Election Reflection

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Robert Wright: After it was clear that Trump had won, some people, you know, on team blue were saying, Oh my God, I can’t believe what kind of country I live in. And I was thinking like, you live in a country that’s split down the middle. Whether Trump gets 50 percent or 48 percent matters because it matters who the next president is.

But diagnostically, this is not a big departure from what we already knew.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of the Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of the Progress Network, and this is What Could Go Right, our weekly podcast where we talk to scintillating, fascinating, eclectic, eccentric, brilliant, thoughtful people animated by nothing more than a spirit of how do we make the world a better place. Doesn’t mean that they are animated by rose tinted, Pollyannish views of the present and the future. We’re not really interested in that.

We are interested in constructive takes on present problems, and we are, as always, interested in how we steer our collective ship in a direction of calm, open waters and not icebergs. How do we explore the world and not be the Titanic?

We do think that this is a particular election that is unusual in many respects, both in how it played out relative to expectations and bears reflection about what that augurs for the present and the future and bears reflection, I think, in a way that you’re not going to find in the mainstream world and may not find in your friend and family groups, which is how do you take a step back, take a deep breath and really think about, okay, what are the implications of all this pro con and everything in between, which is what we try to do.

And we’re going to talk to someone today who has mastered that as a career and how he looks at the world and how he looks at reality. And, yes, how he looks at this present election and the world around us.

So, Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we are talking to Robert Wright, longtime journalist, longtime author, has written a few books that you might have heard of, like Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God.

His latest book is called Why Buddhism is True, and he also has a newsletter and a podcast called Nonzero, which is another one of his books, by the way, called Nonzero. It’s a whole philosophy that you can dive into if you are so interested.

And as Zachary mentioned, we’re going to do a post election debrief and talk foreign policy, which is one of Bob’s, as we call him, specialties, and a whole lot more.

Are you ready, Zachary?

Zachary Karabell: I am ready.

Robert Wright, a. k. a. Bob to his friends, colleagues, and ardent enemies. We are recording this one week from the somewhat calmly surprising presidential election in the United States. And we thought to begin the conversation, but we assure people I do not believe we will end the conversation, with some wise, calm, thoughtful, deep, engaged, eclectic, eccentric reflections on where we are as a country. And if you want to have that, you’ll have to tune into another conversation, rather than the one we’re about to have with Bob.

No, seriously, Bob, you are an unusual soul and a particular voice. And I am deeply curious as to your sensibility at a moment in time where feelings are running amok from triumphalism on one side of the spectrum to anger and despair on the other.

Robert Wright: Yeah, I mean, I’m, I mean, first of all, by way of full disclosure, I’m on, I’m on team blue. I was not hoping that trump would win, but I did try to prepare for that eventuality. One kind of mantra for me is, You never know. The example I give is that in 2012, I was very much invested in Barack Obama winning.

He did win. However, in retrospect, if Mitt Romney had won, Donald Trump probably would have never become president because Mitt Romney would have been the incumbent in 2016. And no Republican challenger probably could have overcome him. And one might argue if one isn’t a big fan of Donald Trump, that that would be a better world.

I don’t, although I don’t even know that for sure. I mean, you never know. It’s hard, you know, it’s hard to say. And you can imagine scenarios where the next four years that, that, you know, even if you’re not on team Trump, maybe it’s better for the country, for the world, even for your team, if Trump is president for the next four years. I can conceive of those kinds of eventualities.

Now, I’m not a nihilist. I don’t just sit around, like, not caring what will happen because the future is so indeterminate, but I do think it’s, in times like this, it’s good to remember that, you know, we’re all kind of playing a long game. And whatever the situation is, there are things we can do to increase the chances that the future will be a good one and we should focus on those things.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m wondering too, if you can elucidate a little bit your recommendations for not feeding the trolls, so to speak, the trolls being Donald Trump in this case, you had a new video out that talked about not giving in to the outrage bait, and why that would be a good strategy at this moment. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I found that helpful as well.

Robert Wright: I did a little sermonette video before the election about how to stay calm until the election, where I kind of emphasized what I just said. And then after the election, I did a little sermonette about not overreacting to, to Trump and Trumpism.

This actually goes way back. My newsletter was originally called Mindful Resistance, and it was started in the first year of the first Trump presidency. And the reason it was called Mindful Resistance is because I thought the so called resistance was being too reactive, not careful enough, not thoughtful enough, not mindful enough, just in the conventional sense of the term, the kind of non Buddhist sense of just, you know, circumspect, careful, attentive.

