Podcasting and the Fragile Public Discourse

Unabridged Audio:

Abridged Video of the episode:

Tiger Gao’s podcast: Policy Punchline

His personal blog/email list: tigergao.substack.com

Transcript

Rob Johnson:

I’m here today with a brilliant young man named Tiger Gao. He’s a senior at Princeton we met a couple of years ago, when I was at the board meeting of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center at Princeton University, where I went to graduate school. And he gave an interesting presentation about something called a podcast, which I had that time not done. He runs Policy Punchline out of Princeton, and explores all kinds of dimensions from the vantage point of young people who know that this world is still out in front of them. And how would I say, given how Rome appears to be burning right now, he’s trying to figure out what the next fire department’s going to look like. Tiger, thanks for joining me today.

Tiger Gao:

Mr. Johnson, thank you so much for having me. It’s obviously a huge honor for me.

Rob Johnson:

When I look at the formation of INET, one of the things, we embarked on was engaging in the debate with senior scholars and so forth. But we also commissioned a man named Perry Merlin and Robert Skidelsky, to analyze curriculum, analyze what people are being taught. And this matters very, very deeply, because we’re not just talking about convincing the experts about what the right models and truth are. We’re talking about how the general public that just takes economics 101, or maybe two or three courses come to act as citizens based on their understanding of the role of these market institutions in that. The education realm, what I’ll call a part of the outside game, and we’ll talk about inside and outside games over and over today. But the outside games of broad awareness of the role of markets, and what goals we’ve set for society and so forth, is just as important as what the insiders belief in particularly in this world, in the aftermath of Donald Trump, where expertise and authority and governance, in all the surveys, the trust, and the faith in them has disintegrated.

And part of what we’ve got to do is figure out what’s wrong. And there’s no better place to start than with a creative man like yourself that’s right in the belly of the beast right now at Princeton. What do you see? And you had mentioned to me in the prelude that you had gone to St. Paul’s High School in New England? Another very prestigious institute.

Tiger Gao:

Yes, I went to a boarding school.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah?

Tiger Gao:

Yes.

Rob Johnson:

And then you came to-

Tiger Gao:

To Princeton.

Rob Johnson:

Princeton. And you, how would I say it, engaged in lots of worlds with your own podcast. What does it feel like? What does economics feel like? Where is your curiosity at this juncture? What do you wish was in the curriculum that’s not there? And what is it that you rejoice that you have learned?

Tiger Gao:

Yes. Very big questions Mr. Johnson, to start us off with. I think, as you mentioned, I went to a private boarding school, and now I’m at Princeton so the past seven, eight years of my life has just been very fortunate to be at the center of world’s knowledge, getting the best education. But I think part of me also realized in that process that titles don’t really matter, in some way almost feels like a hollowing success. These are very traditionally defined, elitist, quality education paths, but I didn’t find the exciting intellectual fulfillment that I had been looking for. I’ve obviously done very well for myself. But I think, in this difficult path, I didn’t find the intellectual conversation that I wanted. I had to largely forge my own path and I needed an entrepreneurial spirit to find and build my own ecosystems rather than rely on others. And that’s how Policy Punchline which is my podcast came to being.

I was a sophomore at Princeton two and a half years ago, and I was very dissatisfied with the extracurricular activities that are being presented here. You either join a business club or consulting club or an investment club or an entrepreneurship club. But my biggest passion back then was to go to talks, afternoon talks, lunch talks given by economists, scientists, philosophers. And I realized that very few students go to those talks and very few students go up to those professors or scholars or visitors afterwards to ask them questions and engage with them. That’s when the idea popped into my head why not start a podcast and back then it was also a new thing. And podcast as a medium which we can go into later has this wonderful quality of allowing one to have long form dialogues, long form conversations during which you really get to develop a connection with your interviewee. I’ve just been so fortunate to have received so many yeses from the cold emails I sent to. By this point over the past two years we’ve done more than 120 interviews and ranging from economics to policy, to politics, to fundamental sciences energy, all kinds of topics.

And I guess just to name drop a little bit maybe in economic policy we had Austan Goolsbee who was the former White House Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors with Bill Dudley former New York fed president. In politics we had Trey Gowdy who was recently… we had him very recently for our elections coverage and he was seen as the head of the Tea Party and chair of the House Oversight Committees. Dave Wasserman who is very famous election forecaster ranked top one or two alongside with Nate Silver. Jim Vandehei who is the CEO of the media company Axios. In sciences we had Robert Langer very recently who was an MIT professor and also the co founder of Moderna, and the most cited engineer in human history.

I won’t go on with the list but as you can see we’ve just been very fortunate that people are willing to sit down for an hour or two hours with us to talk. And it’s just been such an intellectually fulfilling experience to be able to engage in those types of conversations. I think it’s been life transforming for myself and for a lot of our team members to be able to engage in those dialogues in addition to the classes that we’re taking at Princeton.

