 Welcome to economics and beyond I'm Rob Johnson president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Wendy Brown Class of 1936 first chair at University of California Berkeley where she teaches political theory She's written in my opinion two fabulous recent books the first being undoing the demos neoliberalism stealth revolution and And more recently in the ruins of neoliberalism the rise of anti-democratic politics in the West Wendy thanks for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be here Rob. Thank you Well, we are speaking here in June of 2020 The pandemic COVID-19 is upon us all kinds of social unrest economic distress Certainly gives pause To anybody who thought everything was hunky-dory Say at the turn of the year Now you have been a very very prescient writer the two books that I mentioned in introducing you Illuminate all kinds of shortcomings fault lines Which am I call unrealized or unrecognized assumptions? That Masked over many processes and many experiences that we have whether it be with arts or education Environment inequality it covers vast amount of what you might call the diagnostic material of a social critic in a very powerful way So I'm curious right at the outset. You're seeing the pandemic You're seeing the world What is disturbing? What is What would you recommend and what is inspiring that you see in light of this challenge Those are huge questions, and I'm hoping we'll we'll take the better part of this hour to open them up But why don't we start with why don't we just start with the challenge of the pandemic? Okay Disease pandemics they're always challenging for societies But the the challenges are of course ramified when everything that organizes and provisions of society is already weakened or broken and Let's just take the tour here. The US has a broken health care system not only Do we have unequal access as a result of an Almost but not quite successful effort at producing universal health care We have a health care system that is instead fragmented inefficient Largely organized by for-profit industries including hospitals clinics pharmaceuticals with accompanying profoundly unequal access and quality For most Americans health insurance is tied to employment and 30 to 40 million people lost their jobs in the pandemic Hence are at risk of losing their insurance On top of that we have a hospital system that of course is mostly privately owned Which means it tries to stay full in healthy times and was absolutely overwhelmed during the pandemic We have a broken political system Profoundly corrupted by private money and influence. It's log jammed as we all know at the congressional level and of course is currently headed by a Raging narcissistic authoritarian with absolutely no concern for the welfare of the people Only for his own power and image But beyond Trump we have a broken social contract a Contract that one could say was never fulfilled for black brown indigenous and poor people But now it fails almost everyone in Exchange for being law abiding and effortful Even many working class and middle class white Americans now lack basic protection and provisioning that they need to survive let alone thrive Then we have an economic order that as we know is looted at the top by the banks big industries plutocrats while most are one paycheck away from living on the streets Irregulation and speculation has created scandalous urban housing costs the average rent for a one-bedroom. I just looked it up in San Francisco a one-bedroom apartment is 3500 a month so not surprisingly one in five. I'm sorry one in 50 San Franciscans are homeless And then there's the entire American public education system from kindergarten to college which over the last 40 years Has been steadily defunded privatized outsourced and of course importantly devalued over this time And while that education system groans Billions of tax dollars pour into our prison system which now holds more than two million Americans and incarcerates one in 12 black men And there's our corporately owned media which is completely politicized with the effect that about a third of Americans watch or listen to what they imagine is news, but it's really nothing short of right-wing propaganda So given this context, it's actually not any surprise that the US has One of the highest COVID rates in the world It's been unable to respond intelligently or effectively to the pandemic To provision its healthcare workers with the most basic protective gear or organized universal testing for Provide quality care for the sick and it's an unsurprising that we've been unable to Secure those who just got dropped through the floor by the sudden economic shutdown It's not really a surprise either that Congress passed an economic rescue package Care's Act in March That was the single greatest upward redistribution of wealth in the history of capitalism And I think for many of the Care's Act represented this great moment where everybody got $1,500 checks to tide them over during a time of crisis But what we really need to pay attention to in the Care's Act is that it was a huge bailout for Giant industries and a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy While throwing these little one-time checks Many Finally, I would say it's no surprise that that really an unprecedentedly Disintegrated and undereducated public Weaned on libertarian freedoms and weaned on rage against government Rebelled Rebelled against restrictions and closures and refused to participate in what I would call the worldwide Mutual pact that social distancing demanded And it's also not any surprise that that blacks and