Back then, even, I quoted this economist who had been in Venezuela during the Hugo Chavez regime. Of course, Chavez was a left wing populist, but like Trump, I would say, had some authoritarian leanings. And what this economist said was like, never forget that you are his enemy. He was speaking of Chavez or, or anyone, uh, kind of who fits his profile and polarization is his friend.

He wants the country to be polarized. He wants you to fit into the narrative of polarization. And sometimes you, you fit into that narrative by virtue of overreacting to things, and spending all your time condemning Chavez or Trump, whoever it may be, as beyond the pale evil and so on. And I also said Trump is kind of a master at getting the opposition to, to react in a way that seems to his followers to be way over the top.

And the example I gave was when Trump before the election said, you know, well, the headlines were like, Trump suggests Liz Cheney should be, you know, should have guns trained on her or be shot in the face or something. What Trump had said was, it was, it was a version of the classic thing. Hey, if you’re so enthusiastic about wars, why don’t you go fight them?

But of course, Trump being Trump, he added this thing, like, I’d like to see her with nine guns in her face and so on. And so that permitted the overreaction. It encouraged the overreaction, but to his followers, it was like, wait, all he did was say, if she likes war, she should do it. She should go fight em. We hear that all the time.

I think that’s kind of a typical example of how Trump, you know, is, is kind of the troll in chief. He’s very good at eliciting what seems to his followers is an overreaction and on close inspection may be technically an overreaction. So anyway, and I said, You know, not only is it probably better strategy not to gratify him by freaking out every day of his administration, but it’s better for your mental health.

It’s better for your, for your sanity and your peace of mind.

Zachary Karabell: I could not agree more with those sentiments and, and have agreed quite a bit with those sentiments and I’ve been writing, certainly wrote a lot in first term Trump to pay attention to what he did, not so much attention to what he says. I think, as you just articulated, there is a degree to which the reaction of like loosely our cohort to Trump has been immensely counterproductive and providing fuel to a movement because it, as you said, it energizes something on the other side that’s almost a knee jerk level of support.

And that was true with some of these court cases as well. Emma and I have talked about this, like the irony of, I clearly am someone who believes in the power of words and the power of ideas. So to poo poo really toxic words as being less significant can seem odd. But I think part of it is dealing with the real world versus the ideal.

You know, would it be better that everyone spoke well and civilly and respectfully and engage each other with a degree of maturity? You know, absolutely, that would be a better world. Full stop. But in the absence of being the world, and how do you deal with it? You know, I think in our lifetime, a portion of the country’s reaction to Trump is very similar to another portion of the country’s reaction to the Clintons.

I mean, there was just a degree of kind of irrational hatred that the Clintons evoked as early as 1992 and 1993, that was out of all proportion to anything they did. And it just like, literally made people crazy. And I think there’s an element of that with Trump that we would be well advised to hold in check. And look, I mean, the very saying of it, I mean, Emma knows this, right? The very saying of this, it seems to elicit in some people the reaction of, How can you say that? Like, like it, you know, hysterical feeling of you are clearly not rising to the urgency of the moment by even suggesting that there is another way to handle this.

Robert Wright: Yeah. And I’m not denying that the occasion may arise when an extreme reaction is in order. I mean, Trump may well do some kind of authoritarian power grab. I can imagine scenarios where that happens, but I think we’ll actually be better off if we haven’t overreacted to everything else.

Zachary Karabell: You know what? The boy who cried wolf scenario, and I think what people forget about that lesson is that the wolf actually does come, right?

It’s, the lesson is not, oh, chill out. It’s if you freak out too much, by the time what you fear actually comes true, you will not be able to respond to it the way you should.

Robert Wright: No, the stakes are high. That’s why you have to stay cool and keep your powder dry.

Emma Varvaloucas: I woke up today, you know, trying to keep track of everything that’s going on.

And I was very calm, very mindful, very like, okay, I can like really like kind of consider what’s going on here. And I just thought to myself, wow, all this crap me and Zachary have been saying and Bob, it actually works, you know, like, okay.

For me, I think that. There should be a lot more anger kind of placed on Biden in this moment than I have seen. I just feel like he really screwed the pooch. The Democrats to have, you know, an open primary and to have chosen someone other than Kamala Harris and to have had more time than three months or whatever it was. But there is their theory out there, right, that no matter who the Democrats had chosen that Trump would have won.