Rob Johnson:

Now that curious listener can go to your website, is it policypunchline.org?

Tiger Gao:

Yes. You may find us on a policypunchline.com.

Rob Johnson:

.com?

Tiger Gao:

Yes. And we are on iTunes Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. If you google us you’ll find us and you can find us on any platform you usually go to.

Rob Johnson:

Excellent. Excellent. Well, I always think about people like yourself, bright people at a place like Princeton. How would I say, because of your own vitality and intellect what you already proven, what you’re in the process of creating there’s a lot to be optimistic about. But at this point in time they’ll make a silly metaphor, but it’s like being the guy that could do the most push ups on the deck of the titanic. We got to save this ship. And the question is, are we experiencing too much comfort inside the cocoon of elite institutions? You talked about the kind of clubs everybody’s joining. Are we experiencing what you might call brand development in the narrow contours of a highly unequal society to stay in that top tier or are we exploring the unsustainability in relation to social issues, climate et cetera, in a way that allows you to navigate as the leader with, you might call heart filled perspective that might heal this very wounded beast called the United States of America?

Tiger Gao:

I guess Mr. Johnson part of your question is really asking me whether you think the “elite education” today in a place like Princeton or any other Ivy League institutions, whether it’s doing its job cultivating the next generation of leaders, and what those students are thinking about on a day to day basis. Whenever I talk to professors they always say I have hope for our society and I’m very optimistic whenever I talk to young people, because the young people seem to be doing so many exciting things. The cynical part of me and pessimistic part of me sees the other part. I would say that a lot of Princeton students around me are dissatisfied with the culture or discourse that is happening on campus. Everybody seems to be believing that we are in a somewhat dangerous intellectual thought bubble. Not saying there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that, obviously, there’s a tendency that most of us are liberal, most of us are progressive, most of us came from a certain background.

And because people are mimetic, because people are under certain social pressures, where they all take the same classes and read the same news sources, obviously, you have a tendency for people with opinions to converge. And not just opinions, but also ideologies in the way they look at the system. Whenever I talk to a Princeton students, and then I go talk to, a Silicon Valley banker or an investor, I feel like they’re in completely different roles. And if you go talk to a Midwest farmer, someone in the working class, you feel like you’re also in a completely different shared reality, because the Silicon Valley people are thinking about techno optimism, they have their own set of bubbles, per se and likewise with other people. We seem to be in very different pockets of shared realities these days. And we can obviously dive in into the kinds of thought bubbles in elite circles or education.

But I do recognize, I think there is some mindset opportunity cost, because the direct incentives for young people today, a lot of times is to pursue what is seen to be sexy by other peers, right? You want to start some startup as an entrepreneur, be on the list of Forbes 30 under 30, get a great paying job. And you’re incentivized to do so because if you hyper optimize your time at Princeton, to find a good comforting job, you will be able to really achieve that. Part of my worry is whether students are actually incentivized to work on the hard problems and tackle complex issues and struggle through a lot of things. It’s largely a much difficult path for someone to for example, apply to PhD programs and pursue the academic route, or carve out their own path to do something else.

I think there is a sense of naivete and lack of understanding of the complexities of our world’s problems. I do see how young people have a tendency to say, it’s all the boomers fault, and we just have to do this, this, this and then, elect Bernie, or whatever and then the world’s problems would be solved. I think I’m going off on all kinds of tangents that we can gradually converge here. But I guess, the last thing I would say-

Rob Johnson:

Build a mosaic, and then we’ll organize it afterwards. This is great. This is great.

Tiger Gao:

I think the last thing I would say is I probably do see a slight decline in “elite education” in general. I haven’t lived through history for a very long time, maybe I’m idealizing people back in the old days. But I still remember people telling me back in the 1940s, or something, the entire class of my high school, St. Paul school, the entire class enlisted in the military to fight the World War Two. This endeavor is very unthinkable today. It seems that the students today in those elite institutions are increasingly disconnected from the rest of the society because of many secular trends, inequality, wealth inequality, technological transformation, non of their own faults per se. Not that they don’t want to get to understand the real world, but it seems that the disconnect has widened on one hand.

On the other hand, it seems that people’s critique, from people like Nassim Nicholas Taleb and many other intellectuals, they say that elites don’t have skin in the game anymore, right. If you think about a typical Ivy League graduate, who ended up going to the State Department or work at the Federal Reserve, a lot of times they don’t actually have the skin in the game to craft the best policies. And you end up crafting very disastrous policies that you think are good for society. And sometimes, I recognize that because we as Princeton students are very good at justifying whatever we believe in. And sometimes it is very easy for us to think that we are in the right, because we’re more knowledgeable, we are the most educated, and we see the other side as not worthy to be engaged in or that they’re simply wrong, or we’re morally better, right?