Latinos are dying of COVID at three times the rate of whites so there's our pandemic the crisis that exposes not just problem of dealing with a pandemic but the problems that already existed in our society in our polity in our economy in our culture and I'll just kind of end this part of of my answer to your question by saying look capitalism everywhere limits the possibilities of having Certain principles that I think ought to be the principles that govern us actually govern us principles of equality social care social trust But the United States the Soviet Union and Brazil each with the Screamingly highest COVID rates in the world They represent the absence of these principles in the extreme and then you get a little country like New Zealand at the other end of the spectrum Recall that Prime Minister Arden had just a hundred cases in the country but had The the catastrophe in Italy already in her sights in February when she said to the people look stay home Be kind careful We'll take care of you if you take care of yourself and what did that entail and entailed a two-month shutdown But it also entailed Government assurance that no one would lose income or security or housing or health care during this time Now, New Zealand's not a perfect country. No settler colony is no capitalist nation is And now of course like everyone else it has to deal with the other effects of The shutdown with businesses shuttered and unemployment rates and so forth But what it modeled was the foregrounding of social care policy rooted in public health and high levels of trust and Commitment to equality in handling this problem. That's what's required to navigate a pandemic Humanely and effectively that's what New Zealand could bring to it and that nation of course is now essentially free of the virus Do you I? Believe I believe Robert Bella Who wrote the book the broken Covenant is one of your colleagues or at least was at at Berkeley. Is that right? Yes, that's right Well, I remember a famous saying My dear friend and former partner in projects Alex Gibney the documentary filmmaker his stepfather was William Sloan Coffin Mm-hmm, and I remember reading Bella's book the broken Covenant Which popped into my mind as you open the discussion? and he had a Quote from coffin where he said But today because we have so cruelly separated freedom from virtue Because we define freedom in a morally inferior way a country is stalled In what Herman Melville called the dark ages of democracy a Time when as he predicted the new Jerusalem would turn into Babylon And Americans would feel the arrest of hopes advance That's a remarkable passage and I I think it captures at a poetic level what those of us who Operate in the social sciences are trying to kind of map out at the very empirical level, but It captures it beautifully instead of freedom being that which We share in order to govern ourselves instead of freedom being that which we cultivate through knowledge and education and Pursuit of the ability to craft our lives together and to and to produce a common good a Public good together and to tend it and to figure out how to solve problems through it We have fallen into The most extreme version of freedom as a right essentially to social assault to do what you want and to attack or tear at society a Freedom understood as that which is about your individual right to do whatever you want no matter who it kills no matter who it hurts no matter who who's profiting at whose expense and Certainly one can't say that's not freedom But it's not democratic freedom. That's that's what we've lost. It's a it's a form of you could call it Arbaric freedom you could call it market freedom. You could call it Libertarian freedom, but it's a form of freedom that has been so radically detached from the social and the political task of living life together and Deciding together how we shall live what we shall value That it that it essentially becomes freedom against democracy. It becomes freedom against the public good And that's where we are Yeah, I People who listen to this podcast will know I'm very fond of a poem That was created by Muhammad Ali and It was considered it's considered by the Guinness Book of World Records the shortest poem in history It goes like this me we and Yeah, one when I'm hurting And as I'm listening to you I'm feeling like that Kind of freedom that you were explaining explaining to our listeners It's a freedom to do whatever you want But it's not a freedom from the consequences of other people's actions And so I don't know, you know, we're not all Robinson Caruso's living on an island alone so the the notion of freedom Has a we in it as well as a me and it just feels like that liver Libertarian style and The it's not even just a despondency about government. It's it's a disparagement of social responsibility It goes further it's a disparagement of the very idea of society I found one of the most telling moments in the early outbursts against Shutdown and social distancing protocols that were coming from parts of the country that we conventionally associate with Trump supporters or with a certain understanding of Anti-government or even anti-society thinking I found The following sentence just so revealing One man said look I've done my two weeks. I'm tired of it And I don't want anybody telling me what to do at this point If I want to go out in the world and die I can now what I found was so Fascinating about that was the utter failure to understand what Social distancing and what I call the mutual social pack of The kinds of protocols we needed to adhere to in order to bring Contain the pandemic let