Robert Wright: On my podcast a little more than a year ago, I was like coming up with these scenarios by which Barack Obama could engineer, could create a challenge for, could orchestrate kind of a challenge to Biden in an open primary. And because I saw it was coming. I mean, you could tell a year ago Biden was going to be a problematic candidate.

And when he finally did step down, which I encouraged, I could tell that, uh, Kamala Harris wasn’t the optimal candidate. I think the Democrats could have won with, uh, various candidates, but at the same time, to get back to ways that this could wind up being for the best, even if we had squeaked by and won, we would need to reckon with the problem of polarization in this country. And it might be too easy to ignore that if we had won. And it’s funny, after the election and after it was clear that Trump had won, some people, you know, on team blue were saying, Oh my God, I can’t believe what kind of country I live in.

And I was thinking like, wait, we already knew what kind of country you live in. You live in a country that’s split down the middle. Whether Trump gets 50 percent or 48 percent matters because it matters who the next president is. But diagnostically, this is not a big departure from what we already knew.

And, so it, it may be good that the Democrats have to do more soul searching because I, I think they hadn’t really done it. They hadn’t done it in the sense of, A, asking what it was, really, really asking in a searching way, what it was that, that motivates Trump’s base. You know, and, B, in the course of doing that, and this is in a way, one of the most difficult things is to acknowledge that, you know, his supporters are not all these evil people, you know, I speak from experience, all three of my siblings, at least first time around voted for Trump. I haven’t really felt like asking what they did this time.

They don’t fit team blue’s stereotypes of the, of the other side, which is just these like racists, you know, Or authoritarians or, or whatever. They actually, the three of them have different reasons for voting for Trump, different issues. And even the one who’s most focused on immigration doesn’t start spouting racist stuff when you ask him about it, which again, I avoid these days.

But it’s one of various reasons I can imagine looking back from the vantage point of four or eight or 12 years from now and saying, well, it was a tough four years for us. Trump, you know, was kind of an unpresent, an uncomfortable presence at center stage, but, you know, this was, this was good for us. There needed to be more of a reckoning.

Zachary Karabell: It’s interesting. And looking at some of the shifts in voting patterns over the past week, I’m actually struck by, yes, this was going to be a divided election and close, and it was, right? But the shifting voting patterns since 2012, you know, you brought up the Mitt Romney election, are really quite striking.

So there has been a gender divide that’s been growing, but has been growing. It, it, it grew more this year, but it was big in 2020, big in 2016, started 2012, 2008. What is astonishing is the educational divide, and the degree to which the Republican Party, which had been, and I think even by me, largely perceived as a white male party, you really can’t say that about this particular coalition, and there is a striking realignment, I mean, the degree to which Hispanics shifted their voting patterns, particularly male Hispanics, particularly male Hispanics without college degrees, the erosion of, in this case, male African American support, the massive shift in Asian votes, and yes, Jewish votes.

And that is significant. It, it, it, it changes some of, I think, our understanding of what happened 2016, 2020. And it speaks a lot to, there are these moments of, of political realignment. Sometimes incredibly dramatic, like 19, you know, post 1964, and obviously the Civil Rights Act led to a complete flip of the South from a Democratic South to Republican, right?

That was the beginning of that. And this feels like something of a realignment, but I don’t, I don’t know if you kind of agree with that, but when you look at these numbers, it is striking the things I just pointed out. At least it’s striking to me.

Robert Wright: Well, I think there’s been a realignment underway for some time.

And, you know, just beginning with the drift of the white working class toward the Republicans, especially under Trump, and it continues now. And this, what you said about the ethnic vote is important. And, you know, there’s, there’s really an upside to that, I think from the point of view of any American in a certain sense.

And what I mean by that is, yes, we live in a very divided, sometimes bitterly divided society, but the most dangerous kind of bitterly divided society is a society that’s divided along ethnic lines. If you look back at like the great, the great, you know, the, the most horrific ways countries have broken apart, it’s very often been along ethnic lines.

So I wouldn’t say it’s, you know, from that point of view, it’s not bad news that there is no monolithic Latino vote. There is no monolithic black vote. And if the Democrats were assuming there was, which I think many of them were, this is something they need to take into account. The fact that it’s not, and by the way, some people on the left welcome this insight because they’ve been saying all along, look, the true left is about economic class.