If you deny climate change, I just won’t engage with you. If you don’t agree with this movement or this perspective, it must be that you’re ignorant or that you read misinformation. And I certainly don’t do that because I am at Princeton. That seems to be a somewhat prevalent case, but you see a great cognitive business in some way because people say those things, students say those things. But again, as I previously said, the immediate incentive is not for them to actually work on hard problems. So they end up really thinking about big issues and trying to tackle complex issues, but they don’t actually end up doing so. None of their fault of their own, per se but I do think there is some sense that the elite education is in decline today for many reasons. But I’ve really rambled on a while so.

Rob Johnson:

No, this is important because, I’ve done a lot of work with Michael Sandel in his most recent book, The Tyranny of Merit, gets at some of these issues. The issues between what you might call, education versus credentialing and what is going on inside the schools. Secondly, the despair of those other people who don’t have the elite pedigree and their trust in elites their view… What you might call the healthy romantic view was one gets an education, develops great gifts or skills cultivates your gifts in letter pattern recognition. Become aware of more facets and aspects of society. And then in an elite role in governance, one can be more sensitive and help the design evolve, and that’s a noble calling.

On the other side is viewed like after the Vietnam War, David Halberstam The Best and the Brightest. These guys made a huge mistake with Vietnam, and they justified and justified and spent billions and billions of dollars at that time, which will be trillions now, did a lot of harm to people, psychologically, and everything else killed a lot of people. Martin Luther King towards the end of his life, one year to the day before he died, gave a speech at Riverside Church called Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.

You have different phases in different periods. But I think we’re in one right now. I don’t know whether it’s the decline of education, or the decline outward in the faith in elites, that that education is being used for public purpose as opposed to what I’ll call private credentialization, material gain and other things. But it’s a very, very challenging time. I’m a white male who went to MIT and Princeton, worked in the financial sector. I can be accused by people on the outside frequently of being part of that elite circle. I try to hear that criticism, but if it hurts, the natural what I’ll call brain science reaction is to be self protective.

When people try to shame you, you become more self protective. It’s hard to open up when people are throwing flames at you. And you’re in an earlier face, but just what I might call those credentials in one corner of the room are celebrated and down the street they’re burning a scarecrow with your name on it. And it’s a very hard time. And I guess the question is what got you to reach outside of your academic realm, explore the podcast, explore other forms of media? You’ve talked to me about Substack, you’ve talked to me about this new one Clubhouse, various ways of augmenting your awareness and your insights and defining what matters? Tell me a little bit, what was the seed of your decision to form a podcasts and then explore these other realms?

Tiger Gao:

Yes, perhaps one detail I didn’t mention at the beginning, when I was talking about… it seemed like I was just going on a rant about my peers, but I wasn’t trying to. One issue I found that I’m quite skeptical myself about my own learning is that it’s very hard for me to know whether the beliefs I have are the “rights set of beliefs.” For example, during all the turmoil that has happened over the past year, a lot of my friends took actions, they want to do something good, and they post Instagram stories where they forward articles, and then try to spread positive causes. And I think that’s all good. But in some way, these are also simple statistics, a lot of times naive empiricism, a lot of these sources of information that we have, are not conducive to actually understanding the matter in a primary source based, original way, right?

In other words, it’s very hard to read New York Times and really explore the truth. It’s a survey of the kinds of opinions out there, but a lot of those articles were reports are certainly narrative driven. They have all kinds of their own biases. Maybe they’re not written by experts. Part of my own dissatisfaction was that I wasn’t sure whether the beliefs I held or the sources of information I had, were correct. And I think podcasting was the best way that I could think about. And I would even say, probably the last line of defense in today’s media landscape to really explore that. I guess maybe we can talk a little bit more about what attracts me so much about podcasts, from a technical aspect it’s open protocol.

It’s like an email or a blog, you just put the podcast on RSS feed, any app can receive that feed, so it’s not really published on to a specific platform or a system. It’s not censored or controlled by any aggregator like Instagram. So the platform’s can’t really censor it and you have this flourishing of ideas. That’s why we have podcasts about anything. And it’s very easy to set up, anybody can do this. And it’s such a huge contrast to the common information delivery system these days, because the common information delivery system these days, are all short and sweet, the mainstream news, social media, Twitter. And these are very easy to paint disingenuous representations of people’s arguments, right? When you’re trying to reduce Dr. Fauci’s arguments into a two minute clip, of course, people are going to find conflicting clips of two minutes and then contradicting.