alone Eliminate it contain the virus let alone eliminate it. What was it such a failure of understanding there in that? Episode I just cited Was the moment of saying, you know, if I want to go out in the world and die I can Without recognizing that this was not just about oneself was actually about an entire society That social distancing was never just about the individual. It was about a social practice We needed to undertake together and it's not surprising to me that given 40 years of neoliberalism where freedom has been pretty much reduced to You get to do what you want with your family with your property with your education with your mouth With your opinions with your actions with the limitation, of course that you're not supposed to murder anybody or or steal from others But even those limitations as we've been made to realize lately Are not honored exactly That the the notion of freedom that just centers on the I I I it's mine And I get to do what I want. There is no such thing as society as Margaret Thatcher famously said It's no surprise that given that given that Fail I wanted to Bring up your most recent book from the ruins of neoliberalism and the chapter that I found your spellbinding Was the fifth chapter? No future for white men and you begin with the discussion of how science and reason replaced a faith in God and Any other form of authority but the words that you used were I think Max Weber's were disenchantment De-sacralization that that this nihilism this resentment emanates from Which you might call almost feeling abandoned by the concepts that You had come to trust in the in the Which am I called the Magnetic field in which we all lived and collaborated but what What do you see? I see tremendous concentration of wealth more and more people Being despondent or feeling like they're going down life expectancy going down in the United States for over 70% of the population According to recent statistics, but Where where where does this nihilism resentment and disenchantment come from in your mind? I think it's multi-sourced On the one hand what I was Trying to explain in that particular chapter of in the ruins was that we can't just see nihilism as the effect of recent decades, you know the displacement of Truth by everything being mediated literally by the media You know fiction and narrative being More important than facts and science. We can't just see it as the effects of the ravages of capitalist commodification all those theses are out there, but By starting with Nietzsche and Weber to 19th turning the 20th century thinkers I Was trying to get at the extent to which for some time these thinkers have been warning us that once you have the rise of science and the rise of reason toppling the foundations of societies rooted in God or natural law and instead everything comes to be understood as Scientifically decodable that's really what was at the heart of Weber's argument about disenchantment that what science does is disenchant the world that explains everything rather than just experiencing the world as a enchanted mystery and What these thinkers remind us is that what happens what we're at risk of when we lose the Enchanted nature of the world and and the belief in God as the maker and Governor of the world as science and reason come to this place that What happens isn't simply a move to oh, okay, let's do rational Creatures now who democratically decide with one another what we should do and how we should live together What happens instead is is the emergence of a kind of raging reaction against that loss and One of the effects of that loss one of the effects of that reaction itself is is just is to produce a kind of Mm-hmm Trying to think of the simplest way to say this here a release from conscience and a release from a Sense that there's any authority that one ought to obey and instead a kind of antisocial Rancor resentment acting out that's very likely to emerge And so one of the things I was trying to track in that chapter was the way that this long steady process of disenchantment desacralization and and And and reactions in response to that one of the ways that that process intersex with Kind of we could just call it by shorthand hyper capitalism that we've had of over the last 40 years where You just get to do whatever you want that increases your value or makes you money and to hell with society you take that long process of Disenchantment desacralization and the nihilism that goes with it the sense of there's no meaning. There's no rules There's there's no authority and you mix it with an economic form that Unleashes all of our libidinal desires without regulation just says go for it have it take it do it And you get a pretty Disintegrated society now. We're gonna put one more ingredient in this that I talked about in that last chapter Which is that if you also already have a society that is striated by class and race and gender and one of the effects of We'll just call it neoliberal globalization unleashing free trade unleashing markets one of the effects of that is to take what were fairly protected and secured forms of white male socio-economic Existence and drops the bottom out of those drops the bottom out of those because global markets no longer respect that position of white male socio-economic security and international movements of peoples Migration are are also starting to upend it and upset it and so also our various social movements Well, one of the nihilistic effects we have in our time is tremendous amounts of Working and middle-class white male rage against lost position lost Pride of place and that is certainly part of