The Realignment: 404 | Coco Krumme: The False Promise of Optimization - Plus, Saagar & Marshall on the Biden Presidency

Marshawn Sager here. Welcome back to The Re-alignment.

We're doing something a little different today. A bunch of folks wrote in with questions

for me and Sager to go over and have a bit of discussion on. We're going to focus on

both the Afghanistan pullout, the anniversary, especially because this episode is coming

after my 11th anniversary yesterday and the broader discussion of Joe Biden's presidency

that comes out of my interview with Franklin Four. Around halfway into that discussion,

we're going to transition to the Supercast Exclusive Edition of that conversation, where

we respond to Supercast subscriber Q&A. If you would like to hear the full version of

that conversation, you can go to realignment.supercast.com or click the link at the top of the show

notes. And then after that, whether or not you are a Supercast subscriber, I had a great

interview with Coco Kroom. She is a really interesting author who is looking at this

issue of optimization and how a society focused on optimizing everything to death actually

created a bunch of problems and vulnerabilities. It's definitely not a policy book. It's more

of a theoretical meditation, which I think it's great to add to her rotations of focusing

on this efficiency issue. So I hope you all enjoy both this discussion episode, the Q&A,

if you are a subscriber, and of course, my interview with Coco.

Marshall and Sager here. We're doing our AMA Supercast discussion episodes. We're going

to do a bit of open discussion, especially highlighting some points people wanted us to

room it in on for a bit. And then of course, we'd like to get access to the full conversation.

But before we get into the episode today, you can go to realignment.supercast.com or

click the link at the top of the show notes. So first thing I wanted to discuss with you,

Sager, is just the state of the Biden presidency. I had Franklin Foran last week really enjoyed

the book he put out, The Last Politician. It is actually a good chronicle of two years. It's

not really like the gossipy Trump era books we've gotten used to. I genuinely learned something

from it, but that said, like it's definitely not going to sell a lot because as Politico

has articulated in the past week or so, Biden books have been a disaster from a sales perspective.

This one came out last year. It's called The Long Alliance by Gabriel D'Benedetti

of New York Magazine. It's about Biden and Obama and we sold 1,500 copies, one of which

was a copy I purchased. I feel like a sucker there. So it's kind of crazy how few books

those sell. But yeah, I would just love you to kind of like go into, I'm sorry,

you've seen some of the four of reporting. I read the book. I read most of it.

And not all of it. I'm most, I think three fourths done. I actually don't like the book.

I think it is good reporting, bad writing. I think it's very biased kind of it's in

presentation. And this isn't like an anti-Biden critique. It's more so like, I think I got

good reporting, but I think that the packaging of it is just so like, like capital L liberal.

It actually makes it very difficult. I think he did himself a disservice actually by writing it

that way. I have a similar critique like of like Jonathan Alter's biography of Jimmy Carter,

was just a nakedly partisan at times for literally no reason. You know, like, dude,

like I'm trying to read a biography. I don't need you to put in like a line about how Trump

sucks in the middle of Jimmy Carter biography. I found it similar in terms of its packaging.

I mean, yeah, I think it was an okay portrait of Biden himself. I got a better understanding of

like what makes him tick, particularly whenever he's in his older age. The main thing that really

came through is that to me, the worst parts of Joe Biden have basically the best, the worst and

the best parts of Biden have been dramatically exacerbated by his old age. So the worst parts

of Joe Biden are his insecurities. He is deeply insecure because of the plagiarism scandal in

1980s refuses to elevate and to, you know, empower like genuine deputies and to instill a sense of

like managerial confidence with people who work for him. A lot of people work from kind of scared

of him, which is pathetic, honestly. At the same time, he's got like the worst of all worlds where

he's both managed by a staff, but also like buffs at being managed by staff. The best part of Biden

is that he rejects any of the modern framing of the Democratic Party that he finds like very toxic,

and he feels more comfortable in his elderly age to actually push back against some of it,

not on a staffing level or a policy level per se, but definitely whenever it comes to

a rhetorical level. So yeah, I mean, I think you just colored in the lines of some of the things

that I thought about it, but actually I really didn't like, I really didn't like book or did not like

it. That's interesting. Yeah, I think the, I like your kind of separation from the biography

aspect, from the pure reporting aspect, because look, here's another problem. I still think Joe

Biden is a particularly interesting person. So I actually just wouldn't purchase a Biden

biography in the first place, which once again is separate from the degree to which this is a

capital L liberal book. But there were a couple of anecdotes that I think really put to mind

the strengths and weaknesses of the presidency. So number one, and this is a

point that goes to your argument around Biden just not being able to empower people.