You know, the true left sees low income blacks and low income whites as the same, you know, for political purposes, the same part of the coalition. And so, you know, I think, you know, some of them are saying, I told you so, but in any event, it’s not a necessarily bad thing when ethnic groups do not vote monolithically.

And you know, as far as a growing gender gap, well, uh, neither, neither of those votes is nearly monolithic, but even if they were, there aren’t many cases on, on the historical record of societies literally breaking down into wars between, you know, men and women. So that, that, that, that’s not like the same kind of fault line that ethnicity can be, or that ideology can be, of course.

News Clip: Seventy percent of the Latino workforce lives, works in either hospitality, construction, or farm workers. Seventy percent. They don’t have high educational attainment right now. Their children are going on those paths. And so if you do not have a party that’s talking to them about the bread and butter issues, the issues that are going to make sure that they are going to not only see the light today, but eventually climb that economic ladder, that’s the disconnect.

Zachary Karabell: There is something positive about a coalition that is not determined by race and ethnicity. Meaning you can hate Trump’s victory, but it’s a better thing for the country, probably, probably, I guess we’ll find out, that that coalition was more of a rainbow coalition than if it had really just been white men.

Robert Wright: Yeah, I think generically, it’s a good thing. I wish he hadn’t won, but, you know, but that’s life.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, given that realignment and given what you were saying earlier, Bob, about the Democrats, you know, maybe needed this reckoning. In your view, do you think that a reckoning is actually happening? SNL, you know, had this joke, I think it was last weekend where they were like, the Democrats really are, you know, need to come up with a new plan.

And then someone holds up a sign that says Biden 2028.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, that’s so good.

Emma Varvaloucas: And I do. I do see glimmers of both, but I’m curious where you think things are heading in this moment.

Robert Wright: I see a little more of a reckoning. And I’ll give you an example. Right after the 2016 election, I remember Peter Beiner wrote some, something saying, you know, Democrats need to take the immigration issue a little more seriously. Clearly, there are people really concerned about it. So, you know, uh, border security is something we need to give thought to, and he got like shouted down.

I mean, he just, he just quit talking about it because he, he had like violated his speech code and he was just talking about border security, okay? He wasn’t, like, endorsing rounding people up who are already here and deporting them. He was just talking about border security. And my sense of the conversation now is, A, it’s a little more acceptable, left of center, to talk about all these things. To talk about immigration and to talk about whatever you want to call it, wokeness, identity politics, whether that’s gone too far.

Now, I think one reason maybe that it’s more acceptable to talk about controlling the border is because Trump has a lot of people scared with his talk about mass deportation. And I think that is absolutely something to worry about. And if you try to imagine scenarios where actual conflict breaks out between red and blue, or between blue and some sort of a, I don’t know, nationalized National Guard or something, I think the mass deportation could conceivably be an occasion.

If he tries to do that on a huge scale, there will be protests, I think, then there may be counter protests, and, uh, things could get ugly. But, but my larger point is that I, I think, you know, the recognition that that could happen and that would be bad is maybe making it a little easier for Democrats to say, you know, tighter border control wouldn’t be, you know, such a bad thing if it kept things from getting to a point where somebody like Trump is getting a lot of popular support for a fairly radical sounding plan like mass deportation.

Zachary Karabell: We’re in one of these narrative moments of immigration, illegal immigration, bad and threatening. And of course, that precludes the argument of, well, maybe it’s not, you know, maybe having more immigrants is just net, net a good thing. Clearly, that’s not where the culture in the country is. And that’s also clearly true of multiple countries around the world.

You know, there’s this kind of knee jerk response to immigration, particularly in Western, Central, Eastern Europe. So we’re not alone in this kind of backlash against immigration. We’ve had them before. We’ve talked about, you know, 1924 and obviously 1880 with the Chinese exclusion, 1883.

It’s hard to know where it goes from here. Maybe you need a more extreme policy to have people go, wait a minute. Maybe you need to have a disruptive policy economically for people to go, wait a minute. Like who’s going to pick the strawberries in California kind of thing. It is important for people to recognize, like, it’s not like we were this warm, open, embracing country and then Trump came along and we got ugly and nasty.

Those threads have been there. And we’ve also had very ugly periods of enforcement, not necessarily in our memory, but we’ve talked about this. Emma and I have talked about this on the show, you know, Obama’s first term, he made a real show of deportation strength because he thought that would give him the bona fides to negotiate for a more omnibus immigration reform for the first time since the eighties.