what we have at the basis of the right-wing movements and What are often called authoritarian populist movements, especially in Europe and the United States? Well, one of the things that I as I was listening to you and in the role of reason and science is that There is a sense. It's almost like a confidence game where There's a difference between science, which is a humble investigation and Scientism, which is a ritual of pretending to know it's a form of Of what you might call sophisticated form of demagoguery Such an important distinction And the fact of the matter is we just don't know what they call ontological uncertainty or Frank Knight at Chicago called radical uncertainty the Probabilities aren't known the outcomes aren't known and I Guess when people pretend to know And are unmasked for not knowing the quality of Which you might call the integrity and the faith and the trust in expertise or in representation Or in any institution goes down the drain And it's just so important go ahead. I'll let you finish. I was just gonna say And and then in the void and this is this is the thing that just rung my bell in your last chapter when you talked about After the disintegration of religious values There's a yearning for those values and they become what I'll call cynically used for marketing Because people's yearning people's appetite for coherence still exists within them and I think there's a there's kind of a transfer of There's a book. I've just been looking at called the enchantment of mammon Eugene McCarver and it's as if Religion got wiped out by science and reason, but the religious instinct is then transferred to these secular institutions That emotional role And it can be cynically exploited by what you might call Techn psychological techniques of Media manipulation markets fake news, whatever you're gonna call it. So I feel like We're kind of like at sea in the fog without a chart as All of this unfolds and that despondency and that despair and The increase of what your colleague at Berkeley John Powell calls the otherness The scapegoating and the polarization all just catch fire. That's right, you know, it I'll go to Nietzsche again for a moment. He reminded us that it takes an enormous strength To live without truth to live without certainty and by that he did not mean That nothing is real. That's often Misunderstanding of that whole tradition of thought he simply meant that being Recognizing that for human beings first of all, we were always interpreting truth But we're also always fashioning and especially social political and cultural truths. They're not given by God They're not given by science their practices that we establish and then debate and then cast off and then wonder why we Have believed in them historically and so forth now. I think that initial distinction you drew between Science and scientism is really important because I think You know today for example during the epidemic We're all eager for those trained in epidemiology vaccine research and a number of other things to come up with the right Vaccines and the right antivirals to be able to contain this pandemic and eventually Insulate us from it. We're all eager for that and we believe that must come from testable Scientific research That's a very different story from imagining that what the Germans call the human sciences have the same quality social political economic cultural life These things are not submitable to science and our great conceit and our great mistake in Trying to make them Available to the same kind of scientific research that a microbe Can be submitted to has been enormously consequential on the one hand as you say It's it's it's it's led to certain people to certain people to simply worship at the altar of these these positive truths in Government or and reason or in a particular leader or or in economics and on the other hand it's led to a tremendous lack of humility in Thinking and teaching and educating about human things so instead of treating our work and thinking about Markets or in thinking about social democracy as as a as a Exploratory Interpretive set of acts that also of course must have empirical facts They will involve some models some hypotheses But there needs to be the humility to recognize that human conduct that isn't isn't Sequesterable into economic behavior political behavior cultural behavior religious behavior We are always a constellation of all of these things and You can't break them apart and silo them off so that you can submit them to separate laboratories and that of course has been the disaster that has Been brought to us by each of the social sciences is the this belief that you can so what do we get? We get economics shocked by the financial crisis and then shocked again by the effects of a paradigm that turned out to be so disastrous Socially and politically that even the economists recognized they had to take some responsibility For what neoliberalization was producing as its political and social effects you get you get political scientists We're totally shocked by the rise of the right. We shouldn't have been shocked by the rise of the right We should have been able to read the cultural and economic and social formations crises, fissures Disaffection for for for government and for society that was Generating for decades. We shouldn't have been shocked by 2016 But it's telling that each of these disciplines is so unprepared for the eruptions of this moment or the eruptions that that that That that as it were falsify what the discipline has believed in and It's telling that they're unprepared for it because they're they're working in