measurement system override the fear of asphyxiation?

Rob Kurzban:

That’s a really interesting example. I have claustrophobia, and the process for me is not that different from what you described, if I’m in a window seat of an airplane, I do some CBT self-talk and I say, nothing’s happening to me, I’m going to be fine. A million people do this every second.

You get these higher-level things, the central processor, which in your case was getting this information, I’m fine, this is going to be okay. But it doesn’t stop the other system from doing its thing. It still takes a minute. These evolved systems are pretty robust, in the case of claustrophobia, my fear system is set to a very high level, if you put a plastic bag over my head, I can’t even think about it, and you’re going to have that experience of unpleasantness, and then it’s just a question of what can you do to balance it out. That’s a super interesting feature of our systems, you can balance them out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not still experiencing it.

If you’re on the road and someone cuts you off, you know that there’s no point in taking revenge on that person. The anger doesn’t just go away because it’s irrational. Those systems are in there are deep. You can inhibit them to some extent, but they need time to finish doing their work, and then you get the relief from it.

Larry Bernstein:

I read your prior two books. There’s an intellectual arc across all three. Explain how each one builds on the last, and how you got from where you started to where you are now.

Rob Kurzban:

I was very lucky to work with John Tooby and Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara for my graduate work. My purpose was to explore how the theory of evolution by natural selection could help explain and understand human experience and human behavior. The first book I wrote, Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite, was to bring ideas about evolution to a wider audience. One of the main points is that this approach allows you to think about the human mind as having lots of different pieces, each of which has a specialized job. There’s no person inside the person, there’s no little mind inside the big mind, we’re all just a lot of different parts trying to make our way through the world.

The second book was about politics; it takes off where the first one ends. It was called The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, the idea there was people adopt positions with respect to policy and they give you a good-sounding explanation for why they adopt that view, but that’s often not the real reason, there’s a hidden motive in the reason that people adopt their views. This is on all sides of the political aisle, everyone says I’m in favor of this because it’s a policy that will benefit the world, and if you dig into it, it benefits them and people like them, now, not 100%, but that’s the way to bet. How we deceive ourselves, or lie to others, about our political views, and how the modular mind explored in the first book explain that.

This third book takes up a second thread, if the evolutionary point of view explains policy, it can explain hypocrisy, it can explain self-deception, but can it explain everything we feel? That’s the culmination, it doesn’t just get policy, it doesn’t just get hypocrisy, it gets everything we can experience as humans. It’s why do you have the feelings that you have from hunger to awe to confusion. My view is that the scholarship for understanding human social behavior is very poor, I say that as someone who participated in it. A big part of the reason that it’s as bad is because not enough people have adopted the evolutionary point of view to understand and explain human behavior.

Larry Bernstein:

I end each podcast on a note of optimism. Why are you optimistic about a growing understanding for measuring what we feel?

Rob Kurzban:

I am optimistic that the field is changing. There is more and more attention being paid to the fact that psychology has failings. People talk about the replication crisis, the idea that studies in psychology have not replicated, and people are starting to take that much more seriously. That is going to improve the standards in the field, the methods that are used, the statistical techniques, and provide the guardrails against AI contaminating scholarship in a negative way.

When I started in my field, using evolutionary psychology was taboo. And now it’s one of the main tools that people use. Science is slow, it takes a long time for good ideas to spread, but good ideas, good methods, good statistics, rigorous analysis, and a theory that withstood the test of time, that’s starting to catch on, albeit slowly.

Larry Bernstein;

Thanks to Rob for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was is I Love Your Accent.

Our speaker was Valerie Fridland, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno. She is the author of the new book entitled Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.

Valerie explained why accents developed and the reason for their differences. I grew up in Chicago and I don’t think I have an accent, yet she explained why the Chicago accent is the most difficult to understand. How is that possible?

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, I Love Your Accent, here.

Subscribe now

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Valerie Fridland

Subject: I Love Your Accent
Bio: Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno and Author of Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein.  What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is I Love Your Accent.

Our speaker is Valerie Fridland who is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno. She is the author of the new book entitled Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.

I want to learn from Valerie why accents develop and if there are rhyme and reason for their differences. I grew up in Chicago and I don’t think I have an accent, yet I hear that the Chicago accent is the most difficult to understand. How is that even possible.

Valerie, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Valerie Fridland:

I am a sociolinguist. While a linguist is interested in the structure of language, a sociolinguist is interested in answering questions like: Why do New Yorkers and people from Chicago put their groceries in “bee-ags” [biægz], but in the West or LA, you’d say ”b-awe-gs” [bɔːɡz]. In the South, why there’s a drawl? Why do young people say like all the time?

Sociolinguists are interested in understanding how the inherent variation in language are due to articulatory tendencies to be more efficient or clear. Certain sounds are easier to perceive versus others. We can hear a d better than we can hear a “thuh” [ð], which is why only 8% of languages have “thuh” [ð], but many languages have “duh” [d]. Those are linguistic questions. We want to know why speakers start changing thuhs to ds, even if they are speakers of English naturally?

Take an articulatory tendency and then investigate where we’re from, ethnicity, people we interact with, or how major social changes affect our accents.

Belonging and identity are deeply tied to the way we sound. Everybody thinks they speak without an accent, but the reality is we all have an accent. The accents you don’t notice are dominant and powerful in society. And when you’re a member of that group, you think of that as the norm and therefore accent-less. But for a linguist like me, I can tell.

Accents are ancient and advantageous. Language started about 150,000 years ago in Africa. The Khoisan languages that have clicks are some of the oldest. We can trace languages back to 10 major families that likely started as one language. Migrating speakers left the cradle of Africa, they started sounding different and those differences turned into accents. Over time, when you don’t talk to each other, those accents turn into languages. That’s how Latin, after the fall of the Roman Empire, became Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Larry Bernstein:

I’m from Chicago.

Valerie Fridland:

I can hear.

Larry Bernstein:

I used to think I was totally neutral, mostly because when I listened to the national news, I didn’t hear an accent. Peter Jennings and Walter Cronkite have distinct voices, but I didn’t feel like they would feel out of place in suburban Chicago. Saturday Night Live came out with their “Da Bears” sketch. I never said The Bears like that, with the “duh” [d]. I thought it might have reflected some sub-regional language differences. Maybe it was Polish or other Eastern Europeans going to the Bears games. Tell us about “Da Bears.”

Valerie Fridland:

You fall into this myth of non-accent. If you look at who tends to have that myth, it’s often middle-class white speakers from the Midwest. The Bears “Da Bears” does have a lot of substrate influence from Eastern European languages.

In the middle of the 1800s, there was a huge amount of Eastern European immigration, also Yiddish speakers, that came into Chicago and are the foundation of working class Chicago accents. Working class features might not be visible in suburbs or middle-class speech because there is a homogenizing tendency of what you want to do professionally.

We find an intense pressure on standard language forms that moves us away from local features. If a kid’s growing up in a neighborhood where people go to college, there’s pressure to keep local features in that area reduced. But when you go into inner city that’s not the case with working class communities.

Northern Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, they’re all part of the German Belt. The Palatine Germans came in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It’s predominantly their influences felt in the upper north because Scots-Irish influences tend to be more in the Southern parts of those states. Then you get in the later 1800s other immigrants, all of whom don’t have a th sound, and second language speakers pick up that sound that their parents had problems with. Almost everybody born to non-native speaking parents don’t sound like their parents; they sound like everybody they hang out with. But that doesn’t mean they don’t sound like some of the origins of their parents.

That’s why we have “Minne-soooo-ta” [ˌmɪnɪˈsoːtə]. That becomes an influence of the culture of social belonging. It’s not that they can’t say those sounds, it’s that those sounds are revealing of who they are.

In Chicago, it’s not just “Da Bears.” They have something called the Northern City Shift, and you have some in your voice. When you say something like half, you say “hee-af” [hɛəf]. But I’m hyper articulating it.

Larry Bernstein:

My example is “roof” [ruf] versus “ruff” [rʌf]. “Ruff” [rʌf] is common here in the Midwest. When I went out East, they were like, “What are you talking about? It’s a ‘roof’ [ruf].”

I moved to Miami Beach, and I did a podcast on requiring English. In the city of Miami proper, the first language spoken at home, 70% is Spanish. That is an all-time high. It continues to drift higher. I live in Miami Beach and the numbers there are only 50% of the home’s first language is Spanish.

The use of Spanish language reflects Hispanic culture. I feel when I’m in Miami Beach, that I’m in Latin America. It’s everything. It’s food, clothing, how you walk, how you talk. Tell me about language and what makes you culturally from Miami or Chicago.

Valerie Fridland:

The base of Chicago English was the early British settlers. The building of the Erie Canal opened avenues of migration to New Englanders. New England was settled by people from East Anglia, who often had “ruffs” [rʌfs] instead of “roofs” [rufs].

The second layer was German settlement, and they ended up with a blended dialect. But Chicago fundamentally has a British cultural basis.

In Miami, it’s a new place. While you did have a mixing of settlers that spoke American English at the time, you had this huge linguistic swamping from people that spoke Spanish. There have been studies on Miami English, which is predominantly Spanish in terms of its substrate.

That’s things like saying salmon with the l, “sal-mon” [ˈsælmən], because that would be an influence in Spanish, or saying hand with more of an “awe” vowel than an “ah” vowel because Spanish doesn’t have “ah,” so you’d say “hawnd” [hɔnd]. I love going to Miami, the language is not so much Spanish, but the heritage is Spanish. And by having that in their English, it reflects the groups they belong to and the people that matter to them.

Your accents begin in childhood. We have evidence that children can hear the rhythm of the language of their mother in utero. They turn their heads five days after birth towards another speaker that speaks the same language as their mother because they’re familiar with that tempo. But if you give them a recording of someone who doesn’t have that same language, they’re less interested in it.

Then you go to school with kids that sound nothing like you; you’re going to adapt. You’re going to emerge as a speaker with a different accent over time. You pick up the language of the people that matter to you as a child and you continue that into adulthood.

If you take someone that was born in Miami to Spanish-speaking parents and you move them to Minnesota, chances of them having a Spanish substrate in their language as they get older is practically nil, because then you’ve changed the people that matter to them and the people they’re surrounded by.

Larry Bernstein:

I went with my mother to visit my “Ant” [ænt] Beatrice in London. I said to her, “Hi, Aunt Beatrice.” She said, “It’s ‘Ahnt’ [ɑnt] Beatrice.”

I had a conversation with her and she looked confused. After I finished speaking, she said to my mother, “Susie, what did your son say?” And I’m like, “I’m right here. What part of what I said did you not understand?” Then my mother would speak to her and she said, “Oh, now I understand what Larry’s saying.”

We separated from England in the 18th century, but we continued to be repopulated with new people from England, Scotland and Ireland substantially in the 19th century. And yet my “Ahnt” [ɑnt] Beatrice had challenges communicating with her grandnephew. How do you think about the split between England and the United States?

Valerie Fridland:

In Southern Britain, so in London, it’s “ahnt” [ɑnt]. That’s the prestigious pronunciation, but that’s an innovation that’s only been around for about 150 years. “Ant” [ænt] is the older form that the earliest colonists brought with them, which is why we say “ant” [ænt] in the majority of the United States. It wasn’t till the 19th century that became “awe” [ɔ] in certain words in Britain. You had the more authentic British accent.

The early colonists were not from one place in Britain. There were a lot of Irish, Welsh, and Scotts. There were also Northern British immigrants, Southern British immigrants. So for example, New England, a lot of those settlers came from East Anglia. But in Virginia, they came more from Southwestern Britain. They all sounded different.

In the 1600s, one of the things that was ridiculous about Britain is you could walk 10 miles and not understand the person next to you. Within one generation, colonists sounded different from the British back home, no matter what British dialect that was. Then you get to the revolution and uniformity is a big issue because the more unity these states can show, the better likelihood they’ll stick together. Language is identity, and when you can have the same identity through language, that’s when you can have a united nation. I would say the first truly American language occurred after the revolution, not because we didn’t sound different from the British before then, but because we recognized the importance of changing language to sound different.

The dropping of r in Britain, that was a late 18th century innovation. There was a reason we didn’t pick those up. It wasn’t that we didn’t have interaction with British speakers, it was that we had a different identity and we wanted to be American. We revolted not just with guns, it was also with language.

Larry Bernstein:

In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins plays this game where he could listen to an accent and then place a location where the individual was from. He didn’t focus so much on class. It was more like a street or a place. I know it’s fiction, but what lessons can we learn from Henry Higgins’ behavior?

Valerie Fridland:

Linguists look at this idea from My Fair Lady that you can change language and somehow become a better person. Eliza Doolittle had a Cockney London working-class accent. He was a posh speaker, which is the upper-class London accent. It was about changing her speech to sound more like this elite accent. But he realized that she was the most wonderful person because he was surrounded by phonies. It’s about class and language being mixed with one another. You can learn to pronounce something differently, but that doesn’t change, fundamentally, a person.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you have a different view for the movie Clueless? Because in this film, Alicia Silverstone does a makeover. She doesn’t change the language. She just changes, hair, style and clothes. Do you have a different view on clothes versus language?

Valerie Fridland:

The problem is clothes are easily shed. Language is not. The evaluative tendencies we have with clothes are much harsher with language because most people can’t be Eliza Doolittle. Very few people have a phonetician that take them under their wing and say, “Let’s change you and give you a better life.” Eliza Doolittle does express that you lose something when you lose that accent. With Alicia Silverstone she discovers that too. She dresses differently, but the authentic self is what we love in that movie. And that’s what we love about Eliza Doolittle, authenticity.

Larry Bernstein:

Working Girl was filmed in Seven World Trade Center, and I worked in the building. Sigourney Weaver played the investment banker who was unable to go to some meetings. Her secretary from Staten Island, played by Melanie Griffith, got dressed up and played the role, but she couldn’t get rid of her accent.

Valerie Fridland:

There was a reporter in Boston that went viral because she has this very authentic local back Boston accent. People loved it and she’s been on all the morning talk shows because of this local accent. These local accents, whether it’s New York, Chicago, Boston, the South, they scream authenticity. Melanie Griffith seems more authentic in a place where inauthenticity runs rampant.

Larry Bernstein:

There was a professor in linguistics at Penn, Bill Labov. He noticed that most Americans pronounced the consonants the same, and that all the variation in sound was coming from vowels.

He found words that, when their vowels were pronounced differently, would become different words. He would verbally quiz people from different parts of the country on the meaning of those words when said in various accents.

He found that the Chicago accent was the most misunderstood. Now I took that personally.

Valerie Fridland:

Bill Labov is the founder of modern sociolinguistics. He died in his 90s and was doing sociolinguistic research till the day he died. He’s one of my great heroes and a great mentor to me. One of his innovations in studying accents was to recognize that consonants are more uniform across different dialects because of the way that consonants are articulated in the mouth.

The place your tongue hits, how your lips are shaped, what your glottis is doing, those are much more circumscribed when you’re saying consonant sounds than when you’re saying vowels, which are relatively free flowing air. The way that you shape vowels is more on a continuum.

To give an example of consonant variability that Bill Labov did study, think about t sounds. If I’m a standard British English speaker, I’d say “butta” [ˈbʌtə], where I have a full t articulated but no r. If I’m a Cockney speaker, I say “bu’uh” [ˈbʌʔə], where I have not, but instead glottal stop and no r. Or if I’m American, “budder” [ˈbʌɾɚ]. I have what’s called a flap [ɾ] in place of the t, but full r. All the vowels in that are the same, what differs between those three accents in that context is consonants.

One of his most seminal studies was in New York City department stores where he went and asked where lady’s shoes were, which tended to be on the fourth floor. And that was important because there are two rs. He would get “fawth flaw” [foəθ floə] or “fourth floor” [fɔrθ flɔr]. The amount of r used correlated with social class in New York City; is it wasn’t regional, it was class-based.

The secondary area of study he did was on vowel sounds, where he was able to show that there are three major dialect changes happening in the United States. The Western Vowel Shift, Northern City Shift, which is why Chicagoans had the most distinct pronunciation that was hard to understand, and the Southern Vowel Shift. He suggested that in the 20th century, the biggest differences among American regional accents was not in the consonant, but in the vowels. In American English in the 20th century, the most striking changes that were moving the North, South and West further apart was in the way that vowels were pronounced. If you were from the north, from Chicago or Cleveland, you would say “hee-af” [hɛəf]. If you were from the West Coast, you say “hawf” [hɔf]. If you were from the South, you’d say “hayuf” [hæjəf] because you had what was called an off-glide. Those were novel changes that didn’t exist at the beginning of the 20th century.

At the turn of the century, you wouldn’t have heard these regional differences that we hear today. These vowel changes didn’t exist in the beginning of the 1900s, but by 2000, they were making speech among the three regions more distinct on the basis of vowels. That was his main contribution in terms of vowel studies, which was remarkable because it has reversed. Studies done in 2015, 2020 have shown a reversal of all these vowel changes so that we’re finding the opposite, where regional dialects of American English are moving closer together rather than further apart.

Larry Bernstein:

What’s driving that?

Valerie Fridland:

A lot of people automatically say, “Oh, it’s got to be social media that’s making people sound the same.” And while that has some influence, and it’s certainly influential on Gen Z, it couldn’t have been influential on Gen X because they didn’t have social media growing up, which is where our regional accents get formed. But what we did have starting in the middle of the 20th century is increasing suburbanization, a huge rise in the middle class. When you get an increase in class like that, it usually draws you less to local varieties and more to dominant varieties. That’s a homogenizing effect.

Larry Bernstein:

I was in my teens in the mid 1970s. Everyone I know watched the same TV programs: Family Ties, Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and Rockford Files. It would be across suburbia and inner cities. It wasn’t like we had a lot of choice.

Today, we have enormous variation of what’s on television, so it’s hard to believe that modern television and social media which is so varied, would be a force to bring the country’s accents closer together. It seems to me that television would have done that for my generation, but social media would have the opposite effect for Gen Z. I would have expected this homogenizing of accents to have occurred in the middle of the 20^th century, not in 2010.

Valerie Fridland:

Television does not change accents. No research has ever shown that television has a profound influence on the way we sound. Does television have an influence perhaps on the words that we use? Yes. But does it forge accents? No. It’s very limited. To have accent change, to pick up novel innovations and do what your peers do, you have to have interaction. One-way communication does not do it. Social media does that. It’s much more interactive than television. Suburbanization at the time you were born was greatly increased, and a lot of it was driven by white flight. This seems to be one of the important triggers for the Northern City Shift in Chicago and elsewhere.

Two things happened with suburbanization. First, you tended to be around similar people to you, which reinforced certain tendencies. It would diverge from the urban centers.

It’s also dovetailed with this change in industrial practices, because around that same time we’re seeing a demise of the rust belt. Industries moved to the Sunbelt. The relocation of industry was massively taking numbers of people to urban areas of the South that had previously been isolated from Northern influence. A case in point is Raleigh, North Carolina. You can barely hear a Southern accent in most people from Raleigh, and it’s directly attributed to this swamping of Northern immigration.

Larry Bernstein:

So much for the founder effect.

Valerie Fridland:

That doesn’t mean that Southerners in Raleigh don’t still see themselves as Southern. Founder’s effects are not about the language themselves; they’re about the identity of that area. These movers might swamp linguistically and enact change linguistically, but the cultural belief of that area often stays the same.

We can’t ignore that race relations. The Gen Z African American influence that we get from social media has opened for young white people from the burbs to witness African American language and culture in a very positive way. They’re adopting a lot of African American speech styles, which would not have happened in the middle of the 20th century, both because of hostility and access.

Larry Bernstein:

Bill Labov analyzed African American accents on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and in the West. He found that there was little variation in African American accents across the United States. And as I remember it’s because the African Americans came from similar places in the South. As a result, these are related people and came from the same accent.

What do you make of Lebov’s African American observations?

Valerie Fridland:

Walt Wolfram, who studied with Labov, and Ralph Falsold, looked at how African American English was related to the Great Migration. Up to 1900, 90% of African Americans in the United States lived in the South. Massive numbers of African Americans around 1917 moved north, and that continued a trend of exodus from the South to 1970 that brought millions of African Americans northwards. By 1970, over 50% of the African American population had moved from the South to the North. Around 1900, the Southern black accent and the Southern white accent were fairly similar. When you move massive numbers of people, you end up relocating your accent. Those accents are unique in this new area because people in Detroit didn’t sound Southern, so what was previously a Southern accent became heard in the North as a black accent. The 2000s have radically reshaped that. Now, most of the literature that we see by younger linguistics that look at African American English is that there have been a number of regional varieties that got their start in those early migration patterns but no longer sound the same. Regional accents for white speakers are decreasing, but regional accents for black speakers are increasing in the 2000s.

Larry Bernstein:

African Americans are exiting Chicago. 10,000 leave the metropolitan area each year mostly to the South because of education, jobs, and gun violence. For the past 20 years, blacks were moving from Chicago to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. As the African Americans move back south, they’re going to bring their Chicago variation to the South polluting the pure Southern African American accents.

Valerie Fridland:

That’s been referred to as the reverse migration of both whites and Blacks has led to a linguistic swamping effect, particularly in Southern urban areas. It has increased the divide between the rural South and the urban South. The Southern accent does still exist, but it doesn’t exist to the same degree in urban areas.

Larry Bernstein:

I moved with my wife to Tokyo in 1998 to run the Proprietary Trading Department for Salomon in Tokyo. I called a restaurant to make a reservation. I said, “a party of two, the name is Bernstein.” And the person on the other side of the phone said, “Bun-steen?” [bɯ̃nsuˈtiːn]. I said, no, it’s Bernstein. “Bun-steen?”

I said to my wife, oftentimes when foreigners move to the United States, they change their names because Americans struggle to pronounce that name. I think that while we live in Japan, we should use a different last name. It should be short, easy to spell and pronouce. I hear by christen us Mr. and Mrs. Bun.

I called a different restaurant. I make a reservation for eight o’clock. I said, “The name is Bun.” And the woman behind the phone said, “Bun-steen?”

So, we became the Bunsteens.

Valerie Fridland:

I love it. That’s a great story.

Larry Bernstein:

The Japanese can’t not pronounce the consonant r. It wasn’t like they dropped the r, it was something foreign to them.

Valerie Fridland:

We speak with an accent, but we listen with an accent just as much. If you don’t have an r in your language, you generally cannot hear it or you hear it as what the closest approximate in your language is.

In English, we have very specific rs and ls. We don’t have a trilled r. We have what’s called an alveolar r, which is where the tongue tip points to that bony ridge that you burn with pizza in your mouth. If you’re a Spanish speaker, you have two different rs. For an American English speaker, one of the hardest things about learning Spanish is to learn how to make that trill.

Larry Bernstein:

When we moved to Tokyo, my wife went to language school to learn Japanese. Julie came home one day and, I said, “Honey, what did you learn in your Japanese class today?” She said, “I learned how to say shower curtain in Japanese.” I said, “That’s amazing. I’m so proud of you. How do you say shower curtain in Japanese?” She said, “showa kaa-ten”[ʃoːwa kaːteɴ]. It turns out that there are a number of English words which weren’t in the Japanese vocabulary and so they adopted the English words, but they Japanized it.

Valerie Fridland:

Anytime you borrow words into a new language, it involves syllabification routines that we aren’t familiar with. Japanese can’t have as many consonant clusters as in English. Baseball is another word that they borrowed, and it turns out more like “bay-so-ball-a” [basobaɾa]. It has to have more vowels to consonants in Japanese. Languages like Hawaiian, Japanese or Korean are a little more restrictive in terms of what consonants they allow together, so when you’re coming from one of those languages and you borrow English words, you tend to have to break up the clusters and add extra vowels in there.

In American English, a lot of times what we nativize is the vowel pronunciation. The name of the state I live in is a perfect example of that.

Larry Bernstein:

“Nevadda?” [nəˈvædə]

Valerie Fridland:

Right, “Nevahda” [nəˈvɑdə]. Half the country thinks it’s “Nevadda” [nəˈvædə], and their argument is it’s more of the Spanish pronunciation. But almost all the state names come from indigenous languages, they are not pronounced like they were in those indigenous languages. They have been Americanized or nativized.

Larry Bernstein:

I had a roommate and I said, “Oh, you’re from ‘Or-eh-gone’ [ˈɔrɪɡɑn].” He said, “No, I’m from ‘Or-uh-gin’ [ˈɔrəɡɪn]or [ˈɔrəɡən].” How do you do it?

Valerie Fridland:

“Or-uh-gin” [ˈɔrəɡɪn]. Vowels are very variable. They’re more variable than consonants.

Larry Bernstein:

I end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to accents?

Valerie Fridland:

My parents had accents. They were both French speakers natively and I grew up in the South. When I went to college and I took a class in linguistics, I understood that accents are driven by the same underlying tendencies of mouth and mind. We all share those same tendencies because that’s part of being human, that’s part of the language system as it’s constructed.

The role that accents play for all of us is all about connection, this fundamental need for social belonging that is so important to us as humans. Accents can be about unity rather than division.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Valerie for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Unsafe at MIT.

Our speaker was Yossi Sheffi who is a Professor of Engineering at MIT and is a leading scholar in supply chain management. He is the author of a new book entitled Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.

Yossi discussed MIT’s failure to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from violence. He also explained how MIT’s Administration mismanaged the situation, and why MIT’s disregard for its own rules and regulations resulted in chaos

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Unsafe at MIT, here.

Subscribe now

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Listen on Spotify

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Yossi Sheffi

Subject: Unsafe at MIT
Bio: Professor of Engineering at MIT, leading scholar in supply chain management and Author of Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Unsafe at MIT.

Our speaker is Yossi Sheffi who is a Professor of Engineering at MIT and is a leading scholar in supply chain management. He is the author of a new book entitled Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.

I want to hear from Yossi about MIT’s failure to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from violence. I want to learn why MIT’s Administration managed the situation so poorly, and why MIT’s disregard for its own rules and regulations resulted in chaos.

Yossi, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Yossi Sheffi:

I’m Yossi Sheffi a Professor of Engineering at MIT. Unsafe at MIT is my tenth book. My first nine were professional books in supply chain management, manufacturing, and logistics. This is a very different book. After witnessing what happened after October 7th and that people are now saying it wasn’t that bad at MIT? The book was to record a chronicle of events.

It was actually bad. There were threats, harassment, violence, doxing, swastikas on dorm doors, death threats, terror group symbols, and disrupting classes and research labs.

The other thing is the lack of MIT administration response protecting Jews. One can only imagine if I would have walked in the corridor of MIT wearing a white hood. I would have been arrested. When I interviewed students for the book, they were PTSDs. It was very hard for me to get them to open up.

We had to organize and fight for the truth, insisting on basic factual reality in an academic setting. That civilians were massacred, that women were raped, children abducted, the hostages taken and murdered. Those were not fabrication or Zionist propaganda, as some activists claim while tearing down hostage posters along the main MIT corridor.

Second, Israel was no longer criticized for specific policy. It was redefined as uniquely illegitimate, a settler/apartheid state with only guilty colonizers. The logic erased the moral category of innocent and made violence not only permissible, but righteous.

Third, we also had to fight against the total breakdown of law and order on campus. This was where MIT failed most clearly. Rules governing demonstrations, access to buildings, harassment, disruption of education and research were broken repeatedly. Enforcement was nonexistent. Administrators privately acknowledged the violation while publicly insisting that their hands were tied. It was not more apparent than during the MIT President’s appearance in Congress, talking about genocide as depending on the context. She’s the only college president who survived.

Finally, we had to fight the BDS campaign, the boycott divestment sanction campaign on academics. It was presented as a non-violent tactic of conscience. In practice, it was insidious. It aimed to sever research collaboration to isolate Israeli scholars and pressure MIT to treat Israel as a pariah state. To isolate Israeli scholars, to make collaboration with them costly and eventually render their presence on American campuses untenable.

We have two responses. First we organized faculty, Jewish students and staff in lunches twice a week, where we exchange information and give advice how to fight. This continues every Monday with 100 participants. Now the other response became what’s called Kalaniot, an Israeli red flower, an organization to counter the academic BDS strategy. We raised a few million dollars to bring Israeli scholars into MIT. There are 12 of them on campus coming for postdoc or academic visits. They have to work in somebody’s lab. There’s a connection with some MIT researchers, and this connection will stay after they go back. There are now similar organizations in Dartmouth, Harvard Medical School, and Penn. We have now a national Kalaniot organization.

Larry Bernstein:

What you did in writing this book was a sociological analysis, talking to people in the truth-seeking process. What’s also interesting is that we haven’t seen works by other sociologists on this topic. It took someone from the engineering school in supply chain management to act as a sociologist.

Yossi Sheffi:

Sociology is a part of MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Science. This is one of the centers of anti-Semitism at MIT. It’s usually the social sciences more left-leaning, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The faculty get swept in this New York Times, CNN, media description of Israel. I

Students most of them are just idiots. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Why did they join all this? Because it’s the same reason that certain youth join gangs. Because you join a gang, you feel belonging. You are in a community. You buy on this and you just don’t want to listen to anything else. And some faculty absolutely were swept away in this. I didn’t expect sociologists to do much.

Larry Bernstein:

What was extraordinary was the campaign that began against the Jews at MIT and other campuses beginning on October 8th. It only took a day.

The Jews were backfooted, but the anti-Semites were ready to go. How does a group get organized within twenty-four hours to be prepared to go with anti-Semitic demonstrations? Some say that it related to money coming from the Middle East, but it doesn’t feel right to me.

Yossi Sheffi:

We don’t know. But as you say, the money side is one assumption. But the amazing thing to me is there were posters ready on October 7th in the evening at MIT. They were ready with talking points, posters, and organized demonstration. October 8th, IDF soldiers were still fighting in Sderot, in the kibbutzim, in the Negev. Nothing happened in Gaza and there were still demonstrations against Israel. There was clearly a lot of bubbling up of hatred towards Israel.

This hatred was against Jews and Israel, same thing.

Larry Bernstein:

In the book, in one of your interviews of a French Jewish student, he said that in France, those that hate Israel also hate Jews and they’re open about it. But here, you ask Americans, they say, “No, I love Jews, I just hate Israel” — creating this distinction between anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism.

Yossi Sheffi:

It’s just a cover. I don’t believe it. To me, anybody who understands Judaism and the role that Israel plays in Jewish life, understand that Zionism and Jewishness are coupled together. Look,

If I were in Israel, I would not vote for Netanyahu. But this does not mean that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. This does not mean that Hamas is not a bloodthirsty terrorist organization. They’re trying to attack Israel in different ways. Attacking Jews, attacking content, attacking academics.

Larry Bernstein:

In your book you want to create a historical document as to what happened. You hear now what happened is it was a nothing burger; there was never any threats. This has been hyperbolic in its description. Jews were never at risk; Jews were never harassed. This was a very peaceful and loving demonstration against genocide. Tell us about what happened.

Yossi Sheffi:

The technical engineering term for this point of view is bullshit. That’s why I wrote the book, because I felt that it has to be documented by people who were there. There were about dozen students who left MIT because their parents were afraid for their life. They didn’t finish their PhD, their studies, they had to leave. Another way that was infuriating was the comparing of anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. There was no Islamophobia, it’s nonsense.

But what happened to Jews — one example. There was this demonstration on what’s called Lobby Seven, the main entrance to MIT. There were a demonstration and counter demonstration, and one of the Jewish students fell down, he just stumbled, and fell on a leg of one of the Palestinian supporter women and she fell down too. This was then caught on camera. Everybody was videoing everything, and they said, this is an example of Jewish violence. His name was all over the campus. There were death threats against him. This type of violence, threats and harassment went totally out of control.

There were faculty calling a student by name, an example of a Zionist mind infection. Things like this happening for a year and a half over and over again.

Another example, this big demonstration, — the administration closed the main entrance to MIT. The administration said whoever doesn’t get out of here by noon is going to be expelled. The Jews left. The demonstrators stayed the whole day there. Then the MIT did nothing. Despite written warning, you’re going to be expelled if you don’t leave, they didn’t leave.

Larry Bernstein:

The book paints a picture that what we had was a failure by the administration to follow its own rules and regulations.

Yossi Sheffi:

They were weak, afraid, and not equal to the task. Sally Kornbluth, the President, talking about calling for genocide of Jews — it’s depending on the context, it’s not against the MIT rules. And the chairman of the board issued a letter of support. Really?

Larry Bernstein:

The Chairman of the Board of Penn also gave a letter of support for Liz Magill, who was the President of Penn, but the trustees voted against her and had her removed. What is special about MIT that when someone says something so out of bounds that they’re parodied on Saturday Night Live, the Chairman and the President withstand a vote of confidence?

Yossi Sheffi:

The trustees of MIT are not interested. It’s a group that likes to have on the resume that they are trustees of MIT. The group is not doing its job. They go with the president and there’s no accountability. It was a very weak board.

Larry Bernstein:

MIT is a very unusual American university. It has meritocracy-based admissions. It is probably the world’s leading engineering school in STEM. Why is this a problem at MIT?

Yossi Sheffi:

You’re describing MIT of 30 or 40 years ago. You are describing MIT before identity politics, before woke, before the idea that we hire by merit. I wish. To apply for a faculty position at MIT, you had to write a DEI statement. What does it have to do with your engineering qualification? There are still unbelievably good researchers at MIT — in mathematics, in physics, in chemistry, world-class engineering department. However, there is also a School of Humanity and Social Science, the School of Urban Planning and Architecture. These are different people.

Now talk about the students a whole generation of people who are uneducated. I should tell you that MIT is now offering remedial physics course for first-year freshmen. Unbelievable. They don’t know history. Many of these people were burning American flags in these demonstrations.

Larry Bernstein:

And what kind of people were doing that?

Yossi Sheffi:

Students, some staff joined them. But the people who were desecrating Israeli, American flags look like MIT students.

Larry Bernstein:

I’ve had a couple of podcasts with Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt, and he is a big believer that you establish rules and regulations to create an environment for scholarship and education. When people act in violent ways or violate the rules, there are consequences, and the rules are enforced promptly and effectively. At Vanderbilt the Jews felt safe, and at MIT they exited. Tell us about a proper way to handle the situation.

Yossi Sheffi:

At the beginning, I was talking to the Provost at MIT. She was a PhD student of mine, just to tell you how long I’ve been at MIT. And said, “What do I do? How should we respond?”

I said, “It’s simple actually. You take one, two of the leading demonstrators who disrupt classes and go into research lab and do graffiti and ruin the place. You expel them. The rest will get the message.”

It’s not only Vanderbilt. When the encampment started in Dartmouth, the President called the police — not the campus police, she called the police. Suddenly it was gone. Acting decisively and quickly is the key to this.

The students after the event that I described in the entrance to MIT, when the students didn’t leave, they started shouting, we control the campus. And they were right. They did whatever they wanted with no repercussions. You don’t deal with it; it just gets worse and worse.

Larry Bernstein:

I live in Miami Beach. The head of the COVID ward is Dr. Ari Ciment. He’s on the Board of Trustees of the Hebrew Academy, which is a Jewish day school about a block from my house. Alan Dershowitz was invited to speak about anti-Semitism on campus.

The first question came from Ari’s daughter in the audience. And she said, “I’m a very good student. Should I apply to Harvard and other Ivy League schools? Because I just want to learn. I’m not really interested in fighting and defending myself. These universities are not interested in protecting me from danger. Should I limit my application process to schools like Dartmouth, Vanderbilt and the University of Florida, where Jews are welcome, or should I apply to places like Harvard?”

And Alan Dershowitz said she should definitely apply to places like Harvard, because someone has to fight for the Jews. How should Jewish children who are in the application process think about applying to schools like MIT, Harvard or Columbia, knowing that these administrations have been unwilling in protecting their Jewish students?

Yossi Sheffi:

I know personally children of MIT faculty professors who are not applying to MIT, even though they can go for free to MIT if they get in. There’s a big difference between American Jews and Israelis. What I did going against my own university is an Israeli act. And by the way, the university is fighting back. They are harassing me, they are trying to limit the distribution of my book. But screw them. I’m not changing.

I understand an 18 year old who says, I just want to learn. One of the most insidious things that happened to Jews is they were thrown out of study groups. Why is it bad? Because developing the new thing for Meta, for Google, is not something that an engineer does on his or her own. It’s always a team. When almost every MIT group was throwing out the Jews, then Jews have no opportunity to work in teams. You might say, so why don’t the Jews work together? There’s not enough of them.

Larry Bernstein:

My grandfather was a tenured Professor at the University of Vienna. His faculty appointment was in the medical school and in the Freud Institute. Immediately after the Anschluss, all the Jews were fired from the University of Vienna. In my grandfather’s memoirs, he paid the 90% wealth tax to get an exit visa and left. Many of his friends didn’t leave right away, and many ended up committing suicide or getting sent to death camps.

You have choices. There’s a book by Albert Hirschman called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. When you have policies like you described in MIT, what Hirschman said is that you can scream and yell to change. But at some point, you realize you have only one choice left. You can exit. You can leave MIT.

My grandfather wasn’t given a forced exit. Yossi, you are incredibly talented in your field. There are dozens of universities who would embrace you. Why did you choose voice? Why didn’t you choose exit?

Yossi Sheffi:

Because I’ve been at MIT 51 years. I have friends who are the best in their field and enjoy their company. Look, if I would have been 30 years younger, I maybe would have left. I’m 78 years old. I like where I live in Boston. MIT is my home. I grew up here professionally. At several points in your life, you realize that if you don’t do it, nobody else will. I chose voice and resistance.

There are lots of faculty who are reading it for the first time and realizing what was going on. So maybe things will get better, I don’t know.

