 All right. Hello, Tom. How are you doing today? Good, Chris. So yeah, we're here to talk about your new book, Our Own Worse Enemies. So a lot of people from my audience, I'm sure they're familiar with you, but this new book, can you kind of break down like what inspired this book? There's a lot about like the current political landscapes. I'm wondering, is there anything that like, you know, was the catalyst for this book or would you notice that made you want to write this thing? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because people I think will tend to think that I wrote it about the last few years. But actually I didn't. I mean, I started writing this book and I started drafting it out probably about three years ago. And it was actually a book that, as I say in the preface, it was kind of lurking underneath the last book as well, that the key word being in both books was narcissism. That it was just striking to me how narcissistic society had become. And I'm not the first person to think about it. I mean, one of the biggest kind of best sellers about narcissism came out over 40 years ago when people were starting to first recognize this. But I think the catalyst for writing about it was that I wasn't satisfied with a lot of the answers about why politics were going wrong. People were coming to really easy solutions. Well, it's because of the left. It's because of the right. It's because of globalization. It's because of economics. It's because of the housing bubble. And I'm like, I keep thinking this is a longer term thing. This has been going on for about 40 years and decline in trust in government, people not showing up for elections, elections candidates getting kind of nuttier and more like reality show types. So I said, all right, if you're a scholar and you care about this stuff, you sit down and you start kind of testing out ideas and why this is happening. And finally, I just came to the realization that I had to write something that I think was a longer look at where we are and also included where the rest of the world is, because this is not just happening in the United States. This is happening in the UK. It's happening in Italy. It's happening in Turkey, Poland, Brazil, and India. And so I also thought, initially, I was writing this from a more analytical background, and then I decided to write it from a much more personal point of view and include a lot of autobiographical details because I come from that world of a de-industrialized factory town where people went through a bad time. There's a lot of alienation. And a lot of what I'm seeing around me just doesn't make sense as an explanation of democracy becoming weaker simply because the economy's changed. I'll just wrap that part up by saying what really struck me was that the people that are the most angry about democracy are actually pretty well off and middle class. That was the part that I think if you're asking me to go back to the very beginning of your question, what made me do this? It's that the explanations for why democracy is in trouble, people kept saying, well, it's income inequality and it's well, and I'm like, but the people that are the most angry about democracy are doing pretty well. They're the kind of people that are bitching about democracy while they're sitting on their boats. Yeah, that's really explanation. Yeah, and what's interesting, why I love having these conversations, you've been in this realm for years, and I really got into politics probably right when you were drafting this book and coming up with it, like 2016 was that for me. I've always been kind of like a political nihilist, like why should I vote who cares? I've ratified a lot of people that year. Yeah, that's why I looked and I was like, okay, what the hell happened? What's going on? Because a lot of us thought, hey, this could never happen. But yeah, to your point about it's not like the impoverished who are having these types of issues. And in the book, you dive into a lot of this stuff. I loved it, absolutely loved it. But one thing, for those who haven't read the book, one thing that I love was kind of this self reflection, like you said, the autobiographical part. It's one of the hardest things for anybody to do. When did you kind of look at yourself and say, wait, am I part of the problem too? What did you notice about your own behaviors over the recent decades that might have been leading you down this route to maybe? Well, it's a part. I've always wondered that because I think a lot of kids who come from my background, I made a class transition. I went from kind of edge of poor working class to by the time I left for school, my parents had pretty much stabilized their marriage and their finances. And we were kind of lower middle class. And then of course, I got an education and I transitioned into the upper middle class by the time I was middle aged. And I thought, okay, we talk about the collapse of democracy and all of these classes blame each other. It's the working class, it's the elites, it's the poor, it's the rich. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, I've walked through all of those rooms. Was I part of this problem at some point? And I had to sit down and really think about this. In my younger days, I was sort of a kind of, I was a Republican for a lot of years. I turned 18 in 1978. My first election was 1980. I was definitely part of that, what the Brits call blue collar Torreism, the kind of, I was born to be a Democrat. I'm a northeastern working class ethnic, part green, part Irish. That's like a computer generated model of a Democrat in the 1970s. And yet a lot of kids of my generation actually registered Republican and I voted for Ronald Reagan. And yeah, I had some of that kind of, let's stick it to the stick it to the elites, stick it to the smarty pants is, the ordinary folks are the repository of common sense. And then I came to your eyes that that's probably not true either. But then, as I got older, I had to contend with, am I really part of the problem of saying, well, we educated people know everything and ordinary folks should just know their place, kind of an attitude. And I didn't want to be part of that either. So I had to sit and think, having traversed all of these socioeconomic groups over the course of my 60 years on the planet, was I helping or hurting anything? And I think the other reason I put in a lot of biographical details that people wouldn't make assumptions. When you say, hey, working class people who don't really understand the difference between Pete Buttigieg and Donald Trump, that's a problem. And they say, well, of course you say that because you were born with educated parents with a sub-berspoon and a Tony suburb. I'm like, no, my parents had no education. My parents are high school dropouts. I was born in a factory town. I wanted to be able to say, don't assume that about me. Don't assume that I don't have any understanding of that problem because I grew up with it. Yeah. And so one of the