And I certainly wonder, I think I’m probably repeating what I’ve said in other shows, does it really matter if you’re the immigrant being deported, whether it’s done by a smiling president or a snarling one, right? I tend to feel it doesn’t. I suppose you could argue that it’s better to be soft and say this hurts me more than it hurts you than to be vindictive and angry, but I don’t know that that’s the case.

Robert Wright: Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, scale matters and that worries me about what Trump has in mind. We take these people who came in, remember many of them in an era when, you know, we just let them in with a wink and a nod and said, you know, yeah, technically you’re illegal, but everybody knows what’s going on. You can line up in front of Home Depot and contractors will come pick you up in a pickup truck and the police will drive by and not do anything.

And it’s fine to take people who came in when that was the implicit understanding and round them up and completely disrupt their lives is, I mean, first of all, I think, you know, unnecessary. If you really want to get a grip on the illegal immigration problem, tighter border control, you know, is, is enough.

And it just, uh, I don’t know, it just, it really bothers me.

Emma Varvaloucas: Prime Minister of Greece saying the same exact thing this year. We’re going to deport the people that are here illegally.

Let’s move a little bit to foreign policy, which is one of your many specialties. We have, I think, two announcements so far. Up to the point that we’re recording this anyway, we’ve got Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor. What are these appointments messaging to you vis a vis, well, there’s a lot, right? China, Iran, Israel, Russia.

Robert Wright: Well, assuming this sticks, I don’t know, I don’t know if both of those have been confirmed.

Maybe the Rubio appointment has, is now official, but belligerence toward Iran and China is the upshot. Trump had positioned himself as some kind of anti war candidate. And I do think it’s true that he’ll be determined to wind down the war in Ukraine. I suspect that was going to happen before long.

Anyway, but, you know, the, the, the people that he’s appointing so far, and I would include the ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik as well, hawks when it comes to Iran and China, to some extent, I would say this was predictable. If you look at Trump’s constituency, his donors and so on, this was just likely.

And if you look at what he’s traditionally said, that you would wind up with a pretty confrontational stance toward both China and Iran. Now, it seems kind of official. It’s baked into the personnel in the administration. You know, that said, Trump is a little bit of a wild card. He may at any moment decide that he wants to go down in history as the person who surprisingly ushered in a sudden rapprochement with China or something, and of course, some of the tariff talk may be an opening bid. You know, he may hope to negotiate other countries down, including, I hope, China, because he’s talking about a 60 percent tariff on Chinese stuff, which would be a little on the inflationary side. And by the way, of course, bad for people in his constituency, bad for low and middle income people in particular.

But I, I’m worried for sure about, because we’re not that far from getting involved in a war with Iran right now under the Biden administration. And for that matter, when it comes to China, Biden basically took the kind of confrontational, I would say somewhat confrontational policies he inherited from Trump, including it on the tech side, the kind of tech war that Trump started with respect to Huawei, and he just carried it forward. I mean, uh, in general, I would say Biden was less of a departure from Trump on both of those fronts, Iran and China, than we might have anticipated. But still, the personnel in the administration, these are, these are hardcore hawks, at least on these two fronts.

Zachary Karabell: Biden’s policy was intensely confrontational toward China, just lacking some of the bombastic rhetoric of confrontational toward China. But in terms of restricting technology imports, restricting chips that could be used for AI, trying to increasingly draw kind of a, I think Jake Sullivan talked about, you know, a high wall around technology transfers in a way that does beg the question of what exactly does the United States think China should be able to obtain simply as a reflection of they’re an independent, sovereign, and increasingly affluent nation, like, are they allowed to have two aircraft carriers but not four?

Are they allowed to have, you know, second generation chips that do some basic AI but not generative AI? You know, it’s a, it’s a weird question, right? That you’re going to constrain another country just because you can or you can try and then will that even work, right? I mean, how much, I know you’re writing a book about AI now.

How much is China, certainly not in the next two to four years, but over time going to be able to recreate their own internal technology ecosystem independent of the world. I think even the US knows that, but if you ask most policymakers, their attitude would be the longer we can, the longer we can delay that and the more pain we can cause them to develop that, the better. Full stop, right?

But that gets into this whole law of unintended consequences. Like if you’ve, if you’ve alienated someone disproportionately to how much you need it to, does that matter? And I, and I do think it’s important on the China thing to acknowledge the degree to which Biden really did continue Trump’s policies, just quietly, right?