Larry Bernstein:

The Trump administration, when it came in, fifteen months after October 7, immediately went to work in opposition to the policies of institutions like MIT and demanded change. I have close friends and relatives who said that what the administration was doing was wrong. That there was never a problem with the Jews, this was a lie, and that the administration was against academia . Jews did not need to be protected by the Trump administration. Jews could take care of themselves. Did the federal government need to get involved to protect the Jews, and what they did, was it appropriate?

Yossi Sheffi:

First of all, the situation is not better; it’s less in your face. The big demonstrations and the encampments don’t exist anymore. Not because of anything that MIT did — because all these agitators started seeing people snatched off the street by ICE. It’s not Sally Kornbluth, the President of MIT, with the bland announcement that there are consequences now. They were doing exactly what MIT should have been done: take one or two of the agitators and take them off the table.

The fact that some Jewish people say it didn’t happen — well, that’s why I wrote the book. One of the most frustrating things is watching Jews listening to this propaganda and believing it.

Jews have a huge problem because the Jews were always leftist. I grew up leftist in a very liberal, progressive environment. Now the progressives came against us.

Larry Bernstein:

In the Trump administration’s consent decrees with Columbia and Harvard, they had a number of points that they demanded of the university, and I want you to comment. The first is that the university must enforce all their existing disciplinary rules consistently.

Yossi Sheffi:

MIT failed completely. Classes were disrupted. MIT allows demonstration of students, but in certain places, certain times. They just did whatever they wanted: Disrupted classes, disrupted research labs. This was absolutely against MIT rules, yet there was no response. Enforce your own rule? MIT did none of the above.

Larry Bernstein:

The second was they had to discipline against violence, assault, intimidation, harassment, vandalism, destruction of property, disruption of classes, occupation of buildings, and interference with university operations. Is this something that the federal government is making up, or does it reflect a meaningful breakdown?

Yossi Sheffi:

It’s absolutely true that MIT was not doing and being forced to do it would be a very good step forward.

Larry Bernstein:

MIT said that the reason they couldn’t discipline misconduct is that many of the individuals were not US citizens, but they could then be in violation of their visa and would be expelled, and therefore they could not apply discipline. Is that a legitimate reason to not enforce illegal conduct?

Yossi Sheffi:

Among many of the stupid things that MIT did, this takes the cake. Because yes, there were some foreign students who were the main agitators. Why do you want them in the United States to begin with? They were burning American flags. It was a cop out.

You gave them a warning; you told them what’s going to happen, they did it, they laugh in your face, and you just say, “Now I cannot do it because they lose their visa!” I hope they lose their visa. We were just aghast.

Larry Bernstein:

The next Trump consent decree requirement is to enforce protest regulations, enforce time, place and manner restrictions, ban the wearing of masks used to conceal identity during a demonstration, and prevent encampments and unauthorized building occupations. Is this something of a problem at MIT?

Yossi Sheffi:

Yes, categorically yes. This was total breakdown. The MIT has written rules for this. Nothing was enforced.

Larry Bernstein:

Finally, the last argument was to centralize disciplinary authority into the office of a president rather than allowing individual schools or faculty committees to control discipline.

Yossi Sheffi:

That’s exactly what happened. Even after the board suggested that the disciplinary process doesn’t work, MIT put together, as they always do, a committee with faculty that they knew where they stand, and the faculty committee said, “No, we are fine.”

Larry Bernstein:

The Trump administration pressured the university by cutting off funds. It’s a blunt instrument. There aren’t a lot of federal funds going to linguistics, but there are to experiments in the science departments. The science department never left the labs to participate in the demonstrations that gets hurt.

Yossi Sheffi:

It is unfortunate. I wish there was another tool. But to get MIT’s attention — and MIT is not handling very well, not at all. To first degree they’re cutting everybody the same. They should cut the School of Humanities. And the funny thing is that I told the president this at the time, when she still talked to me. That was before the book. But now she doesn’t return my email. When she goes to talk about MIT to Congress, to the administration, I said, “When did you talk about history of philosophy or linguistics?” You talk about science and medicine and engineering and AI, that’s what you talk about. So why don’t we go back to the time before we decide to be a general university and cut out some of these things.

They are caught up in the equity mindset that everybody has to be cut the same, which is absolute nonsense.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you have any suggestions on how to be philanthropic to universities but do it in ways that are supportive of the Jewish people?

Yossi Sheffi:

The best way I can tell you is support something like Kalaniot, because the strength of Israel is not natural resources, it’s science. It’s academia. The most effective way is to create contacts, just like Kalaniot at MIT and other institutions, that bring Israeli scientists for postdoc and visits, but putting them together in research labs with existing scientists so the connection between them stays after they go back.

Larry Bernstein:

I end each podcast on a note of optimism. Yossi, what are you optimistic about as it relates to Jewish life at MIT?

Yossi Sheffi:

The Jews are now organized as a result of this. New students, new postdocs, new PhD students come to MIT, find a home immediately. All this organization came up after October 7th. There is a student MIT organization, and there’s help. It’s better than it used to be that has nothing to do with the administration. It may be better, but it has nothing to do with them. They were not doing any substantial changes. Nothing.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Yossi for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast was Appreciating George Orwell. Our speaker was Robert Colls who is the author of the Orwell biography entitled George Orwell: Life and Legacy.

You know his novels 1984 and Animal Farm but there is so much more to enjoy. Robert discussed Orwell’s important essays like Shooting an Elephant and a Hanging. And most importantly why Orwell is increasingly relevant.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Appreciating George Orwell, here.

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Robert Colls

Subject: Appreciating George Orwell
Bio: Author of George Orwell: Life and Legacy

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Appreciating George Orwell.

Our speaker is Robert Colls who is the author of the Orwell biography entitled George Orwell: Life and Legacy.

You know his novels 1984 and Animal Farm but there is so much more to enjoy. I look forward to discussing with Robert about Orwell’s other major novels as well as his essays like Shooting an Elephant and a Hanging.

Robert, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Robert Colls:

Why are we always getting Orwell wrong? Who said, in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act? It wasn’t George Orwell, although many people, including UNESCO, seemed to think so. It was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.

Who said, it’s not a matter of whether the war is real; it’s not meant to be won; it’s meant to be continuous? It was Michael Moore in 2004, trying to sound like George Orwell. Raoul Peck’s recent movie Two + Two = Five, has quotes from Orwell hanging everywhere, but most are not in context.

No one is more quoted than George Orwell. We get the Orwell quotes we deserve. Looking for a snappy start? Read Orwell on Charles Dickens. Looking for a decisive knockout blow? Read Orwell on Tolstoy. Looking for a lazy endorsement? Go to Google and have anything you like. Orwell never had a better advocate than Christopher Hitchens, but even Hitch got him wrong. His central argument, that Orwell was essentially right about the three great issues of the 20th century is flawed. It’s true that Orwell hated the British Empire, but he hated other empires more, and to do that was to hate British imperialism less. Hitchens was right to say Orwell was anti-fascist to the core, but he hardly said a word about fascism other than to say the term was meaningless. And it’s true that anti-communism was Orwell’s driving force, but he defended the Soviet alliance for the duration of the war.

Orwell didn’t always get Orwell right. Sometimes he made things up. At other times he simply misremembered. He said he’d spent months living with mining families in the north of England when in fact he was only a fortnight living with a working miner family.

We get him wrong because don’t look hard enough. He often pleaded poverty, and his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris, was about sleeping rough. But how down was he? He left the Imperial Police in 1927 after five years on a good salary. While he was tramping in England, the family home was only a train ride away. His books were getting published one a year with good reviews and decent advances. He wasn’t broke, but he did give lectures on being broke. With Animal Farm in 1945, he was in the money.

Probably the most common way of getting Orwell wrong is to rip him out of context. Playing What Would Orwell Say is a dangerous game with such an original and contrarian writer.

Finally, we get Orwell wrong when we look to him for comfort. Will Lloyd in the Times called him England’s most celebrated performance artist. But allowing that to take us to a 1930s England that doesn’t endure is not a good idea. Poverty, useless governments, royal scandals and upcoming wars are not new in the 1930s, and they’re not new now. Dead these 76 years, he is part of our everyday life, we might reckon he has become memeified by the media he warned against.

Larry Bernstein:

Why do you think people get him so wrong? He changes his mind about the Spanish Civil War, how socialism would work, about the Tories, about the working class. One of the joys of reading Orwell is to watch him progress in his thinking.

Robert Colls:

He’s a work in progress. I see him as a human being, evolving. He’s not a philosopher trying to come up with eternal truths. He’s a journalist. He wants to see what’s in front of his nose. Such things change.

Larry Bernstein:

Why did you dedicate such a large portion of your life to writing biographies of a novelist?

Robert Colls:

I first bought The Road to Wigan Pier in 1969, when I was 19, at the University of Sussex. I spent the price of 10 cigarettes, a rash act. He was writing about the north of England and coal mining communities, which I come from. I took to Orwell, who was praising my people.

After that I bought four volumes of essays, and I can remember lying in bed with my girlfriend in wintry London in 1972, reading these essays out to each other. We made a friend for life. He was on my side, and I loved his clarity. I was doing history in the 70s and 80s when there was a lot of capital-T theory going around, unreadable and unintelligible, and there was Orwell writing profound things in the clearest way. In 2012 I wrote George Orwell: English Rebel, and it came easily. This little book I’ve written now, he might have written it himself. It’s dead cheeky. It’s a lifetime friendship.

Larry Bernstein:

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell blasts the political class for speaking gibberish, disguising intent, and being lazy with language. You complained about academic theory. If Orwell were here today; he would rewrite that essay as a condemnation of the academy. Tell us about Orwell’s use of language.

Robert Colls:

My God, if he was around now writing about academic speak. Mind you, it’s on the way out, because professors have woken up to the fact that students have got to understand them. Otherwise. there’s no bloody point. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell’s range of enemies was narrow. He’s firing his gun at the Communist Party and its fellow travelers. He says their language is like a hen house - all bits and pieces nailed together from other pieces of writing. This is in 1946. he would make a very easy slip over to the theory of the 70s and 80s.

I remember going to conferences and listening to these guys, and their favorite phrase was, “it is necessary that.” None of us had the nerve to say, “Why is it necessary?” We’re academics. We can be free.

Larry Bernstein:

Orwell feels out of place wherever he is. He wrote an essay about his time as a boarding school student at St Cyprian’s, as a small child before Eton. He feels alone, beaten up, harassed, and misunderstood. I looked the boarding school up on Wikipedia, and its famous graduates went on and on, like 25 people, of which Orwell was just one, with comments about how much they loved the school. In every situation there are some people who don’t fit and are unhappy, and others who think it’s the greatest thing of all time. He’s the guy who’s alone and thinks everything is terrible. Is that true of Orwell, and why does being an outcast make him a better observer?

Robert Colls:

There are two Orwells. There’s Eric Arthur Blair, who’s a man, and a decent chap: confident, probably with an Old Etonian drawl, probably good fun. There’s lots of pictures of Orwell having a good time, particularly when he’s got a rifle over his shoulder in the Spanish militia and in the British Home Guard. His friends at the BBC said he was good company and would enjoy an evening with him.

Then there was George Orwell, who was somebody else -- a writer and an observer who wanted to write politics as art. He takes a subject and it’s dramatized. Take his time at school. He went there from 8 to 14 years old, writing letters back to his mother saying what awful fun, played football, dancing, and had great jokes.

Larry Bernstein:

Inconsistent with the essay that he writes later.

Robert Colls:

He writes the essay where he’s lonely, sad, nobody likes me. He says at the end, I smelt. Between the two we have a gap of about 30 years. He’s dramatizing that he grew up to hate boarding school. After St Cyprian’s, he won a scholarship to the greatest public school in the empire, Eton College. Once he was there, unlike a tight little prep school full of anxieties. At Eton he was a gentlemen with freedom that he relished.

Larry Bernstein:

Orwell is a very bright young man with serious academic interests even as a child. He makes the decision not to go to university, but instead join the Indian Imperial Police. Tell us about that decision and how it shapes his life.

Robert Colls:

He left Eton, went to live with his parents in a little seaside town in Suffolk called Southwold, and there he crammed for the Indian Imperial Police exam. He came seventh in languages and 28th in horse riding. He got in and he went to Burma. His girlfriend said his parents wanted him to go to university; others say they couldn’t afford it on £600 a year without a scholarship. But I don’t think he wanted to go because he was fed up with school. He wanted to see some real life. There were connections: his mother’s father was a teak exporter in Burma, and Orwell’s father had worked in India all his life.

Larry Bernstein:

He writes a very important essay called Shooting an Elephant about his time in Burma.

Robert Colls:

We don’t even know he did shoot the elephant. He was dramatizing experiences. He wrote it in England in retrospect. For me, Orwell is a better essayist than novelist, and his best essays are A Hanging in 1931 and Shooting an Elephant in 1936.

He’s on station, an officer of the Raj, and he gets called to the marketplace to deal with an elephant that had gone musth (in heat) and flattened an Indian man. When he got there, the elephant was passively eating. Orwell didn’t quite know what to do, because an elephant was not just an animal, it was a piece of capital. He did what he had to do. Orwell sent for an elephant gun, lay flat on the ground, huge crowd egging him on, and took the elephant down in three rounds.

We have a masterpiece of choreography. A huge animal is dying before our eyes. The animal starts to tremble once the shot goes home. The elephant climbs up with its trunk in the air and comes down with a great crash. It tries to get up again. Orwell shoots again. Another great climb, down with a crash, and he finishes it off. It’s an exercise in death, and Orwell performed that which the empire is meant to perform - the white man doing what the white man should do, even if he doesn’t want to do it. Sometimes empires are not so strong as they make out.

Larry Bernstein:

I felt this was a reflection on the British Empire. It wasn’t about the elephant at all. Millions of Indians and a few hundred British policemen doing what the locals want. He self-admits that if he were in charge, he would let the elephant go home to its owner because that is the right answer. A crowd develops with demands to kill the elephant, and he feels an expectation to do the right Burmese thing. That is the reflection of the British Empire that distinguishes it from other empires. He’s doing the locals’ bidding.

Robert Colls:

It wasn’t an empire that believed the state should change things. It wanted to leave the system as it was, as long as it paid fealty to the overriding masters. It wanted to let Burmese be Burmese.

He was against it. He didn’t like what it did to him personally, and when he went through the marketplace in his uniform, people would spit all over his back. It was a complicated experience for Orwell. And it is true that the British Empire had notions of rights and liberties.

Larry Bernstein:

Orwell gets tuberculosis before antibiotics, so it’s a death sentence, and to feel better he goes to Marrakesh for fresh air. On the way, he sees a troop of Senegalese soldiers, very tall African men walking with one white officer, and he says, I just don’t understand how long it will take before they’ll turn their guns on the white man and end this.

As an aside, my own family, just a few years later, in June of 1940, my grandmother was an emigre hiding in France. When France fell, she talked her way onto an army-only train to find my grandfather, and it was filled with Senegalese troops. My grandmother thought these men were giants. She described it to me exactly the way that Orwell described it in Marrakesh four years prior. But the French had already lost the war, and the Senegalese were sad, not revolutionary in anyway.

Robert Colls:

He goes to Marrakesh seriously ill, just out of six months in hospital. He and Eileen, his tremendous wife, go courtesy of an anonymous Old Etonian sponsor, L.H. Myers. They’re broke; he’s writing and coughing up blood. It’s a really bad time.

The Senegalese soldiers, and your story adds to it, are another lovely example of the layered nature of Orwell. The essay is provocative, but it’s also telling a fundamental truth -- when it came to a battle of the empires, most colonial peoples weren’t fooled by ideology stuck with those rickety despotisms in Paris and London rather than Berlin and Tokyo. The British Army was seriously supported by the Indian Army - hundreds of thousands of volunteers that were never conscripted. Orwell knew change was coming, and he wanted to fire a shot across the bows of the British and French empires.

The journalist in him when that young Senegalese six-footer marching past, he caught his eye, and from that Orwell riffs on what he thought he saw.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to stick with Marrakesh. In 1941, my family were interned in Casablanca, and my great aunt Greta told me what the Jewish ghetto there was like: unbelievably poor, beggars everywhere, a dense population confined to a few blocks, the saddest thing she’d ever seen. Orwell’s descriptions, unlike the Senegalese and the Burmese, are more caustic towards the Jews, and reflect some latent antisemitism, which he doesn’t deny. Tell us about the Jewish ghetto and how it reflects his views on the Jews.

Robert Colls:

He says they’re incredibly poor and separate. He’s looking at Jews in Africa, and he has said jaw-dropping things about Jews before that. He doesn’t flinch from telling you what he sees. If he sees a Jewish man in Paris looking dangerous or criminal or unpleasant, he’ll just tell you. Nowadays people would say Jewish, whereas Orwell just calls someone a Jew that was common at the time, and I don’t think there’s any way around it. It’s part of the man. But later on, he becomes seriously interested in the subject of antisemitism. Not many antisemites write long articles for the Contemporary Jewish Record on antisemitism. And he doesn’t like left-wing intellectuals very much, but most of his best friends are Jewish left-wing intellectuals. Complex.

Israel had just been founded in 1948 but he did make it clear to his Jewish friends that he was not in favor.

Larry Bernstein:

Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish Civil War, there’s a scene right at the beginning where he meets an Italian soldier representing the Republic. There were many different leftist organizations fighting, and Orwell was a member of the Trotskyist group. Even though they can’t communicate with words, they look each other in the eyes, he feels an immediate kinship, and they embrace as brothers in arms. It’s an important opening - at the beginning he is emotionally involved and becomes disillusioned as the story progresses. Tell us about Homage to Catalonia.

Robert Colls:

He just goes. It’s very typical of him. He’s recently married, but he just declares he’s going to Spain, to fight or to report or both. He visits Henry Miller in Paris. Miller says, you’re mad, you won’t make any difference, but gives him a nice warm jacket. He goes south on the train, and in southern France the peasants know that the train is, straight into Spain on the Republican side, and they look up from the fields with their hands as a fist. He loves that.

He arrives in Barcelona on Boxing Day, the 26th of December 1936, and joins the POUM, the Trotskyite anarchist breakaway, who were not Stalinist. Welcome to the Spanish Revolution -- an alphabet soup of acronyms. You can always tell it’s him in photographs because he’s a foot taller than anyone else. They march west into Aragon, high in the mountains, facing the Francoist forces, and he does four or five months there. There are a few scraps, but it’s what a lot of soldiers say about war: boring, unhealthy and unpleasant. His wife comes out to work in Barcelona and saves his life in Spain.

In May they’re on rest back in Barcelona, but fighting breaks out between the POUM Trotskyists and the Stalinist-supported main government, who reasonably enough want their telephone exchange back. I don’t know how many serious governments could have an anarchist switchboard.

He goes back to the front, and days into the fighting, he’s hit from 175 yards by a Mauser bullet, high velocity, through the neck, in one end and out the other. It doesn’t hit any arteries, so he survives.

A couple of field hospitals, back to Barcelona where his wife Eileen is staying. She catches him in the foyer and whispers loudly, “Get out, they’re after us.” She had been visited in the night by government secret police, probably Soviet-backed. Orwell and Eileen and a couple of English friends from the POUM make it out of Spain posing as tourists. He goes in as a red revolutionary brother and goes out as a bourgeois war tourist.

Back to London, he is absolutely furious at how wrong the British left-wing press are getting the Spanish Civil War. He doesn’t expect anything else from the right-wing press; he never addresses the right and never says a word about Franco or fascists. He assumes the only side to be on is the left, and they’re getting it wrong. He spends that summer writing furiously against his own side saying, “if you want a revolution in Spain, don’t back the Soviet Union, because they are putting all revolutionaries to the sword.” Spain is the great moment of his life. It’s when he becomes political.

Larry Bernstein:

It was hugely important in his philosophy. When I look at Animal Farm and 1984, Spain is the defining experience that shapes his views. One example, he’s involved in some minor skirmish, and he reads about it in the newspaper, and it is not what happened. Not even close. He realizes that truth isn’t what’s important to the Stalinist writers at all. He views that as a great potential horror of totalitarian regimes, and it becomes central in the Ministry of Truth in 1984.

Robert Colls:

This is pretty much his view. It’s a deliberate manipulation. Orwell was telling you always from his personal experience. He was against people sitting at their typewriters in the posh parts of London, opining about what the Spanish should do, while there were young boys being killed who couldn’t even put their politics into words.

Larry Bernstein:

One of my favorite scenes from Homage to Catalonia is when he has an opportunity to take a shot at an individual who is going to the bathroom. The guy hears them, panics, and gets up holding his pants at his knees, exposing his butt as he runs. And Orwell concludes that he’s not going to shoot a man in that position. It expresses not only the humanity of the situation but his own.

Robert Colls:

I agree. Orwell is on the side of what is right. But if it’s a question of what is human against what is right, he’s on the side of what is human. Not shooting a guy in the backside shows you that. In his wonderful essay A Hanging, the little man who’s about to be hanged is marched down a corridor to the gallows by Indian warders, with Orwell in charge. They’re marching quickly, because they all want it done fast; they’re all upset about it. But suddenly the little man to be hanged takes a little left jump and back again. He was avoiding a puddle. And Orwell said, only then did I realize I was about to hang a perfectly healthy and conscious human being who didn’t want his feet wet. Same thing.

Larry Bernstein:

This moment before an execution has a significant place in Western literature, picked up by the existentialists like Sartre’s The Wall, Camus in The Stranger. There were two major takeaways from A Hanging for me. One was how even in the last moments of life that you’ll dodge the puddle. It’s a reflex. The second was the tremendous indifference of the British officers. They didn’t know him or what crime he had committed. They had a job to do, and they couldn’t wait to finish up and go for a drink. We see this later with British working-class people, what he loves is that they’ve done their job and they go to the pub. Orwell doesn’t oppose the post-work drink. We shouldn’t be in the job of killing people.

Robert Colls:

That little drink scene is superb. They’re all upset, embarrassed, and having a drink. They’re back as brothers - Indian soldiers and British officers together, brothers in empire. Orwell does say one of the good things about the British Empire is it could get things done.

Larry Bernstein:

Orwell was familiar with the leading dystopian works: Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We. 1984 doesn’t come out of nowhere. Tell us about 1984 as the culmination of Orwell’s ideas. He wrote that he was working on some book he thinks is going to be another failure. And here it is, one of the great monuments of Western literature of the 20th century.

Robert Colls:

He wasn’t happy with it or any of his books. His health was in a terrible condition. He couldn’t even get anyone to come up and type it for him; it was too far to the Hebrides. So, he did it himself. At the end he could hardly walk more than a few yards without breaking into sweat. He thinks the book’s an awful, terrible mess. But it isn’t. Maybe that’s a sign of hope for anyone who’s a writer - you might think it’s bad, but it doesn’t say others do. He sends it to Warburg, whose senior editor says, if we can’t sell 20,000, we ought to be shot. It’s a big success from the word go. And all the tropes of his life are blended into this book, from gangsters in the park to sex in the bushes. It’s all there.

Larry Bernstein:

When my kids were growing up, we had book time -- I’d read a sentence, then my daughter, then my son. We read 1984. We get to the last page, where Winston Smith is enjoying his Victory Gin at the bar, and in a moment of absolute joy when the global war is won, he says, “I love Big Brother,” and he means it. And in that moment, a bullet goes through his head, because O’Brien had foreshadowed, we don’t want to kill you now; we want to persuade you to love Big Brother, and then we’ll kill you. And that’s how 1984 ends. And I turn to my very young Jonathan who says, “Dad, it is a masterpiece.”

Robert Colls:

It is a masterpiece. It’s so good you don’t even have to explain it. Animal Farm is the other masterpiece. Sandra Newman’s book Julia is a really good feminist version of 1984. It’s Julia’s story, and for me, Julia is the hero of 1984. She’s much smarter than Winston and more formidable. It carries the story forward in a useful way.

Larry Bernstein:

The literature curriculum in American schools is radically different for my children than when I was a student. Dickens, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Emerson and Thoreau are out. But Orwell is in. What’s so unusual about Animal Farm is that it is perfectly age appropriate at the junior high level, and there aren’t many great works in English literature that are. It opens up political theory. Tell us why it stands the test of time.

Robert Colls:

Anyone can read it and love it. It’s just perfect; it’s like the cap that fits all round the head. I don’t think there’s a word in it that’s wrong. You don’t have to know anything about the Russian Revolution to enjoy it, though it helps if you do. The animals are so English: gentle, slow, stupid, but loyal. It’s the perfect fable. He said it was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which he loved. It’s his best, because it is so perfect.

Larry Bernstein:

I had a previous podcast on Orwell with Patrick Allitt, a historian at Emory, who asked why both conservatives and liberals embrace Orwell as one of their own. When I was reading his essays, it was clear to me that he was a true socialist. He wanted government to own the means of production. The right embraces him because he talked the truth about Stalin and totalitarianism. Tell us why the right and the left both embrace Orwell.

Robert Colls:

It goes back to where we started - why we get him wrong all the time. There’s an Orwell for everybody. Yes, he’s a socialist who’s not interested in class consciousness, the means of production or dialectics. He’s interested in brotherhood and in defending the things and the people you love.

When somebody’s threatening those things, like Hitler, he stands with the state. When he was writing The Lion and the Unicorn, his wife Eileen writes to a friend saying, George is writing a little book on how to be a socialist though Tory.

He’s a socialist with a capital S, but he doesn’t know that much about the working class. He visits them, but he doesn’t know them. He likes the idea of brotherhood. And when it comes to what you eat, what you wear, and who you choose as your friends, he’s a conservative, small c. He loves the things he loves, and that’s it. He’s both. Liberals can take from him the progressive aspects: the anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Conservatives can take from him the man who in the end defends the things that matter. In 1945 he’s Labor through and through, and he never wavers.

Larry Bernstein:

Our audience has read Animal Farm and 1984. If they get inspired by this discussion, what should they read next?

Robert Colls:

Go to the essays. There are various versions and editions of his essays: A Hanging, The Spike, Shooting an Elephant, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and Politics and the English Language, still used in newsrooms across the world as a guide to good writing.

Larry Bernstein:

I agree. I thought they were fabulous. What are you optimistic about as it relates to Orwell?

Robert Colls:

As long as there’s good writers, good conversations and lots of readers, there’s room for optimism.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Robert for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast was -- Is Nolan’s Movie The Odyssey a Masterpiece?

Our speakers were Scott Turow the author of Presumed Innocent and Darren Schwartz the What Happens Next Culture Critic. We had a total blast reviewing all aspects of the new film and we discussed Nolan’s decisions about changing Odysseus’s character.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Is Nolan’s Odyssey a Masterpiece?, here.

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Scott Turow and Darren Schwartz

Subject: Is Nolan’s Odyssey a Masterpiece?
Bio: Scott: Author of Presumed Innocent, Darren: What Happens Next Culture Critic

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is -- Is Nolan’s Odyssey a Masterpiece?

Our speakers are Scott Turow the author of Presumed Innocent and Darren Schwartz the What Happens Next Culture Critic.

Darren, please begin.

Darren Schwartz:

We’re here to discuss The Odyssey. It’s Christopher Nolan’s film on Homer’s Epic. Stars an incredible cast: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zedaya, Charlize Theron, Himesh Patel, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal. It’s the first feature film shot entirely in 70-millimeter.

Gross $800mm so far, budget of $250mm, marketing of $125mm. They need to make $700mm to break even, which they’ve just passed. IMAX showings, which we did not see, are sold out for as much as three weeks in advance. It’s a cultural phenomenon and I loved it.

Larry Bernstein:

Scott, you saw the movie. What’d you think?

Scott Turow:

I liked it a lot. I thought it was a fabulous spectacle, outstanding movie making. but for all that said, I didn’t think it was a great movie because it lacked coherence, but I was still delighted to see this icon of Western literature celebrated.

Larry Bernstein:

The Odyssey was the first book assigned in New Trier High School’s freshman English class.

Scott Turow:

Me too.

Larry Bernstein:

Why is that?

Scott Turow:

It was the first book that I was assigned at the same high school. and this is one of the source documents for Western literature. There are all literary tropes we still have, like the Trojan horse or Penelope weaving, that remain part of our literary culture. Odysseus is one of those Heroes with No Face that Joseph Campbell talked about. He spends twenty years trying to get home. He encounters unimaginable obstacles and yet persists and succeeds at his quest. And that that is the myth that’s being celebrated.

Darren Schwartz:

Are you saying we’ve gotten soft as a society compared to what Odysseus had to go through?

Scott Turow:

The classic hero that Odysseus embodies, every society is soft compared to that figure. and the question is whether the ideal embodied by that hero satisfies us and the question you’re asking your high school freshman. It’s still worth asking today, “Are we satisfied by this image of a hero, or do we think it’s lacking something?”

Larry Bernstein:

The movie uses some of the plot lines but diverges in others. You have had several books turned into films.

Scott Turow:

I have.

Larry Bernstein:

Often, they diverge from your script.

Larry Bernstein:

And in the past, you mentioned to me that this as a different art form. How do you feel about Christopher Nolan diverging in the Odyssey?

Scott Turow:

I have no problem with diverging from the book, which has been my own experience several times. My philosophy is that every narrative work that survives that retains its original power in the retelling has got to be adjusted to meet contemporary tastes and needs, so that the contemporary audience can experience the core force of the story.

Transforming a literary work for those purposes seems to me perfectly appropriate, but you’ve got to get the core power of the story in the translation. I think the Nolan adaptation goes slightly awry in that regard.

Larry Bernstein:

I thought some plot changes were necessary and others were foolhardy. A necessary change was introducing the story of the Trojan horse and the sacking of Troy. It wasn’t described in detail in the Odyssey. A modern audience needs that background information.

Scott Turow:

Adding the Trojan horse, which is the way the Nolan movie opens, is it’s part of the same story and credited to the same author, if we can believe that Homer was just one author. I don’t have any problem with reminding the audience about the sacking of Troy, in Nolan’s version. This is the experience that Odysseus is carrying with him in his 20-year odyssey.

Darren Schwartz:

Odysseus’s strategic decision making is considered one of the great warfare decisions in the ancient world.

Larry Bernstein:

What bothers me is when they systematically change the character. Before he goes to Troy, Odysseus lies down with his wife where she says, “Don’t go to war. Maybe we can just take off, head to the sun.”

Scott Turow:

Agamemnon will come kill our son if I don’t go.

Larry Bernstein:

That’s not how it goes in the poem. That is an idea that neither party had seriously considered. This is his duty. We have a war to fight. I’m the king. I’m going to lead my troops into battle. It was obligatory to him. And then the last scene, which is perfectly foreshadowed in that first scene, is that they then run away to leave the island after the killing of the suitors.

Nolan makes Odysseus into a caring, torn individual as it relates to his struggle with the death that he’s caused.

Scott Turow:

It was a great achievement in the original text. The ideal of masculinity three millennia ago included the glory of vanquishing your enemies, sacking, pillaging and even raping. Nolan’s problem is that’s not going to sit well with a contemporary audience. So, he decides to make Odysseus a more ambivalent, self-conscious hero who sees himself, because of the experience in Troy, as something of an anti-hero. He regrets this. But then at the end of the movie he turns around and slays a hundred suitors who are camped out in his house pursuing his wife.

That piece of the story has been difficult to handle in in other contemporary adaptations. My friend Mary Zimmerman, who stages narrative works. She staged the Odyssey and she too was deeply troubled about Odysseus coming home and killing all the suitors. She felt that the audience would literally walk out of the theater holding their nose. Mary represented the suitors as six figures on stage with sandbags over the heads of all of them. And the sandbags are opened and sand then rains down gently on the suitors. They’re made to figuratively disappear rather than the bloody climax where Odysseus literally spears one hundred people.

Larry Bernstein:

One of the core issues of morality of the Odyssey is that there is a duty when a stranger comes to the door to treat him with love and respect. It is to offer food, shelter, whatever they need to go on their way.

Then if you are welcomed into the home, treat it with respect. Don’t overstay your welcome. Be kind and generous in return and leave on good terms without harming the host in any way. And it’s the suitors who abuse this who have for years eaten everything, sleeping with their slaves. It’s nonstop. And it’s that abuse of that moral code that is why Odysseus feels compelled to kill them.

Scott Turow:

One of the things that Nolan does, which I have to admire him for, is that he explains the law of Zeus that you must treat a stranger who comes to your home with kindness because that stranger may be a god in disguise. The gods were always testing us. and so sometimes they’d show up in human form. But strangers got to act with the courtesy you’d expect of a visiting God.

They’re called suitors because they’re all trying to marry his wife. The reason that the suitors are there is because Odysseus took his time getting home and experienced the charms of many other ladies along the way, including Circe and Calypso.

Larry Bernstein:

I’d like to to go over my favorite scene in the epic poem. It’s when Odysseus returns to Ithaca in disguise, and Penelope sees Odysseus in disguise and orders the older nurse to give his feet a good washing. And this is the same nurse that bathed Odysseus as a baby who had first cleaned a boar’s wound on his leg that she now recognizes as his scar.

She screams out, “It’s you Odysseus, my master.” And in the poem, he grabs her by the neck and says, “If you open your mouth, I will kill you. I’m here to kill the suitors. You cannot tell Penelope.”

He releases her neck and she says, “I understand my role. I’m so happy to have you are home. Later, after you kill all the suitors, can I tell you which of the slaves you should kill who’ve been sleeping with the enemy?” And he says, “I don’t need your help.” And then he tosses her to the ground.

In the Nolan movie, Odysseus’ treatment of the nurse is kind. He’s not beating up slave women. And she is not offering up to kill her colleagues. Both Odysseus and the nurse are taking on completely different characters.

Scott Turow:

The incident with the slave nurse would not suit contemporary tastes to see Odysseus behaving like a slave master, free to torture his slaves and even to kill them if they got in the way that has to be softened.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, we saw another Odysseus film called The Return. This is the 2024 Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche movie. And in that scene with the old nurse when she discovers the scar, how would you describe that scene in contrast?

Darren Schwartz:

Different than the book and much different than the Nolan movie.

Larry Bernstein:

It was sexually charged.

Darren Schwartz:

It was passionate. It was bizarre.

Larry Bernstein:

You screamed out.

Darren Schwartz:

Multiple times, I screamed, “Please stop this horror.” The movie focused only on when Odysseus returned to Ithaca. I thought it was too slow. Then he started making out with this nurse, rolling around to the ground. I had a problem with that.

Larry Bernstein:

It was an incredible scene. She’s extremely glad to see him. Darren and I were flabbergasted.

Darren Schwartz:

It started with the recognition of who he was, then a hug where in the book it was more violent. In the Nolan movie, it was somewhere in between.

Scott Turow:

I have to say I was a little baffled by why that scene got included. We already know because dogs are heroes, in our contemporary world. We know that it’s Odysseus because Argus, his all but dead dog, wags his tail at Odysseus. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, immediately realizes what the significance of that is and says, “Hey, you’re my father. and what are we going to do about all these guys who are camped out in the living room eating all our food?” And Odysseus is like, “Stand back, son, I got this.”

I don’t think we really need the scene with the nurse.

Darren Schwartz:

Agamemnon came home and his wife and lover killed him, stabbed him. It’s a tough homecoming.

Scott Turow:

Odysseus when Odysseus makes a brief stop in hell. Agamemnon says, “You go home in disguise because it may not be the way you left it. It might be that Penelope has taken up with one of these lovers and doesn’t want to see you return. Make sure that your wife actually wants you back.”

Darren Schwartz:

I mean, he’s like, “Well, let’s go see some things. I don’t want to follow Agamemnon. We’re going to go our own way.” He was on the beach. Everyone’s leaving. He’s like, “You know what? Let’s go left. We’re going to take I-294, not I-90. We want to avoid the city.” And you know what? Sometimes it’s good. A lot of times it’s not.

Larry Bernstein:

They didn’t have WAZE.

Scott Turow:

Odysseus, starting with the Trojan horse, is a master of deceit.

Larry Bernstein:

That is a core part of his character. It is appreciated by Homer as a key aspect of warfare. Even today, we look at deception and war as something to support. The Trojan horse reminded me of the Israelis using beepers to blow up their enemies.

Scott Turow:

We want to think of our heroes as larger than life actors. Odysseus’s deceitfulness is disconcerting. Not only does he kill the Trojans by deceiving them with the Trojan horse, saying, “This is a gift.”

Odysseus continues that deceit. He lies to his men at more than one moment, by the way, losing their trust in in the Nolan version. The most interesting episode is when Odysseus, understanding the fact that they’ve lost trust in him, tells them when they face the famous twin dilemmas of Scylla and Charybdis.

Scylla being a voracious whirlpool. He tells him, let’s go toward the whirlpool, knowing that they no longer trust him and will therefore go through the Strait of Charybdis, where there is an awful monster waiting but where they have a chance to survive.

Larry Bernstein:

But knowing that six of his crew will be killed in the process.

Scott Turow:

Odysseus by doing that sparing some of his crew, or is he in fact just saving his own life? Because he certainly ends up living, which had they gone into the whirlpool was far, far from certain. and that he chooses to manipulate rather than win their trust by his valiant leadership is unsettling, but I will say something I really liked, because it is an antihero aspect of Odysseus that’s congenial to a modern sensibility that nobody’s perfect.

Larry Bernstein:

Odysseus arrives back home in Ithaca disguised as a beggar. When he is introduced to Penelope, he says he’s a former soldier who fought at Troy.

Scott Turow:

He’s even deceitful when he returns to his wife and his son. He’s described as this homeless beggar in rags. He can’t keep come clean with Penelope or Telemachus because of the example of Clytemnestra. He’s afraid he may no longer be welcome in his own home. and so. I’ll just trick them. It’s a piece of ugliness in Odysseus’s character. Interesting that it’s part of the anti-hero nature of the contemporary Odysseus that Nolan is inventing.

Larry Bernstein:

I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. She is Professor of Classics at Penn. Her translation uses language and style that is straightforward. Her translation is a poem, not prose, with the same number of lines as the original. She uses meter and alliteration and all that. So, in many ways, she’s taken a traditionalist approach to The Odyssey.