things that you mentioned in the book, and it stood out to me and I tweeted about it when I got the early copy was you mentioned in the book towards the beginning is that something about like, we're not looking for perfection and a lot of people are like, hey, look at these other countries. And especially with Afghanistan and all that stuff being in the news recently, they're like, hey, would you rather be over there? Would you rather be in these other places where women don't get to do that? And that's kind of like this like, okay, well, America's fine if you look at these other places. But what do you say to people like that? Like when they're like, hey, we're better than a lot of other places. You're not living in North Korea. Like, how can we still improve while being grateful for what we do have here in the States? You know what I mean? I think the problem, I mean, I think when people say, well, you're better off than Afghanistan, that's not really a serious comment because you know, it's like, that's like the when your parents used to say to you know, when they're starving children in India, you know, the answer was always, yeah, name two. You know, but I think the bigger problem, and the part of my talk about in the book are the people who say things here are terrible. And it's not really an answer to say, well, it's better off than Afghanistan. But it is an answer, I think to say, it's better off than 25 years ago. Within my lifetime within my adult lifetime, the world is measurably better, including the world you live in in the United States is measurably better. Because one of the things that undermines democracy is when people who are reasonably well off come to believe that they are miserable and aggrieved and impoverished and suffering. And you know, that that it's so I can't tell you how many times I've had college age students say to me, Fresno, you just don't understand these are the worst times ever. And I'm, you know, I just it's it's said with such confidence that it takes your breath away. Yeah, because, you know, then you find yourself saying, as I often did to these tests, I look, this isn't even the worst times in my lifetime. You know, and then of course, you know, the because people love statistics and yeah, but in, you know, 1970, a guy could buy a house in New York for a family of four. And I said, yes, after you've been drafted, served in Vietnam, gotten the GI Bill. And if you're a woman, asking your husband for permission to get a credit card, you know, and they kind of, you know, and I say, yes, you could afford a two bedroom apartment, where you would live with your two children with no air conditioning, one television, one phone, you know, in hot, hot water, most of the time, you know, like they they have when they when they hear well, a worker in 1970 could afford an apartment, they think a really nice place in Brooklyn, you know, hardwood floors and high ceilings and no, you know, they forget that people in the 70s, 60s and 70s lived in dumps, which is why they were affordable. And because you've afforded them on one salary, because women didn't work and minorities were kept out of the workplace as competition. And so, you know, it's not the comparison to Afghanistan that should wake people up, it's the comparison to say, think about what your think about why you believe that democracy has failed and ask yourself if you really want the thing you want, which is to go backward in time, even to even to when I was in college in 19, I began college in 1979, 1980, where 14% of women went to college. Yeah, you know, well, college is is was more affordable than yes, it was more affordable than and far fewer people went. Because they just didn't go to college. Yeah, got jobs and they said, well, there were jobs. Okay, you know, when I graduated from high school, you know, two of the guys I graduated with I said, so what are you guys, you know, they said, what are you doing? So I'm going to go off to BU and I'm going to study chemistry. Or so I thought at the time. So what are you guys doing? They said, well, we're packing up the pickup truck and we're pulling our money and we're going to Texas because there's construction jobs. When are you leaving like two days after graduation? Um, you know, the idea that people romanticize that time. Again, it's not it's not how we're how they're doing in Afghanistan. It's what was what would your life have been like at 20 when I was 20? Yeah. So okay, Tom, since I have you here, and I know you'll have no problem with this, give me some tough love. All right, so I'm a 36 year old guy, right? You're still a young buck, but you're still a little you're a little older than me. And I wanted to be your father. So like, I recently had Jill Philip, which on here about her book, okay, boomer, let's talk how, you know, I don't know if you've read that, but like how the boomer generation like left millennials behind something like that. But but I'm that guy, right? I look back and, you know, but I can relate to kind of your experience, like my parents, like, you know, they didn't have it that great. My mom got a PhD, you know, after dropping out of high school and stuff. But you know, I look back and I'm like, yeah, I can't afford a house. I'm living paycheck to paycheck, you know, minimum wage hasn't been raised in, you know, X amount of years and I'm struggling and, you know, all these other things, right? Like, I think I'm the guy who thinks you guys had it great. So lay it on me. Like, are there places where I should be more grateful where but also where should I be looking for? Hey, how can we improve this thing? You know what I mean? So lay it on me, Tom. Where do you live? I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. Okay, I love Vegas. But, you know, when I hear a lot of folks saying, well, you know, I can't afford to buy a house dot dot dot, where I want to buy one. You know, there are a lot of affordable houses all across the country. They're just not in places where you happen to want to live. You know, it used to be, and this this is where you're telling me to hitch up my grandpa pants and first of all, let me just say I am not a boomer. I don't care what anybody says. I was born in 1960. I began high school in 1975. No combat troops in Vietnam, no draft. The 60s and the 70s were a distant memory to me. I was eight years old in 1969. I don't remember Woodstock. I don't remember any of that crap. Yeah. So late boomer. They call my my little notch between 58 and 64. Jen Jones sometimes, you know, that's a new one to me. Huh? That's a new one to me. Jones. I it's a kind of it came into for about 15 years. People can use that expression. But I don't I just don't identify with the boomers culturally or chronologically. And I was a very cynical generation. I mean, graduated in 79. You know, you have to remember when I started high school, the president and the vice president were people no one had elected. Think of that. Nixon had resigned. Nixon had resigned. Um, you know, Gerald Agnew resigns. Ford becomes vice president. Nixon resigns. Ford becomes president appoints Rockefeller going into 76, you know, talk, you know, oil shocks, stagflation, you know, complete political chaos at the top. It was a hot mess. Yeah. All right. But why, you know, when you look back and say you had it better, first of all, I graduated into about a 9% unemployment rate. That stubbornly stayed there. I mean, when I graduated from college four years later, it was still like 10%. I think by I think when it was high school, it was like seven or eight percent. By the time I got that got out of college, it was almost 10%. Inflation, which we're panicking about now at 3% was 10. My student loans. Yes, you're right. College was cheaper. My student loans were 13.9%. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I was given a relief on my student loans to 9% in the 1990s. Mortgages, car loans, credit cards routinely at 15, 17, 18%. So, well, houses were more affordable. Yes, but mortgages weren't. So you're cherry picking this nostalgia for what 1980 looked like is cherry picking all of the best parts of it, but forgetting, you know, waiting in line for gas. You know, forgetting that a mortgage was 16%. Car loans were 15%. I mean, you were paying, you were bleeding money in every direction. The other thing that I think where I'm just going to, you know, you're saying, well, Tom, I'm struggling. It's paycheck to paycheck. And yet here you are, Chris, hosting a podcast on high tech equipment wearing really nice headphones living in Las Vegas. I'm sorry, but my heart is not bleeding for you right now. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. You're sitting here on a weekday afternoon shooting the shit about politics. You know, you're not, that doesn't feel like suffering to me. But I just want to do the old grumpy old man thing one more time. And say, you know, you're looking at, well, I can't live like my parents did. As I point out in the book, Kevin Williamson is a great lady said, oh, yes, you can. You can live like your parents lived. You can have a 1957 or 1977 1990 lifestyle very affordably, but you have to commit to it. That means no more of this. Yeah. No more of this with this computer, one TV, no cable, one car, much smaller square footage of living space. You can have all that. You just don't want to. What you want is to have the 2020 living standard, but you want it at 1975 prices. Hmm. That makes that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I can, I took a walk through my old neighborhood in Boston the other day, my college neighborhood, and I can't afford to live there now because the apartment that I lived in has been rehabbed and gentrifies beautiful. And it's cost as much per month as my mortgage now. It's like, well, you know, see, you could afford to live in Boston. Yes. The apartment when I lived in it was cracked plaster cockroaches. The superintendent lived underneath me and smoked cigars all day. It had that great kind of cabbage smell that cheap apartments always have that musty cabbages smell. You know, the floors were warped. There was no air conditioning. The sinks didn't work. You know, lots of little cockroaches as roommates. You know, yeah, I could afford to live there. I don't want to do that again. And I think, you know, that is part of the problem that we keep saying, well, I can't live like my parents lived, but you keep imagining how your parents lived without having experienced it. My dad, my dad bought our house in Massachusetts. He bought a house on a polluted river in a depressed factory town that had tar shingles and abandoned tires and wire and fencing in the yard, clawfoot tubs, cracked walls. My parents spent 25 years trying to get that house to presentability, basically, you know, and it's like, and it cost him a year of his salary that in terms of the mortgage, I think there is no arguing that there are some problems. Healthcare is more expensive because you also because you live longer. You know, healthcare is cheaper when people die in their fifties. It just is. You know, college is more expensive. Well, because we all go and we do it floating on huge amounts of federal loans that we don't think about when we take them out. You know, housing is more expensive in part because we all want to live in the same places. You know, I started to say, and then I'll get off this soapbox, but I started to say it used to be like when I graduated from college, you went and looked for the job and then you moved to where the job was. What really strikes me about your generation, you kids today, you kids, you guys decide where you want to live and then you look for a job. To my generation, that is alien. Like you just, you know, when I was, I ran out of money in grad school. I figured, well, I moved over into Russian studies and I learned Russian and I said, well, if I can't make it through a PhD, I'll have enough Russian to go to work for the government because during the Cold War, if you could speak Russian, that was like job security. You could just do that. And I ran out of money. And so I went on the job market and I got offered a job at the, as a Russian, as a Soviet psychological operations analyst with the army in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Now you can imagine for a New England kid who spent most of his life in Boston and New York, moving to Fayetteville, North Carolina was not my idea of a good time. But I said, you know, that's where the job is. And so I went down to Fayetteville. I interviewed for the job. I got the job. I started looking for an apartment. My girlfriend and I broke up because she didn't want to move to North Carolina. And so I said, well, it's time to, you know, get on with my life. At the very last minute, Georgetown calls me like two months before I'm supposed to move. And they said, Hey, we'd like to offer you a scholarship. Come on down to DC. And that, that changed my life. I mean, but the idea that I would say, well, I'm not going to take that job. It's in North Carolina. That wasn't an option. I had to eat food. I had to find warm, warm a warm place to sleep in winter. You know, and so I said, well, here's my here's what I can do. Here's the, you know, skill set I have if I go to North Carolina, then I go to North Carolina. Today, I am amazed at the way people say, you know, I'd like to live in Northern California. I'd like to live in New York. I'd like to live in Chicago. So I'm going to pick that city. And then I'm going to look for a job. And I'm like, that's backwards. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's funny. You've, and I appreciate it. This is why I'm someone who loves tough life. You've helped bring me back down to earth a little time because sometimes I feel like I'm a bad millennial, but being here in Las Vegas, for example, I think about the entitlement of the people in the next state over in California. I'm like, what gives you the right to live in Southern California next to the beaches and just think you deserve to live there. So Las Vegas is cheaper. But regularly, I do acknowledge that there are other places even cheaper than Las Vegas, you know, and Las Vegas, I'm sorry, that's where I go on vacation. Yeah, I live, I live in Rhode Island, right? And I, and if you ask me how I feel about living in Rhode Island, I go, you know, it's okay. There's a lot of strip malls and, you know, like the biggest landmark in my neighborhood is, is BJ's. You know, I mean, it's just a neighborhood, but I'm a mile from the beach. And I realized that suddenly people go, oh yeah, you know, like they will drive three hours to get here to spend the day where I just drive by every day. And I don't even think about it. Look, every place, I did a radio show in Omaha once and I've been to Omaha. And the, you know, we got talking about this kind of resentment of being called flyover states and red America, blue America. And I said, listen, I've been to Omaha. It's nice. It's a nice city and it's, it's affordable. You can live like a king, you know, in Omaha, you know, but you have people saying I want to live in certain places and do certain jobs. Right. I mean, one of the real curses is this what there's a a professor at UConn, he coined this term. I don't think he's right about a lot of stuff, but I think he was right to coin this term. He called it the overproduction of elites where colleges are cranking out kids who say, well, my preferred job is writer. I want to be a writer. Well, you know what? I want to be a Hollywood actor. It's not happening either. You know, I want, I want to be a, you know, I want to work in the West Wing and be the national security advisor. That's not happening either. People are choosing, instead of saying, look, I just have to go to work. I'm 21, 22, graduate from college. I have to get a job. It's like, well, no, I want a career and I want it to be a very satisfying career right out of the bucket. And I want to be one of the creatives. This is, you know, like Mad Men. I want to be one of the creatives. Well, I, you know, a student asked me for advice once about trying to think this before the pandemic. This is four or five years ago. And he said, well, look, I said, he said, I, you know, I want some career counseling. Is he undergraduate? And I said, okay, you know, he said, well, I want to do what you do. How did you do that? And I said, I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I want to be a professor and I want to write books and I want to be a pundit and I want to write for magazines and, you know, and I said, okay, I didn't really start doing that until I was about 52. So I said, you got to do a bunch of other stuff for about 30 years. And then maybe I can give you, I said, and the student kind of looked at me like, like, what do you mean? Like, I just want to do it. You know, I'm like, well, it doesn't work that way. And I said, and I can't really explain my career because like all careers, there's a certain amount of luck. And, and digging when I should have zagged and bumping into somebody who, you know, I mean, they're, and I think part of this sense, this comes back to your question about tough love, part of this sense of entitlement and, you know, why is democracy screwing me over? If you begin from the assumption that I at, you know, 21 years old, here's my life. It's planned out. Here's the career I want. Here's the city I want it in. You are going to be disappointed over and over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. And the best advice I can get to that I will end this tough love segment by saying, if you, if you are 21 and you said, when I graduate from college, I want to live in New York City and be a writer. I guarantee you that by the time you're 25, you will be angry and pissed off and disappointed. Count on it. So here's, so here's, here's where I'm curious, right? Like your, your book, I feel like, you know, whatever I'm reading a book, one of my first questions like who's a target audience, right? And your book, our own worst enemy, it's us. It's all of us, right? So we got millennials, right? We got, you know, we got Jen Jones, we got the boomers, Gen X, all these people. So how, from your perspective, what is it with, you know, people in your age group and stuff? Like, when I look at, you know, just the people who are pissed and saying like, oh, you know, this country isn't working for us and, you know, and just freaking out. Like, so how do we explain other people who have been through, you know, what, what your generation has been through, but they're still angry and pissed and, you know, all these other things. The, you know, for all of the, for all the horse whipping we just gave to the millennials, they're not the problem. I actually think the kids are all right. I think that, you know, I'm counting on Gen Z and the younger folks to kind of move us past this. The most difficult people when it comes to illiberalism, when it comes to this, you know, sort of rejection of democracy are actually reasonably well off people over 55 years old. Because for a lot of reasons, one is because they are having a midlife crisis and life has not turned out the way they want. And because they have developed a sense of grievance about status rather than actual economics and a lot of that is tied into race. You have a lot of middle-aged white men saying the world is changing. You know, I was told that, you know, I was assured as a young man that the world was my oyster and, you know, here I am, you know, 55 and still working and trudging through a job I don't like and, you know, and all of these, you know, multicultural, multi-racial kids are telling me that I suck. And they're not right. They are privileged. I mean, you see this in Italy, you see this in the UK with Brexit. All of these kind of populist movements are actually fueled by the first people that would be dispossessed if populism were actually a thing. But I think, you know, they are also the people who have the leisure. And I say this in the book, this is a bored middle class bored out of its mind that has the leisure to sit around and stare at YouTube and Facebook and Fox all day long and sit there and get, you know, wrapped up and say, yeah, I've been screwed. This country didn't work for me. I mean, I had friends and I always tell this story because it's such an evocative story. I mean, I have friends who grew up like me, working class, no college, you know, tough background, hardscrabble childhoods, and they're they're sending, they're posting stuff on Facebook about how the country screwed them over while they're sitting on their boats. You know, I keep going back to this boat thing that suddenly this middle class, which is actually very prosperous says, I've been screwed over. And I think we've all developed that sense of grievance. We have no gratitude about the world that we live in in the 21st century. We just don't even think about it because we've adapted to it. And we said, of