But a lot of times, it’s not what he’s saying, the nuanced arguments are much more complex. It made me realize that it’s very easy to package narratives into something short and sweet, but in long form discussions, you can really sniff out the BS, right? By prodding it, by questioning it, by challenging our guests. I can actually explore the issue and allows me to see their logical processes and fallacies, because it’s much easier to BS for five minutes, than for three hours. And if I can have a two hour conversation with someone, I can really explore the issue. And I think that goes back to my journey, doing Policy Punchline and what our mission is, we’re not narrative driven, at least we try not to be. We don’t have a predefined view. We’re not liberal or conservative, we’re nonpartisan. We don’t try to interview people of a certain political spectrum. Just to give you an example, during this election season, we interviewed someone like David Pakman, who is a very famous, leftist YouTube influencer.

And we also interviewed someone like Robert Barnes, who proclaims themselves to be a constitutional populist, and is the lawyer for Alex Jones and the Covington kids. We try to explore those issues very broadly and widely and we don’t have a predefined narrative. And hopefully, and by the way, I would say a lot of podcasts out there do have a predefined narrative that they’re trying to propagandize, or spread to people. And we try to be as truth seeking as possible. And I guess my concluding thought is that our cultural, social and political discourse these days seem to be very fragile. And we can talk about this fragility later. It seems to me that because you have dramatically reduced people’s attention spans, because social media has made the profit structure to be fundamentally about clickbaity or reducing them to soundbite likewise with legacy media.

The fundamental business model of the traditional information delivery infrastructure was not aligned with what is in the best interest of people’s knowledge formation. And I think podcasting is in some way, the last line of defense. Usually books will do that in terms of giving you some long form content. But books don’t comment on day to day news activities and current events. The best way for me to learn these days is just to listen to podcasts. Hopefully you and I can also experience this today, which is podcasting is not really about me preaching a certain ideal, but rather, we can come to a mutual understanding of truth or some approximation of what we see to be truth.

And that is what I see as the beauty of podcasting, would incentivize me to really do is this inner questioning of whether the stuff I am believing in, the stuff that so many people around me believe in or whether they’re actually correct. And perhaps I will eventually reach the same conclusion. But I think the process of you reaching that same conclusion should be much more complex than reading it off of an Instagram post or a Facebook article.

Rob Johnson:

Well, you had mentioned to me in our preparatory conversations, that you had been very influenced by a group they refer to as the intellectual dark web. And obviously one of the maestro’s in the podcasting world, Joe Rogan has also been a big influence. Describe, how did they get under your skin? What did you learn from exploring the terrain that they cover? Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, whose wife Pia Malaney works with me at INET running our San Francisco operation, and various others, Jordan Peterson and others. What did that bring to the table for you?

Tiger Gao:

Yes. I would say if there’s any “narrative” that the Policy Punchline and myself is really trying to convey sometimes is that we are counter narrative, is that we see what is happening in the media landscape these days. And then we ask the question, why is this happening? Why are people talking about this? Why do people suddenly all believe in this? And how can I refine my understanding about that and examine that from a somewhat external perspective? I think that’s what the “intellectual dark web” has done in the past couple of years, which is that they saw the legacy media, they saw the political discourse and debates between the dichotomy of Democrats versus Republicans, they saw all of this, and they really don’t like it. And they’re not right wing per se, even though some of them might have a slightly conservative bent, or libertarian bent. But it seems that there’s this reactionary, we don’t like what is currently being preached to us type of underlying current in this movement.

I’ve been following a lot of those long form podcasting and these people are the best long form podcasters out there as you mentioned, Joe Rogan, Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris, I will probably even add a Lex Friedman, who probably does something more science related, but he is also engaging more in the cultural discourse these days. And these people, it’s very interesting. I don’t agree with everything they say. And I think my thoughts on a lot of those issues, shifts back and forth. But because they do those podcasts the last four hours every time, like what Eric Weinstein does, it’s just been a very interesting experience to listen through their logical and thought processes. And see this cultural phenomenon in today’s media landscape, I would say.

Rob Johnson:

Well, I in recent days have listened to a Sam Harris podcast. It’s called, The Divided Mind, and it’s about a writer in a book named Iain McGilchrist, and his book is called The Master and The Emissary. And it’s about left versus right brain process and in many ways, the master is the right brain, in his way of seeing things. Canadian Broadcasting Company, CBC made a beautiful documentary about it. Iain and Sam explored for a couple hours. I had read McGilchrist’s book, maybe two years ago. A gentleman named Laurence Freeman, who’s a Benedictine monk and teaches meditation told me, he thought I would be interested. I thought the book was fascinating. But to see it on that podcast, it validates your perspective about which way you might call some of the deep dives and curiosity that that group is able to bring to the table in this new format we call the podcasts. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Tiger Gao:

And by the way, I was listening to Sam Harris, it was really interesting that he was saying, “Please stop calling me that I’m part of the intellectual dark web,” I think at one point, because he was saying that he is himself. And he does not like to be grouped under one big structure and be critiqued under one big structure. And he was not happy to see some members of the intellectual dark web taking Trump’s lawsuits, election lawsuits more seriously than they deserve to be. And he was quite unhappy. I think Sam Harris probably also stands in this part, which is, he doesn’t like the political correctness. He doesn’t like what he’s seeing with New York Times or the legacy media, or the Democratic Party. But he’s saying, but wait a second it’s not like I’m pro Trump, or pro Republican Party. They’re probably even worse things on the right side. Yeah.