Nolan has publicly said that he used Wilson’s translation as inspiration for the movie. Recently, Wilson wrote a scathing review of the movie in the London Review of Books. She said, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” Emily Wilson has trouble with this film’s treatment of Odysseus. He’s passive, sexless, and regretful. He’s “an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero.”

Scott Turow:

Emily Wilson, the translator of the Odyssey displays typical academic narrowness. She reminded me a periodontist who thinks that all of the problems with American health care are the way root canals are handled. and she cannot see beyond the borders of her own version of the Odyssey. She’s trapped in the Homeric vision and can’t recognize the many brilliant aspects of Nolan’s

contemporary translation of this epic.

Credit where credit is due, Nolan knows how to wring fabulous emotion out of these classic scenes, starting with the Trojan horse. Those are literally epical. The Odyssey partakes of the same elements that cause audiences to pack the theaters for superhero movies. It is an action epic and Nolan is very smart about recognizing that he’s dealing with the same materials that are so pleasing to contemporary audiences. Emily Wilson can’t see that. She’s blind to what makes this movie succeed.

Emily Wilson’s got her feet set in concrete because of her own approach to Homer and literally can’t move on to appreciate Nolan’s.

Larry Bernstein:

What do you think of Circe as a character?

Scott Turow:

She’s a raggedy witch in Nolan’s presentation who perhaps has been abused by men throughout her lifetime, who lures Odysseus’s crew in and turns them all into swine. Now that is a far cry from the version of Circe in the Odyssey where she is a fabulous, gorgeous goddess. Odysseus is eventually happily seduced by her.

Instead, Nolan portrays her as this slattern. The scene did not appeal to me for that reason because, she was inherently distrustful of men. Circe has been interpreted as a classic figure of great fascination, including by Madeline Miller, whose recent novel Circe saw her as a feminist hero like way Homer originally portrayed her. I think what scared Nolan about that version, is that he can’t have Odysseus stopping everywhere, and screwing all these women because it is it’s guaranteed to displease a large part of the female audience. So, he changes Circe. It is an amazing scene because of the movie making involved in the transformation of the crew into pigs. But it just didn’t sit well with me as a moviegoer. and you can say that’s because you knew the original story and liked it better.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s go to Cyclops.

Scott Turow:

I thought that was Nolan’s brilliance as a movie maker, very much at the height of his powers. Cyclops looks like a Claymation figure, grotesquely distorted, and looks like the victim of those misbegotten pharmaceuticals that created grotesque birth defects. I love the scene.

Darren Schwartz:

He seemed very childlike. These guys came in and they’re going to eat his sheep. He walks in, sees a few people. He eats them, doesn’t pay attention to the rest of them, and he’s going to take a nap.

Scott Turow:

He is the discarded child. Maybe his dad has set him up here on this island where he’s got a herd of sheep and can survive well with those circumstances.

Cyclops possesses moral ambiguity, because Odysseus and his crew invade this figure’s house, and certainly are not good guests. Because they put out Cyclops’ one eye, they’re worse guests than even the suitors are in Odysseus’s House. You actually feel sympathy for the Cyclops.

Larry Bernstein:

One thing that was not in the movie but was in the book was that Cyclops had a chat with Odysseus where as part of his deception says that his name is “no man.” And so, when the Cyclops is blinded, he yells out to his neighbors, “I’ve been hurt!” “Who hurt you?” “No man.” And so, the neighbors don’t come to his aid and the Greeks flee.

Darren Schwartz:

But doesn’t Odysseus then still yell at the end his own name?

Larry Bernstein:

Yes, and there’s Odysseus’ pride. He fires a couple more arrows and yells out his real name. Cyclops tells his father the God Poseidon to curse Odysseus’ journey home. This conversation with the Cyclops is a huge, plot-driving moment in the poem, and Nolan cuts it. He doesn’t even have Odysseus talk to him.

Scott Turow:

As they’re leaving and finally back on their ship, one of the crew members speaks up and goes, “That Cyclops, he’s Poseidon’s son. We are going to have a very rough voyage now on Poseidon’s seas.” And that proves to be prophetic.

Larry Bernstein:

In the poem, the gods play a much larger role. I like the fact that there’s disagreement among the gods with different agendas and perspectives, you can see how things can quickly get out of control.

Athena is a huge fan of Odysseus. Always looking out for him, helping out with guidance. Calypso is a God played by Charlize Theron who wants to marry Odysseus and keeps him stranded on an island for seven years.

Athena speaks to her father Zeus and afterwards Zeus intervenes and has Calypso let Odysseus return to his wife. Human agency is core to the story. Odysseus makes good and bad decisions but ultimately it is his agency that causes the ongoing tragedy.

Scott Turow:

Athena tells him a siren would drive everybody mad and says, no, I’m going to put wax in their ears.

Larry Bernstein:

But Odysseus has got to hear the Sirens. His decision puts his crew at risk. If he had put wax in his ears, the ship would have passed without incident. But here they strap Odysseus to the mast, he’s going crazy and some of his workmates remove their wax because they see how he is responding and then they swim to their deaths. I mean, that’s on him.

Scott Turow:

Absolutely. So much that goes wrong, it’s on him. Odysseus disobeys the gods or disregards Athena’s warnings to the detriment of his crew. Odysseus ties himself to the mast so he can hear the siren’s song but not succumb to it. The crew members see him living this larger-than-life experience and a couple of them take the wax out of their ears. As happens with these gorgeous women with this alluring song, they go off to pursue the sirens and die on the way.

Darren Schwartz:

Well, personally, I do believe in free will but sometimes the cards are stacked against you.

Larry Bernstein:

In ancient times, there’s so much going on around you that you can’t explain. Where did this storm come from? It must be because Poseidon’s pissed off. They’re looking for causality for what’s going on.

Scott Turow:

Most of us want to believe in free will, to make choices and not be subject to God’s will. The Greek notion of fate, that the gods decide every moment of your life undermines that Odysseus is a hero in our modern sense, that he can make choices, impose his own will, and triumph over obstacles to return home.

Darren Schwartz:

Scott, I saw parallels between Presumed Innocent and the Kindle County characters with The Odyssey, including the theme of temptation. Rusty’s journey, you could say mirrors Odysseus, is that his character is rooted in good but makes a lot of bad decisions.

Scott Turow:

Odysseus and Rusty Savage in Presumed Innocent are both deeply flawed characters who create their own troubles and then have to surmount enormous obstacles because of their ill-advised choices in order to return to their homes.

Larry Bernstein:

The Odyssey is an 11-hour story, people need to go to the bathroom. In the Odyssey, there’s repetition. Characters tell other characters what’s going on.

You do that in your Kindle County book series. You give background information. You don’t tell them the whole story, but you provide key prior character attributes and historical facts so that the new audience can understand what’s going on.

Scott Turow:

In writing these eleven novels, I’ve tried to make sure that each one is freestanding. But that means that there has to be a certain explanation of the background story of the character when it is consequential to what they’re doing in the present. And it’s always a challenge. But despite having to deliver what happened in the past, the present storyline still works.

Darren Schwartz:

Another question. When you’re writing, when do you know how it’s going to end?

Scott Turow:

The challenge always has been is novels end but life goes on. and I’ve always been conscious that whatever the ending is, it’s got to be meaningful in the context of the story.

If it’s the classic whodunit format, it’s who did do it, and that it be surprising, because we want to maintain suspense, and add something to the story. Is it for example an instance of misbegotten love? is it love gone awry so that there’s poignance to the killer’s appetite to kill? That’s a process of discovery. You don’t write the ending till you get to the end. but you’ve got to know where you’re going, otherwise the story won’t make any sense.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, should the audience run out and see the new Odyssey film?

Darren Schwartz:

Yes. If you’re like someone like you or Scott who read and knew it, then you’ll appreciate it from that level. If you’re like me and don’t have any recollection of reading it, it’s a great movie, but it also has given me the opportunity to go back and learn it. And it’s a visual masterpiece. If you can see it in one of the true IMAX theaters, that is an even more powerful experience.

Larry Bernstein:

What Happens Next with the Odyssey?

Darren Schwartz:

I think what happens next is The Iliad.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s a billion-dollar project. Do you think Christopher Nolan will take the bait?

Darren Schwartz:

Yeah. I’m sure. It’d be interesting to see the growth of the 70-millimeter IMEX theaters, right now there’s 25. In a couple of years, it could be 50.

Larry Bernstein:

Will Matt Damon play Odysseus?

Darren Schwartz:

He’ll be offered.

Larry Bernstein:

If they don’t get Matt Damon, who do you think they will take?

Darren Schwartz:

Ralph Fiennes is probably under consideration.

Larry Bernstein:

Can you think of other films where the objective is “I just want to go home?”

Darren Schwartz:

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

Steve Martin in this case would be Odysseus. He just wants to get back to Thanksgiving. Beautiful wife and family. And he gets bumped from his plane. John Candy’s there. And we all know the journey that they went on. Very similar.

Larry Bernstein:

One key distinction is that John Candy doesn’t have a family to go back to. One of the really awkward moments is when Steve Martin recognizes that.

Darren Schwartz:

At the end he revealed himself as a sad, lonely character that throughout receives Steve Martin’s empathy.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s try a different movie. Castaway.

Darren Schwartz:

Castaway is a great film. Remember the tooth. Could you hit yourself in the face hard enough to take out the tooth.

Larry Bernstein:

I think if you’re in enough pain, you’d be amazed what you could accomplish.

Darren Schwartz:

How about the loss of weight?

Larry Bernstein:

I could lose the weight if I were on the shot.

Darren Schwartz:

He had Wilson.

Larry Bernstein:

Well, maybe Calypso was a figure of imagination as well. Maybe Calypso was a basketball.

What do you think of the ending of the Odyssey?

Darren Schwartz:

Why does he have to kill everybody? Why couldn’t he be like, “Hey guys, I’m back. My wife is taken. Let’s have one more meal. Everyone goes your separate ways.”

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Scott and Darren for joining us.

If you missed our previous 2 podcasts, they have been about the American Revolution. Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice for President and Would you have been a Loyalist or a Patriot?

Our speaker was H.W. Brands, a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of the biography American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.

Professor Brands explained why Washington was appointed commander in chief of the revolutionary forces, the head of the constitutional congress, and our first president.

Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory. He discussed why the British government demanded that American colonies pay their fair for their own defense, and why the Crown chose war instead of reconciliation. Americans learn in school why the patriots fought against taxation without representation, but we didn’t consider why many American colonialists preferred King George’s rule.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Would You Have Been a Loyalist or a Patriot?, here.

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Patrick Allitt

Subject: Would You Have Been a Loyalist or a Patriot?
Bio: Professor of History at Emory and Lecturer for the Teaching Company with the Great Courses

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein.  What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Would You Have Been a Loyalist or a Patriot?

Our speaker to day is Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory where he teaches courses in the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Patrick also lectures for the Teaching Company with the Great Courses. I have taken six of Patrick’s courses and they are absolutely fabulous that are available on their website.

I want to learn from Patrick about why the British government demanded that American colonies pay their fair for their own defense, and why the Crown chose war instead of reconciliation. Americans learn in school why the patriots fought against taxation without representation, but we didn’t consider why many American colonialists preferred King George’s rule.

Patrick can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Patrick Allitt:

The history of the American Revolution has changed greatly in the last 50 years because the historians’ new attention to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and class have caused the event to look different. In particular, it’s now easy to make the case that the revolution was catastrophic from the point of view of African Americans and that it was entirely sensible for them to ally with the British against the patriots.

That in turn makes it more difficult for historians to have an uncritically pro-patriot view of what happened. Some very talented historians have written the history of the revolution from the slaves’ point of view. It’s also true that in the last 50 years, historians have become much more attentive to the loyalists. The traditional historical writing about the revolution paid nearly all its attention to the patriots, under the assumption that they were right and justified.

But now a generation of historians has grown up saying, “Here’s what the loyalists said. Here’s why it was reasonable. Here’s what they did. And here are the severe implications of the decisions they made so that it’s appropriate for us to look at the revolution as much as a civil war within the colonies as merely a battle between right and wrong in which Britain was wrong, the patriots were right, and the loyalists were a bizarre leftover who hadn’t made the appropriate mental adjustments at the right time.”

The last 50 years have been a golden age in the writing about the revolution because so many wonderful books have come out about it giving us a clearer picture than previously.

Larry Bernstein:

Patrick, if you had been living in Boston in 1775, which side would you have joined?

Patrick Allitt:

I would almost certainly have joined the Patriot side because the coercive measures undertaken by the revolutionaries were frightening and draconian. They tarred and feathered people who spoke up for the British. The last Royal Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson had his house burned down and all his property smashed. He lived his whole life in Massachusetts, loved it, and he’d written a history of it. Nevertheless, the Patriots’ attack upon him was severe and brutal. So, I’d have been cowardly enough to stay safely on the Patriot side.

Larry Bernstein:

Patrick, one of your great qualities is that you’re very diplomatic. Why couldn’t you employ diplomatic language to survive and prosper in 1775 Boston while leaning towards the loyalists?

Patrick Allitt:

The nature of a revolution is that it forces people to take sides even when they really don’t want to. The majority of people just want to lead a quiet life. Revolutionaries prevent them from doing so because it’s critical to catalyze public opinion and to force everybody into one side or the other.

Larry Bernstein:

After the war, the loyalists left the country. Many went to Canada, the UK, and the West Indies. But during the war, they didn’t do that. How did they survive during the revolution, which lasted for years?

Patrick Allitt:

The fighting went on from 1775 to 1783, although most of it was over by ‘81 after the Battle of Yorktown. But there were areas in which the majority of the people were loyalists. This is certainly true of New York City, which was occupied by the British after the Battle of Brooklyn in ‘76 and remained a loyalist stronghold from then on. Similarly, when the British occupied Philadelphia in ‘77, a large part of the Philadelphia population was quite content to go over to the loyalist side.

Large parts of the American South were loyalist, so much so that the fighting in the interior of the South was entirely a civil war in which the vast majority of people fighting on both sides were American colonists fighting against each other. So, it wasn’t clear until the fighting was finished and the treaty was made that independence had been achieved. And then, although, as you say, some people did go abroad to England, Nova Scotia or the West Indies, far more people who had been loyalists did in fact stay. Many of them had to pay fines, but they were able to eventually get back into the good graces of their society and remain. Only about 5% or 6% of the loyalists left, and they tended to be the most prominent and wealthy.

Larry Bernstein:

Families were split during the revolutionary war with some siding with the loyalists and others with the patriots. Ben Franklin’s son, William, was a diehard loyalist and the former Governor of New Jersey.

Patrick Allitt:

The Franklin example is the most conspicuous one. Benjamin Franklin spent most of the years leading up to the revolution in Britain and was a bit slow to foresee that the split would come. Although when it did come, he made a decisive choice for the revolution. Whereas his son had enjoyed honors and privileges with his father’s full approval right up to that point, and therefore wasn’t willing to jump away from the society which rewarded him for his good conduct, which suddenly made him a loyalist.

That must have been so strange for people who became loyalists was that conduct that they’d always regarded as good suddenly became bad. George Washington’s military experience was as a British officer in the French and Indian Wars. He thought of himself as an English gentleman, and suddenly the British are the enemy.

If you look at it from the grassroots level, the continuities must have been striking. The vast majority of Americans were farmers. Something like 95% of people lived in the countryside and only about 5% in town. If you were a farmer beforehand; you carry on being a farmer and judge the revolution’s success if your taxes went down. But one of the great shocks of the mid 1780s was Shay’s Rebellion, when a group of Massachusetts farmers said, we’re being taxed higher than we were before.

The people who were most affected were the revolutionary elites. The Americans who became a new political class like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. They suddenly become national leaders, having previously been minor provincial figures. We focus most of our attention on them because the change in their way of life is so dramatic.

Larry Bernstein:

Why did the British government alienate the Americans and encourage revolution, and what lessons did they learn for their other dominions?

Patrick Allitt:

The British Lord North’s government was unimaginative. Rather than making prudent concessions, it took up arms, which was clearly a foolish thing to do because the sheer physical extent of America made it unlikely that even a big British army was ever going to bring it back under British control once blood had been spilled.

The two obvious comparisons are with Canada and Australia. In both cases large numbers of British people settled there and never did have revolutionary wars. The British learned a lesson from the American Revolutionary War. And when in the 1830s, the Canadians began to make the argument for self-government, the British sent out a blue-ribbon commission. They wrote what’s called the Durham Report that recommended the devolution of power to the Canadian provinces. Canada evolved into a self-governing nation within the British Empire, peaceably. The same thing happened with Australia. If only the British government of the 1760s and ‘70s had been more sensible, it probably could have avoided the rift and could have led to one more big self-governing colony. I don’t think that’s unreasonable to think of at all.

Larry Bernstein:

The Americans looked to King George as a savior against Parliament. They viewed Parliament’s jurisdiction over the colonies as an overreach who didn’t represent their needs, but they didn’t deny initially that the king was their rightful overseer. They looked to the king to step in against this unruly parliament. But King George III decided that he would rather side with Parliament than the colonial legislatures. Why did King George III make that decision?

Patrick Allitt:

He thought that on the merits of the case, his prime minister was right. He liked Lord North very much and trusted him. The king was aware that Parliament was full of people who despised him. So, he was loyal to the North Ministry. A reasonable case can be made for what Lord North and the King were trying to do. Once the French and Indian War finished back in 1763, the American colonies were far safer than they ever had been before. Until then, they’d lived under the constant dread of French incursions. But now that dread was lifted. At the very same time that they felt less of that fear, they were asked to pay for the war. That’s something that the British politicians should have been more alert to.

As the American population grew, they could have found ways to put more trust in the Americans and also to honor the democratic traditions in many of the colonies. There was a fairly high measure of self-government and self-taxation. But the King’s view was that when a handful of rebellious subjects in Massachusetts defied him, with the Boston Tea Party, taking stern measures would have the effect of bringing this rebellion to an end and reconciling an otherwise loyal continent. Ever since the early 1600s, this arrangement had worked. The colonies had been willing to subject themselves to British governance. Most of the people living there were of British descent.

Quite often, Americans talked about England as home, even those who’d never been there. What’s remarkable about the revolution, particularly this moment between April ‘75, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and then July of ‘76, 15 months later when the Declaration of Independence was written, is that it’s the period in which a cultural shift takes place. Large numbers of people start thinking of themselves as independent of Britain.

That’s why Thomas Payne’s pamphlet Common Sense is so important, because it ridicules the concept of monarchy. It says to the Americans, “Don’t revere the king. The king is a ruffian. He’s descended from brutal warriors who seized the kingdom by force. There’s nothing sacred or venerable about it and we’re better off without it.” The combination that the king was making war against them and that Payne was providing them with theoretical justification for rebellion were the two things which led to the Declaration of Independence. In the Declaration, most of it after the preamble is an item-by-item indictment of the King himself, who’s depicted as wicked without parallel in history.

Larry Bernstein:

The desire for the British that the colonies pay their fair share of the expense is a legitimate argument. It is the same argument that the Americans currently have in NATO that the Europeans should pay for their own defense. We’re saying in an alliance pay your fair share and be responsible for defending your homeland. In this example, the Indians were still of concern. There are global naval powers enemies in the French and the Spanish. And so, Parliament enacted taxes trying to collect a sufficient amount of money to pay for the defense of this continent and were willing to use the proceeds of the tax to buy American goods. How is there such a breakdown that the Americans found the defense of their colonies so offensive and basic administration so problematic?

Patrick Allitt:

That’s one of the questions which a generation of very talented historians worked on. Gordon Wood, who died recently, was the preeminent historian to ask that question. In his famous book, The Creation of the American Republic, Gordon Wood says, “If ever there was a group of people in the 18th century who lived an easy life, it was the American colonists.” They weren’t subject to oppressive government or taxes. They paid 1/20th as much in taxation as the British and like 1/40th as much as the poor old French peasants.

The British government felt it was entirely reasonable to ask them to pay a little bit more since they were the beneficiaries of British victory in the French and Indian War. But Wood and his cohort of historians go on to say that Americans had been reading oppositional literature written in Britain. A sophisticated form of conspiracy theorizing coming out of prominent British intellectuals who were afraid that the king was going to stamp out their traditional liberties.

Everyone in England had memories of the Glorious Revolution by which the old British tyrant represented by King James II had been expelled. Instead, a constitutional monarchy in the persons of William and Mary had been brought in. Now the claim among these oppositional intellectuals in the early 18th century was that the Hanoverians, Kings George I, II, and III were trying to seize back the absolute power that the wicked old Stuart monarchs had had in the 1600s.

It wasn’t really true, but if you were receiving a constant diet of believable essays alleging this conspiracy, you start to believe them. The Woods generation came up with the idea that it is based on a giant misunderstanding -- the fear that the king was going to make himself an absolute monarch and that America would be put in the position that England had been in before the Glorious Revolution.

Larry Bernstein:

George III decides that his longevity as sovereign of England depends on him siding with parliament.

Patrick Allitt:

George III was extremely accepting of the principles of constitutional monarchy. He was king for 60 years. And in that time, he never vetoed a piece of parliamentary legislation. No one was less vulnerable to the charge of absolutism than George III. We’ve even got essays he wrote as a teenager in which he lays out with great sincerity a theory of constitutional monarchy, which he aspires to uphold. And he always did uphold it. He never was the tyrant who’s described in the Declaration of Independence. That series of claims that he’s tyrannical is completely false. The claims might be made against the British government and the ministry, but they certainly can’t be made against the king himself.

Larry Bernstein:

The French and Indian Wars, to call it a war seems like a joke. They’re minor skirmishes in the woods. The number of Brits and French is trivial. I’ve been in paintball battles that are almost on the same scale as the French and Indian War. A typical battle might have under a hundred Brits and colonialists and 450 Indians. How can we call this a war?

Patrick Allitt:

The most important battle of the French and Indian War was the Battle of Quebec, in which a fairly big British army met and defeated a fairly big French army. And in doing so, seized Quebec, the strategic points on the entire St. Lawrence River, which was the heart of the French Empire in Canada. But you’re right, the parts of the French and Indian War, which took place in the back country of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The battles around Fort Duquesne, the place that’s now Pittsburgh, were very small. On the other hand, victory goes to whichever side can command a monopoly of force and can physically defeat its enemies. And if both sides have small forces, then the small army of the winner lords it over the small army of the loser.

The important point is that it was principally a war in Canada. The eventual success of the British in capturing Fort Duquesne and turning it into Fort Pitt, was a decisive military event after which the French recognized that they couldn’t contest it anymore. On the point of demographics, the population of New England and the population of upstate New York had grown very rapidly in the course of the colonial period. There’d been continuous internal population growth with high birth rates and high survival rates. Whereas by comparison, the number of French settlers in the St. Lawrence Valley was always very low. The French were massively outnumbered in colonists, which meant that the only way the French were going to be able to hold onto their American possessions was by importing armies and they weren’t able to import an army which could win.

Larry Bernstein:

The United States’ population surges over time. There wasn’t really enough land in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales where they had substantial birth rates. They also started getting immigrants from everywhere else in Europe as well. There was no chance that the most dynamic economy in the world was going to remain under the tutelage of a constitutional monarch who did whatever the English parliament wanted. This was not a sustainable outcome in a large continent that would later have five times the population of the UK.

Ben Franklin said that even at the time, it’s just a matter of time before there are more Englishmen here in the colonies than in the UK.

Patrick Allitt:

That’s right. Between 1607 when Jamestown was founded, and 1783 when the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War, the line of settlement only went inland about 100 miles. Nearly all the whites, lived within a hundred miles of the coast. All the cities of any significance were coastal ports. You could go a hundred miles up the Connecticut River or up the Hudson River and find settlements. Movement into the West was still extremely limited at that point.

People like Daniel Boone, who was already in Kentucky by the 1770s, were on the distant frontier, and he was fighting for his life against the Shawnees. What happened next wasn’t foreseeable at the time--Americans spread over the entire continent. Jefferson looked at this and said, “What we need is a nation of yeoman farmers.” he thought, “It’s taken us 200 years to get a hundred miles inland. It takes another 200 years to get another hundred miles inland. And therefore, we’ve got thousands of years’ worth of land into which to gradually increase.” But in the 19th century, the invention of railroads, the California Gold Rush and the Mexican War led to this sudden increase in westward movement, which it was an appreciable force at the time of the revolution, but not a major one.

Larry Bernstein:

It gets to the heart of how you run an agricultural-based economy. You can export agriculture to the extent it’s on a waterway. There was no railroad. You could put the goods on a boat and send it out using a river system and an ocean. Another alternative is you could plant corn, feed the corn to a pig, and then walk the pig to market. But that was the extent of it. Otherwise, that’s why they’re a hundred miles from the shoreline.

Jefferson realized the nature of the American River system and the requirement that America had to not only control the Mississippi, but also to control the port when the Mississippi meets the Gulf. He said, “We got to own New Orleans.”

Patrick Allitt:

That’s right. There’s a passage in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, where he talks about the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers as though they’re parts of Virginia. At the time, they were because the borders extended westward on the map as far as the Mississippi. He had a shrewd understanding of the centrality of the Mississippi to American development and trade.

Larry Bernstein:

You’ve mentioned that it was a predominantly agricultural country. The towns of New York, Boston, Philadelphia are like 15,000 people. My high school is in a town of 15,000 people. I don’t think of it as being important in the context of the world in a time when London was 750,000. England was the big global sea power. They focused on the West Indies sugar islands that were incredibly valuable in terms of taxes and wealth. Tell us about the centrality of the West Indies and how that interrelates with this competition with the French.

Patrick Allitt:

That’s a very good point. When we talk about the revolution, straightaway, we start thinking about the 13 colonies. But the British were thinking about the 26 colonies, if you add in their possessions in what’s now Canada and the West Indies. The revolutionaries themselves also had this in mind, and they sent an expeditionary force to try to capture Canada in the winter of ‘75 and it failed. They sent delegates down to the West Indies to persuade the West Indies to join our side. The Canadians refused because they were convinced that British protection was better. And similarly, the West Indies declined because they were terrified of slave rebellions.

That’s why in the end, only the 13 mainland colonists decided to go with the revolution. It’s also striking that in one of the wars between Britain and France earlier in the century, the British had more or less successfully seized Canada militarily. But when it came time to the treaty, they exchanged Canada for a couple of the little sugar islands, which are microscopic dots on the map because at the time they said, these are more lucrative. And they were right to say so, at the time. The West Indies are one of the places where, because they’re not politically or economically very important today, it’s easier for us to underestimate how economically important they were then and how much of a role they played in British and French strategic thinking.

Once the Americans won the Battle of Saratoga and the French came in on the American side, from then on, the British had to think, now that we’re fighting against France, the thing we must do above all else is hold onto the sugar islands. So, they diverted their military and naval power into the Caribbean to fight against the French. And when Britain thought about what it had done right and wrong in the 1770s and ‘80s, the things it focused on were the Battle of the Saintes in 1782, a naval battle against the French, which enabled the British to hold onto these islands. And the great siege of Gibraltar from 1779 to ‘83 in which a Spanish attempted to seize Gibraltar from the British failed after the British heroic resistance to the siege. In other words, a totally different view of what really matters. If you talk about the island of Dominica and the peninsula of Gibraltar to an American and say, why were these places so vital in the 1770s and ‘80s? Chances are they’ll give you a blank look because it just never comes up in the American textbooks.

Another of the fascinating follow-up stories from the American Revolution is the coexistence of a nation which claimed to be dedicated to liberty and the enslavement of large numbers of people. And the number of slaves increased very rapidly after the Revolution. In 1833, Britain abolished slavery in its empire and they did it peacefully. They did it without a great civil war. Whereas the Americans in the end were only able to get rid of slavery through this horrendous fratricidal civil war.

Larry Bernstein:

In our high school textbook, there’s a graph of the slaves coming to the New World. What it shows is this tiny arrow heading to the United States, this wide arrow heading to the West Indies, and this massive arrow heading for Brazil. It reflects the economics of the slave trade in areas of the world where the returns on hard labor were greater.

Patrick Allitt:

Bad as American slavery was, it was even worse in the Caribbean and Brazil. The death rate was much higher. That meant that far more of the slaves in Brazil and the Caribbean were first-generation slaves who’d got a memory of their lives in Africa and were correspondingly more rebellious. The extraordinary rebellious character of slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil is striking in contrast to the relatively low number of slave rebellions in the United States. By the 1820s, the majority of enslaved people in the United States had no memory of Africa at all. One interesting aspect of the Constitution written in 1787 is that one of the provisos it had was that for 20 years there’d be a moratorium on discussing abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

In that period from 1788 to 1808, very large numbers of slaves were imported. And because they were, it was much more difficult to abolish slavery subsequently than it would have been at the time of the revolution. Obviously the most prominent person whose conscience we study in this respect is that of Thomas Jefferson. In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia and in quite a lot of his letters, he voiced to his knowledge that slavery was a dreadful wrong. And at one point he said, “I tremble when I think that God is just and that we’re going to be punished for our sins, of which slavery is the most obvious example.” In 1780, it did sound as though he was quite serious about the possibility of abolishing slavery. And around him, some of the New England states were abolishing slavery. Massachusetts in 1781. But then he wrote the slave code for Virginia.

And by the time he was president, the number of slaves in America had risen very sharply and he completely lost the belief that it was even a feasible project to abolish. So, with the increase in the number of enslaved people, the viability of abolishing slavery diminished commensurately.

Larry Bernstein:

The French wanted to see if the Americans had a chance to win before they would join up. The winning battle that pushed the French into the war was the Battle of Saratoga. Tell us about the role of the French, why they may have had initial misgivings about making this a world war and whether their involvement tipped the balance in the American war of independence.

Patrick Allitt:

To be French in the 18th century was to experience repeated defeats at the hands of the British. Time after time after time in the six or seven big wars of the 18th century, the French came out on the losing side, and clearly the entire balance of power is shifting in the direction of the British. By 1777, the year of the Battle of Saratoga, the French were absolutely salivating at the possibility of restoring some of that lost honor and lost colonies. They were eager to intervene on the American side so long as the Americans showed that they might be able to win. Horatio Gates was the American general whose army won the Battle of Saratoga. It was an incredible surprise that a big British force under the leadership of General Burgoyne was forced to surrender.

It suddenly seemed possible that the Americans would win. Then the French joined in. They’d already been sending covert aid, but now they’re sending explicit aid, including some very effective generals and admirals who joined Washington’s force and who at the decisive moment of the Battle of Yorktown outnumbered Americans involved in the battle and won a decisive victory. French aid was absolutely essential. They transformed its prospects completely.

One of the things that’s so fascinating and astonishing about George Washington is that he was an unsuccessful battlefield general. Every time he went into a pitch battle with the British, he lost famously at New York at the Battle of Brooklyn in ’76 and again at Brandywine and Germantown in ‘77. He drew the conclusion that fighting the British regulars, he was going to lose if he adopted the style of European style battles.

But once he’d got lots of French support, he was able to win the siege of Yorktown. And once French ships were patrolling in the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay so that the British ships couldn’t get in to relieve Yorktown, they were finally able to win a victory. But Yorktown is Washington’s only unequivocal battlefield victory and it’s done with a great deal of French help. The French were then delighted to discover that they’d finally pitched up on the winning side in these colonial wars.

But isn’t it interesting that British defeat didn’t lead to an end to the British empire? Quite the opposite. The British Empire continued to grow. And even with the 20-years war against Napoleon, Britain came out on top.

Larry Bernstein:

The reason for that is the Industrial Revolution kickstarts in England. It becomes incredibly wealthy place in industrial might, ideas and technology. And it brings that technology to the world. And maybe one of the lessons you were mentioning that it took from the American experience was it would have to govern with a felt glove and that it would have to engage with local communities and have them feel like they’re running the show and they needed to be a benign empire.

Patrick Allitt:

Well, certainly a benign empire when it came to governing settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But her hand, they still ruled with a rod of iron when it came to things like the Chinese opium wars or British governance in India where they were a tiny minority and where there weren’t many settlers. The East India Company for the first 150 years of its existence was just a trading company with a handful of trading stations on the Indian coast. But starting in the 1750s, the army of the East India company got involved in politics. And particularly in 1757, also during the French and Indian Wars, they won the Battle of Plassey, which gave the East India Company effective governance of Bengal, an incredibly wealthy Indian province. And the British plundering of Bengal went forward from that point onwards. And then between then and the end of the century, Britain was extending its grip on India and enriching itself enormously.

But as you say, it’s mainly officers of the British East India Company and sometimes a handful of enlisted men and sergeants with large numbers of Indians from one Indian state with British officers fighting against Indian armies from other Indian states because the concept of Indian unity hadn’t yet developed. If ever there was a beautiful illustration of the concept of divide and conquer, the British and India has to be it.

The British general who lost the battle of Yorktown, General Cornwallis, was not disgraced by that defeat. The British government recognized that he’d been put in an impossible position and that all he could reasonably do was surrender. But when he got back to Britain, he was completely rehabilitated. And then he went off to become the Governor General of India where he won a series of victories against Indian princes and contributed in a big measure to extending British power in India.

Larry Bernstein:

What’s interesting is the role of parliament and their willingness to investigate and evaluate mistakes. And this is such an important part of business and life is you don’t win every battle. What can we do better next time? Throughout the Revolutionary War, the generals are brought back to Parliament to explain their behavior. Howe was brought back to discuss the Battle of Brooklyn, and he argued that hat he didn’t have enough guys. It was a bad risk/reward to pursue. He gave his excuses. He wasn’t rewarded with additional responsibilities, but Cornwallis was.

A different example, Captain Bligh was called in front of Parliament to explain why there was a Mutiny on the Bounty. He explained that Fletcher fell in love with a girl in Tahiti, and it’s not his fault. But that said, he was no longer given additional responsibility. And then the British sent a man of war to the Pitcairn Islands to go find Fletcher. I got to give credit to Parliament to do its full investigative work and come to conclusions on a rational basis.

Patrick Allitt:

There were some very gifted people in Parliament in the late 18th century and obviously they’re wonderful to read about. One of them is Edmund Burke, who was himself a critic of British policy towards America. And now he’s regarded as one of the great founding fathers of Anglo-American conservatism. And one of the arguments he made was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He admitted that Britain was far from being a perfect democracy. But on the other hand, he said, look at the way in which it’s grown up organically. It’s clearly effective, does learn from its mistakes, does find ways to reward exceptionally talented people rising up from the lower classes. Let’s not substitute universal democracy, for which there’s no indigenous tradition. Let’s be cautious in the way in which we do it. The history of the development of British institutions is one of a long, gradual, organic development as opposed to the sharp break that the Americans made where they did one white man, one vote democracy.

Even though the American revolutionaries used harsh measures, what they never did was undertake mass exterminations. And if you look at France, Russia and China, in every case, millions had to die for the revolution to take place. And it’s a huge tribute to the American revolutionaries that they did so relatively bloodlessly.

Larry Bernstein:

You mentioned that one of the aspects of Britain was the ability of very talented young men to rise up and be successful. Alexander Hamilton is the quintessential example of that. Tell us about the role of Hamilton as an orphan from the Leeward Islands being a member of leadership from a very young age.

Patrick Allitt:

As a teenager, he was recognized as being very intellectually precocious. A group of businessmen on the islands sent him to Columbia University. While he was doing his studies, the Revolutionary War broke out and he left college and volunteered for the army where as a 19 year old, his organizational ability drew the favorable attention of George Washington who made him one of his aides.

At Valley Forge in the winter of 1777, Hamilton had become the voice of Washington. When Washington said, “Okay, we’ve got to get more supplies out of the Continental Congress.” Hamilton would draft the letter and Washington would read it and say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I think. “

Then he played a very prominent role in the politics of New York State. He married extremely well. His wife brought him social cache, which his birth denied him. And then, when it came time to evaluate the failure of the Articles of Confederation, he and Madison were probably the two leading voices in the Annapolis Convention and then the next year, the Philadelphia Convention, persuading George Washington to reside over it and give it his prestige, persuading Benjamin Franklin and various other luminaries to get themselves elected as delegates to it.

He was only in his early 30s, his brilliant work as the first Secretary of the Treasury and his writing of three very influential reports. The tragedy of Hamilton is that he’d got this extraordinary prickly pride which made him willing to challenge other men to duels. And it cost him his life. And his own son had been killed in a duel a year previously. The folly of the duel stands in utterly bizarre contrast to the incredible, good sense he showed in almost every other realm of his life and conduct.

Larry Bernstein:

Hamilton the musical was sold out and I had to buy tickets on StubHub at an egregious price. I got the last row. And behind me was the standing room only. The curtain goes up. And as the characters begin to sing, so does the woman behind me in standing room only. Wait, you’re not in the show. I want to listen to them, not to you. But what I think is incredible is that this musical made such an impression that many people memorized the words and it educated an entire generation.

Patrick Allitt:

Miranda is an absolute genius. The show is brilliant. It’s comparable in its impact to Gone with the Wind. It’s surprising that Miranda chose Hamilton. The genius of the show is to make Hamilton seem like a man of action when in fact he was an astonishing administrator. Has there ever been a great movie about a bureaucrat? He found a way to put together a sequence of events which emphasize Hamilton as the man of action, the romantic hero.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to move back to military and war plans and the Revolutionary War. Washington reminds me of the Viet Cong. You have a lot of territory and the British’s prime advantage is naval. The United States is a big place and the local people are supportive of the Patriots. Tell us about the fact that Washington could blend into the forest. The Brits were unwilling to do a surge and the limitations of naval power against a continent.