their little I'm gonna say now pseudo scientific Silo's as if you could submit the complexity the historicity the interdependent nature of of human existence in all of its Various facets to these siloed experiments the way you can with a microbe and I think that that that distinction you make for for that reason is really important But it's really hard to bear. I'm gonna return to where I started It's hard to bear the fact that we do not have Scientific truths to live by in society politics and economics that instead we have to craft Forms of organization and forms of of and institutions and arrangements That we're always experimenting with and and and that we always have to be willing To back off and say oh we got that wrong we really need to think differently about this We we forgot to think about x and y while we were over here thinking about a and b That's not the way most social science works. Yeah Well, I think there are two thoughts that come to my mind the first is with regard to social science the subject and object are intertwined and thinking and So that that kind of scrambles up some sort of causal mechanical consistent link Yeah, scientists like to call objectivity they they would they would deplore the statement that you just made You know the subject and the object are not supposed to be intertwined for them. They imagine that by Mathematizing They can get away from being involved with their object Yeah, go ahead And what the other part and I think this relates to humility Is that and and I'm I'm really echoing what you were just saying Says society does a yarn for order Society wants to feel like They know what's going on what can be trusted etc. So if you have inherent uncertainty No one knows and no one can know definitively, but there's almost like a leapfrog game Or what they call in music a cutting contest Where you try to outshine each other by being more bold in your declarations and more sure of what you say and Unfortunately, I guess what I would say is society's yearning for order is complicit in sometimes propelling the least humble Conmen to the forefront, but when they're unmasked when they're unmasked all hell breaks loose Yes, that's right. I I guess I would compliment what you said by saying societies as a whole may yearn for order but I I Beyond that. I'm not sure I would say there's a kind of ontological yearning in any particular Society that exceeds the culture And and and here's what I mean You could say societies yearn for order, but what about also the statement will societies yearn for freedom and Are they yearning for freedom and order or are they yearning for freedom against the current? Order and maybe we'll talk about this a little bit later But it seems to me that part of what we're seeing in the last couple of weeks with the uprisings under the auspices of black lives instigated by the murder of George Floyd is Is is the emergence of of a sub-society and a pretty big one yearning for freedom from this order and But I don't want to say all societies Have that yearning now. I want to suggest that You know when things feel dark enough Dismal enough pessimistic enough indeed nihilistic at a at a societal level as they have for the past some years in this country I Think you get different eruptions different other things are cultivated as as as deep yearnings besides simply Yeah, well what I make a an oppressive order that leads to despondency say regarding the possibilities for my children is Is haunting and it's not reassuring And and I think But I do think I always I often quote Steven toolman who wrote a book called Cosmopolis Because he talked about from the 30 years war to the present This failing of social science by pretending to be natural science often led in the Cartesian Enlightenment framework to Fault lines that erupted but at the time When the challenge the social breakdown occurred People people often yearn to go back to the familiar rather than to push forward and Evolve in other words learning from those fault lines And moving to a different place. Yes, and and here we have to know if we're just focused on Let's say the US or maybe more broadly the Euro Atlantic world the global north What one of the things we see is that tremendous yearning to go back a Nostalgia for an imagined time when Neighborhoods were calm and white and men ruled households and People of color stayed in their place Preferably outside the country for the most part, but those who were within stayed subjected There's a nostalgia for an imagined other time That feels at risk being lost of being lost but also at risk of Disappearing forever But then you know as you say invoking your children. We also see a millennial generation That finds this world not only unbearable but unsustainable knows that it has no place in the future and That that ridiculous nostalgia for the past is just that a ridiculous nostalgia for a past that was never bright and beautiful for most and Also that had nothing to do with a sustainable economy society or planet so There we have to watch out. I think about generalizing from from From the idea that there's a kind of desire for a return in the midst of a crisis I think we also have to see that the yearning that this generation in particular this young generation is expressing for what in the early Antiglobalization protests was captured by the phrase another world is possible. I want a world that Actually is humane is sustainable is non-racist It does feature equality among the sexes isn't punishing and cruel and doesn't have the extremes of economic Inequality not to not even to mention north-south global inequality and