There's this anecdote about how Biden is frustrated that in his old age and just the current

media environment, people are just unwilling to see the amount of prep and focus he's putting

into things. So for example, during the baby formula crisis, Biden would just spend hours

with the briefing books, learning the issue, putting together a serious plan of his team,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Biden's just sort of like, we did our plan, we're not talking

about why am I not getting rewarded for it. And he just doesn't understand that like he is not in

office because people think that he's the dude who is spending time with the briefing books.

Literally no one asked of that, asked of that, asked him for that. And because no one asked

him for that, he isn't going to be rewarded for it on another level to aesthetically.

And this is where I think the age part plays in because he is just not even capable of conveying.

I don't doubt that for a politician, Biden is incredibly informed on a topic like that,

especially after how focused he is. But I doubt his ability to competently communicate that to

voters. So there is a solution here. I think this is also where his focus on FDR is like a

strength and a weakness. The solution is to take the FDR plan and just make clear to people that,

hey, like, I'm old, I might not be there with it all the way entirely, but I've got the team of

teams that people are really putting it forward. Like I don't understand why Biden didn't just say,

hey guys, look, here's the deal. I spent all of my time mastering this topic. And I've used that

knowledge to appoint the czar of all czars who's going to crush his view for me on the issue.

Same thing could be done with the supply chain problems, same things that could be done with

inflation. There's a way that he could have articulated his strengths. I am going to empower

the people to crush these problems. They would still be rewarded because people are saying, oh,

of course, we're not expecting Joe Biden to hop on the flight to Wisconsin. But we know and trust

that Biden hired the right person for the job, which once again is the FDR model. I have an

episode of Arsenal of Democracy coming out this week where there is this really helpful conversation

with a Hudson fellow named Nadia Shadlow. And she was just talking about how a huge problem

modern government, and this actually goes to a problem the Biden administration is facing right

now, is that everyone is just obsessed with saying like, hey, we passed this big bill and this

spending was included in the bill. And she's like, in DC today, we insist on treating that as if that's

the win, which that then in terms of that quotation helped me better understand the failure of the

Biden presidency. Because at the end of the day, I think people just understand that even if you

pass a semiconductor focused CHIPS Act, or even if you passed the IRA and you're doing all this

investment in climate, they are only going to judge you and give you plots for that once there's an

actual effect on the ground. Nadia's point, and listeners can check out this episode on Wednesday,

is that we shouldn't be judging the CHIPS Act, which she supports by the number of dollars that

were put out by Congress last year, we should be dodging it by, okay, hey, on what time are we

going to enhance our semiconductor independence when it comes to China? That's her point, just

focus on that. And on that point, you know, if I'm on the team Biden right now, I could tell you,

I could tell you that we passed all these bills and all this money, but I don't think they would

have any ability to actually point to accomplishments or their equivalent of the Hoover Dam or the

Civilian Conservation Corps, those different issues. So that really gets at, I think, the lack of

the lack of efficacy there. Yeah, I mean, I just think he's kind of a narcissist. I think that he

really wants all the personal credit. And look, they all are, to be clear, all presidents are

like this. The best ones, I guess, are just able to balance it. He doesn't have the balance, and

this is where his age comes in. Yeah, it's one of the, you know, and I think about this too,

there's a real fundamental narcissism of that, like I put in all this work, why am I not getting

the, why am I not getting the appreciation? I mean, I, listen, I fell victim to this too,

and I get it. I work a lot behind the scenes to like create stuff and people show zero appreciation

for the product, but hey, guess what? Like that's how it goes. That showbiz, baby. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, that's, that's, that, it is what it is. And it's one of those where do a better job

then, do a better job of expressing it to people because they are not mind readers. It's not your

job, you know, it's not their job to be like, you know what, I got to sit back and think about all

these things Biden did for me. It's just what, I mean, that's, it's democracy. You work for people

for a reason. It's very frustrating to work in a semi-public facing job, even at a very small

micro level like I do, but hey, guess what? Like that's your chosen line of work. You're welcome

to go work for somebody else if you want to. I had a lot of politicians who like this, who actually

drives you really, really, really bothers me that they're unable to see that. Yeah, I think the last

thing I'll add is, and I was kind of thinking about this, I think, and I think he, by he, I mean,