Patrick Allitt:

Your analogy with Vietnam is a good one. One of the American historians who was studying the revolution in the 1970s when the Vietnam War was going on was a John Shy who wrote a terrific book called A People Numerous and Armed in which he makes this exact comparison. He says, think about Washington by analogy with Ho Chi Minh, at the time, an astonishing claim to make. Just as the Americans had to ship their stuff halfway around the world and didn’t have a good enough local base of support. The British had to ship their stuff across the Atlantic. It took months. Shy does some very ingenious comparisons and then exactly shows Washington realized that the most important thing was simply to keep the revolution going.

It isn’t so much that his army blended into the woods as that he kept them together in places where it was going to be difficult for the British to force them into a pitched battle. That’s why Valley Forge plays an outsized role in the American iconography of the revolution. Normally, no one ever remembers the winter quarters of an army, but Valley Forge is vital because he was able to keep the army together.

The most important element of the French alliance was naval power. Think just about the proximity of France to Britain. As soon as France declared war, the British promptly withdrew most of their fleet into home waters. And there was a terrific invasion scare in 1779 where Britain was convinced that the French were going to invade them. Once France was in the war America becomes a secondary consideration, which can’t even rival concern over the Caribbean because of the lucrative character of the sugar islands.

It’s a naval war, which the Americans win by proxy with French help. One of the sources of tension between France and America after that was that the Americans negotiated their own treaty in 1783. Franklin, Adams and Jay weren’t willing to wait for French input into the treaty. Their view was we’ve got to get the British government to concede American independence, which the French might have dragged their feet. The American negotiators achieved independence. It’s a wonderful example of the lack of gratitude in politics.

Larry Bernstein:

The French wanted to make sure that the Americans had a chance to win before they made a world war. But King Louis XVI didn’t like the idea of ending the relationship a king. I’m a monarch. Why do I want to encourage republics? There is that delicate balance between republics make sense there but not here.

Patrick Allitt:

That’s right. The history of foreign policy is that you make ugly relationships for practical reasons. The irony of all this is that the French went into such debt in fighting the American war that it is one of the precipitating factors of the French Revolution, which came along in 1789. The French monarchy was bankrupt which made it weaker and vulnerable to a popular uprising.

Larry Bernstein:

Tell us about the French Revolution in the context of the American Revolution.

Patrick Allitt:

The French intellectuals of the enlightenment, people like Diderot and Voltaire had been talking about the rights of man and the universal equality of humanity. What they wanted was to achieve within France the same kind of society as they had witnessed being born on the other side of the Atlantic. But the social structure of France and its different traditions and lack of human equality made it difficult to bring that about in a humane way, which caused the French Revolution to veer off.

The Estates-General in August of ‘89 made a universal declaration of human rights. When you read it side by side with the American Constitution and the Declaration, they’re all drawing from the same intellectual inspiration.

Larry Bernstein:

Global wars are expensive. They got to raise taxes. That’s the spark.

Patrick Allitt:

The history of revolutions in the world since the 18th century, we have to be struck by how reasonable they make the anti-revolutionary intellectuals seem. Revolutions generate bloodshed on a horrifying scale. They involve the obliteration of human rights even when they’re taking place with claims that they’re the fulfillment of human rights.

People are instinctively and naturally conservative in most of what they do, and they don’t cope with drastic novelties launched upon them in the name of an ideology.

With the American Revolution leaving aside the slave areas, certainly in New England and the middle colonies, there was a fairly high degree of ordinary citizens participation in politics. There was a reasonable degree of widespread property owning. There wasn’t a massive difference between the richest and the poorest so that they were able to institutionalize what they’d already achieved in practice.

Larry Bernstein:

You keep referring to this as an American revolution. I don’t think it is. The people who were running the country before the war are the same people running the country after the war.

Patrick Allitt:

As a kid in English schools, we didn’t call it the American Revolution. We called it the loss of the American colonies. But it did carry with it the idea that places which had been self-governing under British supervision now became self-governing without British supervision. Implicitly we were minimizing the revolutionary character of it. The new elite were all property owners’ intent upon the protection of their property, and fighting to uphold the laws which maintained their property. So that is what makes it a very conservative revolution.

Larry Bernstein:

What is the importance of dates and geography as it relates to learning about the American Revolution?

Patrick Allitt:

They’re absolutely vital. The geography because people were so much less mobile then than they are now so that the distance between even New York and Philadelphia was a matter of a couple of days. The distance between Charleston and Boston was a matter of weeks. If a British general sends a letter about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which took place in April of 1775, it takes two months to get to England. Then the ministers have to respond to it and it takes another two for the reply to get back and by that time, the entire situation has changed so that the slowness of transatlantic communications made it very difficult for the British to keep up with what was happening on the ground in America. That’s a geographical constraint.

The most important chronological constraint is the fighting started in April 1775. The declaration didn’t come until July of 1776. For 15 months, British and American soldiers were fighting each other and they both claimed they were doing it in the name of the English king. The study of that 15-month period is vital because that’s the period during which more American rebels came to say, “We’re no longer the subjects of the King of England. We’re repudiating his leadership and we’re declaring our independence and it’s right for us to do that.” You can’t grasp that without paying attention to exactly when it took place.

Larry Bernstein:

What are you optimistic about as it relates to celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution?

Patrick Allitt:

With the exception of the war of 1812, the British and the Americans have been on very good terms with each other. Normally when one empire rises and another declines, as happened to the Americans and the British in the 20th century, they fight each other. But that didn’t happen in the case of the British and the Americans. Our institutions that we share: the rule of law, our principles of moderation and the Anglo-American tradition, which includes the American Revolution as one of its central parts, is a force for good in the world.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Patrick for joining us.

This is the second podcast in a series on the American revolution. If you missed our previous podcast, it was Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice for President.

Our speaker was H.W. Brands who is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the biography American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.

Hal explained why Washington was appointed commander in chief of the revolutionary forces, the head of the constitutional congress, and our first president.

Hal praised Washington’s leadership style and why it was appropriate for his times. We also detailed what happened in the Room Where it Happened.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice, here.

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H.W. Brands

Subject: Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice
Bio: Professor of History at University of Texas at Austin and Author of American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice.

Our speaker is H.W. Brands who is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the biography American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.

I want to learn from Hal about why Washington was chosen to be commander in chief of the revolutionary forces, the head of the constitutional congress, and our first president.

I want to hear about Washington’s leadership style and why it was appropriate for his times. I also want to learn about what happened in the Room Where it Happened.

Hal, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

H.W. Brands:

I decided to write about Washington in the context of the 250th anniversary of American independence. I’m a biographer, and biographers are supposed to be able to explain their subjects. I never could figure Washington out, but I decided it was time to take a shot at it. He was Commanding General of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States. His reputation hovered over the entire founding period, from 1775 until his death in 1799. He was eulogized by Henry Lee as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, and his fame has remained remarkably steady since, unlike Andrew Jackson or Ulysses Grant, who each had long stretches of being seen as disasters. The secret to his success was the simplest and most enduring thing -- the ability to make good decisions. Presidents can be great speakers or charismatic, but if they make lousy decisions, they become lousy presidents.

The harder question is why he got it right so often. He thought carefully and calmly, and never rushed to judgment, the farthest thing from impulsive. But the real key, and this is almost unique among presidents, is that he was able to separate his personal interest from the interest of the country. Most people who rise to the level of considering the presidency conflate the two. They think the country needs them, and that if the country doesn’t elect them, the country is doomed. Washington could tell the difference, partly because of the man he was, and partly because of the moment in history he occupied.

That points to something that also undercuts the tidy version of the story. Washington made good decisions because he was a very good fit for his particular moment, and he’d be a terrible fit for the presidency today. In the first place, he didn’t need the job. By the time Grant or Eisenhower became president, the office was already a really big deal. Eisenhower was succeeding Franklin Roosevelt, the most important figure of the century. For Washington, the presidency wasn’t a big prize at all. Nobody knew what it was going to become. The men who’d held the office before him, as President of the Continental Congress, were inconsequential, both because of the weak structure of the Articles of Confederation and because nobody knew if the new republic would last. It really wasn’t until the 20th century that the presidency became the center of gravity of the American system, the 19th century belonged to Congress.

Washington was the first president, and the last one who didn’t have to compete for the job, everyone after him, starting with Adams and Jefferson had to. Washington already had his reputation; he assumed his fame would rest on having been the victorious General of the Revolution. Whatever came after that was secondary. The presidency was a victory lap, not the prize he’d been aiming for. For everyone who came after him, the presidency would be the first line of their obituary. For Washington, it wasn’t that big a deal.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to start with Washington as a young man, something that struck me in the book was how young he was at every stage. He takes on huge responsibility in the French and Indian War at age 23. And the scale of the battles were only two hundred British and French troops with 500 Indians on each side, it’s less a serious battlefield than a skirmish, a bunch of kids playing in the woods.

H.W. Brands:

It’s a little bit like that. Remember, this was a frontier community. Even Virginia had no real cities, and the frontier was contested land just a day and a half’s ride from Mount Vernon. Frontier communities create opportunity because the layers of institutions and expectations haven’t congealed yet, it’s why Benjamin Franklin was able to rise so far in the British Empire at the same time Washington was exploring the wilds of what became Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.

Washington accidentally stumbled into the conflict that made his name and made him enemy number one to the French, who believed he’d assassinated an envoy under a flag of truce. After the first skirmish, he wrote to his brother that he’d heard the bullets whistle and there was something charming in the sound, which tells you a lot about his temperament. He’d already been a frontiersman before he was a soldier, going on a surveying trip at 17 and loving the hardship of it. He was born into the Virginia gentry, but as a younger son in a mid-level family, comfortable, but not at the top, so he had to worry about where his reputation was coming from. His life’s goal was to win the respect of his contemporaries, not money. In Virginia, unlike Philadelphia or Boston, money wasn’t really the arbiter of reputation. These were planters, managers of large enterprises at a time when a big American business might have fifteen employees.

Washington had hundreds of people who took orders from him, which built an executive habit early. He also turned out to be a genuinely good soldier who liked being under fire, which most people don’t. He had an air of command, and it helped that he was a big, impressive-looking man and the best horseman of his generation, the equivalent of being a star quarterback, and a more practical skill, since everyone had to ride. He impressed people partly by how he looked, but he cared that people respect him for the right reasons, and he spent much of his life trying to earn that.

Larry Bernstein:

He tried to earn respect from the Fairfax family. Who were they, and why did it matter that Washington endeared himself to them?

H.W. Brands:

Lord Fairfax had received a huge land grant from the Crown, that’s how you got large land holdings back then. Lord Fairfax was not a senior member of England’s aristocracy, but they were a big deal in Virginia, a big fish in a small pond. Washington’s father died when he was eleven, so he didn’t have a father figure beyond his older brothers. He was in the gentry, but at a level where he could use a boost, and when Lord Fairfax put in a good word for him with the Virginia governor, that’s how Washington got his start, first as an envoy to the French in the Ohio country, then as commander of the small force whose skirmish started the French and Indian War.

Larry Bernstein:

You mentioned his father died young and his older brothers were educated in England.

H.W. Brands:

That was fairly common, but once his father died, the money for that wasn’t available, and his guardians weren’t inclined to provide it. Washington had surprisingly little formal education. Biographers have been frustrated trying to pin down exactly what he knew. He was tutored in mathematics and geometry for surveying, and he was clearly a wide reader who knew more than his formal schooling would explain.

There’s an apt comparison to other self-educated people of the era, Franklin, and later Lincoln. Formally educated people learn what they don’t have to know, because they know what won’t be on the test. People without that formal education don’t know what they don’t need to know, so Franklin, thinking he had to know everything, learned everything. Washington wasn’t that polymathic; he focused on what interested him. Nobody knew more about scientific farming than George Washington, he considered himself a farmer when he wasn’t a soldier, always trying some new crop or technique at Mount Vernon. And when he became a soldier, there was no West Point, so he taught himself from books and experience.

Larry Bernstein:

You describe him getting a position in the Virginia legislature and being unable to get a sentence out, which is remarkable, compared to Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, who could make an argument. He preferred being a general, where he could make decisions rather than speeches.

H.W. Brands:

Less unusual in those days than you’d think. In the Virginia Washington was born into, being a man of weight in the community mattered more for a seat in the House of Burgesses than being able to give a speech. He was expected to serve simply because he was a wealthy landowner, especially after marrying Martha Custis, though he never owned her land; he simply managed it, and it would pass to her children, not his. Unlike Massachusetts, a Burgesses seat in Virginia wasn’t a stepping stone to anything, you weren’t going to become governor, since that was a royal appointment. Washington had no political ambitions there. It was only with independence that Washington rose to the very top of his field, as commander of the Continental Army, with nothing higher to aspire to.

There’s a wonderful example of Washington’s other strength -- recognizing that in a room full of talkers, silence can be your friend. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was immediately elected president of the convention, and interpreted that role, on the model of the British House of Commons speaker, as simply presiding, never joining the debates. You’d think that would diminish his influence. It did the opposite. While Madison, Hamilton and everyone else argued and neutralized each other, Washington sat in silence at the front, and everyone wondered what General Washington thought. Because he never said, many assumed he knew more than they did, like a Supreme Court justice reserving judgment while the lawyers argue. That silence effectively won him the presidency. When the convention debated the powers of the office, delegates could project onto Washington whatever they wanted the presidency to be. If he’d spoken up about term lengths or specific powers, he’d have won some support and lost other people’s confidence. His silence was strategically an advantage.

Larry Bernstein:

Someone putting together a team needs to be a good judge of talent, and Alexander Hamilton was a prodigy.

H.W. Brands:

A wunderkind, a precocious child. Hamilton had been Washington’s aide during the war, so Washington knew him well personally and unlike Jefferson or Adams, whom he knew mostly by reputation. Adams is a special case. As vice president, he wasn’t a member of the cabinet or considered part of the administration at all. He was President of the Senate, and that was essentially his only real job.

Washington’s cabinet consisted of four people, Secretary of State, Treasury, War, and the Attorney General, and he’d solicit their opinions, sometimes in writing, without betraying his own position. It became clear quickly that Hamilton and Jefferson were on opposite sides of nearly everything, dividing over how powerful the new government should be. Hamilton wanted as much power as possible; Jefferson wanted to keep it as small as necessary. Washington wasn’t dismayed that they disagreed, what dismayed him was that even after a decision was made, they’d carry the dispute into public, lining up allies. But this was probably inevitable. Any system where people can express opinions and vote on them is going to produce factions, since most votes come down to yes or no.

What made Washington different was that, by the time he became president, he knew this was his last office. He wasn’t angling for anything else, unlike Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, who all had further ambitions. That let him rise above the fray in a way that wasn’t available to the others.

By 1791, Madison, who in Federalist 10 had argued factions were dangerous and that the new Constitution would neutralize them, was already conceding in Congress that factions weren’t going away and had to be managed instead. Hamilton was leading the Federalists, Jefferson the Republicans. Washington disdained to be associated with either, even though on ninety percent of issues he came down with Hamilton. When Congress passed Hamilton’s bill for a national bank, Washington had Madison write him the best argument for signing it and the best argument for vetoing it, and Madison came away with no idea which way Washington would go. He signed it.

Washington had a soft spot for Hamilton, who drove everyone else crazy with his ambition and sharp elbows. The reason Hamilton was never seriously considered for president wasn’t the duel, and it wasn’t that he was born in the West Indies, Washington wasn’t born in “the United States” either, since it didn’t exist yet. It’s that nobody liked him enough to nominate him, even though everyone respected his gifts.

Larry Bernstein:

The musical Hamilton has a number called “The Room Where It Happens,” about the negotiation over whether the federal government should assume state debts. Washington wasn’t in that room.

H.W. Brands:

He wasn’t, because he didn’t see himself as a horse-trader, and he didn’t interfere with Congress’s business, that preserved deniability if the deal fell apart. The two stuck issues were whether the federal government should assume the states’ Revolutionary War debts, and where the national capital would be. Hamilton wanted assumption because it would make the country’s creditors answerable to the national government rather than the states, but that outraged states that had already paid off their own debts through taxation. Meanwhile New York merchants backed Hamilton’s assumption plan, and Southerners, mostly farmers who’d end up paying for it, wanted the capital in exchange. Madison brought Jefferson, representing the South, and Hamilton, representing the Northern merchants, together for a dinner, without Washington, who may not even have known it was happening. Nobody kept notes, which is exactly why there’s room for Lin-Manuel Miranda to write about it. But the outcome was clear -- the South got the capital, the North got assumption, and each side delivered its votes.

Larry Bernstein:

What’s beautiful about that story is that it’s compromise, each side loses something, each side wins something, and it happened entirely within the legislative branch. Washington’s role was secondary.

H.W. Brands:

All the great 19th-century compromises: Missouri, the nullification crisis, 1850, were congressional affairs; the president often didn’t even say where he stood. In his first inaugural, Washington said outright he wasn’t going to send Congress a list of bills to pass, that was their job. By the 20th century, Congress waits for the president to set the agenda. We’ve got it backwards from where we started.

Larry Bernstein:

You keep calling it the American Revolution. Was it really one? The colonists seem to have loved the British system in theory, parliament, the king, and only resented not having seats in Parliament. It looks more like a dispute than a revolution on the scale of France or Russia.

H.W. Brands:

There’s real truth to that. The Americans made their case on the basis of their rights as Englishmen going back to Magna Carta, the British still call it the War of American Independence rather than a revolution. If you look at who ruled America before and after, it’s mostly the same people minus the very top stratum of royal appointees: Washington was a leader in Virginia before the war and after it; Adams became the second president. Nothing like the wholesale overturning you see in real revolutions, except that in making the case for independence, Jefferson summoned into being ideas, like “all men are created equal,” that went well beyond the practical question of separation, and that we’ve been arguing about ever since.

It helped that Americans had effectively been governing themselves for a century, since the Crown and Parliament mostly ignored them, until the 1760s, when Britain decided it needed to monetize the colonies better. Once people started getting hurt, tarred and feathered, shot in the Boston Massacre, tensions and emotions took over, and Jefferson’s language about equality entered the picture.

Not every American backed independence, which is why there was a real fight for hearts and minds. But there’s one more reason the American Revolution wasn’t like the others: the losers had somewhere to go. About 100,000 loyalists left for Canada, the West Indies, England, or West Africa, so the winners never had to figure out what to do with them.

In France, the emigres who didn’t escape lost their heads. As revolutions go, ours was tame, and it created a replica of the English model, unlike the wholesale reinvention of Russia.

Larry Bernstein:

After the Boston Massacre, John Adams defended the British soldiers who’d fired on civilians and won an acquittal on the more serious charges, without paying much of a political price. How do we square that with Adams seeing himself as a revolutionary?

H.W. Brands:

Adams was self-righteous, but he was often right, which is its own kind of insufferable. We know a great deal about him because Abigail saved his letters and he kept a diary. He argued that everyone deserved a fair trial and legal representation under English common law, and that willingness to see justice done actually showed the strength of the American position. That’s part of why the American Revolution never turned as ideological or violent as the French one, the English mode of thinking was pragmatic rather than theoretical, there was no entrenched, generations-old aristocracy to topple, and the questions around religion and the church had already been fought out in England’s own civil wars. It was also simply a much smaller world of people involved than London or Paris.

The most bitter fighting during the war, in fact, was between Americans and Americans, loyalists against patriots, not Americans against British troops. But it was a small enough elite that even bitter opponents often knew each other personally, which took some of the edge off compared to a true civil war.

Larry Bernstein:

There’s a song in the musical 1776, “Sit Down, John,” about how opinionated and insufferable Adams could be to the whole room. It’s interesting that the same qualities that disqualify Hamilton from the presidency in people’s minds, the sharp elbows, being a little full of himself, don’t seem to disqualify Adams.

H.W. Brands:

Hamilton always came across as a climber, when he talked to you, you felt he wanted something from you. Adams had a different profile: more religious, and he had Abigail to confide in, which Hamilton lacked. Benjamin Rush, who corresponded with everyone in that generation, received a letter from Adams that’s very revealing. Adams wrote that the history of their generation would be told as a “tie of lies,” and that the story would be that Dr. Franklin struck the ground with his lightning rod and up jumped General Washington, and between the two of them they conducted all the great affairs of war and peace, leaving unsaid that nobody would give Adams the credit he deserved. He knew he wasn’t Washington and knew he wasn’t Jefferson; he didn’t have their charisma. He won the presidency on Washington’s coattails, beat Jefferson narrowly, then lost the rematch in 1800.

Larry Bernstein:

Another example: in the Paris negotiations, Adams was the diligent one, up at dawn, while Franklin was out carousing late into the night, and yet Franklin was the one who actually got the diplomatic results.

H.W. Brands:

Exactly right. Adams had that Puritan streak and resented Franklin’s late nights, but couldn’t quite acknowledge that Franklin was doing serious diplomatic business at three in the morning in those same salons, that’s how you actually reached the people who made decisions. Adams thought he was the one doing all the work. Maybe he was doing all the detail work, but Franklin was the rainmaker.

Larry Bernstein:

You’ve spent your career writing biographies of major American leaders, and telling the story of the United States through them. Why biography, as opposed to straight history?

H.W. Brands:

I grew up in Portland, and every kid in Oregon learns about Lewis and Clark, so I was attuned early to things that happened before my own generation. I became a historian, but I chose to write biographies because people will buy biographies who won’t buy history books, history sounds like names and dates, but biography is the nonfiction genre closest to the novel, and people like novels about individuals.

I had in mind a series of biographies that would add up to a history of the United States, though I didn’t tell my publisher that at the time. Benjamin Franklin covers the 18th century; Andrew Jackson picks up the story of emerging democracy; Ulysses Grant carries it through the Civil War and Reconstruction; the two Roosevelts get us to the mid-20th century; Reagan is the last one. I hadn’t written about Washington because I thought Franklin was the more interesting, many-faceted story.

Eventually I moved to writing smaller ensemble books, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and Henry Clay; Truman and MacArthur; and, most recently, Franklin Roosevelt against Charles Lindbergh over whether America should enter World War II. The isolationist side gets short shrift from history because they lost, but they weren’t dupes or fools, they had a real case to make, and I wanted to recapture a time when the outcome wasn’t foreordained. That’s what I think history and biography are for: making the past understandable to the present, and giving readers the chance to put themselves in the shoes of people who didn’t yet know how things would turn out.

Before Pearl Harbor, it was entirely possible America would stay out of the war, and Charles Lindbergh led that argument. The fact that the Trump campaign adopted “America First,” the old slogan of that movement, was a sign that the debate was no longer so old.

Larry Bernstein:

You don’t mention the Washington myths in the book, the cherry tree, and so on. Why skip debunking them?

H.W. Brands:

Even my students, much younger than the book’s typical reader, have mostly heard about the cherry tree, it’s ancient history to them, but they know it. I could have added a paragraph, but I think most readers are already better informed about these myths than I’d be giving them credit for; setting up that straw man just to knock it down felt unnecessary. The real vogue for a heroic, mythologized Washington comes after the Civil War, when a divided North and South go looking for something they still have in common, and land on the Revolution, and on Washington, a Southerner who became president of the whole country. That’s when you get the multi-volume hagiographies. The early Parson Weems stuff, the cherry tree included, was always understood as material for children; no serious adult took it as history.

Larry Bernstein:

One thing we now reflect on is Washington’s decision not to seek a third term, that idea that an executive should serve his time and go home, the way Truman went back to Independence, Missouri. You quote King George III, who was reportedly astonished that Washington resigned his commission and went home after the war, supposedly calling him the greatest man in the world for it.

H.W. Brands:

He did say that, “if this report is true, Washington is the greatest man in the world.” But I’d point to a quote I like better: John Adams wrote to Abigail after his own inauguration that he looked over at Washington and thought he saw a twinkle in his eye, nobody else ever saw Washington’s eyes twinkle, and imagined Washington thinking, “I am fairly out, and you are fairly in; let us see which of us will be happier.” That gets at the real truth. Washington never wanted to be president in the first place; he had to be talked into a second term by Hamilton and Jefferson after intending to leave following the first. By his second term, he was so disgusted with the direction of politics that he couldn’t wait to get out. This wasn’t selfless restraint; it was someone who couldn’t leave fast enough.

Even the King George anecdote reflects a misunderstanding: George III was judging Washington by an English context, where a general who didn’t seize power after a civil war was remarkable. But there was no real government for Washington to seize. The Articles of Confederation had no taxing power and no authority over the states, if Washington had marched on Philadelphia to take over the Confederation Congress, he’d have found nothing there, the way a NATO commander who marched on Brussels today would find nothing worth taking. If Washington had actually wanted power, he’d have been better off marching on Virginia, which at least had something to seize. It just wasn’t a live possibility in the 1780s the way marching on Washington would have been by the Civil War.

Larry Bernstein:

There’s an old and recurring argument about how much authority the federal government has to send in force against domestic unrest, it came up again recently with the dispute over the National Guard in Minnesota. Washington faced his own version with the Whiskey Rebellion.

H.W. Brands:

He put his old uniform back on, got on his horse, and led militia from several states toward Western Pennsylvania, though he never really intended to fight and never got close to the front. His presence, and the fact that militia were already on the way, was meant to intimidate the rebels into standing down, and it worked. They sent negotiators; Washington made clear the government would fight if it had to, and the rebels melted back into the countryside.

Andrew Jackson later made a similar threat during the nullification crisis, though he arranged a tariff compromise before it came to that. Grant might have done something similar during Reconstruction, sending troops against the Klan in South Carolina.

The earlier parallel that got Washington behind rewriting the Constitution in the first place was Shays’ Rebellion, in western Massachusetts in 1786. Washington became convinced these uprisings could be the end of the republic, since state governments and their militias, often riddled with sympathizers, couldn’t be counted on to put them down, and only a stronger federal government could reliably intimidate a local uprising. Once that principle was established, though, it mostly didn’t have to be exercised again until secession, and that one had to be settled by war.

Larry Bernstein:

We saw versions of that same tension in Reconstruction, when Grant sent troops to protect Black voters in the Carolinas, only for the Hayes administration to curtail federal power over internal state affairs almost immediately after. How should we think about that recurring argument between state and federal authority?

H.W. Brands:

It’s been going on for 250 years, so it’s probably not going away. States preexisted the national government, Madison actually wanted to wipe the slate clean and eliminate the states as sovereign entities entirely, but that didn’t fly, so the Constitution was built with that tension baked in. There’s no intrinsic answer to how much power belongs to the states versus the federal government; people will argue whichever side benefits their politics at the moment. It’s really the fundamental question of politics. How do individual people live together in community? Every political system has to work that out, and every country does it differently at different times. We’ll be arguing about it forever.

Larry Bernstein:

What are you optimistic about, for America at 250?

H.W. Brands:

We’ve made it this far, and there’s every reason to think we’ll keep making it. Every generation has thought the country was falling apart, and it never has, except for one enormous hiccup during the Civil War, which we got past. I tell my students of my year-long American history course: you’re now part of this 250-year experiment in self-government. Don’t screw it up.

Larry Bernstein:

Last question, do you teach that year-long course through biography, or more standard readings?

H.W. Brands:

Not through biography exactly, but I do hang moments in history on individuals, because people are interested in people. When I teach the Revolutionary War, I introduce students to Temple Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, who had to choose between his rebel grandfather, sailing to Paris to negotiate the alliance with France, and his loyalist father, William Franklin, then under indictment in New Jersey. Temple was about my students’ age, and I ask them: what would you have done? Because everyone has to make decisions on incomplete information, without knowing how things will turn out, and Temple Franklin had no way of knowing the rebels would win.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Hal for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was about Rocky’s 50^th anniversary.

Our speakers were the What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz and a special guest Scott Holstein my friend since kindergarten.

Rocky won best picture in 1976 and now is the time to rewatch it. This franchise is a Stallone production: He wrote it, directed several of the films, and acted in it. We talked about why Sly is the real hero who made these films successful.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Rocky at 50, here.

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Darren Schwartz and Scott Holstein

Subject: Rocky at 50

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Rocky at 50.

The original Rocky film was released 50 years ago, and today we are going to review the entire Rocky series. Our discussion will be led by the What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz with us is a special guest Scott Holstein who is one of my oldest friends.

My objective of this podcast is to discuss why Rocky won best picture and why you need to rewatch it. This series is a Stallone production: He wrote it, directed several of the films, and acted in it. He is the real hero that made this franchise successful, and my plan is to talk about how he did it.

Let’s get started.

Scott, tell our audience about how we met.

Scott Holstein:

First day of kindergarten. I am five-year-old, and I find two kids rolling on the ground fighting, wrestling. One is Larry and the other is Jeff Bloom.

Larry Bernstein:

I am not violent, so Jeff must have started this.

Scott Holstein:

Absolutely, Larry looks up from underneath Jeff and says, “Hey, new kid. Help me.”

Larry Bernstein:

Did you help me?

Scott Holstein:

Not a chance. I wasn’t going to take on Jeff Bloom.

Larry Bernstein:

Come on, if there’s two of us, we got a shot.

Scott Holstein:

He was a future football star. It was a great meeting. And we are still friends.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, start us off.

Darren Schwartz:

Well, the project was the 50th anniversary of Rocky and we watched Rocky 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 and Rocky Balboa.

Larry Bernstein:

Rocky Balboa is effectively Rocky 6.

Darren Schwartz:

And then we watched two documentaries on Sylvester Stallone.

Larry Bernstein:

The first documentary was called Sly and the other was the 40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic that was made 10 years ago. Did you love Rocky 1?

Darren Schwartz:

I was inspired. It reminded me of when I saw it in the theater with my father in 1976, great memories. It’s a movie about a down on his luck boxer who is a local thug, gets a chance to fight in the championship, but ultimately, it’s a story about a guy looking for respect and love. It was great to connect with it again.

Larry Bernstein:

I have not seen Rocky in 50 years. I was awestruck at how good it was. It felt fresh. The dialogue was much better than I expected. Stallone was superb. I had grossly underestimated his ability as an actor. It was excellent. Scott?

Scott Holstein:

His love for Adrian was raw. Fantastic. I saw it at the Edens Theater on Skokie Boulevard.

Larry Bernstein:

Me too.

Scott Holstein:

Which no longer exists. The movie for me was inspirational, absolutely.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, the music plays an enormous role in all the Rocky films. What do you think of the Rocky Theme song?

Darren Schwartz:

It is central. Bill Conti was nominated for the Academy Award.

Larry Bernstein:

Nominated but did not win, lost to Evergreen which was the theme from A Star is Born.

Darren Schwartz:

I remember listening to it on the radio driving on Cranbrook Road. I have a vision when I was nine years old and it stays with you.

The melody builds to a crescendo. I think of him making it up the stairs and jumping at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Larry Bernstein:

The music is core to the entire series. In the original Rocky, it’s slow going. 1970s cinema is not like current films in terms of its pacing of dialogue or action. Kids will think it is ridiculously slow. But then when the Rocky theme starts, there is a spark.

Rocky is jogging and then because of his training he can accelerate into a sprint and with that the music changes with his speed. He runs up those stairs and starts jumping. I may have never mentioned this on the show before, but I went to Penn beginning in 1984.

Darren Schwartz:

Did you run the stairs?

Larry Bernstein:

Everyone ran up the stairs and jumped around. Most people run up the stairs but never go into the Art Museum.

Darren Schwartz:

They should charge for that.

Larry Bernstein:

The Rocky statue was installed at the top of the stairs.

The statue was created for Rocky 3 and was donated to the city. There was controversy as it was not considered to be fine art. The statue was moved from the art museum to the Spectrum which is where the Flyers and the Sixers used to play. But by popular demand, the statue was brought back to the art museum in 2005, and this year there was a major exhibit at the art museum called Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments.

Philadelphia was not safe when I lived there. The year before I arrived Mayor Wilson Goode fire bombed the MOVE Building that accidentally burned down an entire square block.

My dad came to visit me over Columbus Day weekend during my freshman year. My college roommate was out of town, so my dad slept in my dorm room. It was hot, so I left the window open and early in the morning a squirrel came into the room and was running around.

Scott Holstein:

It sounds like Rocky chasing the chicken.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s similar.

Dad said that I needed to get a screen. I found in the Yellow Pages a hardware store 8 blocks away. I called them up and I told them that I would walk over and pick it up.

“Walk. Are you out of your mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not safe here. The screen costs $16. Come with exact change. I have a half door. Take a cab, tell the driver to wait, run over. I’ll hand you the screen in exchange for the cash, get back in that cab and get out of here.”

Scott Holstein:

What happened to the squirrel?

Larry Bernstein:

Squirrel didn’t come back thanks to the screen.

In the Rocky movies we get a visual tour of Philadelphia. The Italian working-class neighborhood where he lives and trains. We see him running on paths next to the Schuylkill River, and sprint on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to the art museum steps.

Darren Schwartz:

One of my favorite lines was during the press conference. They ask Rocky, “What do you think about the fight being at the Spectrum?”

“I like it. It’s near my house.”

Larry Bernstein:

That goes to Rocky’s use of language. Most athletes, especially boxers resemble Apollo Creed with their use of hyperbole and antagonism towards their opponent. It’s nasty.

Rocky is understated, self-deprecating, kind, and direct with his language.

Darren Schwartz:

Rocky was a reluctant challenger. At the press conference, he’s a fan of Apollo. He’s sitting next to him. Apollo’s doing his Ali version of, I’m going to destroy this man.

And they ask, “Rocky, what do you think about that?”

He goes, “He seems kind of mad.” He does not have the challenger mentality. He’s happy to be there, the reluctant challenger, and develops that killer instinct once he trains. The inspiration for that is Adrian who gives him the confidence that he can win.

Larry Bernstein:

The fights are only like 20 percent of the movie, most of it is his preparation.

Scott Holstein:

The training begins this transformation from a troubled guy into a fighting machine. And it’s an internal struggle as much as it is a physical struggle.

Larry Bernstein:

Rocky is a series of six films. Darren how did Stallone make the sequels interesting?

Darren Schwartz:

Each Rocky movie follows the hero’s journey, which is a call to action, finding a mentor, training, trials, growth, death, rebirth, revelation, and ultimately success. You see that in every film.

They started each movie with the previous film’s ending fight. I’ve never seen that before. Stallone gets a lot of credit. In Rocky 1, Rocky ends with his fight against Apollo Creed that he loses. Split decision, this judge for Stallone, this judge for Creed. And Adrian comes to him. He’s yelling, “Yo, Adrian! In the background you vaguely hear winner and still champion.” So that’s minimized because what he’s really won is Adrian and self-respect.

That’s the end of the film. Rocky Two, opens with the fight ending and Rocky and Creed going to the hospital.

Larry Bernstein:

In each following Rocky, the film starts with a minute or two from the previous movie.

Darren Schwartz:

An inter-lacing effect where you are in the end of the previous movie to begin the next. It is an example of how Stallone brought a creative force that hasn’t been done in other films.

Larry Bernstein:

What are some of the motifs that Stallone uses in the series? What is the equivalent to the martini shaken not stirred?

Darren Schwartz:

He’s got the hat that he wore in the original film. Which was interesting because he picked it up on set. The director, John Avildsen was like, “You can’t wear that. You look ridiculous.” Because it was done similarly by Popeye Doyle in French Connection.

Stallone said “I’m doing it. “ So that stayed in.

Larry Bernstein:

In Rocky 5, Paulie gave Rocky’s power of attorney to his accountant who stole all his money. Rocky is bankrupt. They auction off all his stuff and he has to move back to his old neighborhood in South Philadelphia.

Darren Schwartz:

It’s a two bedroom.

Scott Holstein:

And Adrian goes back to the pet shop.

Larry Bernstein:

When Rocky clears out his attic, he finds the old hat and we’ve come full circle. He puts the hat back on and goes back to his old neighborhood.

Darren Schwartz:

The turtles went away for a couple movies, and they came back.

Larry Bernstein:

Adrian worked at the pet shop and sold turtles to Rocky in the original movie.

Darren Schwartz:

A turtle is a disgusting animal. Bad things happen with turtles. One of my two spirit animals, but I don’t want to touch them.

Scott Holstein:

My dad’s former law partner died of getting E. Coli from a turtle. He kept pet turtles in his basement.

Darren Schwartz:

There you go. What’s he thinking?

Scott Holstein:

He’s deceased. He created a cement terrarium in his basement that had ten turtles.

In the summer, he would let them out into his backyard. Our son had a baby turtle, and we ended up giving it to him to take care of.

Darren Schwartz:

Did your son’s turtle kill the guy?

Scott Holstein:

Possibly. I don’t think they ever figured out which particular turtle.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s talk about Rocky’s body as an integral part of his character.

Scott Holstein:

It was used to define where he’s at in his journey. He starts out bulky, 10% body fat in Rocky 1. In Rocky 2, he’s muscular but not cut. In Rocky 3, he hires Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trainer buddy. There is a rivalry between Arnold and Stallone. They argue about who’s got the lowest body fat. Rocky’s got to 2.8% body fat in Rocky 3.

Larry Bernstein:

Some of members our audience may not know what that percentage means, Scott your lean, where do you personally stand?

Scott Holstein:

I appreciate that. I don’t know what my body fat is. When you drop your body fat from 10% to 2.8%, that’s like what a bodybuilder does.

Darren Schwartz:

He said it was too low. He was not eating enough carbs so he couldn’t focus and was dizzy.

Scott Holstein:

His breakfast was raw tuna fish.

Darren Schwartz:

I don’t know if it was the iron or the mercury, but he was losing his mind.

Scott Holstein:

Rocky 3 starts and Rocky is totally cut; you look at him differently. He’s an assassin. He’s a polished sculpted specimen. He’s at his peak physical specimen.

Larry Bernstein:

In the documentary Sly, they interviewed Schwarzenegger and he said that they were hypercompetitive in every aspect of their lives besides the body fat.

Darren, you and I have never had that kind of rivalry.

Darren Schwartz:

No.