I don’t know if the Chinese, I mean, if anything, there seems to be some sense that the Chinese prefer Trump. I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, if the Chinese government prefers Trump, because they find him more, I don’t know, transparent, which is something to think about.

Robert Wright: Yeah, well, I think they, for one thing, expect less lecturing on human rights and things from Trump because he’s a, you know, he’s a kind of a realist in some sense.

And that’s what the Chinese like is, is, you know, and they don’t, they don’t lecture us much on our system. Their view is you do deals with countries and you let them mind their own business. And that’s certainly Trump’s philosophy. On the tech war, I think you’re, you’re right that Biden, I mean, on the tech front, he, if anything, accelerated the tech war.

The import restrictions that we’ve imposed on China, not only from US companies, but by virtue of the leverage we have over technologies that come from other Western countries, but contain some US technology, those restrictions are extreme. And I think you’re right, Zachary, that it’s only going to accelerate China’s development of the indigenous capacity to build these high end chips that we’re denying it.

I had a guy on my podcast named Paul Triolo, who’s a true expert on this, at the Albright Stonebridge consulting group. And he’s written at length about this and has kind of documented that that’s what seems to be happening. And there’s one other point that is really overlooked about the chip war, I think, which is that it increases, I think, the chances of war over Taiwan because it decreases China’s disincentive to invade Taiwan.

Because so it used to be that, you know, this, the world leading chip factory, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC, it was sending high end chips to both the West and to China. And that was a deterrent to Chinese invasion because it’s pretty clear that one way or another, if there’s a war, that factory gets enduringly incapacitated, not just because even if the US lost, we would blow it up on our way out, but because it’s dependent in an ongoing way on support from the Netherlands, which makes the manufacturing equipment. So, you know, China knows they invade. And probably that’s an end to the high end chips that were, that were coming from that factory and were going to China.

But now those chips are only going to the West. So this former disincentive to invade no longer exists and that’s not getting enough attention. You know, I, it’s just evidence that Sullivan and others, I think, had not really thought this thing through. And, you know, a hobby horse of mine is just cognitive empathy, trying to put yourself in the shoes of everyone, whether it’s people in the red tribe, if you’re blue, or the blue tribe, if you’re red, or in China, if you’re American.

It’s not that you need to sympathize with them. It’s not emotional empathy, but at least try to understand their point of view. And I think if you’re China and you, you look at this attempt to deny them of the kinds of chips that by our own account are vital to a modern cutting edge economy, this is like almost a declaration of war. You know, it, it, it almost reminds me a little of, of our cutting off Japan’s access to energy before World War II.

I know you want to have an upbeat podcast. So.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, we don’t, we don’t want to have like, you know, we’re, we’re ostriching, right? We’re like just digging our heads into the sand and pretending that problems don’t exist that do exist.

That’s not helpful.

Robert Wright: You’re not naively optimistic.

Emma Varvaloucas: Right. Correct.

I think per Zachary’s last point, I want to ask the same thing about Israel and Palestine. You know, there was a big contingent who normally might’ve voted left in this election that didn’t vote or voted for Trump because they felt that Biden’s support for Israel was tantamount to supporting a genocide, right?

But one thing I wasn’t really sure about is what Trump would really do that would be materially different from Biden. Do we think it’s going to be more of the same vis a vis the US ‘s relationship with Israel?

Robert Wright: Oh, I think it may be worse. There was this famous quote, Israel should, quote, finish the job.

And I think a lot of people meant, thought he meant just, you know, go ahead, ethnically cleanse Gaza. At any rate, I think we can, we can safely say that that his sensibilities around things like that are less sensitive than those of a Biden or a Blinken or a Sullivan. I mean, I’m not fans of their policy. I think they should have used the leverage they had over Israel and for that matter, Ukraine to bring both, both wars to a halt earlier than they have, but Trump can just be so callous. And I just don’t think he cares one way or the other about the Palestinian people. And you know, you look at, again, you look at his donors, there’s some pretty hardcore, I mean, there’s pro Israel and then there’s pro Israel, right?

Like hardcore right wing, you know, and that’s more, Trump’s donor base. Look, Trump would love to be seen as a guy who magically ended a war. I just suspect that his approach to ending the war, you know, I’ve already heard that he said to Bibi, I want this wrapped up, you know, by my inauguration. I don’t know if that’s true, but he won’t be picky about how it’s wrapped up.