course, of course, we all have air conditioning, of course, over the counter drugs or miracles that there are there are over the counter drugs that I take every now and then I look at that and I say, I remember when this stuff was $15 a bottle and a prescription. Yeah. You know, you know, flu vaccine, forget about coming up with a COVID vaccine in here, flu vaccinations. Oh, you got to go to the doctor and you're going to make an appointment. Or today, walk into your CVS, lift up your arm, boom, shot, good. Bye-bye. Yeah. We don't even think about that stuff anymore, because our standard of living has become so high that we've just gotten used to it. We just expect it as our entitlement, as our due. And so that, to me, that's the real problem is this kind of bored middle class revolt that tears down democracy so that this bored middle class can become the action heroes of their own movie. Yeah. And that we saw that on January 6th. Yeah. That was a bunch of people saying, I am Tony Stark. You know, I'm Jack Reacher. I'm the hero of my own action movie now. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting, too, the way you framed that, because I'm more of a psychology nerd. And I think about like hedonic adaptation, like when things get better, now we just kind of want more and more and more. So I can see people kind of forgetting. Like, for example, in 2012, I was rock bottom drug addict when I got sober, right? And I try to remind myself, like you mentioned, like I got these nice headphones, I'm paying my own rent. Like 2012, I was lucky to sleep on a couch. You know what I mean? So I try to remember that and just like get back into gratitude and like, you know, with this and with everybody. Ask this, Chris. Just ask anybody of your generation to describe an oxygen tent. I don't even know what that is. I kind of sucked you in on that one. Yeah, you're baited me. And an oxygen tent is what they, like when you had a heart attack or pneumonia or anything, you know, you go into the hospital, right? They take the terminal tube, they put it in your nose. Suddenly, you know, you feel great, right? They used to, they didn't literally, they would put you in a room with a big plastic tent over you and pump and turn a big metal knob to try to pump oxygen into that tent. Wow. Like, and if, and if somebody lit a cigarette, which people did, of course, and people used to smoke in hospitals, that's the generation you missed. People smoking in hospitals, doctors sitting there talking to you with a cigarette in their hand in their office. And if somebody smoked, you could literally like these oxygen tents like explode them. That was normal. And we just say now, of course, you know, my dad had a heart attack in 1974. And he was in the ICU for two weeks, because they don't know, they didn't know what to do with him, you know, like, oh, good luck. Go home, take naps, make sure you're okay. You know, now you're like, God, you know, knock on blood. But, you know, most people, they're home in a few days, they're given blood thinners. And, you know, you can literally take your EKG with a little gizmo attached to your phone. We've just gotten used to that. And I think, let me anticipate when I know some people watching are going to say, they're going to say, yes, Tom, you think we should trade off our well being for a bunch of gizmos and gadgets. And my answer is your well being is is vastly higher than you realize it is compared to even 20 years ago. And you just don't understand it, because you have been, you have internalized the message that your your wants are needs and that everything you want that isn't that you don't get is not because of your own lack of talent, or because of bad luck, or because of, you know, ups and downs of the economy. It's because the entire system is screwed and it's rigged against you. And if in a fair system, you would be doing exactly what you want, exactly the way you want to do it. Yeah, yeah. And I don't hear Tom for your next book, your next book should probably be like a self help type book where you just lay that tough love. I would I don't want to get into that Jordan Peterson space, you know, make your bed and all that stuff. Someone else has done that. I because I don't think, you know, I don't think that rules for living and you know, pull your pants up and all that stuff. You know, if if you start from a basic sense of gratitude, and you know, having gone through what you went through with addiction, you know, gratitude is really important to life. If you start from that basic sense of gratitude, the rest will come. Yeah. And including the understanding of where things are bad, because I would never look, you know, into a camera here and say, it's all straight and down. Everything's fine. Climate change can be okay. Income inequality cares. No, those are real problems. But they are not problems that exist because democracy is bad. And that's really what's at the center of my book. Stop thinking that democracy is the problem. You're the the choices you make as voters, as consumers, you know, part of the when people say, well, jobs went away. Well, jobs went away. For a lot of reasons, including that we as consumers want a lot of cheap junk. Yeah. Yeah. Jobs went away, because we didn't want to work some of those jobs. Whenever I hear someone say, you know, my grandfather's era, my dad's time, there were there were good factory jobs. And I think to myself, you've never seen the inside of a factory. Yeah, those jobs you you would be you would spend three days on that factory floor. And then you would do what a lot of people do, and you'd look for another job, and you would let immigrants who will take those jobs, do them. You know, there are a lot of jobs that your parents and grandparents did. You know, I lived right across the river five minute walk. I remember my best friend's dad, he was an Italian immigrant, used to get up and he didn't have a driver's license. He would walk down and walk to a factory right across the bridge. It was a paper factory. They made notebooks. And he stood there for eight hours a day, stamping and assembling notebooks one after another, little spiral bound notebooks, picking them up, putting them in boxes, stamping them wire and putting them, pick them up, put them down. You tell that to some, you know, 18 year old kids saying, Okay, I have a job for you. It's in a factory. It's making notebooks all day long in an unair conditioned, big dusty, nasty factory on a polluted river in a small town. And they're going to say, See, democracy sucks. Yeah. When in fact, those were the jobs that sustained, you know, millions of people in the 1960s and 70s. But I actually think it's a sign of a better society that we are not making people do that anymore. It's horrible. It's horrible work. It kills you young. There's a reason that people at 60 looked really old. You know? Yeah. Yeah. So where does, like, I see a lot of similarities. Like, I love the depth of expertise, right? And, and