Larry Bernstein:

Why don’t we have weigh ins. I know you weigh yourself twice a day.

Scott Holstein:

Twice a day. Is this true?

Darren Schwartz:

Yeah.

Scott Holstein:

I don’t mean to laugh at you, but morning and evening?

Darren Schwartz:

Twice in the morning.

Scott Holstein:

Is it a water issue?

Darren Schwartz:

Before and after.

Scott Holstein:

Well, I think it’s like looking at sales on a monthly basis. You should look at yourself quarterly.

Darren Schwartz:

I disagree with that.

Scott Holstein:

Between Schwarzenegger and Stallone, the movie gross was also a big competition. One guy would do a sequel, and then it would make X, and then the next guy would do another sequel and makes X plus, and they would fight back and forth.

Darren Schwartz:

And body count in terms of how many people died in their movies.

Larry Bernstein:

Stallone’s father was incredibly abusive to him throughout his life. After he achieves fame and fortune from the Rocky series, Stallone organizes his own Polo team, and he invites his father to play, and in the opening minutes of the game, his father knocks him off his horse and badly hurts him.

Scott Holstein:

Worse than that, his dad writes a movie called Sonny.

Darren Schwartz:

A boxing movie.

Scott Holstein:

Essentially the exact same story. He puts himself in as the lead character.

Darren Schwartz:

And he went to some film producer, “What do you think about making this boxing movie?” And the guy’s like, “Your son just made an Oscar winning movie about a boxer. What are you thinking?”

Scott Holstein:

Who the hell does that?

That’s insane.

Darren Schwartz:

Stallone’s personal life was an uphill battle from the beginning. He was pulled out by his head with forceps that caused permanent nerve damage that makes his face to droop and effects his speech that makes him sound like a thug appears like a form of paralysis.

Scott Holstein:

I thought that was put on by the actor to make him appear stupid. But his face is paralyzed.

Darren Schwartz:

His parents, until he was five, dropped him off at different foster homes. They divorced at 11 and he lived with his dad who was abusive and he got kicked out of 13 schools. He was voted most likely to wind up in an electric chair by teachers, that’s serious. But he still retained a relationship with his father. In the polo incident, his father ran him down. Afterward, during the press conference his father said, “That was a great match. I really enjoyed playing my son.” And Stallone’s like... “I don’t know if you saw that, but my dad knocked me off,” and then Stallone never played polo again. But he still retained a relationship and love for his dad.

Larry Bernstein:

Back to Rocky, the original film budget was $1 million and it grossed $225 million. It is an excellent return on capital. That will be like buying Bitcoin in

Scott Holstein:

2011

Larry Bernstein:

And then having the gumption not to sell and take profits.

Stallone wrote the screenplay for Rocky 1 in three days, he was the lead actor, directed many of the Rocky movies in the series. Remember that Barbara Streisand did a similar accomplishment with Yentl. Darren, how to think about the similarities between Stallone and Streisand?

Darren Schwartz:

There’s not many, but Stallone was nominated for an Academy Award for writing solo, not with a partner, an original screenplay and then acting in the movie.

At the time, Stallone can’t get any roles. He says, “I’m going to write my own screenplay” and stars in it and gets nominated for both. It’s an amazing feat. Orson Welles did it, but it was an adapted screenplay. Other people have done it, remember Goodwill Hunting, Damon and Affleck. He was on his own. He wrote that thing in three days. Incredible.

Larry Bernstein:

Darren, I have observed you over a three-day period and get absolutely nothing done.

Darren Schwartz:

He also adjusted it over time as they were shooting. In the original ending Rocky throws the fight. Stallone said, “this needs to be a story that people can champion.” Just like, in the original ending of Rambo, they kill him off, but he said, “I’m doing this as an homage to Vietnam vets who’ve been treated poorly. Rambo can’t die.”

Scott Holstein:

Bringing in Mr. T, he got chastised by the producers for doing that and Hulk Hogan who was great. It’s crazy, but people are going to love it.

Larry Bernstein:

And he’s right. In Rocky 3, he has an exhibition fight with Hulk Hogan who in comparison is a giant.

Stallone is not very tall in real life.

Scott Holstein:

5’9”.

Darren Schwartz:

He’s listed as 5’9”. He’s got to be 5’7”.

Scott Holstein:

That’s our size. I’m 5’ 8”.

Larry Bernstein:

Mick says, “Call this thing off. Hogan’s going to kill you.”

In the exhibition fight, Hogan picks up Rocky and throws him out of the ring.

Scott Holstein:

That’s a great moment in the movie.

Adding Mr. T is a perfect choice.

Larry Bernstein:

I went to Mexico City on vacation with my wife and kids. We drove by a wrestling match similar to Nacho Libre where the bad guys wear masks.

My son was immediately on board but my wife Julie hesitated, “I’m not sure this is the right thing to do.” But once Julie’s in, she’s 100% in, and we got front row seats.

They open the event with a dwarf throw. They pick up the little guy and throw him into the audience and somebody out there was ready to grab him.

Scott Holstein:

It’s a dwarf. It’s a person.

Larry Bernstein:

People can get hurt. Julie got so excited that she left her seat and entered into what is called no man’s land, an area around the ring. It’s empty because wrestlers get thrown out of the ring all the time.

Julie entered no man’s land and security runs over and says, “Lady, what are you doing? This is dangerous. Get out of there.” “Oh, sorry.” And she retreated back. But you should know that Lucha Libre is something you need to see in Mexico City.

Scott Holstein:

I want to say one more thing too about Stallone’s choices. He is really good at taking the temperature of the culture like what he did with Dolph Lundgren.

Larry Bernstein:

That is the Russian boxer Ivan Drago that Rocky fights in Rocky 4.

Scott Holstein:

What year did that come out?

Darren Schwartz:

’85

Scott Holstein:

We’re talking about the Russian Olympians on steroids. Dolph Lundgren is a science project.

Darren Schwartz:

Totally juiced.

Scott Holstein:

Drago is juiced. He’s built by the Russians.

Larry Bernstein:

He towers over Stallone.

Scott Holstein:

Drago’s training is computer driven.

Larry Bernstein:

And what does Rocky do?

Scott Holstein:

Rocky goes in the middle of the winter to Siberia.

Larry Bernstein:

Across his back, he carries an enormous log.

Scott Holstein:

And it was breaking him.

Larry Bernstein:

Running up a mountain with the Rocky theme song playing in the background.

Darren Schwartz:

Helping villagers.

Larry Bernstein:

Supposedly it’s Siberia but it is actually filmed in Jackson Hole, he would return later that evening to a fine resort with a steak dinner.

Scott Holstein:

That movie puts Stallone in the hospital. Drago apparently hit him so hard. It moved his heart in real life.

Two weeks in the hospital. He tells the actor Lundgren to hit him as if it’s real and it puts him in the hospital. Amazing. And Drago kills Apollo in the beginning of the movie.

Larry Bernstein:

That’s in the movie script; that’s not real life. I don’t think we can compare a fictional death with Stallone’s heart injury.

Scott Holstein:

It’s all mixed up in my head.

Larry Bernstein:

A Gorbachev look alike is in the audience for the Drago fight.

Scott Holstein:

Think that I’m going too far by suggesting that it helped bring the Berlin Wall come down?

Larry Bernstein:

The Wall comes down four years later. No, I don’t think people remembered that scene from Rocky 4.

Scott Holstein:

Because at the end of the movie, all the Russians are screaming, Rocky, Rocky.

Larry Bernstein:

But not knock down that wall.

Darren Schwartz:

The speech at the end of Rocky 4 is one of the low points of the entire series and possibly one of the low points in all cinema.

Larry Bernstein:

Another interesting aspect about Stallone is that he is also the boxing choreographer of the movie. Tell us about that.

Darren Schwartz:

He was not a boxer in his younger days. He learned to box and worked with Joe Frazier and some other contemporaries. And he took to it.

He came up with the idea for Rocky after watching Muhammad Ali beat a guy named Chuck Wepner. He was inspired by Chuck Wepner’s background, gritty guy.

Chuck Wepner said, “Hey man, you’re making a movie about me.” Wepner sues; they settled for an undisclosed amount. You could argue that he inspired the movie, maybe it was based on Rocky Graziano’s story.

But to me that goes to the heart of that, Stallone dives into everything, he wants it to be realistic.

Larry Bernstein:

In Rocky 3, Apollo Creed trains Rocky for the fight against Mr. T.

Mick’s dead and Rocky desperately needs a new coach to teach him better footwork.

Darren Schwartz:

Creed said, “We’re going to an LA gritty gym with a different crowd, look, and feel. The whole idea was I’m going to teach you how to dance because you need to be a real fighter not a brawler. Carl Weathers played Apollo Creed. Stallone said that he was one of the best natural gifted athletes he’s ever been around. Even though he hadn’t been a boxer, he was the most realistic boxer in the movies.

What stood out to me was how fast Carl Weathers was running backwards? I mean, can you imagine running full speed and then turning around? Athletes do it. I couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it. I don’t think Scott could do it. Of the three of us, Scott possibly could do that.

Scott Holstein:

I could do it.

The best moment of their relationship is the ending of Rocky 3, where the film ends with them in the ring in a rematch. And it ends with the fists going up. It turns into a painting.

Darren Schwartz:

That’s one of the most iconic visuals in the Rocky franchise. You got him on the steps of the museum, arms in the air, and you’ve that LeRoy Neiman painting where they’re both about to hit each other.

Scott Holstein:

It’s the mentor and the mentee as equal. It’s a beautiful moment. You thought they hated each other. Then in the movie Creed, you find out who won.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s go back to Rocky 1. The big event, the championship fight goes the distance. We think were watching a boxing film and then suddenly the plot line flips to Adrian. This is a love story disguising itself as a boxing film.

Rocky is beaten to a pulp; he may lose an eye. His face was used as a punching bag. Rocky screams out to Adrian who starts running.

Darren Schwartz:

She wore a red beret, which I think inspired Curtis Sliwa of the Guardian Angels in New York. That’s just part of her look, and she gets jostled going through the crowd. Paulie lifts up the ropes so she can sneak in. She runs up to him at this amazing moment, but Rocky only cares about her.

She runs up to him and he goes, “What happened to your hat?” Stallone’s always throwing these funny little lines in, which ties into the fact that he was the writer.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to move to Sly the documentary. In Sly is when I realized that I had totally underestimated Stallone as an artist. Tell us about your response to this fabulous documentary.

Darren Schwartz:

There’s an appreciation for how badly he wanted to be successful, and at the root of it is his abandonment by his father and the bullying.

I was bullied when I was younger.

Larry Bernstein:

No one talks about that.

Darren Schwartz:

I call it beauty bullying.

Larry Bernstein:

Because you were so good looking?

Darren Schwartz:

Well, not just that.

Larry Bernstein:

The hair?

Darren Schwartz:

Yeah. My hair was thick, luscious, and long. And these kids were bullying, but you turn it inward.

Larry Bernstein:

Tell us about the documentary Sly.

Scott Holstein:

It’s imperative to watch. It’s amazing. Go to Netflix. His upbringing explains a lot about him. One of the things he brings to his movies is his ability to understand what will please the viewer. He’s a very emotional guy. You realize how deep of a person he is.

Larry Bernstein:

Stallone has a deep appreciation for art. In the movies, there’s the Rocky statue. His restaurant in Rocky Balboa is filled with artwork and memorabilia. In Sly, Stallone is filmed in his Florida home, there’s art everywhere. I turned to Darren and I said, “That’s a painting by George Condo.”

I paused the film, took a picture of it, and download it to ChatGPT. AI said there is an 85% probability that it was painted by George Condo. Later, I asked my wife and she said, “Of course it is Condo. Everyone knows that Stallone has a fabulous George Condo collection.”

Stallone’s films include excellence in art, music, and technology. There’s a scene in one of the Rocky films where he’s running towards the Philadelphia Art Museum and the camera is steady with him without jostling about.

Darren Schwartz:

It’s reported that it was an early successful use of the Steadicam. He was using new technology. He wasn’t afraid to break the mold.

Larry Bernstein:

Rocky visits his brother-in-law Paulie who works at a meat packing plant. Rocky sees the meat and finds an opportunity.

Scott Holstein:

What could be a better way for Rocky to train than to punch frozen slabs of beef?

Larry Bernstein:

Without gloves. That has got to hurt.

Scott Holstein:

There is nothing lower tech and grittier than punching frozen beef. That’s the message. “Punching a bag just doesn’t do it. What can I do to create something impactful to the viewer?”

Larry Bernstein:

Stallone watched the great heavyweight fights and tried to incorporate them into his choreography.

Scott Holstein:

I’d like to ask him. Why not protect your face? At least attempt to. He’s not even trying.

Larry Bernstein:

Going to round 14 of Rocky 1, Creed shows the good sense to protect his face. But if you put your gloves up to your face, you leave your ribs exposed. This was when Rocky applies his lessons from punching the beef ribs at the meat packing plant to pounding Creed’s ribs. As he stumbles at the bell, Creed tells his trainer.

Darren Schwartz:

He broke my ribs.

Larry Bernstein:

Rocky 4 is when music jumps the shark. It feels like it’s a series of music videos.

Darren Schwartz:

I had a hard time focusing on Rocky 4. With Russia, we boycotted the Olympics in ‘80. They boycotted us in LA in ‘84, when they were shooting this movie. The music was the worst in Rocky 4 because it had that Miami Vice feel. It was 1985 cinema. It was not good.

Larry Bernstein:

In the first three Rocky movies, music moved the storyline along. Here the music dominated and the story got lost.

Darren Schwartz:

It descended into an MTV music video with weird hair, 80s music.

Scott Holstein:

I found out the other day my son who’s 21 had not seen Rocky. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve failed as a father. And he’s not interested.

Larry Bernstein:

Ok, it is decision time. For someone who wants to understand Rocky—not just the movies, but the cultural phenomenon—what films and documentaries would you recommend they watch.

Darren Schwartz:

Rocky 1, 2, and 3 then both documentaries, then I would watch Rocky Balboa. Because there was a 16-year gap between 1990, which was Rocky 5 and Rocky Balboa. He comes out of retirement because there’s this video simulation that’s shows Rocky can beat Mason the Line Dixon, who’s Antonio Tarver, who was a real boxer. Rocky Balboa is worth seeing.

Larry Bernstein:

Here’s what I would say. You got to start with Rocky 1. It’s a masterpiece that won best picture. It remains fresh and different. Rocky 2 starts slow, but it’s successful. Rocky 3 is excellent. I think it is better than Rocky 2. Mr. T is incredible... Mr. Pain!

Scott Holstein:

Pity the fool.

Larry Bernstein:

Sly the documentary is a must see.

Darren Schwartz:

I agree. You get an insight into how his career went.

Larry Bernstein:

I end the podcast with optimism.

Scott Holstein:

That Stallone’s going to do one more.

Larry Bernstein:

Oh my God. I didn’t see that coming.

Darren Schwartz:

I am optimistic about pursuing your passion and against all odds making a career out of what you want to do. And learning about someone who you thought you knew and realizing, wait a second, this guy’s a creative genius. He’s not a blockhead. People should reintroduce themselves to Stallone.

Scott Holstein:

Stallone as Rocky has single-handedly inspired millions of people to work out. The music, there is no song like the Rocky theme to get pumped up. Chariots of Fire is not even close. Nothing’s like Rocky. Nothing. I go to the gym a lot. Nothing is better than that tune if you’re not feeling it. It’s inspirational.

I don’t think he even realized what he was doing. The underdog theme executed with the hero’s journey and bringing it to modern day boxing. It’s a gift.

Darren Schwartz:

Larry, what are you optimistic about the Rocky franchise?

Larry Bernstein:

Rocky 1 was made 50 years ago with only a one-million-dollar budget. Historically there were barriers to entry in the film business. Stallone could not do this on his own. He needed someone to put up that money. Today, the price of cameras, film, and lighting is much cheaper. For $100,000, a young person can write, direct, act, and make a high-quality production film. I’m optimistic that we’re going to see many young artists with small budgets make wonderful movies.

Thanks to Darren and Scott for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Improving Your Memory.

Our speaker was Michael Kahana who is one of the world’s leading experts on memory. He is a former Professor of Psychology at Penn, and is the founder of Nia Therapeutics that developed a medical device so patients can radically improve memory, especially for individuals with a brain injury, dementia, or Alzheimer’s.

Michael discussed how memory function works and how his medical device can improve human memory retrieval to improve cognitive abilities.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, A Breakthrough in Restoring Memory, here.

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Michael Kahana

Subject: A Breakthrough in Restoring Memory
Bio: Former Professor of Psychology at Penn and Founder of Nia Therapeutics

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein.  What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is A Breakthrough in Restoring Memory.

Our speaker is Michael Kahana who is one of the world’s leading experts on memory. He is a former Professor of Psychology at Penn, and he is now the founder of Nia Therapeutics which is a company seeking to bring a medical device to patients that can radically improve memory for individuals with a brain injury, dementia, or Alzheimer’s.

I want to hear from Michael about how memory function works and how a medical device can improve human memory retrieval to improve cognitive abilities.

I met Michael 10 years ago at a previous Penn Days event, and I was incredibly impressed by his research. As a result, I became one of the founding investors in his business venture.

This podcast was taped at a conference of UPenn professors that I hosted so you will hear questions from me as well as my friends.

Micheal, please begin with 6 minutes of opening remarks.

Michael Kahana:

My talk is about human memory and my journey from professor at Penn to building a company that will hopefully change the world. After 22 years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychology, I’ll be dedicating my life to building Nia Therapeutics. A company that will be advancing therapeutics for memory loss.

Let me first start by telling you how I got into human memory. I started out studying physics in college. I was fascinated by mathematical descriptions of the physical world and by the human mind. I started reading up about neural network theory, the work that’s at the foundation of modern AI by John Hopfield, David Rumelhart and Jay McClellande.

I did my PhD working on mathematical models of how the brain stores and retrieves information. I was fortunate to have a wonderful academic career for over three decades studying memory, its mathematical description, and its neural basis.

The major focus of my early work was disproving the theory that says that memory involves two separate systems, short-term and long-term memory. That is a dated theory that has been disproven by extensive experimental data and theoretical work. I developed a new theory of memory that was an amalgam of ideas that is the basis of AI models, neural network theory and a concept called recursive retrieved context that endows a neural network with the ability to have memories that exist at a particular time and place in the system storing those memories.

I’m going to share with you two stories in my academic journey that changed my life. The first was in 1997, a young neurosurgeon Joseph Madsen at Children’s Hospital in Boston took me to the ninth floor North Wing and I saw a young man aged 16 sitting up in bed. He had a big ribbon cable going out of his brain into a port on the wall, and he was playing an Atari video game.

I asked, “who’s analyzing the data?” Joe said, “We don’t have enough memory storage to save the data. Once we see a seizure, we know what we’re going to do, and we delete the data at the end of the day.” That was the first time that I took a major risk in my academic career. I took my money and bought computers and hard drives. I set up a collaboration to harvest brain neural recordings from neurosurgery patients with intractable epilepsy who need to have electrodes implanted in their brain, record the signals, figure out where the seizures are coming from and then remove it if they can pinpoint it in the brain. That began a journey that lasted for two decades identifying the brain signals at a micro level within the brain that predict memory function.

The next major event happened in 2013, at the Society for Neuroscience meetings in New Orleans, we studied a patient where we had stimulated the brain and his memory got better. Now, usually, when you stimulate with electrical currents in the brain, memory get worse. This one patient his memory got better. Was that a one-off? How could we systematically investigate brain stimulation on a large scale? Because every hospital did it in a very ad hoc manner. There was no real science to it.

We got a big grant from Jeff Lang at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, who was a colonel in the US Army to help wounded warriors who had memory or cognitive loss due to IED blasts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We were given a $24.5 million-dollar four-year grant, which is about 10 times as big as a typical NIH grant and it allowed us to ramp up the study of electrical stimulation memory.

We invented a device here at Penn together with Medtronic, which hooks up to electrodes in the brain. For three years we mapped out the neural signals in the brain associated with memory and collected data from hundreds of neurosurgical patients. We gently stimulated the brain to learn how stimulation modulates neural circuits.

There were three major discoveries that came out of that project, but before I tell you, I want to tell you about an unsolved puzzle in memory research.

Memory is way more variable than any theory predicts. The theories predict some variation over time in the same individual but the data show massive variation. So, the same person one day their memory is pretty good, another day their memory is not so good and that range of memory function within each of us, especially people with a brain injury, neurological disease, dementia, that range is enormous. How large is it? It’s so large that if you take somebody in their bottom 50th percentile versus their top 50th percentile, there is a two-fold difference in memory function on every metric. So, when you’re not doing so well with your memory, you’re doing half as well as when you’re in your upper half of your own distribution. Huge variability and theories don’t explain it. I thought maybe the neural recordings could explain the variability.

Discovery one was we could use AI techniques to forecast when your memory was going to be good or bad. It’s a forecasting model, just like in financial time-series models. In this case, we can forecast memory very reliably.

Discovery two was if you looked at when brain stimulation pulses arrived, did it matter what the forecast said? It turned out it had a huge impact because if the forecast is that the brain is doing well, then stimulation made memory worse. But if the forecast said that the brain was doing poorly, then brain stimulation sometimes didn’t do anything and sometimes it made memory better.

So, the third question was, how do we learn when the stimulation does nothing, and when it makes memory better? That’s a simple engineering problem because it’s a search of the parameter space of stimulation, locations, amplitudes and frequencies in each person and you build a model. You take this massive data set on each human brain and you learn when I stimulate a bad state, what’s the probability that I jostle the brain into a better state or stay in the bad state? And we learned that.

How do we deploy this? $14 million of DARPA money went into inventing this gadget and we tested the therapy in human subjects who had electrodes implanted in their brains. In five published papers and four data sets, we showed that we could reliably improve memory consistently in human patients with this algorithmic stimulation.

How do I take this to market? Well, you can’t wear this device as a therapy. It’s too big. You can’t have electrodes coming out of your brain. You need a fully implantable system. The government is not going to fund that. So private investors, started a company, a spin out from Penn, and we developed a device similar to deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease, which is now a widely used therapy. This device is a cranial implant. It doesn’t go in the brain but goes in the skull under the skin. It has electrodes that go into the brain. It has a hundred times the capability of recording than any existing device, but notably it has a computer inside of it and it can record the signals, analyze and deliver stimulation just like this larger device connected to a computer did in our research studies, and it harvests all the data and it goes on to a wearable earpiece like a hearing aid.

The plan is to bring it to human trials in the next six months. The first study will be in patients with traumatic brain injury. There’s no treatment for traumatic brain injury memory loss. The FDA was excited for these younger, healthier patients in their 20s or 30s who have debilitating memory loss. This therapy should work for any memory loss due to any neurological disorder or neurodegenerative process.

We have a team assembled to do a study in early Alzheimer’s disease based at Rutgers Alzheimer’s Center and the University of Texas Alzheimer’s Center. Then the third big activity that my company is going to be doing is to make the device a lot smaller.

Larry Bernstein:

Tell us about how a robotic neurosurgeon will install wires inside the brain.

Michael Kahana:

The implantation of EEG electrodes is done with a ROSA robot by neurosurgeons. 20 years ago, this was a risky procedure. Now it has essentially zero serious risks associated with it. The biggest aspect of this surgically is the craniotomy, where you put in the device. They wires go inside the memory centers of the brain. One of the reasons why no existing therapy can do what this does is because this does a different therapy for every patient.

There are 64 contacts that are placed along the key axes that cut through the memory areas of the brain with these tiny wires. It learns to model the memory of every patient, which is going to be a different model for me, for Larry, and for each patient, which is why it has the capability of learning to get better and better over time.

Larry Bernstein:

All of us are in good and bad memory states all day long. Even in a good day, there are bad moments. Tell us about how an electric shock does a reset and why it takes us back to a good memory state.

Michael Kahana:

The memory system is a complex electrical network that has stable configurations. It can fall into different stable attractor states. Some of those attractor states are conducive to good function and some are conducive to bad function. If I’m in a bad state, I deliver a small pulse to white brain matter tracts that coax the brain from a state that’s poor into a state that’s better.

Larry Bernstein:

And how does that work exactly?

Michael Kahana:

A short quarter of a second wave of electrical activity. You have an anode and cathode, two contacts that are made out of platinum and you deliver biphasic electrical pulses between these two. You don’t feel or hear anything, but it makes a little electrical pulse. And what we do with the device is we see the state of the brain before and after the burst. We see whether the burst coaxes the brain in a good direction or not and that’s how we can learn and adapt the therapy.

Larry Bernstein:

When you go to bed, you would charge up your device and download all of your brainwaves.

Michael Kahana:

All your brain data goes to the cloud encrypted. When we download the data and then we can analyze and improve the models of your memory system. It knows when your brain is in a better or worse state and it recalibrates the model on the fly, meaning if the brain is shifting its context, it can recalibrate the AI model.

When you do memory tests, you can tune the therapies. The therapy will learn that when your memory test scores are better or worse, it will refine the AI model. And you can rebuild the model every night and get a better model based on the new data that you’ve downloaded.

Larry Bernstein:

The next question comes from Rory MacFarquhar.

Rory MacFarquhar:

Why do you encrypt the data?

Michael Kahana:

For confidentiality of your brain data.

Rory MacFarquhar:

If someone got your brain data, what could they extract from that information?

Michael Kahana:

We published a paper where we showed that when you had people look at letters, we could tell what letter they were thinking of. If you thought of a word, we could tell whether that word was one of 25 different categories. You could probably build models to predict what people were thinking about.

Rory MacFarquhar:

Have you tried to rebuild something from the data that you’ve collected on all your patients? Is that literally possible? Can you put it up on a screen and see what they’re thinking?

Michael Kahana:

We published a number of papers showing this. The idea that you can use brain data to read the mind. Speech recognition systems are 90 odd percent accurate. These systems are way less accurate, but they’re way better than chance. If the question is what exact word am I thinking of, they’re going to be very unreliable. If the question is, am I thinking of a living or a non-living thing, they’ll be very reliable. The whole basis of the neural prosthetics work in motor systems is that you can read out the motor activity of the brain and build a model of speech or motor activity and that’s been advancing very rapidly in the last three years.

Larry Bernstein:

What kind of improvement in memory are you expecting?

Michael Kahana:

I would expect an improvement of about one standard deviation, so it’s a pretty big improvement. A standard deviation improvement in terms of an SAT score would be 200 points out of 1600, or for IQ, it would be 15 points with a 100 mean.

Larry Bernstein:

What does a one standard deviation improvement in memory entail?

Michael Kahana:

To evaluate memory function in real life with implications for whether somebody goes back to work, goes back to school after a head injury, or whether they’re going to develop dementia, it’s context dependent recall tasks. If you give people a list of words and then you ask them after a brief delay, what were the words in the list? That’s the kind of test. And there are many varieties of those tests and they all load on the same underlying factor, which is the same factor that we’re decoding.

Larry Bernstein:

I gave you 10 words and the average is six. Would a standard deviation be something like two?

Michael Kahana:

Yeah, that’s about right.

Michael Kahana:

We’re talking about people who give them a list of 10 words and either they get zero or one or they get three. And so that’s when we’re talking about patients with memory loss. We’re saying three is not great, but you can function. It’s not embarrassing. Zero or one, you don’t even want to leave the house. You don’t want to go to work.

That’s the thing about memory loss. People have a bad memory. It’s not such a big deal. A colleague of mine in my department once commented at a faculty meeting that “my memory isn’t as good as it used to be. I had this legendary memory. I would walk into a class with a hundred students and it would take me a few weeks to learn everybody’s name. I can’t do that anymore.” That’s not a problem.

The problem is when you’re sitting in the meeting like this and you don’t realize why you’re here and what’s going on and what am I supposed to be talking about? And the problem is that people with impaired memory, they have days like that and then they have other days where they’re just a little bit forgetful. It’s not such a big problem.

The goal of this therapy is to keep people out of those situations where they’re going to not want to go to work, not want to show up in front of their colleagues. We have prominent lawyers who get into a car accident. They have a head injury and they say, “I’m embarrassed to show up in a meeting. I don’t remember what’s going on. I have notes and I’m reading them over and over again just to figure out, to get my bearing. And it’s impossible.” That’s the kind of memory that we’re trying to blunt that horrible situation that people face.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Brande Stellings.

Brande Stellings:

For degenerative memory loss that’s going to worsen over time, does starting this therapy arrest the deterioration of memory? Does it have any impact on it getting worse?

Michael Kahana:

The one standard deviation increase is about five to six years of degeneration. The question that you’re asking is critical. Does the rate of degeneration change? We will only know that when we do the trial.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is David Wecker.

David Wecker:

I was just curious how big you think this market is in terms of revenue. Does the device ever have to be replaced and is there a recurring revenue stream from the cloud service?

Michael Kahana:

It has a sales price of about $35,000, Manufacturing price at scale would be less than $10,000, so you’re talking about a $25,000 margin. The total possible number of patients who could benefit is 27 million. My expectation is that over a period of years, it’ll ramp up from small numbers to 10%. You could imagine different curves based on different levels of effectiveness.

In terms of recurring revenue, the idea of putting this earpiece or eyeglass as an element that can be easily updated every year you could get a new version. People can pay for that privately. Some insurance will pay, some insurance won’t, same as hearing aids. Some insurance will not let you upgrade your hearing aids. Medicaid probably won’t, but private insurers sometimes will. You can have recurring revenue from that and from cloud services and from the updates to the memory model that would be done periodically.

Larry Bernstein:

Michael didn’t say you need to replace the thing that’s in the brain.

Michael Kahana:

No, that’s intended to be permanent. We got breakthrough device designation, which gives us a special priority reimbursement where they give you an upgraded reimbursement above the base Medicaid- Medicare reimbursement level, the whole issue is market penetration. The market is enormous and it’s just about how quickly you capture the market.

Larry Bernstein:

The market is enormous now, but even you, Wecker, years from now, you’re a great candidate.

David Wecker:

Hopefully many years. Do you plan on trying to commercialize this yourself with a sales force or do you expect to sell or team up with a larger organization that has those resources?

Michael Kahana:

I want it to be successful and to scale and if the best way for that to happen is through an IPO, then we’ll do that. If the best way is through strategic acquisition by a larger company, then whatever makes the thing grow.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Rory MacFarquhar.

Rory MacFarquhar:

There were memory impaired human subjects that you were testing. I didn’t think that you could do that with human subjects. How does that work?

Michael Kahana:

There’s only one neurosurgical treatment that requires chronic implantation of electrodes for a period of one to four weeks where you can record all those data. That was when I gave that talk at Harvard and they invited me to the ninth floor of the children’s hospital where patients with epilepsy who failed all their medications were having debilitating seizures, those patients also often have cognitive impairment and they get electrodes implanted in their brains for three or four weeks to get seizure data for a treatment involving the resection of the seizure focus. I saw the opportunity, the patient is sitting there, they’re playing video games in the hospital, let me do my memory experiments, have them play memory video games and then build models of memory. They were doing stimulation clinically so that when they would suction out a part of the brain, they didn’t cause harm.

Larry Bernstein:

Can you give an example where when you had a portion of the skull open and you put a probe in, what response, if you shocked it, how they would have a memory release?

Michael Kahana:

The patients would be playing memory games or remember lists of words and the computer unbeknownst to the subject would apply therapy on some trials and not apply therapy on other trials. And sometimes there was one patient at the Mayo Clinic, they got the stimulation and they’re remembering almost the entire list of 12 items and on the other trials they were remembering three items. That was a pretty dramatic case. Every time the stimulation therapy was applied, this patient had phenomenal memory and the patient reported they didn’t feel anything. They were just like, “My brain was clear on those trials.”

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Colin Teichholtz.

Colin Teichholtz:

There are other companies doing neural implants such as Neuralink. If each one of these types of devices is totally different and unrelated, are there additional applications to what you’re doing in addition to what you’re doing with memory?

Michael Kahana:

There are a number of competitors to Neuralink that are focusing on what I would call the input-output problem. They’re trying to solve the fact that some people have a damaged spinal cord or have a damaged input-output system. They’re recording the brain to read out motor signals. And they’re also trying to plan to do similar things for patients who have perceptual disabilities. A cochlear implant would be an example that’s very commonly used but now they’re developing therapies for people who are cortically blind to stimulate the cortical system to create sight. So those are input-output systems.

The other category of systems are central. They’re focused on the apex of the neural system neural processing tree. That’s like my device. There’s nothing else like it when I tried to do this. People said, “There’s no possible way you’re going to build a de novo medical device. You have to use an existing device.” I’m not Elon Musk, so I couldn’t just capitalize it on my own. But you could imagine a class of devices of which this is a version that treats central disorders that would include depression, PTSD, higher level language dysfunction. Memory is the big one. There’s a company that has an idea for treating severe PTSD, and they’ve recently approached me to see if we would license our technology to them because they didn’t imagine that they would want to try and build their own.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Paul Orlin.

Paul Orlin:

In your paper you talk about random stimulation does not help memory but specific predictive pulses from the AI does. Can you explain why you think that is?

Michael Kahana:

Random stimulation is going to interrupt the brain during good states and bad states, whereas the AI predictive stimulation is going to be tailored to only perturb the brain when it’s in a bad state with parameters that are designed to coax it into a better state. So the random stimulation is not going to work. That makes sense because if random stimulation would work, this problem would have been solved a while ago with DBS type devices.

Paul Orlin:

What do you think’s happening to create the memory?

Michael Kahana:

You could imagine a version of this therapy that would create memories. We’re not doing that. I’ve thought about that. It’s science fiction. You could imagine the study that I proposed once, which I haven’t done, is you could barcode memories.

For example, if I wanted to, if I click my phone and I could say, “I want to remember that guy and his question and put a barcode in there and then later recapitulate that memory by triggering that barcode.” The therapy that we’ve developed is designed to take the brain and help it get to states that it knows how to facilitate the formation and the retrieval of memories. Naturally move the brain into a state that’s more conducive to creating and retrieving memories.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next question comes from Paul Rozin who is a Professor of Psychology at UPenn.

Paul Rozin:

Someone is in a bad memory state and you stimulate. When you get them in a better state, when you turn the stimulus off, did they go right back to a bad state or is there a residue?

Michael Kahana:

There’s a residue. We’ve shown that. There’s a residue of staying in the good state.

It will stop after a half or a quarter of a second and then it will wait for the brain to drift back into a bad state before it reapplies the therapy seconds or minutes later.

There was a conversation about kosher laws and rabbis before, so I just wanted to add a little fun note. I asked a famous old rabbi, “What do you think about this?” Is it kosher? Can you use it on the Sabbath? And he looked at me and he said, “Is this going to help me remember the whole Talmud?” And I said, “I think so. “ And he said, “You should do that.”

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Ron Miller.

Ron Miller:

How long is it going to take to finish these trials and how much money is it going to take?

Michael Kahana:

Five years. After you develop the device, you do the animal testing, which we’re finishing now. Then you do in humans for five years altogether. Because we got this breakthrough device designation and there’s a special program called TAP, which is run by the director’s office at the FDA. They try to fast track devices. The whole project as like a 10-to-12-year project from start to finish and it costs altogether about a hundred million dollars, the whole business.

David Wecker:

Remembering can be an intentional act but it can also be a passive act because memories sometimes just parade through one’s consciousness. There’s also the issue of sleep where we seem to be incorporating memories. I’m curious about how this might affect our consciousness where memories are popping up.

Michael Kahana:

I believe and my research supports the claim that the same basic machinery of memory is used when you try to remember a memory, you pull back something from the past, you update memory when some cue from the environment or from inside of your head involuntarily triggers the memory. Now those two are not exactly the same, but they involve the same mathematical rules. They involve the same equations and related to that is the idea that when you do have a spontaneous thought, it is a memory and it operates as a memory that alters your future beliefs, which is a fascinating idea because it means that circumstances that make one set of memories more likely to pop up than another set of memories will shape your beliefs separate from the ground truth of what happened to you.

David Wecker:

When you do the human trials, are you going to be able to collect any data around those types of issues?

Michael Kahana:

Absolutely. From a clinical and a pragmatic point of view, the therapy helps people in their daily lives and the best we can do right now is we can do tests that evaluate memory in a way that’s predictive of memory in your daily life. What you’re saying is that maybe the person with memory loss is having fewer of these spontaneous memories. And so, if you restore some of those spontaneous memories, maybe that will give them the capability to alter their beliefs in both good and not good ways based on their experiences. There may be situations where not learning and remembering is good. I don’t think that’s generally the case, but yes, if you’re learning and remembering things that are painful that then recur, we know that among people who’ve experienced a traumatic event, about 15% go on to develop PTSD and that’s because of the machinery of the memory system going awry.

The Nia Therapeutic trial with this device, one patient undergoing the therapy for a year will generate more data by a factor of 10 than all the data we’ve collected in these 20 years of NIH and DARPA funded studies. That’s one patient in one year. You can imagine what you would learn from the first 5,000 patients.

Larry Bernstein:

Next speaker is Brande Stellings.

Brande Stellings:

For many companies their real business is data.

Michael Kahana:

The data will be enormously valuable for a given patient to improve their therapy. The company by pooling data in an encrypted, safe, anonymized way will be able to deliver far better therapy to the next patient in the study. Data are extremely valuable. The only thing I’ve been focused on is the therapeutic side.

Larry Bernstein:

Many of us might be reticent to install a wire system in their brain, but when we see Mitch finally being able to function, and we see incredible improvement in his cognitive skills and memory capabilities.

Michael Kahana:

In neurosurgery, things that were unimaginable two decades ago are becoming accepted today and once you know people who benefit from whether it’s a cochlear implant or DBS for Parkinson’s disease, I think this will be more effective than either of those therapies, then there’s no more stigma. Nowadays, people don’t worry about getting a cardiac pacemaker, but 25 years ago, very few patients who needed pacemakers got pacemakers. What you see is you see a course of adoption where a therapy that is clearly beneficial to people is adopted at 1% in the beginning and then later it’s adopted at 20%. It’s never adopted at 100%.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you want to end in a note of optimism?