And if it, if it means Israel just, you know, occupies Gaza or ethnically cleanses Gaza or whatever, I think that’ll be fine with Trump.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to shift gears as we, as we wrap up. and kind of ask you the big picture question given that you’ve been asking a lot of big picture questions for a long time. There’s a common view right now i think for most people. At least I hear it a lot across all, you know, stripes, geographies that the world is far more uncertain, far more dangerous between climate change, post COVID, wars around the world, immigration, crime, you know, there’s a litany of the world is a less secure, more troubled place than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

And I think people feel that palpably. The question is, is that really true? Right? I mean, when you look around the world, is it in fact that way versus is there simply a feeling of it being that way?

Robert Wright: Well, I think it’s true that there are new kinds of threats, and some of them are of great magnitude. I think, you know, biotech makes it more plausible, for example, that somebody could engineer a massively destructive bioweapon, or for that matter, that you could have a pandemic even worse than the last one.

I think AI has the potential for both a lot of good and a lot of bad, including in the realm of helping somebody make a bioweapon, I think, and being, you know, possibly destabilizing in various ways. I think the good news is that the solutions to these things are, in principle, pretty clear, you know, that, that, A lot of these new kinds of threats, including climate change, are, you know, they increase the Nonzero sum dynamics between nations, which is to say they give nations more of an interest in cooperating to solve the problems.

The problems are soluble, but they sometimes call for new forms of governance, more in the way of international agreements and treaties and international governance generally. And I am worried by how little recognition of this there seems to be, but in a way it gets back to the question of polarization because you know, the US has to be a part of any of these kinds of solutions. And I would say, by the way, so does China. So this is one reason I worry about the deepening of tensions between the US and China. There are too many international issues that require cooperation.

But leaving China aside, and by the way, I think China is open to cooperating in a lot of these, these areas. Leaving China aside, I think the US is not going to be poised to really address these things until we tamp down some of the polarization, because right now, international governance is a dirty word uh, in the red tribe, both sides have their stereotypes of each other. And the stereotype of team blue on the red side is that it’s a bunch of coastal elites who don’t care about America and are detached from the interests of everyday Americans.

And in some cases, look, that’s true. We’re not paying enough attention to the interests of everyday Americans, but anyway, that caricature, you know, these global elites, that fits into this opposition to anything that can be depicted as as international governance. And I think among the reasons we need to get the polarization under control and convince both sides that the other side is not as bad and threatening as they think is so that the US can become a more responsible player on the global stage.

Zachary Karabell: Well, Bob, I want to thank you for your reflections and thoughts. You got in the Nonzero world right there at the end, so I’m glad that we’re.

Robert Wright: You knew it was going to happen sooner or later.

Zachary Karabell: It’s got to enter into the conversation. For those of you who don’t fully get that reference, just look up Robert Wright and Nonzero and, and enjoy the very deep rabbit hole that you can go with that concept and how it is a bit of an evergreen one for our world.

But I do recommend that people check it out. It is an important concept to say the least. I’m glad you are still plugging away with your determined yet detached acumen. I look forward to your book about AI, which I am sure will force us to look at it in a counterintuitive and nonzero fashion. And thank you for your time today.

Robert Wright: Well, I’m glad you two are doing God’s work. Good to check in again. I know Emma from the, from the Buddhist world, from years ago, so keep it up.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Bob, you too.

Zachary Karabell: Part of the whole concept of Nonzero is not giving enough weight to things that you think are of incredibly low probability. And I don’t know exactly how that fuses with the Buddhist sensibility of also don’t, don’t like overreact to things that are in fact of low probability, or even don’t be so sure you know.

And I think in a lot of ways, we started The Progress Network, and I was very clear at the beginning, and we probably haven’t continued to harp on this to the degree that we should, that both optimism about the future and not giving way to such certain feelings about the present is an act of humility.

It’s an act of recognizing that we may not know everything, that our assumptions about how things are going to unfold could be wrong, that there’s a lot of other permutations that could happen. And while we may feel relatively certain that we know how things are going to play out, we should always step back and question that. And, and pause, right, before we give way to the false certainty that we know exactly how this is going to happen.

And that’s obviously relevant to a Trump presidency, which is, we have a lot of assumptions about what we think is going to happen, and some of those assumptions about what that group of people want to do are probably correct.