Rob Johnson:

He’s not an advocate, he’s an explorer. And that’s quite healthy I think.

Tiger Gao:

Exactly.

Rob Johnson:

I listened to his podcast, after the January 6th episode in the capital, and he had lots of criticisms for all sides about what was happening and who was using it for other agendas that he didn’t think was accurate. It was really quite an extraordinary episode and a courageous episode. I admired what you might call he stepped out in front of the speeding truck on both left and right sides of those arguments. I found it refreshing. What other things do you find as inspiration? Some people are interested in poetry. Others are interested in deep dives in psychology people like Jonathan Haidt. His most recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind about the influence of some of these coercive tactics. Tristan Harris and others made a film about, what do we call it, The Social Dilemma, on how the electronic technology is affecting us. And as was said, towards the end, how it’s fomenting a civil war because keep their advertising budget, everybody’s getting positive reinforcement for their priors. And it’s bifurcating society into two violent teams.

There’s a lot of stimulus out there. And I’m just curious, what have been some of the the high points. What would you put in your hall of fame of the things that have changed your perception here in the last two to three years?

Tiger Gao:

I would say podcasting is probably the most significant because that’s also where I derive a lot of my day to day information from all those thinkers. Honestly, some of the people we’ve listed before, along with other podcasters, more traditional. A lot of those people influenced my thinking in many ways. Outside of podcasting, I would say, which we can go into a little bit later is my only experienced interaction with economics. I’m fascinated by the subject. I’m an economics major, I love the field and economic debates. I read dozens of economics books every year. I really love the debates that are happening in financial markets, in economics, academia, and I personally struggled a lot in the past year or two, thinking whether I should apply for economics PhD programs. And last fall, I went through a very long process applying to research positions and grad school. And I ended up coming out of it deciding not to do it, which is a big formative experience on that end.

And I think on the other hand, I think my interactions with my peers really shaped me a lot. Especially given all the social turmoil, COVID, Black Lives Matter and then election season. The past year in 2020, it shaped me in such a profound way, because you see how thoughts start to diverge. Students have become more politically activated, and their thoughts diverged. And as you clash with people and debate with people, you also become more mature, you also derive a lot of intellectual fulfillment out of those connections and debates. It’s fascinating to see how Princeton students and my friends from other institutions come out of those processes critiquing the world critiquing things. And I think that gave me a huge boost as well.

And also, I guess, the last thing I will touch on, which is something we talked about last time we saw each other in person is meditation and yoga that side of things. I spent three years, three months, three weeks actually, I keep screwing up the scale. I spent three weeks in India last winter, the winter before COVID hit. And I was on this yoga meditation trip that Princeton took us on. And I had a great philosophical and spiritual experience, interacting with some of the monks there and learning stuff about Hinduism and also practicing meditation myself. I think that component also shaped me a decent amount. These were probably some of the major influences that would come to my mind. Yes.

Rob Johnson:

That’s fascinating. That’s amazing. The people in India how are the Sri Ramana Maharshi and there was a gentleman, he wrote a book, he’s a French thinker. He wrote a book called, Sat Chit Ananda. And he was trying to reconcile the monotheism of his training as a French Catholic clergymen with the polytheistic vision of gods and try to understand how they say, fuse them so there wasn’t one was right, the other one’s wrong. There’s a lot to explore there and a lot to explore. I read a book recently called The Gospel According to the Beatles. And it was about how the Beatles were kids, working class kids in Liverpool. And as they started to catch fire, what they refer to as Beatlemania was almost like religious devotion. Like they were witch doctors or shamans or something. And the fascinating thing was that the Beatles didn’t understand where this was coming from. So they went exploring, George Harrison and John Lennon were more at the vanguard of that. Ringo went along because he was a good fellow and Paul McCartney was a bit the anchor. But they ended up all four in India for an extended period of time.