Michael Kahana:

When I was teaching, students get to do one lecture where I just answer their questions. One student Kobe asked me, “How did the study of memory help you think about how you could be a better person, live a better life?” The answer I gave him is, “Every day try to make good memories for yourself because the memory system is going to think about those memories when you’re asleep, when you’re walking around and make good memories and that will benefit you in many ways.” That’s my note of optimism. And this is a good memory, so thank you.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Michael for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Predicting the Midterms.

Our speaker was Patrick Ruffini who is a pollster and a Substack writer for The Intersection that does analysis on topics like gerrymandering, realignment, and polling errors. He is also the author of a book Party of the People.

Patrick discussed who will win in the midterms in the House and Senate. Our discussion got into the weeds about campaign issues, the current state of play, and who will win the close races.

Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Predicting the Midterms, here.

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Patrick Ruffini

Subject: Predicting the Midterms
Bio: Pollster and Author of The Intersection

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Predicting the Midterms.

Our speaker is Patrick Ruffini is a pollster and the author of his own Substack entitled The Intersection that includes frequent analysis on topics like gerrymandering, realignment, and polling errors. He is also the author of a book Party of the People.

I want to learn from Patrick about who will win the midterms in the House and Senate. My plan is to get into the weeds and find out what the issues will be, what the state of play looks like now, and who will win the close races.

Patrick, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Patrick Ruffini:

In 2024, I wrote a book called Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. That election had a realignment of working-class and non-white voters towards Trump and the GOP. Now it’s been about a year and a half of Trump. We are about four months away from the midterm election. You have the normal midterm backlash, particularly against someone like Trump who has been extremely assertive about the use of executive powers.

This has intensified Democratic energy to put a check on him. In some respects, the groups we saw swinging towards Trump on the basis of inflation are swinging back. Some of the gains that Trump made in 2024 are reversed, but some are durable. There’s a flip side to this Democratic energy, that side of the aisle seems unruly. You’ve seen a string of progressive primary victories in Colorado and New York where progressive candidates swept congressional primaries. You will have a healthy Democratic Socialist of America contingent in the next House.

Republicans were quite successful in redistricting this cycle. That doesn’t mean that they have protected themselves from losing the House, but they’ve protected themselves from getting wiped out and built in a lot of safe seats for Republicans. It means that at best, you’re talking about a Democratic majority maybe 220 or 225 seats, maybe up to 230, which is pretty narrow. That means this DSA caucus will have outsized influence. They will provide the margin and decide whether Hakeem Jeffries can become Speaker, and if we’ll see the same chaos and drama that we saw on the Republican side a few years ago.

Larry Bernstein:

The House has 435 seats and so a majority would be 218 seats or more, so if the Democrats were to win 220 seats that would be a 5-member majority. That would give enormous influence to the 5 marginal players from the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America caucus.)

Patrick Ruffini:

After the Biden debacle, Democrats were told to trust this older, steady-hand candidate that failed them badly. Now, they are not inclined to listen to what the party establishment is telling them. The party establishment was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. You are seeing a Democratic Tea Party. There is energy behind the idea that Democrats need to regain the working-class voters that they lost in the Bernie and AOC faction.

It looks increasingly likely that the Michigan Senate race will go to Abdul El-Sayed in the primary. Democrats are nominating problematic candidates who could lose them seats in a reverse 2022 when it was Republican MAGA candidates who lost seats in very winnable races. It not only could have a significant impact on which way the Senate goes and what the House looks like after 2026, but we could see a Trump-like candidate of the left go far in the primary based on the mood of the Democratic primary electorate.

Larry Bernstein:

Historically in presidential primaries, the Democratic presidential candidates tack to the left and then in the general election, they tack back to the center to persuade independents to join their cause. What’s surprising here is that there are maybe two dozen congressional races in the House that are in play. And some of these candidates are very left-wing candidates. Do voters in these tight congressional races think of the national party? Do they consider that the candidate is particularly progressive? Will it affect the result of the election in such a tight toss-up race?

Patrick Ruffini:

It absolutely could have an impact. There’s been solid research that shows that the more far-left or far-right you are in your identification that those candidates tend to perform worse. There’s a penalty for perceived ideological extremism. Most of these Democratic candidates are in these deep blue districts where there’s no chance of the district going the other way. Voters there perceive why not get exactly who we want? And that is very telling about where the median Democratic primary voter is.

You haven’t seen as many progressive candidates in these swing districts win, but there have been examples of it. Notably in Maine 2 District, which is a Trump district held by a Democrat. The more progressive candidate won there. You had Colorado 8. A very tight seat. You had the candidate who was more progressive in that race win. This goes back to the Michigan Senate race where the more progressive candidate is likely to win in that primary, and that’s a swing seat where it’s pulling very tightly. Look at John Ossoff in Georgia. Look, he’s wondering who had him up by double digits. So that’s really kind of the model for Democrats of what a swing state race should be doing for them to cycle.

Larry Bernstein:

Primaries bring out a different voter than the regular election. That spells trouble for both the Republicans and the Democrats because they choose people who are much farther away from the median voter. Is there a real difference between the primary voter and the regular voter?

Patrick Ruffini:

The risk here that’s absolutely true. The primary voters tend to be more ideological. It’s been prevalent on the Republican side where you have more far right candidates win. There’s no real penalty for being more ideologically extreme. That’s going to mean more unruly House caucus on both sides. The other risk is that a progressive candidate in the Democratic primary starts at a disadvantage.

We did some polling, who’s the most electable Democrat? People are saying Gavin Newsom is the most electable Democrat, not somebody like Josh Shapiro with a track record of winning in a swing state.

They’re saying Gavin Newsom who publicly fights with Republicans and who’s adopting Trump’s social media strategy. There’s a hunger for somebody who acts like Trump, but isn’t Trump. I don’t think most people would say that the Governor of California is the right model for electability.

Larry Bernstein:

In the House, there are 15 to 20 seats in play. The redistricting ended up favoring the Republicans just by chance as Virginia lost in court. How many net seats do you think the Republicans were able to pick up because of redistricting?

Patrick Ruffini:

5 to 10. But if a normal midterm kind of wave happens, that’s a 15-seat difference between where Republicans would’ve been under the old maps and the new maps. It means at best you’re probably talking about a 225 to 210 House for Democrats. And that’s maybe being a little bullish for them. It’s a house where you have these more ideologically extreme members who hold a lot of sway because Jefferies needs to get 218 votes to be speaker. So how many concessions are they able to extract from him? We all remember what happened with Kevin McCarthy.

Even if Republicans lose the House this time, it makes it much easier for them to come back in 2028 because they don’t have as many seats they need to pick up. A lot of those seats are in friendlier terrain. This whole fight is going to largely decided by how the maps are drawn rather than the quality of the candidates.

Larry Bernstein:

You brought up this speaker issue. I’m not sure why we should care. They threw out the speaker on the Republican side. It seemed very dramatic. The Politicos were upset and how’s the House going to function? Everyone I know who’s not a politico was not paying any attention to this. And then one day Johnson was running the show. There’s technical stuff like the rules committee. But isn’t this inside baseball that away from Patrick, nobody else cares?

Patrick Ruffini:

That’s right. I don’t disagree with that analysis at all. You have an ungovernable House with these narrow majorities. If we have a third Trump impeachment, would that register politically? You would also have investigations of Trump, the Trump family, but also companies aligned with the administration.

Larry Bernstein:

A New York House Democrat, Goldman recently lost the primary. He ran the Trump impeachment trial and he’s thrown out for someone more progressive. It’s not like the more centrist Democrats were opposed to impeachment. The fact that it moves to the left won’t change that impeachment or investigation zeal. That’ll be going full throttle regardless.

Patrick Ruffini:

It probably intensifies the zeal. But you’re right that the median Democrat would be on board with that because they’re afraid to be primaried.

Larry Bernstein:

Political analysts evaluate each individual district to see if it leans more Democratic or Republican. One example is the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index or PVI. A District that is D+2 means that in a national election this district is expected to swing towards the Democrats by 2 more points than the rest of the country.

I want to look at two kinds of House races. Take a district that leans Republican by 2 percentage point like Zach Nunn’s seat in Iowa’s third congressional district. This is a district in previous presidential races, Trump tied Biden in 2020 and he beat Harris by 5 in 2024. This is a seat is one of 18 seats that the Cook Report calls a tossup.

The second seat is Colorado’s 5^th District. It is in central Colorado and includes Colorado Springs. Trump beat Biden and Harris by 9 points in the past presidential elections. The incumbent Jeff Crank is viewed to likely win by Charlie Cook. This is rated to be a R+5 district. If the Democrats improve their performance on a national basis by four points, the math suggests that the Democrats would win by 2 points in Iowa’s 3^rd district by 2 points and the Republicans would hold onto the Colorado 5^th district by one point as R+5- 4 equals R+1.

That said, national shifts don’t apply evenly. Each district is special in its own way.

There will be enormous fundraising in the most competitive seats so turnout will be high on both sides. For less competitive seats, the Democrats will be more energized to vote, and this will impact the national voting patterns. So, Democrats will improve their performance in districts that will be easy wins for either party and thus incremental Democratic votes are wasted.

Patrick Ruffini:

It’s a very astute point you’re making here, and that exact thing has happened a couple times before. First off, you mentioned a four-point shift. That’s not enough for Democrats. The median seat in a country that went Trump plus two is Trump plus four or five. Democrats need to, at a minimum, win Trump plus five districts. There are very few opportunities for them until you get to Trump plus nine based on redistricting. And that’s the foundation of why I’m saying it could be a very narrow majority for the Democrats. It’s very rare for a non-incumbent to pick up a seat that was won by Trump plus 10 or more. The math is very tough regardless of how good the candidates are.

Larry Bernstein:

The election is soon; you would think that the issues would be bombarding the airwaves already. Back to 2024, the key issues were immigration, tax policy; now we have Iran. What will be the important issues?

Patrick Ruffini:

It remains what it was in ‘24, which is inflation and the cost of living. Trump’s economic ratings decline significantly with the Iran war and the rise in gas prices. Remember 2018, everyone thought Trump was doing a great job on the economy; they still lost. Don’t think you can be going into a midterm with $4 gas and overperform.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s go do some Senate races. Georgia Ossoff polled up by double digits, but Trump won that state. So how is it possible? Is Collins a terrible candidate? What is going on in Georgia?

Patrick Ruffini:

I don’t think Collins is a terrible candidate, but I think Georgia is a very Metro Atlanta state. Statewide success is somebody like Brian Kemp who is well-liked and can overperform in the Atlanta Metro.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s move to Michigan. This is an Even state. Trump lost by 3 to Biden and beat Harris by 2. If there’s a national shift of four, this should be a D + 4 state right now. If El-Sayed wins the primary, he’s progressive, he’s anti-Israel, does that put Michigan in play for the Republicans?

Patrick Ruffini:

It could. And all the polling right now is tight within one or two points, but I think that’s very much the outlier. It’s tight against all the potential Democratic candidates. Now, that’s misleading because when you have a very contentious Democratic primary, you have Democrats who hold out in supporting the other candidates.

Mike Rogers, a strong candidate running against candidates who are in a divisive Democratic primary where the most left-wing candidate is likely to emerge from that primary. Ultimately that provides the opportunity. It’s still a lean D state in this environment. Historically Republicans have had a hard time in Michigan. It’s been a while since they’ve won statewide especially for the Senate. Even in good years, Democrats have tended to overperform there. This is turning into an exception to that historical pattern.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s go to Maine. This is a Democratic state. Susan Collins is the moderate centrist candidate. Meanwhile, Graham Platner has so much negative press on his behavior and his Nazi tattoo. It’s incredible to me that this is a serious candidate. Yet in the polling, it’s even. If the Democrats put out their worst candidate, can they lose?

Patrick Ruffini:

They absolutely could lose. You have the worst possible Democratic candidate going against the best possible and most overperforming Republican candidate by far compared to virtually any other state. Will it be enough? In 2020, it turned out not to be a pro - Democratic year. She was able to get by a decent margin.

It’s looking like a strong national environment for Democrats that probably pulls Platner over the line. The candidate matchup couldn’t have been worse for Democrats.

Larry Bernstein:

My friend David Brail placed all thousand What Happens Next interviews into Claude AI. He asked who made the most accurate predictions of all my interviews? Answer was --- Patrick Ruffini. So here we go, will the Democrats take the House?

Patrick Ruffini:

I think so. They’re looking at about 225 seats, which would be a pickup of around 10 seats, which is more of a function of what Republicans did with redistricting this cycle than anything else.

Larry Bernstein:

In the Senate, will the Republicans hold Texas?

Patrick Ruffini:

Yes.

Larry Bernstein:

Will the Democrats hold Georgia?

Patrick Ruffini:

Yes.

Larry Bernstein:

The senate race in Maine is in flux after rape allegations came out against Platner. We have no idea what is going to happen about the replacement. That said if the election were held today would Collins win in Maine?

Patrick Ruffini:

I’m going to say yes.

Larry Bernstein:

Who will win in Michigan?

Patrick Ruffini:

I would tilt it ever so slightly towards the Democrat in Michigan.

Larry Bernstein:

Really? El-Sayed wins. It’s fifty-fifty down to the wire, but there hasn’t been polling suggesting that Rogers would win in this cycle. It’s as close of a toss-up as you can get.

Larry Bernstein:

Who wins in North Carolina?

Patrick Ruffini:

Democrat - Cooper.

Larry Bernstein:

The Dems pick up one seat in that scenario. Am I missing one?

Patrick Ruffini:

You could make a case for Alaska, Ohio and Iowa. There’s a chance they pick up one.

Larry Bernstein:

Alaska is funny because it’s a rank order state.

Patrick Ruffini:

The issue with Alaska is that you have this other Dan Sullivan on the ballot. The Democrats put this other candidate named Dan Sullivan to split the vote. I still think Sullivan wins.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s go to Ohio.

Patrick Ruffini:

Ohio tilts Republican. It is Trump plus 13. The history in Ohio has been every cycle the polls are showing Democrats as they showed Brown ahead in ‘24. Ohio, Iowa are going to migrate in the same direction. It’s just going to be enough for Republicans to keep both those seats.

Larry Bernstein:

So based on that, it’s one seat pickup. 53-47 Senate. Any forecasts for any particular district in the House that you think is interesting?

Patrick Ruffini:

It’ll be interesting to see as a bellwether what happens with some of these districts that swung pretty heavily towards Trump in 2024, particularly these Hispanic districts. There was a poll out yesterday, Henry Cuellar, the very conservative Democrat under indictment, pardoned by Trump in the hope of him getting out of the race, and then he did not get out of the race showing the Republican is up 9 there, which would puncture this idea that Hispanics are moving back in a big way, at least in that part of the country. I was surprised to see a poll that saw him losing. I’m paying close attention to that as durability of this realignment.

Larry Bernstein:

In California 22, David Valadao is running to keep his House seat. This district had been a Trump plus 1 that during redistricting was gerrymandered to make this seat flip to the Democrats. Do you think Valadao can win because the Democrats chose a progressive in their primary?

Patrick Ruffini:

Normally Valadao always survived. The ultimate over-performer. That’s redrawn to be a Democratic pickup. But if anyone can survive, he can. The primary results have a Democratic progressive candidate in a general election.

Larry Bernstein:

Black male voters moved towards Trump.

Patrick Ruffini:

This is the group I’m a bullish on staying in the Republican Party because we’re moving to pure ideological sorting in the electorate. In the past, you had voting on racial identity lines that favored Democrats with Black male voters. Those ties are diminishing across the board.

Larry Bernstein:

You are a Republican pollster. How does that influence your judgment? We often see in these polls Democrats and, Republicans getting different answers. The people that pay you are Republicans does that influence your ability to forecast?

Patrick Ruffini:

When it comes to the polls we do for clients, our north star is accuracy. We are judged by Nate Silver on how close we were to the results of the election. We’ve had an A in the Nate Silver ratings over the years. In particular, the metric has almost no bias in our public polling projections. Oftentimes there is a trend towards Republican firms having a Republican bias or Democratic firms have a Democratic bias. We have no bias.

Larry Bernstein:

Is Israel an issue that will matter in the races?

Patrick Ruffini:

It’s the animating issue on the Democratic left deciding Democratic primaries. It’s provided the spark for these progressive candidates to prevail against the establishment. But in general elections absolutely not, it’s not anywhere near the top 20 issues.

Larry Bernstein:

I subscribe to your Substack, and it’s fabulous, and I encourage my listeners to check it out. One of the things that you mentioned in the New York races, specifically in the House primary races, is that the populists are winning, but the people voting for it in the Democratic Party are a college educated and not working-class voters. So normally we think of the populists garner working-class voters, but here it’s white college-educated. Comment on that.

Patrick Ruffini:

Working-class voters are moderate and not invested in day-to-day politics as your typical college educated voter. If they see somebody too far left or right, that’s a turnoff to them.

Labor has become fundamentally conservative rising into the middle class. They don’t want to overthrow the system. Maybe you have a bunch of downwardly mobile people in Brooklyn who are upset at the current economic system, but that’s not a reflection of the average voter. We need to distinguish between dissatisfied with how things are going in the performance of the system versus overthrowing the system itself.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Patrick for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was The End of Meat.

Our speaker was Paul Rozin who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Paul argued that in the future meat consumption will decline significantly because of increasing cost as well as health and moral reasons even though most of our audience enjoys meat including me.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, The End of Meat, here.

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Paul Rozin

Subject: The End of Meat
Bio: Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is The End of Meat.

Our speaker is Paul Rozin who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

This discussion was held at a conference that I hosted in Philadelphia so the questions will be asked by me as well as my friends.

I want to learn from Paul about why our future may have substantially less meat because of cost, health and moral reasons despite the fact that many of us find it delicious.

Paul, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Paul Rozin:

The title is The Future of Meat. Let’s talk about the good side of meat. It’s a complete food. You can live on it alone because we’re made of the same stuff, so we get everything we need. It’s delicious. It’s the favorite food of humans around the world. It only accounts for 18% of all the calories eaten but that’s because it’s expensive. Most people in the world would eat more meat if they could afford it.

There’s a bad side of meat. High meat diets are associated with cardiovascular disease. It involves killing and maltreating animals, which is not nice. Some don’t think about it when we’re eating a steak, but it’s true.

Meat is much costlier to the world than plants. Beef especially is an extraordinarily extravagant food. You need 30 plant calories to get one calorie of beef. That’s wasteful of a lot of plant food. You have to wait a year and a half to get a cow big enough to kill. To get a quarter pound of beef, it’s 164 square meters. For chicken, it’s 7. Chicken is a lot better for the world. If you got rid of all the beef and lamb in the world you save an amount of land that’s roughly twice the size of the United States that’s now being used to either pasture the animals or to grow food for them. Over 70% of the agricultural land in the world is devoted to feeding animals, not humans.

Meat is the favorite and most taboo food in the world. Almost all food taboos are about animals. 500 million people won’t eat meat. They can afford to eat meat but who are voluntary vegetarians and their primarily motive is compassion. About half of vegetarians live in India and are Hindus.

I want to talk about three psychological things that affect our relation to meat. One is the idea of disgust, which is the strongest food rejection. You can feel how strong it is. If a cockroach or a rat touches your food, you won’t eat it, even if it’s your favorite food. Almost all food disgusts are animal products. It’s rare for people to say something like asparagus is disgusting. And if they do say that, you say, “Suppose your favorite food touched a piece of asparagus.” People say, “Oh, that’s fine.” So, they don’t mind.

Americans eat a lot of meat, but we don’t eat many different kinds of meat. There are 4,000 mammal’s species. We eat three: cows, pigs, and lambs. We only eat their muscle. Many don’t eat the liver. Some people do but very few. We don’t eat kidneys. We don’t eat eyeballs. We only eat them cooked. Of animals we only eat a little piece of them. Most animals are disgusting.

People in this country particularly and most of the West, love natural. They think that natural is healthier, but there is no evidence for that. It’s tastier, no evidence for that.

Some favorite foods are pizza, cheese, and chocolate. Pizza is the most popular American food. They’re not natural foods. You think you can find a pizza tree?

There are volcanoes, hurricanes, heat waves, and death. They’re all natural. If you look at what people think is natural it is not what’s in it as it’s how it got there. For example, if you take mineral water out of a spring, that’s good, that’s natural.

Now take out the minerals. That’s not natural anymore. Now you put the minerals back in. Now it’s like it was originally and people think that’s really unnatural. That’s much more unnatural than when you just took the minerals out. Putting it back means you poked in twice.

The context of the genetically engineered crop is almost the same, but it’s got a different history. The corn that we eat is so far from the corn that you find in Mexico, the original corn. It’s about one-tenth the size. The opposition to genetic engineering is moral. 50% of Americans say genetic engineering should be prohibited no matter the risks and benefits because it’s wrong. Technology is the only way out of this mess and yet people are opposed to it because they think it’s not natural.

The last point I want to make is sustainability. That’s a new moral issue. People are generally opposed to genetically engineered food, but it’s pro sustainable because it increases yield and pest resistance. They love organic food, but it’s actually not sustainable because it takes considerably more land to grow organic food. It costs more but people are willing to pay more.

Lots of people believe that natural things cause sustainability. That’s absolutely incorrect. Natural is not bad. It’s just neutral. Meat is not sustainable because it’s such an inefficient use of land and it produces toxic gases. The solutions are technology and behavior change. Due to technology, meat is not necessary anymore. We can replace meat with plant products and can supplement the plant products with things like vitamin B-12 that you can’t get from plants.

There are four potential ways we have of dealing with this problem, most of which involve technology. One is eating insects. Insects are eaten by two billion people. I’ve eaten quite a few of them. They’re pretty good. They don’t taste like meat, but they are tasty and natural. It’s disgusting and that stops people from eating it. They’re not cheap because they haven’t been scaled yet. No one’s tried.

The next thing is precision fermentation. This is a modern genetic transfer. You could get microorganisms by putting animal genes in them to make animal proteins. Insulin is made like that now. You can make heme, which is a blood protein, which makes meat taste like meat. You can grow that in plants. But it is not natural to poke it in there and change the genes. So, there’s opposition.

There’s plant-based imitation meat. The idea is to make plant products often from soy into meat texture and add heme to it, which has the taste of meat. It’s more expensive than meat and it’s not the same taste, but it’s moving quickly.

The last one I want to mention is cultivated meat. We take muscle cells out of a cow and grow them in a culture. Its taste is supposed to be quite good. For many people, it’s disgusting because almost all animal products are disgusting and this one is not natural.

We’re in a situation where the technology is moving rapidly and within 10 years, I think we’ll have cultivated meat that’s cheap enough and tastes good. It’s typically an S-shaped curve where a new technology develops very slowly, then some breakthrough occurs and it goes up quickly.

Let me give you examples. There were 8,000 cars in the United States in 1900. In the mid-1920s, America produced 20 million a year. Solar panels are now 10,000 times cheaper than in the 1950s.

What can we do to get people to eat less meat? We could take a little plant-based or cultivated meat and mix it in with real meat. So, it’s only 2% and then 5%, then 10%. We in psychology know that people get used to anything. People get used to losing a leg. They get used to getting old. Old people have as much quality of life as healthy young people.

If the person next to you breathes right into your mouth, you would find that disgusting, but you’re breathing their air if you’re sitting right next to them and you just get used to it. That’s the way the world is. Your body contains a pile of shit. You get used to it. You don’t think about it.

We’re going to get to the point where meat substitutes taste as good as meat. There’s the moral issue of poking into things and making them unnatural. The answer to this is to fight moral upset with counter morals to tell people that genetically engineered food has been poked in, but it’s saving people’s lives in Africa because they get more food. You got one moral against another and you work that through.

We know in psychology that people are more moved by individual events than by statistics. Joseph Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” And he was right about that. If you think about the eco value of not eating meat, the fact that it saves the earth is abstract. If you do to not eat meat, it is not going to affect the climate much. But on the other hand, you’re participating in killing an animal when you eat meat. That’s much more immediate and it’s been the main reason people became vegetarians. We can use what we know about persuasion to get people to accept biotech because they can see the moral advantages of biotech.

Mitch Feinman:

I’m curious of the journey of your interest in meat. You were my Psychology 101 teacher in 1983. My only D in academia ever on your first midterm exam.

Paul Rozin:

My daughter got her only D at Penn in Psych one too. Not mine.

Mitch Feinman:

She was probably not studying like me. You talked about disgust and persuasion. Tell us about the journey studying psychology to meat.

Paul Rozin:

I have a joint PhD in biology and psychology. I started out working on how animals choose foods that are good for them. Rats can eat everything, but they eat what they need. I then decided to work with humans like how kids learned to read.

My wife wrote The Flavor-Principal Cookbook that said that most of the world’s cuisines have a set of flavors that they use on almost all food. Like with China, it’s soy sauce and ginger root. And I said, “That’s odd. Why do they do that?” I started working on how humans deal with food, which I’ve done for the rest of my life.

The first thing I studied was why people eat hot peppers because it tastes terrible. And then, I got interested in meat because it’s the favorite and most taboo food in the world. Much of my work now has been about how we’ve perverted the pleasure of eating in the United States. I do a lot of comparisons between French and Americans. The French enjoy eating as an experience and we think of eating primarily as affecting our arteries.

I recently got back into meat. I was working with a young postdoc who was a vegan and started thinking about how there are both health and moral reasons to not eat it. Some vegetarians are health vegetarians and some are moral. For example, if a newspaper article says, “Meat is great for you.” Health Vegetarians would stop being vegetarians and it would have no effect at all on moral vegetarians. They don’t care about that.

I’ve been studying sustainability and natural. Once I found that people think that natural is sustainable, which is wildly incorrect, I decided I better look into this because breaking this belief that natural is wonderful would be a major advance in dealing with a crisis of climate. So that’s how I got here.

Hugh Nickola:

Internationally does the view of meat and disgust differ dramatically.

Paul Rozin:

Most of our data comes from the Western world. I do a little work in India and Mexico where it’s quite different. India is different because they have half the world’s vegetarians for moral reasons at birth. They’ve never eaten meat. Most of the vegetarians we encounter in this country had an early experience of eating meat and turned away from it for health or moral reasons. We are the most obsessed with the health effects of food.

We have good food in this country and we enjoy it, but it’s tempered by this worry about weight. In the third world, which is 80% of the world, they’re much more worried about getting enough food. In Brazil and China, they’re increasing their meat intake because they’re getting wealthier and that’s what’s kept them from eating meat.

The French spend about twice as much time eating as we do it a day, but they eat less. They eat slowly, they savor their food and it’s why they have half the level of obesity that we do. It’s very ritualistic eating in France. You don’t watch the Dallas Cowboys or the French soccer team during dinner because that would intrude on the food experience. The proper way to eat, proper sitting at the table, not getting up at the middle of the meal while other people are still eating. All of this is deteriorating slowly because convenience food even affects the French. The world is getting more like America. People are getting more concerned about longevity. If you love food, it’s a disadvantage.

Larry Bernstein:

One of your core points was that meat’s too expensive in its use of land and plants. But our farms have become increasingly more productive. 99 percent of Americans used to work on the farm and now it’s less than 1%.

We’re seeing increases in productivity of 3 to 5% per year in use of pesticides, genetically modified crops, ability to minimize damage by insects. The tractor gets more productive every year. When you have massive increases in productivity, the cost of meat goes down.

My inclination to go for the cockroach seems low given that we are becoming rich. Why can’t we splurge and eat as much meat as we want?

Paul Rozin:

First, we’re plateauing on the efficiency of crops. I don’t think that we’re going to be able to continue to yield that much more from the land even with genetic engineering, but we are getting more. That’s true that it is getting cheaper, but we’re not going to have enough land. Arable land is half the land in the world. And of that, half is used for agriculture and of that over 70% is used to feed animals. Converting that pasture land to forests would be good for climate change.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to talk about imitation meat. In this audience we have Howard Shainker who can’t distinguish between a real and a fake diamond. Can you tell us about the transition in how humans think about manufactured versus natural diamonds?

Howard Shainker:

We used to own the largest online diamond vendor in the world called Blue Nile. When we bought the business, the lab grown diamond market was like 0.25% of the market. Over five years that we owned the business, which was a bad investment, the penetration of lab grown diamonds went from basically zero to now 50%.

Larry Bernstein:

Why did that change?

Howard Shainker:

You can’t tell the difference between one diamond and the other. At the very high end of the market, people cared and we had the belief wrongly that there would be nostalgia, why is a diamond forever? It takes thousands of years. It grows deep in the earth. And that’s the bond that means this marriage is forever. It turns out that women want the biggest ring you can buy within your budget. Women and men at 25 are optimizing for bling and the biggest you can get is the best. That is the consumer preference over everything else. Now, the majority of the market is lab grown and the price point has decreased even more.

Paul Rozin:

This raises the issue of authenticity. With art, for example, you would pay a lot more for an original Picasso than a really good imitation, not because you can tell them apart, though experts can, but because he really touched it.

For your grandmother’s ring, she touched it. That’s very valuable to you. You’re not going to trade that in for an imitation. Why did that not work for diamonds and why does it work for great art? Nobody cares about hearing the original performance of a great piece of music as opposed to the current one. So that’s like the diamonds. For some things authenticity matters and for other things it doesn’t and we don’t know the principle that explains why your diamonds were taken over.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Steve Zoll who is the sausage king of Chicago.

Steve Zoll:

Say, we develop a meat duplicate by using vegetables or cultures. Will people want to eat it? Will the grossness be an obstacle to getting people to adopt this manmade meat?

Paul Rozin:

People get used to almost anything but not everything. When we have a perfect imitation meat and another piece of meat that’s real next to it, how are people going to react to that? Are they going to be willing to pay more for the real meat even though the experience is the same? But we do know that people care deeply about the history of things. If beef died out because of some plague, people would go without beef for a while and they might not go back as much when that got better.

Shani Raviv:

I advised for a company that farmed grasshoppers at scale. They chose this insect because you can use 100% of it. It’s kosher and halal.

The decision was to go with dog food because this is an easier access to the market. There wasn’t success in bringing insect-based protein into real food. They mostly hide it. There are energy bars that have 1% to 5%. Do you think the right strategy is to hide it as 1 or 2% in the ingredients or to define a new category?

Paul Rozin:

Insects are so disgusting to people that it’s probably better to make insect flour. I’ve tasted it. It’s pretty neutral. It’s a little nutty, but it’s good. The insect bars that you’re talking about, which are available now, are expensive. And the reason for that is no one scaled insect production.

It’s easy to farm insects. You don’t need a lot of space and the black soldier fly has to live for three weeks and then you can harvest the larvae and grind it. They eat non-human food. They eat melon rinds. They even eat feces.

Jeff Shell:

In 2025, more meat per person was consumed in the United States than any year in history. I would propose a theory that beef is part of the culture of eating in America. July 4th is flipping burgers on the grill. A burger is about as American as it gets. You do not see a lot of people on July 4th flipping impossible burgers.

Paul Rozin:

You’re absolutely right. It is a central part of American culture. So, there are two issues. One is to give up on the hamburger, which is a problematic thing to do and another is to make the hamburger an imitation roughly as good. And if you do the latter, how many people will still be upset because it isn’t a real hamburger. I can’t predict that.

Larry Bernstein:

Paul, end on a note of optimism as it relates to meat.

Paul Rozin:

I care about killing animals, which not all of you do. From my point of view, there’s going to be reduction in the amount of real meat. It’s going to be better for the earth, but how fast that’s going to happen I can’t say. There’s so much working against meat. What’s in favor of it is that it tastes great and it’s got prestige. In the third world, the more meat you eat, the more respected you are.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Paul for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Following the Terrorist’s Money.

Our two speakers were Eyal Azoulay and Ellie who are the founders of an Israeli Not-for-profit called ColEven. Terrorists move money from their Western supporters to the Middle East to fund their nefarious affairs. This happens despite the best efforts of American and European banks who spend billions of dollars trying to stop it.

Learn about how ColEven with its staff of former Israeli intelligence professionals work with the banks to impede bad actors.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Containing the New Axis Powers: China, Russia and Iran, here.

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Seth Cropsey

Subject: Containing the New Axis Powers: China, Russia and Iran
Bio: President of the Yorktown Institute and Author of Breaking the New Axis: A US Grand Strategy for Eurasia

Transcript:

Containing the New Axis Powers: China, Russia and Iran

What Happens Next in 6 Minutes - 07.27.2026

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Containing the New Axis Powers: China, Russia and Iran.

Our speaker is Seth Cropsey is the President of the Yorktown Institute and the author of a new book entitled Breaking the New Axis: A US Grand Strategy for Eurasia.

I want to learn from Seth about why the Eurasian land mass is critical to American security. In addition, I want to hear about why the lack of ideological coherence of our adversaries is a weakness that we can exploit.

Seth, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Seth Cropsey:

American foreign policy has to deal with one superpower China, another near competitor Russia, and Iran. What is our strategy?

There are three schools: the most extreme is the isolationist approach, we can simply protect our borders and we’ll be safe. The second is China is the biggest threat so our resources should pivot toward China to prevent its global dominance.

The third school, which I would include myself in, is that our security, diplomacy, economic relationships, technology rest on understanding that the threats come from Eurasia, Europe and Asia, everything from the English Channel to the South China Sea. Europe, the West Pacific and the Middle East offer different economic opportunities, raw materials and finished goods and exclusion from any one of them would be like taking away the third leg from a stool.

Larry Bernstein:

What did we accomplish the Iran war, and is it part of an ongoing Eurasian conflict?

Seth Cropsey:

We destroyed a lot of Iranian military assets and hurt the Iranian economy significantly. The long-term consequences don’t look good because of the memorandum of understanding, there’s no effective compliance requirement to maintain the status quo in their search for nuclear weapons and the question of their increasing production of ballistic missiles is not addressed.

The ballistic missile production was harmed. It was not destroyed. It’s going to come back. And against their pledge of good performance, we’ve promised to provide economic relief in terms of sanctions and an ending of the blockade. The only assurance that that agreement has of Iranian compliance is the current administration’s threat to go to war again.

The history of the West complying with agreements with problematic states is bad. Going back to the Versailles Treaty, where Germany rearmed and no one did anything about it. The anti-ballistic missile treaty required the Soviet Union not to use radars. The Russians built a radar before and during the Reagan administration, but we did nothing in return. The Oslo agreement that Israel signed with the United States required certain behaviors of the Palestinians, which they quickly failed to observe.

Larry Bernstein:

We have enemies and Iran is one. What do we do about it? We can destroy their military forces. We can try to do a regime change which may require ground forces and we can apply economic sanctions.

Seth Cropsey:

And we can also arm their population that protests against the regime.

Larry Bernstein:

Trump and Netanyahu destroyed their existing nuclear supply, their existing ballistic missiles and destroyed their naval forces.

Seth Cropsey:

The ballistic missile production was harmed. It was not destroyed.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s a whack-a-mole situation.

Seth Cropsey:

It’s going to come back, yes.

Larry Bernstein:

Years ago, Ben Gurion made a statement that what distinguished Israel’s defense strategy was that it could not employ land forces to take over Arab capitals and subjugate them. What they could do is destroy their existing military equipment knowing that they would re-arm and attack Israel again. That’s the cards they’ve been dealt.

As we describe three foes of the United States (China, Russia, and Iran), we can’t use ground forces to destroy these enemies. We have economic sanctions that we’re currently employing against Iran maybe not for long, and also with Russia, but we’re limited of what we can do.

Seth Cropsey:

I’m concerned that the current memorandum of understanding tells me nothing more than to expect another war to take place at some time in the future.

Larry Bernstein:

For sure, because that’s our only option available to us unless there’s a regime change, or they decide that they do not want to destroy the United States or its allies.

Seth Cropsey:

Greater force could have destroyed Iran’s energy infrastructure.

Larry Bernstein:

There was fear that Iran would destroy our Gulf allies’ petrochemical infrastructure. It was a mutual assured destruction strategy for petrochemicals and that would create significant economic pain in the United States that weighed in the decision.

Seth Cropsey:

Which would be worse: their possession of a nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles in the near future, or the sort of damage that you described. I think the former would be worse.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you think we’re worse off than having not destroyed their existing military capacity?

Seth Cropsey:

We’re worse off now, yes. A famous Italian political philosopher observed that if you’re going to kill a king, make sure you don’t fail. We’ve stirred up the hornet’s nest and laid the way for them to recover financially by lifting sanctions against promises, which we should know they’re not going to observe.

If they out wait Trump, they know that they have a reasonable chance of facing an American president who is less likely than Trump to use force. And with the rift in his supporters that the war has caused, it’s a reasonable calculation that Trump would not use force again.

Larry Bernstein:

You learn in conflicts, both sides. The world learned that the Strait of Hormuz is more delicate than expected because of technological improvements with drones. The Saudis are now aware of it and they’re beginning construction of additional pipelines to take oil that would otherwise go through the strait. There’s also possibility of a canal.

Seth Cropsey:

A canal would make a lot of sense.

Larry Bernstein:

These aren’t expensive compared to a carrier group. I expect that these pipelines and canals will be built and be operational probably in two to three years. They don’t want to be paying this tax to the Iranians. How will this change the dynamic of future administration’s ability to be more aggressive?

Seth Cropsey:

If the oil did not have to flow through the Strait of Hormuz that’s a good thing, but that does not answer the question of ballistic missiles, which already can reach the Gulf States from Iran with no trouble. And if their production is ramped up even without a nuclear weapon that also presents a threat.

Larry Bernstein:

UAE and Saudis are aware that they have soft targets in their petrochemical infrastructure as well as their desalination plants. They could harden those assets.