But how that actually gets done and how it unfolds and what gets done remains to be seen. And I’m not saying that actually as an act of comfort. I’m saying the discipline of don’t be so sure you know how things are going to happen and be aware of the fact that there are things that might be in the mix that you’re not noticing and that you haven’t adequately paid attention to.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think that discipline is near impossible for most people, mostly because, I don’t want to transcend to like a rant against mainstream media, it’s just more so like when you think about worst case scenarios, most of the time, people are just reading about them in the media, right? They don’t also read like, what are the constraining factors on this happening?

Or like, what are the mechanisms by which this needs to happen? Because the media is not well set up to talk about that stuff. So I think at the day, our ability to predict what’s going to happen in In the US, basically for anything, we just don’t know enough. Like, we don’t know enough outside of our small circle.

How would I really balance the, the reasons why I think this would happen versus the reasons why I think this wouldn’t happen versus let me give more emphasis to low probability events or not. It’s just that we don’t have, most people don’t have those capabilities given the, the information that they have available to them.

Zachary Karabell: Right. And, and that’s where, you know, the, the kind of, trying to be aware that in the face of what seems to be a tsunami of certainty, particularly in the opinion commentariat and particularly in the way in which things are disseminated within social media, to just be able to step back and go, you know what, this may not be quite what we think.

Now, I mean, look, the problem with that is if you’re going to really ubiquitously apply that, you’d apply that to climate change. You’d apply that to everything that we I’ve decided we know and we know the outcomes of and that starts entering very dicey territory legitimately for a lot of people. The elements of doubt, the elements of uncertainty, because it feels like that’s exactly what people try to sow as undermining things that you think are really important, you know, affirmative action, climate change, like it cuts both ways as it were.

But maybe it should cut both ways in the sense of the point is not that there aren’t certainties and there aren’t clarities. It’s just when it comes to how things are going to unfold in the future, particularly the further future you go out, the less anyone can claim legit certainty. Even as many people seem to act like they know, like they’ve got this perfect crystal ball that they know with clarity how things are going to unfold and that’s where uses of history become really problematic and misleading because people are constantly looking to some historical precedent and saying, Well you see how that unfolded well clearly this is that in the present therefore, dot dot dot, that’s where we’re heading. And history never does that. Like, history does not provide that kind of perfect guide. You know? You don’t get to just like discover your perfect historical parallel and bingo, you know therefore how it’s going to unfold, which makes all the Hitler analogies particularly problematic, right?

So, you do have to embrace a degree of, you can’t just apply that, I don’t quite know, to things that fear, that you’re scared of. You also kind of have to apply it to things that you think are vitally important.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think it’s just not taking it to the extreme, right? It’s just basically what you’re pointing out, that you can’t, you can’t take it to the extreme of like, I don’t know what anything’s, don’t know at all about anything that’s going to happen, therefore I wash my hands, I step back, I go to my little cave on the mountain, right?

It can’t be that. It’s, you can still choose a road, make a decision. It’s just that you hold these things a little bit more loosely than, uh, most people seem to be doing in this present moment. There’s a difference between those two things.

Zachary Karabell: And I think Bob in particular, and I urge people to look at his work over time, kind of embodies that, you know, he has very strong views, he knows what he thinks, he’s got strong opinions, but he also embodies the, like, he knows he’s just one guy with an opinion, and I mean that really respectfully, like, he knows that the fact that he has strong beliefs does not make him right, except for his last name, which is Wright.

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, look, you don’t need to sell Bob to me. I’ve been a Bob Wright stan for probably going on a decade plus at this point. So I, I urge other people to join me in the Bob Wright fan club. It’s a good place.

Zachary Karabell: Send your membership dues to emma@theprogressnetwork.org.

Emma Varvaloucas: I can’t guarantee where they’re going to end up.

Zachary Karabell: Anyway, thank you all for listening. I know we’ve done a couple of Trumplandia episodes. It just seems like this is what’s top of mind and for the moment, you know, it’s legitimately top of mind. So we’ve been focusing on it. Send us your thoughts, your comments, your tired, your hungry, your alternate versions of Emma Lazarus poems.

Check out What Could Go Right, our free weekly newsletter at theprogressnetwork. org, you can sign up for it, shows up in your inbox. Thank you to The Podglomerate for producing, Emma for co hosting, and all of you as always for listening.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you so much, everyone. And thanks to Zachary.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? is produced by The Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. 

To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. 

Thanks for listening.