Franklin Ford did a good job of conveying this. This is a very direct tie on certain big issues

that we focus a lot of our work on between the Trump and the Biden administrations. And I think

that if polls continue where they're going, and let's just imagine where Biden isn't reelected,

it'd be fair to say that Trump's first term and Biden's first term both failed in the easiest way

we could evaluate the success of a first term, which is, did you get reelected or not? It seems

to me that the Trump administration's fundamental issue is that it crushed the vibes, like look at

those polls that say that these are current modern day polls that say that Trump accomplished more

than Joe Biden did. That's just like ridiculous. They got to appear like metrics. If you just look

at the actual metrics, that's just not true. But, and this is to your point about, I'm not just going

to whine and say, like, why won't the voters recognize how much has been accomplished? Like

accomplishment is also like a vibe. There's an energy. There's a schwa de vie. If there's a

lawn, there's all these different features. And that is what the Biden administration is

in front of doing incapable of actually translating. And at a key level, vibes only take you so far.

Then there's a pandemic and an election and everything falls apart. So the Trump administration

was strong on vibes, weak on policy. It seems to me the Biden administration is strong on policy,

irredeemably weak on vibes and ability to convey a successful administration that's

accomplishing things. I had a, and people push back when we talk about vibes. Some people like

vibes. Other people don't like, don't like vibes. So I'll try to make vibes a little more tangible

for people. The biggest advantage Trump had going into 2015, 2016 was that he articulated

that there was a general feeling of decline in the country. And his recognition of that was

something a lot of voters gave him credit for. And if Joe Biden had one overarching political

goal, it would have been to say, Hey, the way that we arrest national decline isn't Trump

running in bowl in a china shop. It's me and my experts and our center left democratic party

seriouses, but we are going to arrest that feeling of natural national decline. I don't think the

Biden administration policy wins aside in terms of passing those spending bills has at all impacted

that even when you have the factories coming back, even if you have the alliances performing in Asia,

they just been unable to translate those political and policy accomplishments into a country's

understanding of itself, something that someone like Reagan was incredibly effective at.

First look, he's talking about this. She's like, look, you know, she's like, Biden,

he's done some good stuff. She's like, that I really support that will impact the country on a long

term. She's like, but on a short term, it's like, what have you done for me lately? And look, I mean,

even the Trump, Trump was able to connect his rhetoric to one of the most favorable economic

conditions that he had no idea. If anything, the most vindicated thing of Trump was consistently

hammering the Federal Reserve not to raise interest rates. Turns out he was right. He was

actually 100% right in terms of his own personal, personal political ambitions. And look, I think

Biden, the inability to make people, I mean, I talk about it forever, I've said it around the show,

freedom from fear. Guys, the Great Depression got way worse for the first six years of the

FDR presidency. Nobody ever remembers that. It was so much worse under FDR. And he still got,

not only reelected, he got like 70, 80% approval ratings because people felt like he really was

fighting for it. And that's all, that's all people care about. It's not even about the long term

stuff. It's like, on a day-to-day basis, is the president in the trenches. The CCC, the

Civil and Conservation Corps, didn't really work, also got struck down. Or maybe I'm confusing it

with WN. One of them got struck down. I forget. Lots of three-letter programs got struck down as

unconstitutional. Yeah. There was a lot of crazy shit, which was actually wrong, didn't really work

at all. It was like all kinds of stuff with agriculture. Didn't matter. Farmers were like,

hey, he actually thinks about me. He's caring. Many of it actually backfired. Same thing.

Doesn't matter. It's not just the policy. It's like the daily feeling of action. He's failed on

that dramatically. And then the main one is, and this is, I'll talk about my show probably

more than anything recently, structural. The structural conditions have never been worse

for most people on a day-to-day basis. For the very, very basics of life, food, housing,

shelter, it's a disaster, I think right now in terms of that entree place. And if I was in politics,

that's all I would be doing all day long if you actually wanted to fix it. But that's a very,

very difficult thing. We don't have a really consensus around those issues. Some of them

aren't even really federal. Some of them are local and state. It's complicated. And so you just

default to what you know, which is either old-style politics or culture and primary-based

politics. And that's where we are. We are. And once again, what Biden knows, and this is the

part which I think that Franklin conveys properly, is Biden knows big spending bills and working

with Congress effectively. Biden has been a much more effective president when it comes to working

with Congress than President Obama was. Nobody cares. And that's the key thing. And actually,