Seth Cropsey:

They certainly could and we could help them.

Larry Bernstein:

Let’s move to the Russia-Ukraine situation. How should we think about this conflict in your paradigm of maximizing US security and emphasizing the importance of the Eurasian landmass as being critical to our security?

Seth Cropsey:

Putin looks at the expansion of Russia the way the Czars did in the 16th century. He understands that without productive military capabilities that Ukraine brings, Russia remains short of being an imperial power. I take Putin’s words seriously that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and he means to reverse it.

Larry Bernstein:

How has this Ukraine war influenced Putin’s position?

Seth Cropsey:

It’s not clear that Putin has an accurate grasp of the casualties that the Russian military is taking or the amount of destruction.

Larry Bernstein:

I found surprising the ineffectiveness of the Russian Navy versus Ukrainian bomb-laden jet skis and drones. The Russians have abandoned the Black Sea. If they can’t even beat a country that doesn’t have a Navy, imagine what Americans would do to them.

Seth Cropsey:

It’s a significant setback for them and the Ukrainians accomplished it through imagination and determination. But as long as Putin is willing to accept the casualties for moving the front forward, kilometer by kilometer, the West faces the possibility that the war will be resolved in Russia’s favor. If he thinks that he is successful in Ukraine, the danger that exists there applies elsewhere in Europe.

Larry Bernstein:

Imagine that Ukraine had been a member of NATO during this attack. Would it have resulted in World War?

Seth Cropsey:

The entire point of NATO, which is a defensive alliance would have been proven correct. The threat of having to face the joint efforts of the United States and the European countries would deter him from attacking Ukraine in the first place.

Larry Bernstein:

And if it didn’t?

Seth Cropsey:

Then there’d be a fight.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s also possible that Trump would have said, “We’re not going to fulfill our treaty obligations.” Would that have been worse?

Seth Cropsey:

Yes, that’s true.

Larry Bernstein:

We should never have expanded the NATO alliance to include Ukraine. It’s always been Russian. You can see Trump making these arguments. I’m not sure that there would have been bipartisan support for a major war against Russia to fulfill these obligations.

Seth Cropsey:

That’s a separate question from what the consequences would be if Ukraine had been a member of NATO.

Larry Bernstein:

I understand that it could have deterred Russia, but there’s some probability it wouldn’t have.

Seth Cropsey:

That’s true.

Larry Bernstein:

Biden did say, “Don’t do it. I see you on the border, demanding that you respect the borders of Ukraine.”

Seth Cropsey:

But how likely was Putin to take Biden’s word seriously?

Larry Bernstein:

How seriously would Putin have taken the NATO obligation?

Seth Cropsey:

Given Europe’s desire not to have a major conflagration in Europe again for the third time in 110 years, pretty good.

Larry Bernstein:

You mentioned in the book that if Ukraine gets lost, that Poland is next, but Poland does incorporate the NATO deterrence. Do you think that the NATO deterrence will work in Poland?

Seth Cropsey:

It will work. NATO would be effective against Russia now. Putin has avoided mass mobilization since the beginning of the war. He won’t go to the families in Petersburg and Moscow to have their sons go into this war.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s probably just as true amongst the Western Europeans as well. I don’t know how effective a draft would be in Spain to defend Poland.

Seth Cropsey:

Well, a draft in Spain wouldn’t produce anything. But if you look at the steps that are being taken in Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Italy and England to increase the defense budget, those are already bearing fruit and Putin can see that.

Larry Bernstein:

Russia has been pretty bloodied by this Ukraine war. It’s lost a half a million men. More than a million people, mostly their brightest have emigrated out of Russia. They’ve lost a substantial amount of their munitions. They have to be very disappointed in their military capabilities, watching them against a third-rate armed force like Ukraine to be stalled for four years now. Is there any internal recognition in Russia that they’re very limited what they can accomplish to halt them from invading Poland as an example?

Seth Cropsey:

Russian oligarchs question whether this makes sense to continue losing money, enduring sanctions, losing men, and being an international pariah. People’s tolerance for being ostracized is limited to say nothing of having their national wealth expended on a project that in four years has produced gains that are not commensurate with the sacrifices that have been made.

Larry Bernstein:

Now having seen the Iranian memorandum of understanding, do you anticipate that the US will give up on Ukraine and they will be forced to give up their homeland to the aggressor?

Seth Cropsey:

I think a lot of that is up to us and our ability to work with allies and our strategy. If we are party to Ukraine’s loss of sovereignty, that will have effects around the world, Taiwan being the most obvious one.

Larry Bernstein:

Why are you focused on Eurasia as a single landmass as being important in the context of US strategy?

Seth Cropsey:

The question is whether we focus on China to the exclusion of everything else. That I think is a mistake because of the connections between the Middle East, the Far East and Europe. The productive capabilities of East Asia cannot be separated from the energy from the Middle East, and neither can be separated from the financial and technological advantages and the political, cultural, economic, historical connections that we have with Europe. The argument is to see Eurasia as a whole, rather than three parts, two of which can be regarded as lesser in favor of China.

Larry Bernstein:

How should we think about India as an ally as a member of the Quad, particularly regarding the defense of Taiwan and as a bulwark against Chinese aggression? What level of Indian support should we expect in a conflict with China in the Indian Ocean?

Seth Cropsey:

For the import of oil, ships have to pass through the Indian Ocean if they’re going to East Asia. And for the export of Chinese goods to Europe, the Indian Ocean is necessary transit. India is a place of significant strategic importance, and that’s why it’s not necessarily a good idea to have changed the name of what the Trump administration had originally called the Indo-Pac Command to its former name Pacific Command, PACOM.

Larry Bernstein:

I suspect that the Japanese would be brought into the war. I don’t imagine the Chinese would be able to export goods to Japan.

The Middle Eastern powers will have to choose a side and may be unwilling to export oil to China or alternatively the US Navy could prevent it.

What is the Chinese trade and export plan with a Taiwanese conflict?

Seth Cropsey:

It’s an uncertain situation because we don’t know their strategy, but when you frame it in those terms. If they went for a blockade, that’s an act of war, but nobody’s shooting things. What would our reaction be?

Larry Bernstein:

We’re going to blockade China.

Seth Cropsey:

The Chinese want to avoid counterblockades. They want to resolve a situation militarily by doing it quickly. Then it’s all over and that can be put aside while the West continues to import goods from China.

A large amphibious assault preceded by a tremendous missile barrage avoids the economic problem that you rightly point out.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to talk about demographics. The reason why the Eurasian landmass is so important is this is where most people live. Where is the world’s GDP away from the United States? It’s in the European Asian landmass.

Seth Cropsey:

The combined GDP of Eurasia is greater than that of the United States.

Larry Bernstein:

Europe and Asias populations are in incredible decline. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, as an alternative, in 1960, its population was 15 million. It’s now 115 million, expected to be 215 million by 2050 and 325 million by 2075 and by 2090 its population will be greater than the United States. GDP follows population to some extent and Africa will become a much more important part of the world. South Korea, its population is expected to fall 80% at current rates between now and 2100 and will not be a material economic power. How should we think about population driving economies and reducing the relative importance of the European Asian land mass as it depopulates?

Seth Cropsey:

I don’t see the West situation as being hopeless. I think it’s remediable, but that would take a considerable shift in the political, social, and cultural currents that run not only in Europe but increasingly here.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to go back to Taiwan. The Chinese violated the terms of their Hong Kong treaty during the first Trump administration. Trump called them out and asked for international support to push back against the Chinese and there was radio silence from our European and Asian allies. Trump said, “Nobody cares. What do you want from me? “ Is what we saw in Hong Kong a precursor of the international reaction for Taiwan?

Seth Cropsey:

I’d like to believe not, but a more vigorous reaction response requires an important nation to take the lead.

Larry Bernstein:

As an example, the United States took the lead on the Iran situation. The Europeans, the Indians, they didn’t care. They were, if anything, opposed to the US action. Could you imagine a situation where if the United States said we’re going to boycott China, that the Europeans would say that’s a violation of international law, we want our stuff?

Seth Cropsey:

If United States leadership is serious about its goals, willing to explain what they are and to back them up with the means necessary, the support of others is desirable; it’s not necessary.

Larry Bernstein:

It’s a big world and the United States has a number of foes and you’ve also mentioned that the only way to push back on that is through an alliance system. But if the allies neither arm nor are supportive with those arms during conflicts, it doesn’t allow for this interchange.

Seth Cropsey:

That’s why alliance management is so important.

Larry Bernstein:

Earlier I asked you about the Spanish if they were to tolerate a draft, you said they’re not going to show up and I believe you. Maybe the Poles will show up I could see the South Koreans showing up. Actually, maybe the South Koreans won’t show up.

Seth Cropsey:

The English, the French and the Italians deployed carrier strike groups to the Taiwan Strait within the past two years. They showed up. They understand what’s at risk there. I don’t count them out.

Larry Bernstein:

One of the aspects of your book is that countries end up doing what’s in their interests. Modi’s relationship with Trump is not critical to your prediction for Indian behavior.

Seth Cropsey:

Talk to 10 senior Indians and see what you think.

Larry Bernstein:

What I would find out is that they’re not aligned.

Seth Cropsey:

Their opinions are not held universally.

Larry Bernstein:

For sure. And that is true in the United States as well.

Seth Cropsey:

Yeah.

Larry Bernstein:

The progressive left and John Bolton don’t agree on first principles.

In each podcast, I end on a note of optimism. Seth, what are you optimistic about as it relates to the Eurasian landmass?

Seth Cropsey:

The profound ideological differences between the Iranians and the Russians and the Chinese are certain to produce fracturing in the future. There is no line through China, Russia, and Iran the way there was between Germany and the Soviet Union before the Ribbentrop deal came undone. There was a commonality of ideology, authoritarian-fascist, but the lack of an ideological connection spells trouble for the axis and we ought to take advantage of it.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Seth for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Following the Terrorist’s Money.

Our two speakers were Eyal Azoulay and Ellie who founded an Israeli Not-for-profit called ColEven. Terrorists move money from their Western supporters to the Middle East to fund their nefarious affairs despite the efforts of Western banks to stop it.

ColEven’s staff of former Israeli intelligence professionals follow the cash and then inform the banks to shut it down.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Following the Terrorist’s Money, here.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Listen on Spotify

Transcript PDF

102KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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Eyal Azoulay and Ellie

Subject: Following the Terrorist’s Money
Bio: Founders of the Israeli Not-for-profit ColEven

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Following the Terrorist’s Money.

Our two speakers are Eyal Azoulay and Ellie who are the founders of an Israeli Not-for-profit called ColEven. Terrorists successfully move money from their Western supporters to the Middle East to fund their nefarious affairs. This happens despite the best efforts of American and European banks who spend billions of dollars trying to stop it.

ColEven uses the latest technologies in coordination with a staff of former Israeli intelligence professionals who inform the banks that bad actors are using their institutions.

I was introduced to Coleven at the Miami Beach Impact Forum. This organization has an annual Jewish charity shark tank event. At the dinner, four different charities explained what they do and then the audience picks charities to support. I was super impressed by Coleven’s mission and accomplishments and donated to them.

Ellie, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Ellie:

Coleven is a nonprofit intelligence organization. How do terror organizations move money through the global financial system despite the enormous compliance and regulatory infrastructure designed to stop them? Most people imagine terror financing as suitcases of cash or secret bank accounts. In reality, it is often hidden in plain sight. It can look like a charity fundraising campaign, a nonprofit organization, a small company registered in London, Hong Kong or Delaware, or an online crowdfunding page collecting donations from ordinary people who have no idea where the money is ultimately going.

Our mission at Coleven is to identify hidden financial networks and provide actionable intelligence to financial institutions, regulators, payment providers, and governments to take action.

We are not a government agency, think tank, or an advocacy organization. We are an operational intelligence organization using open-source intelligence, financial analysts, corporate records, and sanctioned data. We are mapping networks, identifying risks that can be used by decision makers.

Banks are consuming our digestible product because they are not equipped to map terrorism networks as opposed to anti-money laundering. They have a gap with the intelligence and Coleven can help.

The financial system is powerful. Military action can disrupt terrorist organizations. Law enforcement can persecute them, but if you remove access to funding, you reduce their ability to recruit, operate, travel, purchase equipment and expand. Money is the oxygen that allows these networks to survive. We focus on the financial layer because it is one of the most effective points of intervention. Eyal, do you want to share how it all started?

Eyal Azoulay:

What is financial crime enforcement? When we talk about a crime, enforcement is the local police, the state police, and the FBI to enforce the laws. In finance, the regulator within the government says, “Here are the rules and best practices.”

The enforcement arms are the financial institutions themselves. They build the operation and execute enforcement including judgment and penalties. An organization is the prosecutor, the judge and the executor. All three within a financial institution who can’t see the details from the noise. It’s not scalable. If they are not doing good work, the government will say, “Here’s a big penalty and here is where you failed.”

You don’t need to go to the regulator. If you want to be effective, you need to go to the enforcement arm within financial institutions.

Larry Bernstein:

Financial institutions often harass innocent bank customers by mistake.

Eyal Azoulay:

Innocent citizens can get penalized and it’s almost impossible to get back from it. There are huge amount of suspicious alerts activities and tools that handle that at scale are bad. Everything is static about one single point. If you don’t understand something within the context, how can you make a judgment?

Larry Bernstein:

We got two different concepts: alpha error and beta error. Alpha error is when you miss the terrorist. Beta error is when you misdiagnose an innocent. Missing the terrorist is worse, but damning an innocent is also problematic. The reality is it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. In a normal day’s work for a bank, there aren’t much terrorist activities. It’s predominantly innocent people who get snagged. I am both an individual and a partner in a financial institution. KYC – Know Your Customer is a total mess.

Eyal Azoulay:

Oh yeah.

Larry Bernstein:

Their collection of information about me seems ridiculous. If my passport were to expire that is a problem as if my US citizenship is now in doubt. They want me to swear that I’m not doing business in Sudan.

Are current KYC best practices effective in achieving its goals or is it simply a nuisance for most innocent customers?

Ellie:

This is something that we’re dealing with every day. How do you identify Hakohen, which is a common Israeli name with Kahane Chai, which is a group of extremists. Terrorism is a small niche within the KYC ecosystem. It is the hardest to find because it’s about putting a lot of dots together and mapping seemingly innocent names and entities to put them all together rather than to follow actual monies and things that raise red flags. And we need the human eye to be professional to sit and map.

Banks lack the human resource to do this. As we speak, number 24 in Hamas can register himself with any US bank because he’s not part of the US blacklist.

Now the very same person, number 24 in Hamas won’t dare walk into a bank in Israel. We were managing to map the cousin of the #1 in Hamas because her family name was familiar to our researchers, but I’m not sure that every top bank in the United States can be familiar with such a family name.

Larry Bernstein:

Eyal, you mentioned that the bank is a self-regulating organization.

Eyal Azoulay:

It is extremely regulated but not on the right things.

Larry Bernstein:

The banks have been read the Riot Act that if they screw up and allow a Mexican mob to bank with them. They will get a huge fine and heads are going to roll.

There’s a check the box mentality without a vision as to the real sense of what’s going on. I saw the TV show Ozark.

Eyal Azoulay:

Exactly.

Larry Bernstein:

Tell me about the bad guys working around the check the box.

Eyal Azoulay:

First of all, I 100% agree. The top five banks in the US have 9,000 people executing this work. They are spending $250 billion every year on a system that is over-featured to make sure that the regulator is happy and is not pissed at us.

Over featured, over engineered only to that metric, not can I find bad actors and wash them out of my system? Can I reduce the amount of friction that I bring on innocent people? These are not the goals. There is a single goal and the single metric is keeping the regulator happy. That’s it. $250 billion of operation in an industry that is focused only on one thing and that’s where the problem is. It’s only checking the boxes is making it look like we’re spending a lot of money. If you go to a risk organization, let’s say with Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank. You tell them, “You can do A, B, C and make it better and reduce people you’re going to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

I’m not going to go back to the regulator and telling I’m spending less money because then it will be piecemeal. That’s the problem. The concept of KYC, know your person you are interacting with. Larry, you and I can go into business together. We’re acting on good faith of what’s going to happen.

But when we shake hands, there’s mutual risk exposure. I bring exposure to you, you bring exposure to me and we need to understand it. That’s the essence of what they’re trying to do in a bank in a KYC. Who is that person in front of me and what is the exposure that that person, that entity can create for me as a bank? Now because everything is superficial, everything is about checking the box, they’re looking on data out of context. They don’t go deeper to understanding why because they have neither the tools nor the people with the right skills and don’t have the motivation to do it.

Larry Bernstein:

Tell us about not understanding money movement in context.

Eyal Azoulay:

First of all, it’s a business. We spoke about the motivation towards making sure that the regulator is not unhappy with us. The goal is to push as much business volume as we can.

You have stakeholder fiduciary rights. So how do you manage that balance? You check the boxes and then the regulator is not unhappy with you. The problem with the gray area. It’s a concept that says that I can deal with 80% and they will be fine. The rest of the 20% are great people like Larry and 10% of them are number 10 in Hezbollah. They don’t care. Simple as that.

Larry Bernstein:

Ellie, how does your organization figure out who the bad actors are, and why are you successful when big banks fail despite billion-dollar budgets?

Ellie:

We are focusing on providing financial institutions with clear maps about organizations and individuals, showing the connection between an individual to a certain NGO, another company that will lead to one hop from a sanctioned entity.

When you’re sitting with a compliance officer, you start at the end. And the end is a sanctioned person or entity. Second from the end is the other guy that has a business relationship with this sanctioned entity. We are focusing on that gray area for those gatekeepers and provide them with insightful intelligence.

Now we bring our findings only from the open source, from the social media, from tax registrations. We have our secret sauce - the mapping and provide evidence that is verified and trustable. However, it’s not a level that will be required by a court. Our map backed by reports that are clickable. We save gatekeepers time and prevent huge fines and even criminal charges for senior management of these banks.

What makes us a very unique NGO is that we bring actual intelligence to the desks of those who can act upon it. KYC is about checking the boxes, but it’s about a different behavior and typologies that represent the financing of terrorism as opposed to money laundering. We know it’s because we also conduct educational sessions with the compliance and fraud teams.

Larry Bernstein:

What is your interaction like with the banks?

Ellie:

Dealing with banking disclosure, they cannot share with us certain information. Once we can bring a bank our reports, they happily respond that it received with thanks, but they will never share with us a certain individual name that came through this net.

They’ll just thank us because we help them with their potential exposure. We do have some indications because we verify that our report was opened 400 times by the same compliance department at a certain bank. A high opening rate of our materials, we know for sure they have interest with that information.

Larry Bernstein:

Your job is a whack-a-mole.

Ellie:

You couldn’t define it better.

Larry Bernstein:

There’s the bad actor who needs the cash. Cash is the oxygen for every organization. They need to get cash from friends of the bad organization. You shut down one of their bank accounts and they will open a replacement. It’s like water. Water is insidious. If you have a leak in the roof, it will find its way through your ceiling. Cash is like water. Tell us about the whack-a-mole and how you deal with it.

Ellie:

The whack-mole is complicated. It’s not only about cash finding its way through the cracks, but also that certain individuals that managed to evade the sanction list. So only their organization was sanctioned, but senior management didn’t get onto the blacklist. They managed to open the new organization and are familiar with the student groups that funded antisemitism within the universities such as SJP and AMP. They’re all about the same people that are shutting down and opening up the organization. So, it’s not only about the money, it’s also about the way they’re structuring their organizations.

It is a never-ending whack-a-mole. I’m looking at my researchers sitting in the next room putting the dots together again and again and again and mapping these materials. How come they don’t give up?

Sometimes they already know their organizations and the individuals. They know him because they met him in another case and he pops up in another case and another organization and so on. The money goes with them. However, we have our indications that we disrupt them. It’s not only about freezing and shutting down certain accounts. It is also about raising the awareness of the gatekeepers to those phenomena and to the way they behave and to the regulator list.

The regulator managed to shut down an organization we provide with the name of the five senior management of that organization, which are no less important and have their contribution to the situation.

As a nonprofit organization with a very lean operation, we cannot solve the financing of terrorism problem. We know that billions of dollars are going through the Western financial institutions and we cannot solve it all. Money will always find its way to the malicious hands. But we’re trying to interfere with this cash movement and make it less easy to operate out in the open and more difficult for those networks to collaborate to transfer the money.

That is similar to how the US government is trying to deal with drugs. Drugs will not vanish from the world, but fighting the drugs within the United States making it difficult for them to operate and extend.

It’s about sealing the cracks to make it harder for those networks to work. We read their reactions in the social media. They don’t exactly know who but they are complaining about the difficulties they are facing recently in the places we are active like with fundraising platforms. When we tackle a certain URL that is fundraising monies to fund terror. When we manage to shut down such a campaign, this is a win that we can point at because it’s just shutting down the campaign and freezing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Larry Bernstein:

I’ve given a charitable donation to your organization and I encourage my listeners to consider it as part of their active giving because your mission and impact per dollar of contribution is substantial. Ellie, can you give our listeners a reason to give money to your organization to reduce terrorism?

Ellie:

Larry, thank you so much for your kind donation. Here is a link to our donation page. We’re a nonprofit organization providing information for free and banks cannot resist to receive it.

Larry Bernstein:

They’re stuck.

Ellie:

They’re stuck when they’re familiar with this information. So here is a lean team sitting in one room in Tel Aviv, you should see our office here. They’re not elegant, very modest, best analysts we have in the country coming from amazing units in the IDF.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you have Americans with banking experience who have moved to Israel to work for your organization?

Ellie:

We have some Olim Hadashim that are here that made Aliyah to Israel and coming from the banking system in the United States. We have here someone who was in charge of fraud in one of the big banks in the United States so he can provide us with the other angles.

Speaking of our impact, one of the top tier banks in the United States stopped correspondent banking thanks to accurate information we’ve managed to provide that bank. Billions of dollars were frozen.

Larry Bernstein:

For our listeners what that means, if ColEven were to flag a terrorist organization using a Lebanese bank several times. a US Bank will stop doing business with the corresponding bank in Lebanon.

Ellie:

It is as simple as that.

Larry Bernstein:

What are you optimistic about as it relates to undermining terrorist organizations ability to move cash?

Ellie:

To collaborate with like-minded organizations that are doing amazing work and we can share our insights and shorten investigation times as well as raising the awareness of the biggest institutions and with the regulators. We will interrupt in a massive way money and interfere organizations working with Western financial institutions.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Ellie and Eyal for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was Encouraging Debate with College Students.

Our speaker was Daniel Diermeier who is the Chancelor of Vanderbilt. Daniel spoke about how the administration builds a culture of political neutrality on campus that encourages free speech and allows for debate without shaming.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students, here.

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Daniel Diermeier

Subject: Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students
Bio: Chancelor of Vanderbilt University

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students.

Our speaker is Daniel Diermeier who is the Chancelor of Vanderbilt. I want to hear from Daniel about how the administration can build a culture of political neutrality on campus. I want to learn about creating a university culture that encourages free speech and allows for debate without shaming the opposing perspective.

Daniel, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.

Daniel Diermeier:

I’m the chancellor of Vanderbilt University. There are key institutions that are at the root of the success of our societies, whether that’s businesses or democracy, and rule of law. But, the trust in these institutions has plummeted dramatically. The main reason is that they’re complicated and often don’t operate in a way that’s easily for people to follow. So, if we are not able to explain clearly what the benefit of what the university is, we’re going to lose the trust of the American public.

The second important piece, is that these institutions have a particular purpose. The moment we deviate from that, then we lose the fundamental reason for why we exist and what the benefits are; we eroding trust as well. My concern is that universities have done both of these. They have not clearly stated what the purpose and benefit is for universities. And secondly, that they have drifted away from the purpose of creating and transmitting knowledge towards taking positions on a whole variety of political issues. University leaders need to address these challenges.

Larry Bernstein:

You’ve talked about keeping political ideology out of the classroom. Why is that problematic? Why does that create distrust? And how can the administration remove politics from the classroom, research, and tenure decisions if the faculty isn’t on board?

Daniel Diermeier:

Great research universities are about creating an environment for pathbreaking research and a transformative education. You want students to leave with knowledge in their particular area, whether it’s computer science or history. You want to prepare them for a meaningful career. And, you want to make sure that they can function as educated citizens in a free and democratic society. Now in most areas that works. The education is great in the sciences and the other areas. But what we’ve seen is that in some fields there are real problems where society reflects upon itself.

Those are the humanities, the qualitative social sciences, sociology, anthropology. You need to be exposed to the fundamental perspectives that are relevant. Let’s say you take a class on criminal justice and some people have argued persuasively or provocatively that the criminal justice system is biased or that it has the consequences of suppressing minority communities. You need to have both of the perspectives that are germane to the field and you then need to be discussed.

They need to be present in a syllabus. If that’s not the case, you’re only getting one side of the argument and then this particular class is not doing its job. To me, this is not about left/right balance so much than it is about the subordination of scholarly standards.

Larry Bernstein:

I did a podcast recently with John Shields who is a professor at Claremont. He looked at college course syllabi and found that there was faculty bias in the choice of what reading material was assigned. What did you think of John Shields’ analysis? See this link for my podcast with Shields.

Daniel Diermeier:

Their recent study looked at three issue areas that are domains that tend to be very controversial: criminal justice, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and abortion. Now, in the case of the criminal justice class, they focused on a controversial but widely read book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which is a complicated argument that argued that the mass incarceration related to the war on drugs had the consequence of suppressing African American communities.

Now there was a lot of criticism of that as there would be when you have a provocative book like that, that people took issue with the analysis and the data of the argument. What they found is that when they looked at syllabi on this particular topic, 94% would only assign the New Jim Crow. The students would never hear the other side of the argument. That’s problematic because now students have an impression that that’s the state of scholarship in this area even though it is not.

That point of view is not driven by scholarly concerns but by a political agenda. This is not a case about balancing left versus right. This is a case about teaching a particular area of study in a way that it should be taught.

Larry Bernstein:

John Shields argued that the politics of the professor shows up in the syllabus and whether it’s by design or not, the fact is that you have a leftist author in this example, Michelle Alexander, combined with a second author who’s even much further to the left and that there’s no book assigned from the center, center-right or the right.

Daniel Diermeier:

I’m a little worried about framing the entire issues a left versus right and take the example of Michelle Alexander’s book and you have a devastating critique written by somebody who is center-left.

So what matters is not so much that we balance left versus right, that we have the relevant perspectives in a particular class on a particular area that are represented. Now sometimes these people’s research will be motivated by their beliefs and that by itself, it’s just that’s who we are as humans. That’s the great German philosopher later taught in the United States, Hans Reichenbaum always made the following distinction. He called the context of discovery and the context of justification. Context of discovery, we have ideas for why we engage with research. Some are political, some are personal, some are theological, some are moral.

But once we enter the world of justification where we have to put our research and now it has to be criticized, to be open to criticisms no matter what people’s point of view. And in a teaching context, we need to faithfully represent the particular area of research that is relevant to this area. So you can have very intense debates on economics, on regulation or crime and people are like, it’s 80% on one side, but people are interested and committed to figuring things out. They’re not putting blinders and restrictions on themselves saying, “You can’t ask that question because it’s inconsistent with my political belief.

I want to emphasize the commitment to scholarly rules here. Universities tend to limit this debate., Many areas in the humanities, for example, like how we interpret pieces of art where we have the same problems, but they don’t naturally map onto a left/right ideological spectrum. And these fields are just as problematic, it’s just as important that we are committed to rigorous scholarship and the norms and standards that support that.

Larry Bernstein:

How did the university system become so partisan?

Daniel Diermeier:

I would say 85% of the faculty now just want to do their work. Your typical mechanical engineer want to be 14 hours in the lab and be left alone. They may tend to vote Democrat on average, but their politics is not central to their work or who they are, but they tend to vote Democrat. That’s the vast majority of faculty. That is not problematic that’s working well.

The sciences, engineering are working really well. Then there’s another smaller group. These are faculty members that fundamentally believe that the world is structured in an unjust fashion, that we understand this injustice as systemic and foundational, that our responsibility is to dismantle these structures of oppression and that this struggle and this commitment become central to who they are as scholars, as researchers, and as teachers. These faculty tend to be concentrated in certain fields: humanities, qualitative social sciences, sociology, anthropology, and adjacent fields. It’s important to the way they view their role and their purpose in the context of the university. They have a very clear idea what the university should do. It should be part of the struggle and they’re organized. As a consequence of that, they tend to dominate certain departments. They sometimes dominate issues of institutional self-governance.

You have a scattered group on the conservative or the traditional liberal John Stuart Mill’s free speech group and you have an organized group on the left and the radical left. I don’t mean moderate left, I mean radical. And so as a consequence of that, university presidents have to navigate that in an environment, which it’s difficult because you constantly get pushed from one side. Some presidents like my former boss at the University of Chicago, Bob Zimmer, was very clear about the principles the University of Chicago stands for, but many presidents don’t want to deal with any drama on campus.

Muddling through and then the ship drifts for 20 years and over time it drifts in a radical direction. That’s what we’re seeing in certain fields.

It manifested itself first in the free speech controversy. So, this was like when we had speech codes like this inviting a certain speaker. We had the Halloween controversy at Yale.

That’s better now because we have a clear set of Chicago principles and groups like FIRE played an important role to put some pressure on universities to improve the free speech environment. Chapter two was institutional neutrality. That of course was critical after October 7th. And again, we had principles and then we had pressure

from alumni, also like the Jewish community. And again, universities moved in a good direction by adopting standards of institutional neutrality.

The third chapter now is what happens in the classroom, in research, and in professional associations and that’s a much more complicated problem because it needs to be done consistent with academic freedom.

Fundamentally you need to look at what’s happening in these departments, who is hired, under what circumstances, what are the principles? You have to ask yourself, are we producing the next generation of scholars? And then you have to look at institutions of certification. These are professional associations, journals, prizes, all things that be prestige and recognition of faculty. There have been problems there as well. The whole system of research, teaching, how do we educate the next generation of scholars need to be looked at and presidents need to lean in one by one to get this set back to the original purpose of the university.

Larry Bernstein:

How do we depoliticize our universities?

Daniel Diermeier:

Well, there are formal principles and then there’s informal aspects and culture. The formal side is this commitment that leaders of universities will not take positions on policy or political issues unless they’re directly and material connected to the core purpose of the university.

I will take a position as a university president on things like research funding because it’s directly connected to the university, but will not take positions on foreign policy or the Dobbs decision. Why? Because we don’t want to create a chilling effect where certain things can’t be talked about or whether we have an institutional orthodoxy. And secondly, if we do a statement, particularly if we do it in haste over the weekend, we are supposed to be the places of expertise and careful work that looks at the complexity of the world in a methodologically rigorous fashion and making a statement over as complex an issue as the conflict in the Middle East is exactly the opposite of what university should do.

Now the important thing is it’s not just about the speech by presidents. It is also about divestment. The university endowment is there to support faculty and students. It’s not there to be an op-ed page. We’re not in the business of boycotting because they have a connection with Israel. Departments should not make statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the same reason that they create a chilling effect and an institutional orthodoxy and that is particularly pernicious for junior faculty that rely on their senior colleagues to get recommendations for promotion and tenure or for graduate students or even for undergraduates. So that should just be off limits.

That’s institutional neutrality, and the second part is the informal aspects that there’s certain things you just can’t talk about or you’re going to be ostracized. It is not appropriate to shun somebody that is a great scholar just because they have a political position that disagrees with the majority of the department. That is not acting as a scholar. The fundamental principle should be is that we are hiring scholars because of their scholarly competence not because of their political orientation.

The moment you hire people or promote them because they’re in line with particular political position, you have deviated from scholarly norms and that is not okay.

Larry Bernstein:

I did a podcast on the demise of small colleges in New England like Hampshire College. We’ve seen prospective students drift away from smaller colleges towards the major universities in the United States. Students are now at Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, UPenn and the University of Texas. These schools have exploded.

Daniel Diermeier:

Our applications in early decision went up by 20% last year. We took like 2.8% of our regular decisions. This is off the charts.

Why are students and families looking for this environment? The reason is that we’re living in the age of technology. AI is front and center for everybody, but the same is there’s similar revolutions going on in biomedical and engineering, quantum and so forth. The knowledge base in these areas turns over extremely rapidly. So, if you want cutting edge AI research, I think the estimated knowledge base turns over in like three to six months, very similar in biomedical engineering and all the areas that are core to the innovation economy, which also means that’s where career opportunities are for students.

Students want to be exposed to that. Not all the students, but many want to do that. To teach this at the frontier of knowledge, you need to have it taught by active researchers. That is not true with the traditional areas like philosophy or history or English. Yes, there are advances, but the speed is not as profound and age and experience may make you an even better teacher of Plato. The problem for local arts colleges is that it is very difficult to teach these fields at a level that is at the frontier of knowledge because you need researchers for that, but to have researchers that you need a research infrastructure, which means you need labs and federal research grants and all of that.

A related point is that a rural location is not an innovation center. An urban environment is attractive to students because many of them want to get engaged sometimes in startups, in projects, in internships, all these types of things and that is easier if you are in a large research university in a thriving metropolitan area. Those are the reasons for why there’s success.

Larry Bernstein:

The price of education has gone up significantly in real terms, it grows faster than inflation and takes a greater percentage of our economy. It’s a combination of entertainment and education and that’s why kids want to be on campus but being on campus is expensive versus online.

Daniel Diermeier:

When you look at the net tuition that students pay after financial aid, in real dollars it has gone down at least at Vanderbilt over the last 15 years. And that’s because of the very substantial financial aid commitments that we make, particularly for low-income students, but it’s on a sliding scale. I think that’s not appreciated and it’s an important thing to keep in mind. That’s an important social mission that we engaged in as university is that for no student should the financial barriers to access prohibit them from going to Vanderbilt.

The second comment I think is, isn’t there a cheaper way of producing this type of education. Isn’t there a better way to do this?

I went to a German public university and that was much cheaper. It was funded by the state and I was first generation and I got a fellowship, but that was just for my living expense because the university was free. And the problem is that the quality is much worse. The classes are totally full. If you have a TA session, there were like 90 people around. There was no career support. There was no mental health support at all. There was no extracurricular activity at all. If you are first generation students and you have no support, the dropout rates are very high.

If you are admitted to Vanderbilt and you graduate and you come from a very wealthy background and you come from the toughest background in the country these two students graduate from Vanderbilt have the same lifetime expected income. They have the same life chances irrespective of their income, of the income of their parents. That is an astonishing accomplishment and that is what we do. But in order to support the students, there has to be a lot there.

For example, they have to meet each other. They have to be networks. Living together is really valuable for social capital. The system delivers on that, but it doesn’t come cheap.

Larry Bernstein:

When I was applying to college, Vanderbilt was a sleepy Southern school. Today it’s reputation and its educational offerings are world class. What happened? How did Vanderbilt rocket ship to become one of the top universities in the world?

Daniel Diermeier:

We’ve seen a tremendous increase in interest over the last few years. It is a place that values academic rigor, but combines this with a commitment that the students would grow as a person. It’s part of who we are. We set up the residential college model all the way down to the importance of extracurricular activities and the way we provide opportunities for students outside the classroom. The second piece, we’re a very collaborative place. We say students learn best, grow best if they’re members of a community that’s supportive and challenging.

It’s a sports analogy, it’s hard to make the team. When you make the team, we want you to be the best first baseman you can be and we want to be the best person you can be and your teammates are there to support and challenge you and your coaches are there to guide you. That’s the educational model. We sharpen it. We improved it. We did more in residential colleges. That’s pillar one.

The second thing that happened was really October 7th. We talked about in the last podcast together (about expelling students who misbehave), but we took a very principled stand on that. We were very clear that we would not tolerate harassment of Jewish students on campus. When we had problems with protestors, we acted according to our principles. And then when there were violations of rules, we took a properly disciplinary action. We did exactly what we said we would do and we lived up according to our values. Because we were an outlier on that among universities, there’s a lot of media interest in that.

That positioned us as a place that’s principled, that’s committed to creating an environment on civil discourse on campus where students can explore ideas, where they’re taught how to think, not what to think, and where we treat each other with respect, we don’t demonize each other just because we have different points of view.

It particularly resonated with the Jewish community because of the stark contrast for what they saw at other universities. I was honored by Chabad International, the Lamplighter Award, and from the White Rose Society in recognition for the environment that we created for Jewish students over the last two years.

Our last Passover Seder, we celebrated in the football stadium, 600 students were there. They had a great time. They brought their non-Jewish friends along. It was fantastic. That puts you on the map.

If you were like a family three or four years ago and you were saying, “Okay, where am I going to send my sons and daughter?” And you have a student that can go anywhere, let’s say, Penn, Harvard, Stanford.. Once you’re a viable alternative, now the differences matter. Se have seen a dramatic increase in interest from families from the Northeast, especially New York and California and especially from Jewish families that are saying, “This is a place where my son and daughter can thrive.” Something right about our culture. We invest a lot in the student culture of civil discourse. When students come on campus, they sign a pledge, we have a program which we call Dialogue Vanderbilt that is how we do things around here and where it becomes a habit for the students to engage with respect and by using arguments and not demonizing each other. And when people visit on campus, they see that and when they talk to the students, they see that. In the current environment that alternative is striking to people, that’s why we see the increase in interest.

Larry Bernstein:

What makes you optimistic about the university?

Daniel Diermeier:

I am optimistic that things are moving in the right direction. I’ve been on politicization of universities for about four years. We had the drama with October 7th and then the conflict with the federal government. Seeing things like the Yale report, the Harvard report, the principles that the AAU put out, these are all movements in the right direction. I think people recognize that these are great institutions, but certain things need to be fixed.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Daniel for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was How AI will Change Law Schools, Law Firms, and Users of Legal Services.