They explored the use of psychedelic drugs and other things to try to understand. Where did all this energy come from? It’s fascinating to see how those Eastern philosophical disciplines have influenced the culture of the United States. There was an Englishman named Alan Watts, who was a London born I think or English born London based for a while. Who moved to Northern California, dealt with all the beat poets, and became an interpreter of Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism, and what have you. It was very influential in particularly Northern California, when you had that counterculture ’60s before it became called, what I call New Age and seemingly engaged in political reform. It was at the time people like Jack Kerouac were writing and others. It’s fascinating to me to hear that you had the, you might call it, inclination the intuition, to go exploring that realm at this juncture. I find that encouraging.

Tiger Gao:

I would say it’s probably because I consume too much media these days. I’m very deeply ingrained in the discourse today. There’s so much information and stuff flowing through my brain everyday as we talked about right before the interview. People are going crazy these days and they’re trying to put out the fire in their brain. We’re seeing this rise of meditation and so on. And obviously, I think being at Princeton has always been a very high stressed environment. I’m always doing research, taking classes, running the podcast, it’s just so much going on. And then there’s constantly more stimulants coming in from all sides in terms of political ideologies, or new economic ideas. And sometimes I do find myself feeling the need to calm down.

Rob Johnson:

When we started INET back in 2010, April. There was a gentleman who had been a friend of mine who had been an Italian economic and finance minister named Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. And he gave the last talk at the first conference in Cambridge, England. And he said, “I think that INET has to focus on three things, financial sustainability…” and that’s what this crisis is brought to ahead meaning the great financial crisis of 2008/9. Second, resource sustainability, and it relates to climate issues and rapport with the environment, and with Mother Nature. And then the third was what he called social sustainability. And then he finished his speech and he sat down, by the way, he later wrote it up as one of the Per Jacobsson lectures that you can find online just before he passed away. But about two months after he gave the speech at INET, he put it in writing so that our listeners and your friends can… I’ll send you a copy.

But he was talking about how the breakdown in finance, given the prestige of finance, was going to rattle people, was going to take people to a place of great discord, and the trust between government and markets would come under pressure. Then when he sat down, he said, “I didn’t say this on stage, Robert, but all of this is going to feed back into social unsustainability.” And when I listen sent to you just moments ago talking about your trip to India, what I could sense was a prescient like you were a seer. Because you went there before the pandemic. It wasn’t after we’re all in isolation. And like we said, our brains were burning. You could see it coming, you could sense it coming. I won’t say see it, but sense it and I think that’s fascinating. I think. I admire your humility and your curiosity at the same time, I think it’s a really nice combination. Well, let’s start with your perspective on things like Clubhouse, Substack. How would I say, what you think is the wheat in the chaff of quality media at this juncture in time?

Tiger Gao:

In my earlier response when I was talking about podcasting, I obviously, I guess talk too much about the contrast between podcasting and some of the new rising media forms. And I think Clubhouse may be a very good one, because a lot of people in Silicon Valley these days are talking about Clubhouse. And if you haven’t heard about this, it’s this audio only app, you drop into listen to famous people talking to each other, debating each other, and you can raise your hand and try to participate. And Mr. Johnson, I saw you on Clubhouse two weeks ago, when Eric Weinstein got you on. I was there for your very first conversation.

Rob Johnson:

Yes. There was a woman that I used to work with in the music business named Susan Piver, who is a meditation teacher and a really, really quite brilliant person in spiritual concerns. And she said she was going on Clubhouse to do a meditation thing. Was I interested? And I looked at it and then Eric called me and I loaded it up and got on. And then he introduced me and we had a talk with I can’t remember several hundred people for just a few minutes.

Tiger Gao:

Yeah, with a thousand people, yeah.

Rob Johnson:

That you apparently were a part of. Yeah.

Tiger Gao:

And it’s really funny that Eric Weinstein was saying, I wanted to join, Rob because whenever I join, I bring a lot of traffic with me, because I want people to follow you. It was quite funny. But the Clubhouse somehow just became this new thing. And I wrote about it in my Substack ladder. And I went on a rant, and I’ve been talking to a lot of my friends, because a lot of people in the VC entrepreneurship community are in it, and so are a lot of Princeton kids. I have to say, I don’t really like it. I don’t know how you feel about this new media forum, because it seems to me that a lot of people compare it with podcasting. But I think the equivalence is very false. Because for podcasting, you need some level of preparation, it’s slightly more formal. The information density is much higher. Sure, the technological barrier may be very low, you just need a mic. You either have to have things to say yourself, or you need to be able to get guests on the show to talk with you.