again, that goes back to like, I think a lot of it goes back to us. I hear a lot of people talk about the failed education system and all that. But for example, right? So here's where, where Chris gets into some tough love, like, I'm a college dropout. I was a drug addict until I was 27. And now I read, you know, I'm on track to read like 300 books this year, right? And, and, you know, to your point of like, you know, technology, I listen to books, I have an app that converts PDFs to audio so I can listen. It's amazing. But anyways, like with, you know, in the age of COVID with people falling for like conspiracies and election fraud, and it almost just happened again in California. Like, where does this kind of blend in? We're like, this kind of, I don't know, the, this lack of intellectual humility, right? And people not understanding how things work or trying to educate themselves. You know, there's research that shows like, when people have access to Google, they think they're smarter than they are. You know what I mean? So how does that kind of tie in with us being our own worst enemy and this lack of knowledge or trying to learn and be more, you know, wise and knowledgeable? That's, that's the problem with narcissism. I'm smart. Well, yeah, okay. But that, that doesn't mean you're, you know, about viruses. I mean, the, I really bristle when people say, well, the education system is the problem. No, we have never been a more educated public. High school, when I, when I started college, high school graduation was, it was not uncommon to run into people who had dropped out of high school. And I don't mean like inner city black kids, right? You know, that stereotypical TV show of, you know, the urban gritty high school. I mean, like people, I knew, I knew people in my neighborhood that I went to high school with who dropped out who literally like guys that I would wave to on the street go, yeah, you know, quit school last year, you know, and again, we go back to this problem of the middle aged folks. Some of the people that are the most illiberal are the people like my age who had civics who went to high school during the golden age of public education funding who have some community or state college back when it was completely affordable. It's not, education cannot inculcate virtue. And 40 years of a culture of consumerism and self actualization that has told us that everything's about you. You know, I did a podcast with NPR where the producer had put together a string of ads from the 60s and the 70s and 80s that were just great because he's about my age. And he said, yeah, you know, and it was, you deserve a break today. You've come a long way, baby, you know, you deserve it. This is about you. It's your time. You know, that 40 years of us saying, yeah, it is about me. And then someone comes along and says, listen, you have to do the thing I'm telling you to do, because it's a very dangerous virus, or, you know, because, you know, because I have more knowledge than you do. And I just have that you have to kind of let me drive the car here for a moment. People say, I'm not doing that. You're not the boss of me. No one's the boss of me. And I think we have become, I think the other thing that happened since the late 60s and early 70s is that we monetized and consumerized a youth culture, a perpetual youth culture. It really strikes me looking around, thinking about when I was a kid in the late 60s, early 70s, and looking around now. It is really hard to identify people that you instantly recognize as being adults. You know, I see men and I say, I don't really know how old that person is because he's dressed like a nine year old, you know, and has the attitudes of a nine year old. And I think that became a thing that we just that being young and adolescent perpetually became a part of our culture and was something that was sold to us as a positive good, even in our pop culture. You know, I don't want to hit this point too hard because I'm a I'm a pretty immature guy in some ways. I mean, I, you know, I play computer games and I have my little bobblehead from my fallout for, you know, computer gaming and, you know, and I love superhero movies and all that crap. But when the top movies of the past 20 years are basically all superhero movies, it tells you something about how our culture and that the average gamer is like 35 years old now. You know, like that I seem to remember, I don't kill me about this statistic because I remember reading somewhere that like gamers are like now guys in their thirties. Well, you know, that's me. I wasn't because I was there were games when I was in my thirties, but I was busy, you know, and I think we have kind of become a permanently juvenile culture this way. And and that, I think, you know, democracy requires stoic cooperative adults who understand reason and persuasion and not always getting your way. And I don't think we're that kind of culture anymore. I think we are a perpetually adolescent culture and you see it even in our cultural days about how we dress, what we go to see, what kind of musically listen to you know, what our favorite movies are and and so on. Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. Something I've noticed just even, you know, even recently, one of my favorite pastimes is, you know, especially just since COVID is just seeing these viral videos of stuff going on. Recently, it's been like school board meetings and you have you have people from school boards resigning and I'm just, you know, I see this lack of like emotional regulation and I'm like, what's happening? And in the book, you talk about, you know, these anger issues people have and all these things. And, you know, I have a couple more questions. And one thing I I would love kind of like your overall thoughts is social media, right? So you talk a bit about social media on social media. And and yeah, so so here's my question, right? So yesterday at the time of recording this, there's this huge like expose about Facebook came out and they know it's harming like young young women and all these other things. But like, I found you on Twitter, love your Twitter. And I love how you share people's cat pictures with you with your book and all that what brightens up my day. But anyways, like social media, you know, it connects us. It helps me get, you know, diverse opinions, but also is where a lot of fighting happens and a lot of ridiculous. And I'm curious, like, you know, there's all these problems and how misinformation spreads. But there's also this way for like you to get your your opinions and your workout and stuff like that. So do you see it like kind of like net positive net negative? Like, if you could snap your finger and get rid of social media tomorrow, you know, would you I'm just I'm curious of like the big picture thoughts you have on it. That Thanos finger snap is pretty tempting right now. You know, I was a techno optimist. I mean, I was when, you know, I was I began my teaching career when I was 