Sagar, to your point when you're saying some of these aren't even federal issues, it's just like

if there's a general feeling of decline, it's related to the cost of education and local

inflation and housing, et cetera, especially because the IRA and the CHIPS Act are like long-term

bills, that just is not going to translate into ameliorating those issues. And I think this is

just also where he just suffers from the lack of ability to just find the right team of people

that people would have confidence in. So that's why I think the theory of the case is really key

here. So one other thing I want to get into, because a bunch of people wrote in asking for

our thoughts about this, especially given there's a lot of focus on this topic within the

Biden administration when it comes to the Afghanistan withdrawal. People want to know,

two years out, James Hassan, Jerry Dunleavy had their book, Franklin, Rick reports on this,

they want to hear your take. I want to give my take on this one real quick first. My take would

basically be, and this is why I think if there's a section that listeners would probably enjoy the

most in the Franklin Four book, it's going to be like the deep reporting on what went down in

Afghanistan. My takeaway is, and this is your point, Sager, Joe Biden is incredibly stubborn.

And sometimes that stubbornness is a real advantage, which is he's the first president

since the war in Afghanistan started, who was just sort of like generals. I don't care what you say.

I don't believe you. I don't believe it's going to be turned around around the corner.

We are withdrawing no ifs ands or buts here. And look, if you're a person who thinks we

need to withdraw from Afghanistan, that by definition is a good thing. Trump couldn't do it.

Obama couldn't do it. Never. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here's the problem of the stubbornness

since it comes out in the reporting. He's so stubborn that I don't think he followed up and

did the work. I think at their best, James, Jerry, and Franklin just pointed out there are just some

very basic things that they just didn't take care of, didn't focus on that led to a lot of the

disaster parts. I think there are some very straightforward, you had months to plan this,

there were basic tactical and strategic decisions that were done properly.

They weren't paying attention to the actual speed at which the country was falling.

They weren't paying attention enough to, for example, and this was in the reporting. I didn't

know this. I didn't realize that the, and this is the political disaster. Remember when the plane

took off and all the people were on the plane? I mean, that literally happened because the pilot

panicked and just took off. So if you're talking about planning and strategy, it's sort of like,

hey guys, what do we do? This is a basic question. What do we do if people start rushing in the

airfield? There are just basic things. I just don't think we're asked. I think that's where

the disinterest came from. He's just very... I have a real issue with Jerry Dunleavy and James

Hasson's book. Look, I like Jerry. I think he's a nice guy. I don't know James at all. I know his

brother. I think the entire premise of the book... Who's his brother? Peter. I worked with him for

years over at The Daily Caller. Peter's a good guy. Again, I don't know James. I know he's serving

in the military, so respect. That said, I think the premise of the book is bullshit. And I also

think the premise of Jerry's entire posture on this, which I've argued with him privately on this,

is also bullshit. I redirect actually an entire premise, Marshall. This is entirely military.

They do the same thing that they did in Iraq. They didn't want to plan for it. They want to

foresee administration's hand. They're going to say, it's too much of a shit show. We can't do it.

We got to stay. This is why you have to do it. That's exactly what they did in 2008,

ahead of the status of forces agreement. By the way, not a lot of people focus on this.

Then you were referring to Iraq with status forces agreement.

We left behind actually more military equipment in Iraq in 08 than we did in Afghanistan.

They did the exact same thing because they just assumed that they were like,

nah, the Obama administration, they're not really going to do it. There's no way we're

actually going to get out of Iraq. And Obama was like, no, we're actually getting out of Iraq.

And so it was a total disaster. So I think this was sabotage from the top down. I think

General Milley and all the Joint Chiefs, all of every single one of them should have lost their

job as a result of this. Commander-in-Chief gave them an order. They didn't follow the order

properly. Also this entire idea around Bob Grom and all this being entirely a political decision.

Once again, these were made at the actual command level. It wasn't just that they were like flagging

it up to the White House and the White House was ordering them specifically not to do this.