It seems to me that, at least for me in order for me to prepare this conversation with you, I had to spend, many, many hours. Whereas for Clubhouse, I feel like it’s a much more casual thing that… essentially giving a lot of people, more people to talk without needing to be thoughtful, which means if you are some mid level management consultant, or marketing director at some startup, you now have the platform to just ramble on for many hours and getting praised by other people. And you’re adding a lot of noises. The main thing I wanted to say, tying back to what you were saying about Susan Piver and meditation is that it seems that Clubhouse is really the exact opposite of meditation, what we need in society, because the whole thing about Clubhouse is that if you’re brushing your teeth, or if you have five minutes, you don’t know what to do right now, why not just enter Clubhouse and jump in a conversation? But if you really think about it, that sounds horrible because your mind is going crazy. You feel incredibly unproductive, you feel like you’re not learning as much as you could, and you have to open 30 tabs on your Chrome browser, when going to Clubhouse all the time, you have to multitask.

And that just seemed to me as is exactly the opposite of what the society needs right now. And it’s just adding so much noise to discourse. And I see it as not something that good and it’s probably not going to last very long. Eric Weinstein spends like 15 hours a day on it. I wanted to hear your thoughts on this.

Rob Johnson:

My thoughts are, I don’t have a lot of experience one or two times that I’ve been on. And the only time of any duration is the one that you mentioned. But I see the advantages for someone who does not have a big footprint in the media already established, that they can reach a lot of people quickly. I think you’re right that instead of a more thoughtful planned experience, it’s an improvisational experience. And it’s therefore likely to have what you might call more noise and related to this in the signal. In that respect, I don’t know if one will allocate their time in the realm of quality control to a lot of Clubhouse relative to other forms of expression or learning. Being in the audience in Clubhouse may turn you on to some people you never thought about or never knew of that are interesting. And it’s in that sense a value. But how much time do you have to hang out and go fishing for interesting people you’ve never heard of? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Tiger Gao:

It seems to be literally a definition of echo chambers, right? You have those little rooms and young people, your moderators and everybody pat themselves on the back and… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, per se. It’s just, you have to recognize, it’s really funny. There’s a comedian, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, Tim Dillon. He’s a very famous comedian these days associate with Joe Rogan, Eric Weinstein, they all did a session together. And Tim Dillon was making fun of it saying, “Why are you letting Silicon Valley people talk to each other? You already own everything and enslave us. Wall Street people never talked. They never bragged about how they’re screwing people over. Why are you letting…” It seems to me that the greater point I was trying to make is that Silicon Valley or a lot of entrepreneurs today, they seem to be in their own little thought bubble and this ties back to our discussion about elites, which is really… they really have a shared worldview and they keep reinforcing it. And this is not getting it out, yeah.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how it unfolds. But I’m a little bit more curious now in light of how you’re expressing. There’s a music blogger, writer, he has a show on Sirius XM named Bob Lefsetz. And Bob has been saying he’s not finding Clubhouse very nourishing in same way that you are. Tell me about Substack. I know I subscribe to people like David Sirota and Matt Taibbi and a handful of others through that medium. Tell me, what is Substack doing for us?

Tiger Gao:

Mr. Johnson, I would also have a quick plug I would recommend you to subscribe to my newsletter that sometimes I send.

Rob Johnson:

Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll do that, for sure.

Tiger Gao:

You can find me at tigergao.substack.com. I started sending emails to my team many, many months ago. It was just, whenever I hear something interesting around me or I stumbled upon a new finance charge, or I talked to some people like you who gave me some new fresh ideas, I sent it to my team. I have a small list of like 30 kids on my podcast team. And they gradually grew I started bringing in my close friends and then they started bringing their close friends. One day Clubhouse happened and people were saying, why not just put this online and make it more of a public thing so that there’s an archive that people can go through. And I really think Clubhouse is doing tons of good for our society in some way. Because the whole business model behind Clubhouse is that they send newsletters and emails or just like podcasts. It’s open protocol, anybody can subscribe. There’s no way you censor it anybody… If you get on someone’s email list, they can just email you.

And there are a lot of independent journalists some of you mentioned and also there are others like Matt Yglesias, who quit Vox to start a Substack account. And there’s Glenn Greenwald, and many other people, Adam Tooze now has a Substack, a lot of people are getting on. Famous bloggers. A lot of people in all kinds of different intellectual circles. And they write those either long form or short form articles, and they can monetize them because subscribers can pay and there’s now paywall. I think this is the direction that our society needs rather than Clubhouse because it’s more open protocol, you don’t see a clear hierarchical caste system, like you do on Clubhouse where you’re not able to speak, you can have more open protocol, decentralized mechanism of disseminating more thoughtful information. And I see that as a lot of actually much more constructive way of disseminating information rather than the previous one.

Rob Johnson:

Interesting. I’ll have to actually deepen my dive there.

Tiger Gao:

These are some of the media consumption things that’s been on my mind these days, especially in contrast to podcasting. You were talking about the fragility of the media discourse.