28, my full-time teaching career. I first started teaching in the mid 80s. My first real teaching gig was 1989. And I thought this is transforming the world. Like I remember calling in my colleagues. Hey, guys, look at this. This thing is called a browser, like Netscape, right? This thing called Netscape, you know, and it's sitting there going, you know, like, and I'm like, oh, let's find a website because there's like 10 of them, you know. And I remember thinking this, this is great. This is going to create more international understanding, more connection among people. The problem is that it has become like all things. It's kind of like food. This is the I always use this metaphor of food. You know, when I was a kid in the 70s, the belief was that we'd all be eating silent green and starving and cannibalizing each other because it would be overpopulated and there wouldn't be enough food in the world. And of course, now we know there's there's the problem with food is the supply supply and getting it there. But we're up to our asses and food, which is why we're all obese and diabetic because we're all eating junk all day long. And I say this as, you know, sitting here with I'm glad the camera only goes to here. And we make bad choices about that. So we created this ability to generate tons of food and then we eat, you know, McNuggets for breakfast. Same thing with information. We created this miracle of the internet and we use it basically to, you know, the biggest internet industry is porn. And then we use it to basically yell at each other and fight with each other. And I again, I'm just going to keep hammering this point because it's about narcissism. There's a great line. And I'm part of this problem. I have an ego, you know, I'm I have a big Twitter account. I love it when people say, Oh, I love what you said, you know, like, you know, I got a little dopamine rush. But I think that the person who said it really well, and I wish I could remember how to attribute this quote, but it was every tweet boils down to acknowledge that I exist. And every tweet if translated means acknowledge that I exist. And that becomes why I'm saying, and the way I'm going to make you acknowledge that I exist is by making you mad. And then because anger and that's a form of emotional engagement, right? The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. And that is the thing people on social media will not accept. They cannot accept indifference. They will they want you to love them or hate them, but you are going to engage with them. And you are going to know they exist. And you are going to feed that narcissistic need, even if they have to publish, you know, racist memes to like shock you into responding to them. And again, it goes back to, you know, the guy who in the rest of his day has to wear a paper hat or, you know, work shorts and, and, you know, trim a tree can go online and become a great social warrior, you know, and a hero for Donald Trump or a social justice warrior, warrior for the left, or they can live out this fantasy life online of I am, I am really important. I am the leader of a movement. I am somebody. And that's poisonous after a while. It's poisonous. You know, part of the reason that I enjoy cat pictures, first of all, I love my cat. It's a reminder. Hey, most of us are just ordinary people with dogs and cats. You know, when people get really mad at me online, my answer to them is move on, ignore me. I'm paid to have opinions. I'm paid to put my opinions out there and write articles. I'm sorry, but I am. I chose that career. If you don't like those opinions, let the market speak by just saying I'm done. I don't read that guy. Instead, it's I am going to engage and I want to have a white, hot, narcissistically energized interaction that gives me a feeling of meaning and existence so that when I, so that I don't have to leave the computer and go and do whatever job I have to do, my yard or change my kid or scoop up the litter box or walk my dog. Because life, I think people, and this comes back to the bigger issue we were talking about, Chris, I think people find ordinary life too boring and too dull. And I think one of the things I'll just add an autobiographical detail here. One of the things that made me realize that ordinary life is not boring is that I was hit by a car and I was almost killed. Now that, having a near death experience like that, you wake up and say, wow, this is the bonus round. Every day that I can actually walk to the bathroom and pee on my own steam without having to ring a bell, that's a great day. And every day that I can drive a car and go buy a bag of groceries without having somebody have to drive me because I can't move my head, you know, it's a pretty good day. And I think, you know, people have just, again, forgotten that they think that life is dull and has to be livened up and they have to be involved in great things on great issues. Let me let everybody off the hook for one moment as well to say it is also the nature of Facebook and cable news and social media to appeal to your worst and most narcissistic instincts because it says to you all day long, you must have an opinion right now. We need to know what you think. When we're talking about this and at the moment we're doing this, the big issue has been the revelations about General Milley. And did he talk to China? Did he worry about a coup? Did he interfere in the nuclear chain of command? And, you know, my Twitter stream, I am an expert on this stuff. I work on these things and I have said, look, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm still waiting for information and trying to parse it out. My Twitter stream is full of people very confidently saying, now, this is what the nuclear chain of command is like. And I want to say to people, you know, you're not required to have an opinion on this right now. It's not a necessity. It's okay if you just say, I hope to learn more. But the nature of Twitter, the nature of Facebook, the immediacy of the way things are reported in the 24 hour news cycle kind of sticks that electrode into your head like a crack monkey and says, have opinions. You must have opinions. You have to have them right now. I fall prey to it. Like I said, I'm paid to do it, to have those opinions. But the average person, it's okay if you disconnect for a few hours and say, the world will turn without my view on whether or not Mark Milley disrupted the nuclear chain of command. Yeah, that's definitely a big issue. I definitely agree. That's one of the biggest things like I've talked with, you know, many people on the podcast just about like how to think. And a lot of it's just slowing down, right? And like I don't need an opinion, but but yeah, like to go back to you get a hit by a car, like I can relate to that near-death experience. This is something I think about all the time, Tom, like back in 2012, I was 27 years old congestive heart failure in a hospital that like, Hey, you got like a 20% chance of