They're the ones who received an order, not only from Biden. The President of the United States,

Donald Trump signed a deal with the Taliban. We were getting out on May, what was it? May 5 or

something like that? May 1 of 2021. Boom. No discussion. And then they just, again, they assumed

it wasn't going to happen. They got their temporary thing. They thought it was fake. And also massive

indictment of ISR. Country we've been in for 20 fucking years. And you don't know that the Taliban

is about to take a district. I gave the Bidens, I mean, I am basically not willing to. I think

the only thing I will ever criticize about the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan was the

worst press conference, probably of his entire presidency. This is also when we really lost

the country. Do you remember this when you leaned on the podium and he got, it was horrible. It's

horrible. Anyway, yeah, the pilot, what the fuck is, what's the White House supposed to do about the

pilot? Some shithead 25 year old who takes off too quickly. You can't do anything about that.

Nothing. Like, yeah, it's his fault. I think he should have lost a job. I doubt he did.

I doubt anybody who was in command on that. In fact, I know they didn't.

You know, General Milly is still strutting around. So look, fuck them. I feel very

passionately about this. I think they sabotaged it from the day one. And I think they got what

they wanted. I think they, I think they, at the end of the day, they won. I also, you know,

this is a funny one, two years out, two years out, how do these people, how are they going to

choose their beloved Afghan girls or Ukraine? How do you think that Ukraine is going to go

when you were tying $300 million of fucking a year down in Afghanistan? Also, not a single one

of their predictions ever came true. Not one American citizen was ever killed in Afghanistan,

not one American citizen supposedly left behind was ever killed in Afghanistan, a Taliban every

single, let every single one go. There was no mass slaughter of Afghan interpreters. The Taliban

are fucking stupid. Okay. They know exactly what they're doing. The, the entire idea was that we

were going to have some mass terrorists based in Afghanistan. Nope. Actually, it turns out,

even though we were out of the country, we're still able to kill Al-Zawari. I mean, it's just

every single critique is bullshit. So look, yeah, like I said, I feel very passionately. I'm the

biggest Biden stand there is on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think it's the best thing

you did in his presidency. I think you can, if anyone ever questions your, your ideological

heterodoxy and your fairness, I think you could dine out on that anecdote for the next 10 years.

Okay. And I think what the two things, one, I get your point around the military. I just am

always going to be very, I wish, given everything you just said, then Biden extended his skepticism

of the military and the generals through the withdrawal. Because I think once again, you see

this in the reporting by, you know, for, I think he literally just checked out of the issue. Maybe

then there were a bunch of things going on, but I'm always just going to like, okay, but that's

Jake Sherman's fault. And then Jake Sherman should have been fired. Like listen, I agree.

Jake, Jake, Jake Sullivan. Jake Sullivan, sorry. Yeah. Jake Sullivan. Jake Sullivan should

have been fired 100%. Look, I believe in accountability. I think every single person

involved in that should have been fired, but for very different reasons than people

are saying, and you know, this is the thing I've been going back and forth with Jerry,

and they never have any fucking answer for this. Now what? Okay. They're like, oh,

the Taliban took control of the thing we withdrew to the airfield. What you're saying

is that the United States military should have occupied the city of Kabul. Do you know,

and everybody bitches and moans that 13 people were killed. I think it's horrible

that these people were killed. What do you think is going to happen? How many people

are going to get killed if you occupy, occupy the city of Kabul? We're going to be a direct

shooting war with the Taliban. You think it was easy for ISIS to walk into a fucking airport?

Can you imagine what it would have been like doing checkpoints? It would have been Iraq,

suicide bomb level shit all over again. We would have lost hundreds of troops, hundreds.

And we know this from the time that we occupied the country of Afghanistan. So it's just,

it's so dishonest. It is so unbelievably dishonest. I'll drop a nuclear hot take too.

Listen, I have been so angry lately, watching some of the families of the people who were

either wounded in this attack or not, who have been turning this into some sort of partisan

football when it's like, how many more of your sons would have been killed in the alternate?

Nobody ever asked that question. Like nobody ever actually thinks about it. And so, man,

it makes me really, really upset. And listen, if you lost your son, you freeze, you know,

God bless you, you're allowed to do whatever you want. But I think that weaponizing people's kids,

you know, dead kids for political purposes is fucking disgusting. And I'm watching it happen

all the time on Fox News. And you know, what's, again, what's the alternative? What were we

supposed to do? It would have been 10, 50 times worse. But whatever, you know, nobody ever,

no one's ever gonna hear this. I know that. No, I think, I think especially the part where

I agree with you is the underlying bad faith of a Mormon decent person. And actually, once again,