and that that I Think it's it's a big generational divide. Although I don't think it's exclusively generational but I do think that there's a world that that knows that it's Losing and almost finished. That's what we see in the world that GOP in this country is still trying to cultivate And then then there's another population Looking at a very different horizon no nostalgia at all for that past Right That's right So We've seen Just what you might call an eruption of Protests all over the world in the aftermath of George Floyd's passing And I've seen some who are in power Try to use this As what you might call evidence that all hell's breaking loose and we need to be tougher on quote those people Yes including the president of the United States But it feels to me and I'm in New York, but it feels to me as I watch all around That We're in a place that's Not containable the the Scale and The awareness the awakening to the contradictions To the unsustainability socially and environmentally in particular It's where people have just they just had it and watching that poor man on the video with a knee in his neck for nine minutes It was It was horrid But it was it was our society Yes, and I think I think we've unlocked now a Political energy a broad-based participation and to me That's the most hopeful thing I Could have imagined at this point. How do you see this? I agree with you completely. I think the last two weeks have brought us more hope broad based and deep than anything Anything in the last four decades and I guess I would start by saying a Couple of things about How we might understand What what what released and Inspired and and and fueled these uprisings. I mean as you say Floyd's Cold-blooded murder by a white policeman Was itself horrible, but it was also Gasseling poured on already smoldering fires I mean, there have been scores of such videos in recent years and just prior to the one of Floyd Of course, there was the murder of Ahmad Arbery the black jogger Rihanna Taylor the black health care worker, but also I think this is really important The video of the iconic encounter between the white woman and the black man in New York Central Park, yeah Yeah, so just I mean, you know this but just to remind listeners this Middle-class white woman was angered by the middle-class black man's request to that she obey a park rule to leash her dog and She responded by attempting to openly terrorize him by telling him she would call the police and And report that she was being threatened by and these were her words an African-American man And then she proceeded to do exactly that she called the police and three times repeated that an African-American Man was threatening her and her dog and at one point said threatening her life and her dogs Of course, he was doing no such thing, but what this video did Was capture the utter normalcy of white America using the police to terrorize black America and I think if you combine all of that With the fact that already and now we're going to go back to COVID Due to systematic racism in housing education health care employment access to nutritious food and other elements of well-being African-Americans have three times the COVID mortality rates of whites And they also at the same time have filled out the ranks of undervalued underpaid essential workers during the crisis So here they are serving the country in countless ways from health care delivery to food delivery and yet They're the least protected most afflicted with the greatest numbers of deaths So there you get the picture already of slavery Repeated in the 21st century and then you get these murders and these encounters And of course, they're also living under the most blatantly racist political regime in recent history where where racial hate episodes have become routinized Normal and you put all that together and the house blew up. Thank god But I agree with you That the uprisings in some ways now exceed these moments and protests against this condition. I mean, they've really been the most amazing thing Not only are they a powerful rebellion against white supremacy But through them a whole generation is getting educated and politicized But also the deep fatalism the deep despair That has hung heavy over black and brown communities But in some ways also over all who care about justice that deep fatalism and despair is being pushed back That that deep political pessimism and powerlessness Is being exploded yes, and They these protests I find You know striking in the cities Where you and I live But there are thousands of them going on in towns and villages all over the country And they're all over the world all over the world, of course, too But I mean just thinking about the way it's blown the top off the pessimism the despair the fatalism The nothing can be done. It's hopeless this Raging lunatic is in power and look at all the people who support him and so on It's and you know the complicity of the GOP and so forth And now what you have are young people old people families relatively apolitical people too in the streets finding their voice finding the solidarity with others Look when even the national football league Apologizes for its past complicity with white supremacy We're in a political earthquake as we know the nfl But we don't need to go down that road. But you know, it's it's it's an important sign that that particular operation has turned around And essentially without saying his name apologize to Colin Kaepernick for being a visionary And them not recognizing it now. I just want to add a few more things Please certainly the immediate issue of murderous racial violence