living. I wasn't allowed to see my son because my addiction was just so many things, right? So today, like, like a lot of the bullshit does not bother me, right? I'm like, I'm like, you understand how little that problem is in the grand scheme of things. But you know, I recognize like we can't go hit everybody with cars or we shouldn't turn more people into drug addicts. You know, so, so the last thing I want to talk to you about. And I was hit by a drug dealer. Well, I'm glad to say it wasn't me. Hopefully it was nobody I knew. But I've seen one of the solutions you talk about come up quite a bit lately, which is people should or like we should implement a policy where people kind of have like this service to our country, right? So, you know, again, like hopefully, you know, there's not a war where we have to implement it like a draft and people have to like go do stuff. So, like, so for the last thing, like to end on a positive note and to get into the solutions, like what is that? Not even what does that look like, but like today, today without a government policy of us getting into solutions, you know, like, what do you think? Like if someone's listening right now, you're like, and they're like, you're right, Tom, I'm a narcissist. I throw my opinions out. I argue with people. I'm a very angry person. What what can we start doing right now to kind of have this connection with our country with our fellow people and stuff like that? Okay, first of all, if you're the kind of person who says I'm a narcissist, you're not a narcissist. A psychologist, a psychologist once said to me the real sign of a narcissist is that they are not capable of forming that thought. So if you if you're sitting there listening to us and saying, hey, I wonder, maybe I'm that kind of guy, then the good news is you're not that kind of guy. If you're the kind of person listening to us saying, well, that's not me. And my my anger is totally legit. You're the person needs to do a little more work. And ask yourself, you know, is your anger legit is, you know, could the world turn without your hot takes for 24 hours? My comment, I think a lot of what we can do, even though in the book, I suggest some larger structural things. I think this begins at the personal level. And I always tell people be the example you want to set. Be civil in your daily interactions. You know, I was talking to somebody one time, we were talking about the guys you see on the highway with the I saw a guy in a highway with it. Can I swear on this podcast? Go for it. Okay. So a guy had a big sign on his truck that said, fuck Biden and fuck you for voting for him. And, you know, my wife and I looked at it and the first thing we thought was what a sad person that must be to advertise that. Yeah. And I said, you know, he was we were on the mass turnpike and he wanted to take one to get in lane. And I slowed down and I waved him in. I said, go ahead. Instead, I mean, because people put a flag like that on their truck, because they want to have dirty looks. They want to fight with you. You know what? Don't be that guy. Say, I see you. I get it. We all see it. It's like that comer, that guy code comes right. We all see it. We all see it. Progressive or whatever it is. We all see it, you know, fine. And be polite and just say, look, I'm not going to engage. I'm not going to feed this, this narcissistic grievance that you're waving as a big blue flag behind your truck. You'd like to take a left and go ahead of me. Feel free, fellow citizen. Go ahead. You know, be polite to people. Don't take any shit from anybody. I mean, that's different. Yeah. You know, don't be a doormat. But don't go looking for that. And, you know, I think what people really find is that when you won't engage like that, when you won't provide that kind of negative energy, they kind of don't know what to do. And maybe it does trigger a little bit of shame. You know, be polite, be adult, be the person you want other people to be. And then in your civic habits, read a local newspaper, make sure you vote in every local and city election, not just every four years, you know, watch your local news broadcast. Not just, you know, the rage a haul guy at eight o'clock or, you know, your pal Rachel at nine or Chris Cuomo or Sean Hannity, you know, and look, you know, again, I'm part of, I'm on, I do Morning Joe. I've done a couple of other shows. I do them pretty regularly. But, you know, it's okay to say, hey, I'm going to turn on channel whatever here in Wisconsin. I'm just going to find out what's going on in my community. Yeah, you can do all these things. These are not momentously difficult things to do. This is the way normal Americans used to live before we were jacked into the information economy and the information culture 24 hours a day. And I look, you know, I admit it, I'm the guy in the grocery line. I'm checking my emails and I'm, you know, I'm doing all that stuff. Yeah. But it's okay to not do that for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Just set a better example for the people around you. Don't go looking for those fights. And at Thanksgiving, when Uncle Ned comes in and says, I'm here, I want to talk about stolen voting machines and Hugo shot, just say, you know, because that's bait, that's emotional engagement. Just turn to that person say, pass the potatoes. I'm not having that discussion. We're not, we're not doing that today. Yeah. Time replace. Yeah, absolutely agree. And I think that's a great note to end on because I can relate to that, especially just not engaging. It's really surprising how effective that could be. So, but yeah, like we barely even scratched the surface of all this stuff you address in the book. And I've seen a lot of people taking pictures with their animals. So I'm guessing it's doing well, but I hope more people get it. So, so yeah, the book is available everywhere to my knowledge. Is it available internationally yet? Or is it just next month in Canada, and then the month after in Europe, in Great Britain, and in Europe, Oxford, UK, available everywhere in North America now. So, so yeah, you're on Twitter. I'm going to link that down below. Is there any other places where people should be looking to find you, like, you know, to stay up to date with your work or is Twitter the best place? Twitter. And I write regularly at the Atlantic. So, you know, you can always find my work there. I'm a contributing writer there. So, you know, again, we don't need to, if you, you know, we don't need to be, we don't need to spend all day with each other every day. You know, when I get my, my poorly informed takes, including my unbelievably bad views on music, you know, you can always find me somewhere on social media. But yeah, I just follow from their animal pictures. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Tom. It was a pleasure talking with you. I love the book. And, and yeah, maybe we'll do this again next time when you write, you write your next one. Thanks for having me, Chris.