Rob Johnson:

The media, in some places is viewed as marketing for their advertisers, or censoring for their advertisers. And so some of the suspicion of experts and institutions and powerful people and all that is coupled with suspicion about the media. That the media isn’t like a magnifying glass. It’s like a lens that refracts what you see or what you’re allowed to see. It’s altering or sculpting, what perceptions you’re allowed to see. It’s a gatekeeper. And I think some could say in a wholesome way, that’s quality control relative to some of what happens in social media and others would say, “Oh, it’s an agenda.” They’re pro Palestine. They’re pro Israel. They’re this, they’re that, they’re pro banking. They don’t criticize the fossil fuel industry because they get donations. There is a fragility to what you might called confidence in the media because everybody is so cynical now. About how does this channel that’s sending something to me get paid and what are its incentives? And how does that affect their judgment? I think that creates an obstacle to the healing of trust that you and I’ve talked about throughout this conversation.

Tiger Gao:

Mr. Johnson, it seems to me that there’s a positive feedback loop going downhill. I don’t know if you have any sense. I was interviewing Dave Wasserman, who is a very famous election forecaster, and he was saying, quoting Nate Silver, who is another election forecaster that, whenever society sees great technological transformations, especially pertaining to the technology of dissemination of information, peace becomes very hard to be maintained. Because charlatans can eat more easily spread misinformation. And I think that’s what we saw with the rise of Twitter and Social Media, it became easier to spread misinformation. And people were receptive to them, because they already had some skepticism, as you said, towards the experts and legacy media. And the legacy media felt this knee jerk reaction to say, American voters, or those people are very fragile, they can be so easily manipulated. We feel an obligation to protect them against the evil force. And but and by doing so, they have to exert their own normative and moral judgment.

Tiger Gao:

This is an example that Sam Harris cited, and I guess people can agree or disagree, but he was saying, during the Hunter Biden story. He said that the media is clearly biased in terms of trying to control this. Sure, it may be Russian [inaudible 00:53:23], sure it may be misinformation but the media almost felt an obligation to control the story, because they feel like Americans would really led astray by this new story. And it ended up being the classic Barbra Streisand effect that they actually blew up a little bit more. Probably the New York Post article originally didn’t have any attractions but because the media tried so hard to suppress it, it became so huge. It seems that we are in this very weird dilemma, which is any slight deviation from what is perceived to be right. Any slight deviation upholding this pristine picture of truth would completely derail our social discourse and country back to another four years of Trump or however gloomy outcome that the journalists and tech media complex may perceive to be.

And we just seem to be in this downward spiral because that leads more people to not trust the media landscape, and the media landscape feels their worry is validated and so on.

Rob Johnson:

The healing of trust is impossible to do. People are suspicious of the channels and they’re continuously being accused of having agendas other than serving US, the observers, listener, watcher, what have you. I think that there’s a lot of danger in this realm, particularly because of the aroused suspicion that is the precondition now. The unraveling you’re talking about, the feedback loop is related to the degree of suspicion and distrust that we might call in the fabric of society already.

Tiger Gao:

Yes. By the way this is really funny, before this interview happened I was talking to my friends and they were warning me. They said, “Tiger you have to in some way be careful because it’s not necessarily what you say, but how you say it. Because if you mentioned certain examples or certain buzzwords that trigger people to think some other direction or if the way that you’re portraying some of your ideas could easily be misinterpreted by people as you are not who you are.” And I feel like the fact that we have to have these kinds of conversations these days almost shows how slight deviations from the script of the mainstream what is commonly acceptable in different circles, any slight deviation from that script would almost result in immediate banishment and it seems very… I’m not very optimistic about where things are headed in that [crosstalk 00:56:10].

Rob Johnson:

I see people like YouTube and others no. Appearing on both sides of the spectrum to be taking things off repeatedly to essentially not be a party to controversy. That may which I might call deaden the debate. I’ve talked earlier about fomenting broad base critical discourse narrowing the acceptable is going in the other direction.

Tiger Gao:

I guess we talked about so much about media, and I really care about media because media is really how information is filtered and disseminated. I feel like what we’re doing right now is dimension reduction. That’s what traditional legacy media and social media are doing is that you have a 64 dimensional view by someone like Dr. Fauci and you reduce it to the two dimensional because you can spread it faster. But you might be losing a lot of information and as you reduce those the journalists passed on their own judgments regarding what is right and what is wrong, which means nowadays the expert classes become more fragile not because they’re wrong per se but because it’s just much harder to operate under this environment. Hopefully I think podcasting is doing a good job.

We’re having a long conversation which could expand some of the dimensions. And I think that’s the true value of podcasting is that it expands the Overton window of the kinds of discussions that we can have and the topics that we’re allowed to discuss and we feel comfortable to discuss because I don’t feel like somebody would take my words out of context and then attack me.

Rob Johnson:

And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.