By the police by the carceral state by vigilante groups random middle-class white people in central park Capitalism that's all part of what's promulgating this but I think there's something else Nearly three months of Having to have sheltered in place and worrying about covid Give a lot of people a lot of time to reflect on the world we live in how it's organized What's prioritized? What's valued? What's devalued? What's deeply wrong? You know, why was this country so unable to even handle basic supply chain issues around food? Why were farmers dumping food in fields while people were hungry in cities? Because the farmers previously have supplied high-end restaurants and couldn't get the supply chains redirected to where the food was needed all of us playing out in front of us while we're sheltering in place And of course the shutdown itself also did something which was featured immediately how the climate crisis Could be redressed By redirecting our extractivist economy and our fossil fuel dependent economy In a different direction. I mean, you know suddenly everyone commented on it clear skies breathable air But also human life was reduced to the simple requirements of surviving and taking care of ourselves and each other Getting food and shelter and health care and having basic internet connection. That's what mattered So what am I saying here? There was room during this time to think about the way we live Together and what's wrong with so-called normal? Everyone wanted to get back to normal almost everybody I know and these were not just progressives We're also those people were also questioning normal. They were thinking about normal and I think part of what's behind the explosion in the streets is not just Though it's not nothing a reaction to this murderous racial violence And not just oh, thank god. We're out of our houses. Let's explode out of our houses. Let's go back to the Tomorrow most humanity I've seen in you know three months I think part of what is behind the explosion in the streets is no more normal A better world is possible and it's time to make it right now And as it's built The sense of you know trump hanging out in his bunkered sensed fortified white house and The recognition that the people really are not going to leave the streets and they're not going to be faked out by white supremacists You know throwing molotov cocktails or some looting going on Instead they are just going to hang in and demand a better world We have a convergence here of some crises that usually become the opportunistic moment for the right and and and the powerful But they become the opportunistic moment for the people and uh, that's rare and it's wonderful and I'm incredibly hopeful from this set of possibilities Yeah, I think the uh If I if I were doing the soundtrack Which is kind of my propensity I'd have to pick the lane brown song seize the time as the anthem for for right now This is a time that is filled with horrific and frightening observation, but it's also a time of great potential And as you explored over the course of this conversation Uh There's an awful lot that's unsustainable and particularly what I find it hard to understand is how our politics is usual With high unemployment It's not seizing upon Which am I called the employment potential from a of a profound public program for energy transformation To start retraining and hiring people for Which am I call invigorating the economy in the macroeconomic sense But most importantly transforming the structure of the economy to a sustainable place vis-a-vis energy Absolutely And the scale the mobilization That I sense is required over the next 10 to 15 years Is is gargantuan And and it's all over the world. It's in india. It's in china. It's in europe latin america the united states but uh, but I I I pray That we seize this time And my children and my first grandson was born about a little over a year ago I just I can't I can't imagine Us going back The the awakening and the scar tissue are both far too profound and wendy As I try to do my job fulfill my mission and my purpose at the head of The institute for new economic thinking There isn't anybody I know Who's given me more clues And insights as to where the fault lines Were hiding in plain sight than you I look forward So much to working with you I hope to see you again on this podcast Before too much time passes And I really want to encourage everybody to read the two books Undoing the demos and from the ruins and neoliberalism Maybe next time you and I talk We can choose a theme Which is how must education be reformed To reinforce This awakening and this New understanding that we have to craft But for today, I just want to thank you as always For an excellent contribution Rob, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you And I'm just delighted that you're doing this work with the inet podcast And I'd be enormously pleased to talk to you about the future of education my own investments in public eye at your higher education are huge And it's been part of my work now for some years to Try to preserve the great American experiment in provisioning public higher education or the many And so it would be a real pleasure to have that conversation with you in the future But in the moment, I just want to say thank you for being such a great conversationalist Well, thank you for bringing so much to the conversation and helping our audience Invigorate their confidence and their hope and their sense of a light at the end of the tunnel We'll talk again soon Bye. Bye And check out more from the institute for new economic thinking at inet economics dot org