Our speaker was Polk Wagner who is the Deputy Dean of Penn Law School who has been charged with figuring out how to adapt the law school curriculum to the AI revolution. Polk discussed how law schools will adapt as their graduates’ jobs will no longer focus on document creation but will instead require complex legal analysis.

We also talked about how AI will change the structure of law firms since the by-the-hour billing practice will end and what will replace it.

In addition, we chatted about how consumers of legal services will use AI to negotiate contracts, to comprehend complex legal agreements, and to help draft documents that previously would have been delegated to their attorneys.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Curing the New Ebola Virus, here.

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Ari Ciment

Subject: Curing the New Ebola Virus
Bio: Pulmonologist and Former President of Medical Staff at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein.  What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Curing the New Ebola Virus.

Our speaker is Ari Ciment. Ari ran the Covid Ward at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach and is the former president of the hospital’s medical staff. He is probably best known for being my doctor.

Let’s begin.

Ebola has reared its ugly head again in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Is this a mutation of the previous Ebola virus or is this something new that has come directly from a bat?

Ari Ciment:

This is a mutation of Ebola virus, but it does have a natural reservoir which is the bat.

Larry Bernstein:

Do the bats get sick and die or are they merely transmitting the virus?

Ari Ciment:

Bats pick up the Ebola virus. The Ebola virus is a filovirus, which is an RNA virus that are responsible for all the previous pandemics because an RNA virus mutates 10,000 times faster than DNA viruses. What does that mean when they mutate? They change their surface proteins. The Ebola Zaire virus from 2014 had specific surface proteins. This one is different than that virus, although it’s in the Ebola virus family. So. the same vaccines that were used for Ebola Zaire or the same monoclonal antibodies are not going to be effective with the current Ebola virus.

So as per your question about what happens with the bats, the bats are protected. The bats pick up this Ebola virus. Then comes along a hunter making bush meat, he’s killing rodents, he’s killing bats. They start eating the meat and they become infected with the Ebola, whereas the bats won’t suffer any symptoms.

Larry Bernstein:

A major difference between Ebola and COVID is that COVID is an airborne virus. I remember at the beginning of COVID that we were like, “Don’t touch this.” It turned out that was a bunch of nonsense and we knew it early on but we still kept using our cleaning fluids and not touching the box.

But over time we recognized that for an airborne virus, it was more important to keep our distance, have the windows open so we wouldn’t catch a substantial viral load.

Ebola is not an airborne virus. So how do you catch it?

Ari Ciment:

So this is purely by contact. I don’t know if you saw the show 24. At the end of the season, if you remember, she shook the hand of the man who had Ebola virus and the implication was that the Ebola virus went through the skin into the person. It doesn’t necessarily go through the skin, but it’s very catchy in the sense that if you have an open wound, if you touch your mucus membranes, that’s what is meant by contact precautions. So that’s why you see all the HAZMAT gear

COVID is airborne. It’s easier to get. However, the mortality is much less than the Ebola virus that is going to be 30 to 50%, whereas COVID was more like 1%.

Larry Bernstein:

Going back to transmission, fluid is the key thing. So, your excrement, blood, vomit, spit, semen, carries the virus and any of those liquids gets into your body, that is how it transmits. What’s interesting is that this illness in the human host results in diarrhea, vomiting, complete and utter bodily destruction. And in that destructive process, you are just disseminating this liquid virus every which way. And you’ve got a loved one in trouble, you go over to check on them to clean up the mess. And in that process, you catch it. You touch an open wound, you touch your mouth, you touch your eye, you touch your nose, and then lo and behold, you’ve got it. This is going to most likely result in transmission in the home.

Ari Ciment:

One bodily function you didn’t mention was sweat.

Larry Bernstein:

I didn’t realize that.

Ari Ciment:

60% of the cases are women and it points to household transmission, which is key here because women are usually the caregivers. They’re taking care of the sick person.

What’s also very interesting, Ebola virus replicates really fast in the cytoplasm as opposed to COVID. The Ebola virus ends up very fast with more dramatic symptoms. The key finding classically is hemorrhaging. Young kids that have bloody noses and just nonstop blood. That will become a cycle of constant transmission and infection. And when they end up dying, the people taking care of the dead bodies are also contracting the illness.

Larry Bernstein:

Let me ask an ethics question as it relates to funeral rights. People die every day and the state does not limit anything to do with what happens next. But I could see from a health consideration that the state could say, “This dead body we are going to burn it because the dead body can spread Ebola. Have your funeral without the body. Okay. That’s over. Now that violates Jewish traditions for sure. Tell us about the ethics of state actions to take the dead body for fear of Ebola spread.

Ari Ciment:

If you watch the videos, there was a video on CNN I saw it. It’s an actual coffin that’s being handled by a healthcare worker in HAZMAT and the family want to get to the coffin and he is protecting it. He is making sure nobody gets close to the coffin. But you could see the skepticism, which is so critical to this epidemic to be going out of control.

Larry Bernstein:

Americans and other doctors who work for Doctors without Borders are going to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the locals are very suspicious of their behavior because their loved ones are dying from their care given the 30-50% mortality rates from the Bundibugyo Ebola virus.

Ari Ciment:

In some cases, they burn down their housing because they don’t know why they can’t see their loved ones. First of all, they don’t understand.

Larry Bernstein:

It doesn’t help that there is ongoing violence in the area between the Hutu and the Tutsi people in the DRC. You may remember that there was a genocide in Rwanda and there is ongoing fighting now between these peoples in the very place where the Ebola is running wild. Is there a relationship between civil wars and epidemics.

Ari Ciment:

Because of the ongoing friction between the M23, the Hutu and the Tutsi that is rampaging from the DRC and Rwanda, that friction is causing a lot of skepticism.

Larry Bernstein:

The medical professionals in the DRC are taking the individual patients and separating them from their families, and the families are outraged. They want to see their sick kid, they want to see their father. The families get angry and then they burn down the medical facility.

Ari Ciment:

They’re burning down in frustration; they want to see their family members.

Larry Bernstein:

Pandemics success needs a host to propagate, and then the virus will jump to the next patient and so on. The last thing you want to do as a virus is to kill the host before it jumps to the next patient. Ironically, Ebola is very successful at killing its host and that usually burns out the disease.

Ari Ciment:

Yeah. It’s great in killing its host, but the key difference is there is no asymptomatic transmission as far as we know. So the people that are spreading Ebola are the people actively infected. A super spreader like the early COVID is spread because people are walking around, they’re totally fine, they’re laughing and they’re breathing in your face, you’re getting the infection, you don’t know it. And then one week later you’re sick and then you’re spreading it the same way. Ebola virus, there is also an incubation period. The incubation period is roughly 2 maximum 21 days, but it’s probably more like seven days. That’s incubating while you’re not symptomatic, you’re not transmitting the disease. This is the real hope. The truth is the Ebola virus will not spread crazily like COVID did because you know who is the person spreading the disease. So, if you get really good at cordoning them off, blocking that transmission, then you should be okay.

The other important part to this story is the rate of infection called R0 (R-Naught) that we used to talk about a lot with COVID. If you’re infected with a virus, how many people will that one sick person infect? The R0 for COVID was about two to three. The R0 for measles is 12 which is enormous because it’s such an easily propagated virus through the air, very catchy. R0 for Ebola is something like 1.5.

It’s high but it’s not as high as the airborne viruses.

Larry Bernstein:

Years ago, with the Zaire Ebola virus an infected person traveled on a 12-hour bus trip in West Africa and nobody else got infected from him. If that had been Covid, everyone would have gotten sick because it is an airborne infection in a closed bus. But Ebola can only spread through liquids so that is a big advantage for us all.

Next topic is antibodies. What is an antibody?

Ari Ciment:

An antibody is your immune response to the illness. You develop your B-cells create a response to the proteins in the virus and then you could combat it the next time you see it.

Larry Bernstein:

Doctors have been aware of antibodies for generations. With the Spanish flu in 1918, doctors knew that the surviving patients had produced antibodies that were successful in beating back the Spanish influenza. And physicians got samples from the now healthy survivors of the flu and they injected these antibodies into sick patients who just came down with or have been exposed to the Spanish flu and it works to a degree. Tell us about the history of this. Tell us about how we’ve improved upon it in the last century, whether we can make antibodies artificially. Tell us about antibodies as a response to viral attacks.

Ari Ciment:

The antibodies live in the plasma. The very first records of convalescent plasma are WW1 soldiers who survived and they took their blood and injected it into people that were currently infected. I enabled our hospital to use convalescent plasma for the treatment for COVID here in Miami Beach, but that is not as effective as the monoclonal antibodies, which were being developed by companies like Regeneron or in this specific Ebola crisis. It’s a company called Biopharmaceutical MAP. They’re the ones that made the monoclonal antibody against Ebola virus in the previous Zaire Ebola virus. Those companies make a more modified directed antibody versus the protein that’s on that virus.

Larry Bernstein:

So, one approach is to take surviving patients antibodies and give it to an infected patient. Another approach is to look at the actual virus and build and mass produce antibodies to kill it.

Ari Ciment:

I would say the biggest one on the market right now probably is this one called MBP134, which is by that company I mentioned MAP Biopharmaceuticals. It’s basically a pan Ebola virus. It should work against all the Ebola viruses.

Larry Bernstein:

The antibodies are like magic.

Ari Ciment:

For sure. That was the most miraculous medicine I ever witnessed. That was the Regeneron and the Eli Lilly. Those monoclonal antibodies, they stopped the virus in its tracks. It would hit it and boom, your disease process stopped. But if somebody already has hemorrhagic symptoms, they’re bleeding out, they have organ failure, those things are going to correct over time if the patient could survive, but they’re going to be significant organ dysfunction if they’re not caught in time. It’s going to be everything is about timely administration. With COVID, if you got the monoclonal antibodies within the first one to three days, you were golden, but if you got it five days late, it’s not so clear it was going to be beneficial.

Larry Bernstein:

I want to expand on Ari’s point. This MBP134 monoclonal antibody therapy is a cocktail to two antibodies designed to treat multiple strains of Ebola virus and it worked on both the Zaire Ebola virus from 2014 and it is working also with the Bundibugyo Ebola that is running wild right now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So far in the DRC it reportedly decreased mortality by 30% but from a very high number. I suspect that if you got the monoclonal antibodies in a place like a top US hospital at the right time, you are going to survive.

Tell us about the previous Ebola Zaire virus.

Ari Ciment:

It’s named after the Zaire River, because that’s where it originated from. It caused 11,000 deaths in the Western part of Africa. It was Sierra Leone. It wasn’t in the DRC.

Larry Bernstein:

The Sierra Leone is far away from the DRC. It is 1800 miles apart which is like the distance from Denver to NYC.

Ari Ciment:

Most of the deaths from Ebola Zaire happened in the Western part of Africa. Whereas this Bundibugyo is in the Eastern DRC, which is near Uganda.

In 1994, the Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis, a real genocide over 100 days. The genocidal Hutus escaped to the Eastern DRC, the place right now, which is the epicenter of the Bundibugyo Ebola. And that was the Hutus’ stronghold till now. The M23 is a Tutsi group that is at war currently. They fight with the Hutus’ remnant in the Eastern DRC. That’s where they have gold mining. They have tons of metals, tungsten, and it’s a mineral haven.

Bernstein:

I want to give my audience some background information about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is in the South and Central part of Africa. It is a geographically a large country that borders several African countries including Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania. The population is growing very quickly. In 1960, the DRC population was 15 million and today it is 115 million. It is expected to be 220 million in 2050 and 320 million in 2075.

If you compare the population of the DRC to Russia for example. Russia had 8x more people in 1960 but that gap shrank so now Russia is only 20% more populous today. By 2050 Russia will have half as many people as the DRC and by 2075 only a third of DRC’s population. This shows the power of exponential growth in the DRC as compared to zero growth in Russia.

Another metric is that the DRC will have the same population as the US in 2090.

Ari Ciment:

You also have to factor in that they lost six million people during the second Congo War, which was 1997 to 2003. So even with that their population is growing.

Larry Bernstein:

The DRC is an impoverished country that lacks suitable drinking water and a poor healthcare system. The infant mortality rate is 6% as compared to ½ of 1% in the USA. Each year 300,000 babies die in the DRC. We have been discussing the Ebola virus which as killed around 200 people this year in the DRC. But in comparison 1000 babies are dying every day in the DRC. I know Ebola is scary because it could jump the ocean and end up in our backyard. But isn’t the relevant health risk for the DRC its infant mortality?

Ari Ciment:

I think that’s a great point. 1300 Ebola cases so far, there’s 240 deaths and the fear is it going to rise above even the Zaire Ebola virus, which was 11,000 deaths.

Larry Bernstein:

What is definition of a pandemic?

Ari Ciment:

A pandemic is it’s not only crossing local boundaries; it’s crossing all over. Pandemic is all over the world, pan. Epidemic is a local out of control. You could think of it like a fire with the embers going from one room to the next, whereas the pandemic is a fire with smoke going all over all the rooms.

People who want to know about the epidemiology of the virus, it’s a filovirus, which is unique to the Ebola viruses. That’s the thread-like RNA virus that replicates really fast in the cytoplasm, causes hemorrhagic symptoms as opposed to the flavivirus, that’s Dengue fever and Zika that is spread by mosquitoes.

Larry Bernstein:

Can a mosquito transmit the Ebola virus from one human host to another?

Ari Ciment:

I don’t think so.

Larry Bernstein:

Would you take a Pfizer vaccine that’s been approved by the DRC, even though it’s not FDA approved.

Ari Ciment:

Yes. If the mortality was that high, for sure. I would.

Larry Bernstein:

I end my podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to this new Ebola mutation?

Ari Ciment:

I think it’s a fascinating scary story. What makes it unique is this geopolitical situation and the fact that the DRC is in the World Cup for the first time after 52 years. Hopefully this Ebola will die down. I think this will be a stimulus for the DRC and for Rwanda to finally make amends.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Ari for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was How AI will Change Law Schools, Law Firms, and Users of Legal Services.

Our speaker was Polk Wagner who is the Deputy Dean of Penn Law School who has been charged with figuring out how to adapt the law school curriculum to the AI revolution. Polk discussed how law schools will adapt as their graduates’ jobs will no longer focus on document creation but will instead require complex legal analysis.

We also talked about how AI will change the structure of law firms since the by-the-hour billing practice will end and what will replace it.

In addition, we chatted about how consumers of legal services will use AI to negotiate contracts, to comprehend complex legal agreements, and to help draft documents that previously would have been delegated to their attorneys.

Upcoming on What Happens Next is Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students.

Our speaker will be Daniel Diermeier who is the Chancelor of Vanderbilt. I want to hear from Daniel about how the administration can achieve political neutrality on campus. I want to learn about how to create a university culture that encourages free speech and allows for debate without shaming the opposing perspective.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, How AI Will Change Law Schools, Law Firms, and Users of Legal Services, here.

Subscribe now

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Listen on Spotify

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Polk Wagner

Subject: How AI Will Change Law Schools, Law Firms, and Users of Legal Services
Bio: Deputy Dean of Penn Law School

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history, and today’s episode is how AI will change law schools, law firms, and users of legal services.

Our speaker is Polk Wagner, who’s the deputy dean of Penn Law School, who has been charged with figuring out how to adapt the law school curriculum to the AI revolution. I want to hear from Polk about how law schools will adapt as their graduate’s jobs will no longer focus on document creation, but instead more complex legal analysis.

This podcast was taped at a conference that I hosted so many of the questions will be asked by my friends. And in the audience was David Stellings, who’s the managing partner of law firm Leif Cabreze. I want to learn from David about how AI would change the structure of law firms as the work process will need to change and I want to find out if the by the hour billing practice will end and what will replace it.

I also want to hear from my friends who use legal services about how they plan to use AI to negotiate contracts, to understand complex legal agreements, and to draft documents that previously would have been delegated to their attorneys.

Polk, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks?

Polk Wagner:

This young transactional lawyer named Zach Shapiro had a small practice and he created a viral post called the Claude Native Law Firm where he described how he was able to replicate functions of a huge array of legal associates legal work, using mainly off-the- shelf Claude tools.

It does document review, it drafts, and it revises based on comments. He stays in the loop on the judgment calls, but really the work is being done by Claude. Artificial intelligence technologies are extremely good at text. Lawyers do a lot of interacting with documents and so it seemed only natural that this was going to be an area where there were significant disruption and change, but until I think this winter that was mainly theoretical. Now it’s coming more quickly than any of us thought. Giant law firms are probably 12 months behind. There’s a lot of friction involved in getting these tools to work in the real world. Scholarship by its nature takes years to get through the publication process.

And an even slower step than scholarship is the teaching. Law is by its nature a very conservative and slow profession. That is a virtue as well as a detriment, but that makes it even slower in law school. We teach people by making the students do things.

It’s the repetition, the writing of the briefs, the writing of exams, the papers is how we teach people to work through structured arguments, reasoning, judgment, assessing under conditions of ambiguity, all important lawyerly skills. We are seeing from these AI tools that the work piece is being mostly replaced. That raises a whole bunch of existential questions for a law school like mine and for law firms How should we be teaching students? We know that there are going to be a bunch of things that lawyers do that the AIs can’t, they’re not good at judgment, reasoning, analysis, people skills, all of these things that lawyers do that are important and probably going to become even more valuable in the future.

Traditionally, that’s not something we teach specifically. . Instead of producing entry-level lawyers, we need to be able to produce associates at a fifth-year level. People who can supervise the creation of work rather than doing the work themselves. They need to be able to supervise teams of AI agents and make judgment calls and choices almost from day one when they come into the firm. I’m doing a sort of a small-scale test with some of my colleagues where I have my AI bots write exams and I slip them into the pile of the exams that my faculty colleagues get and they grade them.

There have been four so far and the AIs have finished first in every single one and not by a small amount either. I’m doing it primarily as a wakeup call to my colleagues that we need to rethink how we’re assessing.

This particular study is offering AI its best possible advantages because it’s under high stress, tight time conditions, strict word limits. An unnatural situation where the AIs are going to be exceptional. It writes so much better than a law student under extreme time pressure. I don’t think that necessarily says that there will be no more lawyers. That’s interesting to think about as a pedagogical tool. Our toolkit has always been these exams and they’re not what we should be testing anymore.

Jay Greene:

Is this conversation among your colleagues about reducing the number of students you admit or perhaps eliminating your school or other schools like it? So even Education schools, there’s very little demand for new teachers relatively. I would try to convince my colleagues that we should shrink and they thought this was the most monstrous thing.

Polk Wagner:

That would not be a popular thing for sure, but you’re exactly right. There’s going to be significant displacement in the legal market. The question is timing. The roles of particular lawyers are going to become much more valuable. Those that can apply reasoning, judgment, handle ambiguity, all the things that AI can’t really do. Penn may be fortunate enough to be on the correct side of that curve, given the type of student profile we typically have. If I was predicting, I would say there are going to be fewer law schools for sure.

There are predictions about whether there’s going to be any more hiring of software coders anymore. On the other hand, there’s going to be a lot of demand for software because it becomes inexpensive and there’s going to be people who need to manage those systems. There might be more coders. We might see a similar phenomenon in law, the demand for legal services and access to the legal system is such that when the costs come down, you need more people to sort of manage that process.

Rory MacFarquhar:

Watching the guy discuss the two-person law firm, one version of it is these two people become incredibly valuable, but the other version says, fast forward 24 months and you have a zero- person law firm. The companies can do all the legal services that they need.

Polk Wagner:

One of the things that we are planning for is what we think of as legal work largely going to be done not at law firms in the future. It’s going to migrate into various places, maybe inside firms themselves where they can do versions of DIY legal work relatively straightforward. You can really harness these materials to allow a small group of in-house lawyers to run what used to require significant outside counsel. I still think there’s going to be roles for high-end lawyers at firms that are very specialized, but I do think that what we think of as legal practice is going to migrate into a whole bunch of different arenas.

We need to think about is how to teach our students to succeed in all these contexts. Whether they’re in-house or in the government where they’re not traditional lawyers, but they’re still doing legal work.

David Stellings:

My partners on the executive committee, there was a raging debate going on how we should change our AI policy. At the heart of that debate is the question of whether associates should be allowed to use AI to create a document and then check the document and improve the document or whether they should be required to draft the document themselves as lawyers have for hundreds of years. I think that they’re going to use AI regardless of whether we tell them they’re allowed to use AI. If they use AI, how are they ever going to become good writers?

As litigators our success is based largely on our ability to argue persuasively in writing and verbally and if they never develop that skill, how are they ever even going to be in a position to supervise the AI agents?

Polk Wagner:

We restructured the 1L curriculum this year for legal writing and they had no access to AI for the first two months and were taught the very beginning, how you write a brief,and then starting in the second semester they were given more and more access to use AI tools and then taught how to use them effectively. I mean, that’s where we are now, which is you got to learn how to do it.

David Stellings:

It takes so much longer than two semesters to learn how to write. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’m still learning how to write better, more persuasively. My wife who’s also a lawyer, we were talking about this last night and she’s like, “Well, maybe lawyers won’t need to write anymore.” What do you think about that?

Polk Wagner:

I have a colleague who does contract law whose hypothesis is that we won’t have contracts anymore. You just have your AI agent talk to someone else’s AI agent and they’ll work it out amongst themselves given the parameters that they understand about the business.

Larry Bernstein:

I had a golf outing the other day and David Brail created an app which kept score, handicap adjusted, skins, everything you can imagine. David has no skills whatsoever, period. It was amazing. How did David pull this thing off? He said it was pretty easy. I just told it what to do. Someone who has no skills to be able to get an A+ result.

Polk Wagner:

You understood immediately whether what the AI was doing made any sense or not and you understood the structure of the thing enough to know, “Oh yeah, these are the things I need to look at. These are the things I don’t.” How do we create these experts in understanding where the minefields are?

Coding is different because coding is very clear whether it works or it doesn’t. You run it and the thing crashes or it doesn’t. That’s not quite the same as what we talk about in law, particularly with long running agreements between corporations where the answer may be 15 years down the road some edge case arises that nobody ever considered.

Larry Bernstein:

Example, I have a will and a trust and these things are complicated. You sit down with a lawyer, you lay out all the conditions, they hand you this very extensive legal agreement. I’m sophisticated, but I don’t understand what’s going on in this document. I tell my parents that they should sign the same thing. And my mother says, “Larry, do you have any idea what this is? “ And I said, “Well, just sign it.”

Lawyers in general are very poor at articulating complex documents. We must take this leap of faith that this document reflects the needs and desires of this family. What AI can do is unbelievable. It’ll explain in plain English exactly what this thing does.

Polk Wagner:

AI tools make it so much easier to become familiar with subject matter areas that you’re less familiar with and it can draft simple documents. One of the roles that lawyers have always played is trust. The reason that you just sign whatever they put in front of you is because you trust that the lawyer that you’ve hired. Lawyers can provide that advice and trust to guide you and that is something I think that AI can’t necessarily replace, at least not in the foreseeable term.

We need to train the lawyers who can take the summary that you bring to them and engage with you in a way that gets to the point quickly, and gives you trust and reassurance that what you’re doing is going to meet your needs. That’s where the legal education and the practice of law need to change because traditionally, we’ve favored lawyers who can do the thing not talk about the thing. You do get the occasions where the lawyers don’t communicate well, but I think that’s going to be part of what we need to be teaching lawyers.

Mitch Feinman:

My wife is a trust and estates partner at a big law firm and a third of her job is being a therapist. If you look at the most common use of AI right now, therapist is number one on the list

and growing. I observe how my wife and her firm do things in terms of hardware and equipment and processes and I’m astounded. Talk about laggards on the technology adoption cycle and big law firms. I know you’re taking the perspective of graduating law students, but you’ve got people running these law firms who will be running them for a long time who are so behind on technology adoption. Do you believe they’re just going to have to adapt despite not being well

equipped to do so?

Polk Wagner:

That would be my expectation. I do think there’s a long transition period here. There’s lots of scholarship on the way that technology diffuses through the economy. It takes a long time. There’s an enormous amount of friction. The bots can create simple legal documents, but it’s not legal for them to do so right now because of various bar association rules. The firms are set up to maximize the amount of work because that’s what they can bill and that’s going to change. The question is how quickly and Walmart sent out a list to all their outside counsel f with things that were no longer billable because we want you to do it with AI.

If you’re a big, slow law firm and that letter comes from your major client, that is a serious wakeup call that is going to force change much more than the firms arguing amongst themselves. Once the clients start saying, “I will not pay anymore for the stuff that AI can do well,” then the firms are going to have to change.

David Stellings:

Most of these lawyers are getting paid by the hour and it seems to me like this is going to impede their ability to bill as many hours as they’re used to billing.

Polk Wagner:

100%. And this is going to dramatically force many law firms to change the way that they are doing business. How do we make it so that the students that we graduate are going to be successful in these new models? We’re adding to the curriculum a lot of courses on how to think about new models of legal practice, whether it’s contingency fee firms or modified fees or flat fees or all the different ways that don’t rely on the hours of work because that’s going to be gone.

Penn Law primarily sends lawyers to large New York City law firms. At least those firms appear to have made no changes at all in their hiring approach.

David Stellings:

Anecdotally, some of the top law firms are considering applying in the litigation context, which is where billable hours have reigned, a similar paradigm that they apply in the deal context with PE where they get a percentage of the deal amount either in a flat fee arrangement or even some hybrid with a contingent element.

Polk Wagner:

If law firms are going to survive, they’re going to have to have different business models andI do think we’re going to be seeing law being done in a lot of different places.Our students are going to end up in jobs that are not at law firms, working inside companies or for regulatory organizations, rather than at a traditional law firm.

This dramatic reduction in cost is going to ripple throughout the way that law is done.

Polk Wagner:

I think there’s enormous opportunities for truly dramatic public benefits. You could imagine landlord-tenant law. The landlords take advantage of people who otherwise don’t have access to the legal system or lawyers. You could imagine a city like Philadelphia setting up an AI system that resolves these disputes at pennies on the dollar and dramatically shifts the balance of power between landlords and tenants to the benefit of people who probably need that access to the legal system who don’t get it right now. We can’t even see yet all the ways that this is going to change the way that we think about the legal system.

I have a project right now with about 25 federal judges and my team of RAs and I work with them to explore how AI can improve litigation, and they are seeing a dramatic increase in filings because it’s very cheap and easy to file. They’re seeing this among prisoners at this point because they have access to ChatGPT in the prison library and they make very compelling briefs that sometimes make good points at a pace and scale that the system is not designed to deal with.

David Kostin:

Is there a thought process of how the sentencing process may use AI?

Polk Wagner:

There’s an enormous literature around biases in AI. AI models represent all of us and because of that they have all the good and bad parts of us. It has been documented in many cases that without significant guardrails, these models can behave in ways that are socially detrimental because there’s a lot of socially detrimental information that they’ve been trained on. The ethics of using these tools for sentencing is a big open question. There are courses at the law school right now exploring that and nobody knows the answer. The opportunities are tremendous in terms of the pace and scale at which you could resolve disputes. People sit for months waiting for their sentencing, why could we not do that in a day?

There’s the opportunity for those systems to be much more accurate than a judge guessing what the right answer is, but there’s also concern that these systems are not judgment machines. They are at best knowledge machines. What they do may look like judgment, but they’re not exercising any human judgment and where you keep the human in that loop is an interesting question.

Bryan Verona:

I take exception to your characterization of landlord tenant power structures. It’s not that simple. Time is the more valuable against landlords and the system is horribly clogged, at least in New York. Which clearly doesn’t need to be the case. his idea that criminal cases, certainly civil and/or litigation can be argued by bots conceptually overseen by a judge bot. Why do we need people? Who gets to calibrate the judgment and the sentencing? Why are theatrics in court relevant? Why are biases of judges relevant? Doesn’t this streamline these processes and certainly speed them up?

Polk Wagner:

I think that there’s a lot of opportunities for streamlining at every place in the legal spectrum. One of my colleagues is finishing up a study where he created two pools of humans, each with different political affiliations and asked them to interpret the contract terms. They gave different answers for those pools and then he asked an AI to also interpret them. These were all known terms that had been decided over many years by courts, and the AIs were always better. AIs don’t have those sorts of biases in them and obviously can be much faster. What is the role for humans? I think for a long time we’re going to need humans as trust and accountability markers.

Would you trust the outcome of a dispute you had to just pure AI over a judge ultimately making a call?

Bryan Verona:

Probably.

Polk Wagner:

Because you think that the AIs have less bias? or- Humans are

Zachary Schur:

Humans are imperfect things.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next question comes from Moira McDermott who a Math Professor at Syracuse is.

Moira McDermott:

I wanted to go back to the question of how much training do you need before you can evaluate and be a supervisor? We must have a statement on our syllabus about AI use and it can be of no use in these limited situations or go hog wild. I’ve always picked that middle one and tried to lay out when I thought you’d be able to use it. You can use it to help you study, making practice quizzes, that sort of thing. I tried to use Claude, ChatGPT to make extra practice problems for exams for my students and it was hard.

I give it my old homework assignments or old exams, and it just doesn’t do a very good job because like if you just change the numbers, either it could be very messy computationally or it misses the point. There’s a particular purpose for a question that I ask and there’s something in the problem that must work a certain way to be a good measure of the thing I’m trying to get at.

Polk Wagner:

The AIs do not have any sense of what problems they should be resolving. That is where the real skill of an advanced knowledgeable person matters a ton.

Moira McDermott:

The real thing is being able to ask the right questions, not answer them.

Polk Wagner:

Exactly. That is going to be a very durable skill for humans in the legal context. How do we get students from zero to a point where they can ask the correct questions? As someone in charge of figuring this out at a law school that is the big existential question that I worry about.

Rory MacFarquhar:

What are the legal and institutional protections on the role of human lawyers that would require actual change to eliminate?

Polk Wagner:

Various bar associations have taken various positions on the use of AI. Most end up along the lines of if you use it, you’re entirely responsible for anything that happens. Various judges have created their own local rules that apply to trials either in their venue or in their courtroom. Those range from, I don’t want to see anything that has any AI content at all to, if you use it, just don’t screw up.

The weird case by having a client ask legal questions of an AI that was deemed to be violating or piercing the lawyer client privilege, that seems like a one-off case. There’s a lot of fear around how these cases could turn out because as lawyers, unless we see something decided by a court, we don’t know what the answer is yet. There’s certainly a lot of regulations about who can be a lawyer and what you need to be a lawyer. I do think more lawyers are embracing the fact that these can be powerful assistance at this point more so than making the final decisions.

Paul Yablon:

People lie and part of the judge’s job is to determine who he believes and what is the truth. When we use AI, we are careful about the data sets we use, and we scrub the data because that is imperative to get the right outcome. If we knew that the data going into the decision making process was true, I would feel more confident that AI would make the right call. How do you deal with that?

Polk Wagner:

The more confident you are that the facts are going into the decision are the source of truth, the more confident you are that the output decision is going to be correct. The whole point of our litigation system is to surface what is as close to the ground truth as possible. Cross examination tries to prevent the lying or at least address it.

The judges that I’m working with have a lot of concern about the data getting worse. Traditionally we believed photos are compelling, or a recording of somebody’s voice. This is no longer ground truth. None of these things can be determined to be truth in the way that they were even six months ago. Lawyers and judges are seeing a lot more evidentiary challenges and concerns and incredible ambiguity about what is real, what is not real, because we have not gotten our arms around yet how to distinguish between something that’s AI created and not AI created.

It’s going to be an enormous challenge to work through that we’re not yet equipped to do. :

All of the major AI platforms have various proposals for how to tag or otherwise identify AI created artifacts as such. The judges I talk to are seeing this daily.

Larry Bernstein:

Our next speaker is Steve Kuhn who is the founder of Sportspredict.com.

Steve Kuhn:

Shani and I started sportspredict.com, where we have people predict sports events and we give rewards and status to people who are good predictors. I want to propose a potential idea for the world of law. Let’s say you have a case in front of the Supreme Court, and we’ve got tons of data on how every Justice Supreme Court has ruled on various cases before. We put all that in and we create a bot for each one that tries to mimic how they would decide a case and best predict how they would decide a case. Then as the legal team, your job is to come up with the brief and the set of arguments that maximizes the odds that you win. It becomes like law predict. How would you know whether they’re good? You would know by their ability to judge in historical cases or current cases what the odds were. We would assess them by saying, “Here’s a case for all nine justices, give us your odds.

Polk Wagner:

There’s a lawyer who has a blog that is doing something very similar\ He has a set of AIs that will write Supreme Court opinions and they are shockingly close to the ones that actually get written because it’s given enough data, it is relatively predictable how these cases turn out and the writing styles are easy because you’ve got a huge corpus of writing. So you can say, “Oh, here’s what Justice Thomas is going to write on this case.” And it’s almost always shockingly correct or shockingly close to correct.

Larry Bernstein:

One of the reasons we love arbitration is because it’s so much faster than going through the courts. I was involved in arbitration, and it ended up taking a long time, costing a lot of money. It surprised me. I have a feeling that if this arbitrator was required to use AI that this could speed up things.

Polk Wagner:

There’s a market for arbitrators, right? There’s going to be a lot of incentives and pressures for the arbitration firms to get efficient. The reasons that they are a popular option is that they can do things much more quickly and cheaply than traditional litigation. That is an area where you’re going to see rapid development. I would view the arbitration industry as a leading-edge indicator of when more automation of the law starts to occur.

One of our alums who started an entire AI law firm has identified employment law as an area of low hanging fruit for AI because the terms of those contracts are relatively detailed, straightforward and well worn. The AIs can do a good job of assessing the quality of agreements and how they’re going to play out.

Larry Bernstein:

I’m interested in how contract relationships between firms and individuals will change. With AI, we can negotiate bespoke user agreements.

Polk Wagner:

I have a browser extension in Chrome that I use that lights up different colors depending on how egregious the user agreement is of the website that you’re on. We are halfway there in having the identification of these things. Whether that makes the market much more efficient for me than negotiating with the websites to get my own version of the agreement, I don’t know. The next step would be that my browser negotiates with the server at the other end and says, “Here’s the set of agreements or set of terms we can agree on, “ and then we go from there.

Extended warranties are a version of that. People get to choose the product with the various menus, and you might have a longer or shorter warranty and pay more or less. There’s a lot of friction because there’s a lot of incentives on the part of the current incumbents to maintain this structure for as long as they possibly can. And it’s about when the market pushes.

David Stellings:

Consumer contracts almost always are contracts of adhesion, meaning there’s no negotiation. You accept their terms and conditions. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Larry Bernstein:

Contractual relationships are going to be in flux. The reason we have lawyers is because the businesspeople don’t really understand what’s going on, what happens is lawyers fight, fight, fight, and then they come to the businesspeople and say, “We’re fighting about this. What do you want me to do? “ And we can skip a step and just say, “Here are the issues, businessperson, what do you want to do? “ And then you can lay it out instead of having these teams of lawyers negotiate back and forth for days and just get to cut to the chase.

David Stellings:

There is one way those terms and conditions and consumer contracts change, which is through litigation. For many years had in its terms and conditions a forced arbitration provision. Forced arbitration provisions essentially prevent groups of people from gathering and suing companies and if they can’t gather, there’s no economically feasible way to stand up for themselves. But so Amazon had this arbitration provision and a smart firm said, “Okay, well, you want to go through arbitration, I’m going to market.” They got like 15 million bucks from a funder. They gathered something like 80,000 Amazon customers, all of them filed notices of arbitration.

Amazon wound up having to pay arbitration fees. Forget about whether they won or lost. Amazon was on the hook for like a thousand bucks per person who was filing for arbitration. Amazon removed the arbitration provision from its contract. Complaining’s not going to do it, but maybe that way.

David Stellings:

I was a defense lawyer for about five years and I’ve been a plaintiff’s contingency lawyer for almost 30 years. It’s so much better. I’ve always thought that the billable hour model has perverse incentives for the lawyers. Most lawyers are ethical people and are not intentionally spending additional hours doing work so that they could bill a client. But I do think that lurking in the back of their heads is the idea that if my group doesn’t bill $5 million this year, then our bonuses are going to be slashed relative to these PE guys who are making $30 million a year. I do think that it influences behavior. It makes them less likely to approach the other side even when they know that they’re eventually going to have to settle because it’s contrary to their business model.

I think this AI revolution is likely to finally push the billable hour away from the center of gravity of the legal system in the US.

Polk Wagner:

I think this is terrific because being a lawyer on a billable hour model sucks and it is a terrible lifestyle for young lawyers who feel like they’ve got to bill more hours, and the focus becomes on how much you work as to whether you’re doing a good job. I think that has a few perverse incentives, not only economic, but on people’s personal health. I think one of the interesting things about that viral Zach Shapiro essay was about how much better his job was now that Claude was doing most of the work. Because he could make the big decisions, the calls, work with the clients, and someone else was dealing with the writeups of the documents that’s so tedious and makes your job less fun as a lawyer.

Using Claude on a constant basis has made my job just so much more fun. I can do more, I can do better, I can put together a mini course in the morning instead of spending weeks on it.\ It’s a different model and frankly, I think it is better.

Law firms are going to have to change the practice of law and what we think of as law is going to have to change. There are enormous benefits both in the joy of doing what you love as well as monetary and economic benefits. I’m optimistic, but not without some clear-eyed views of the challenges ahead.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Polk for joining us.

If you missed our previous podcast, it was fixing our healthcare system. Our speaker was Josh Gottlieb, who’s professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Health.

I want to learn from Josh about what are the barriers to educating more doctors and what we can do to solve the seemingly intractable problems to increase quality and productivity of our healthcare system.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on a podcast or Spotify. I’m Larry Bernstein with the podcast, What Happens Next.

Check out our previous episode, Fixing Our Healthcare System, here.

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