I like Jerry, I like James, we had a good conversation. I think in my format, they were

pretty fair. But very clearly, the GOP foreign policy crew is using the withdrawal as like the

ultimate like peacemaking issue in the sense that like, if you're an isolationist, if you're a realist,

if you're a neocon, if you're a hawk, it's just an issue where you have something you can attack

the Biden administration on. That's it. It's like, oh, it's like the weakness. I think it's just used

very aggressively in that fashion. And I think to your point, the lack of engagement with the

alternatives are a key. And I think also, and this is actually very helpful to think of from your

perspective, the key thing Jerry and James, where we say that at the top of their episode,

is that they think that you have to divorce the judgment to leave the country from the tactical

withdrawal. And the key thing to your point, though, is you have to weigh what happened

against the alternative. So you just say, if you just take that off the ground, that that kind of

defeats the entire purpose of the analysis. Yeah, if we stayed, now what? You know, it's like, now

what? They never answer that. Well, then we're at war with the Taliban. Okay, we're going to get

suicide bombed, SVS, SBB IDs, every single day. And now, you know, you guys got guys coming back

with no legs for what reason? Like, answer that question. And then, and then the bigger medic

question was that we funded to the tune of over $100 billion, the most pathetic fighting force

the world has ever seen, the Afghan National Security Forces. How come there's no scandal

about it? It's like, I am shocked that it's like the withdrawal itself became the flashpoint. And

it's like Saigon in 75. You know, what's the scandal? Is it Saigon? Or is it the fucking

entire experience of MacVe command or whatever? I blame MacVe command. Easy. I think history will

indicate the decision. No questions asked. Yeah. And considering how many questions I got from

folks about that episode, like legitimately, some of the most engagement I've gotten in a while,

I will be sure to follow up with a, let's just say a less politically driven guest.

James and Jerry, they wanted to stay. Fuck and say it then. Defend the decision. That's my

thing. Defend the decision. Everybody can do nitty gritty. Give me the plan.

Thousand troops in Afghanistan. What purpose? Why? How long? Why is it worth it to be in an

active war with the Taliban? They'll never, they'll never be able to answer that question.

There we go. So now we're going to get into some Q&A. If you'd like to hear this portion of the

episode, go to realignment.supercast.com and click the link at the top of the show notes.

Five a month, 50 a year, 500 for a lifetime membership. All right. And now for my interview

about the new book, Optimal Illusions, the False Promise of Optimization.

Coco Kourmi, welcome to the realignment. Hi, Marshall. Thanks for having me.

Really excited to speak with you. So we're talking today about the false promise of optimization.

There's a couple of different levels that we can have that conversation around. There's the personal

versus societal. I guess I'll start with the personal. I own an Apple watch. I have a loop.

I took those off to do this recording. I'm wearing an analog watch. What are your thoughts on the

idea of optimizing ourselves via technology, digital tools, tech, et cetera?

Well, I hope you didn't take those off on my account. I have my personal preferences. I'm

often accused of being a Luddite, which I think is an unfair characterization because I certainly

don't impose my preferences or my way of doing things on others, which my sense of the Luddites,

the original Luddites, is that they had sort of an activist bent in addition to an aesthetic one.

I don't have an Apple watch. I do have an Apple phone. I am in favor of being contemplative about

the technologies and the optimizations we choose to let into our lives.

You know, it's funny when you describe yourself as not a Luddite because you're not an activist.

I had an image of you and a cohort of people just trying to smash Apple stores or other

kind of tech forward places like Teslas or anything as if you were attacking the looms

or the old Industrial Revolution things, if it's the 1790s. But I guess the real question here then

is we're talking about the personal aspect of optimization, but the book is actually,

aside from the obvious type of optimal illusions, describing the false promise of optimization,

especially on a societal level. The idea is that there's a false promise,

and that's kind of like the word that we're living in today where we're kind of reckoning with

the successes and failures of a society centered on optimization. Looking back though, what would

your articulation of like the best case scenario, the most optimistic vision,

what could optimization have offered us from a societal perspective?

My view is actually quite sanguine of optimization. It's positive, right? I think

optimization has offered us already a huge amount of benefit, societally. We have medicines that

we wouldn't have had without the technologies and ideas about optimization. We have lifespans and

health around the world that again wouldn't have existed without some of these innovations.

We have supply chains that get us all manner of delicacies from literally all corners of the world

within days and sometimes hours. We can experience cultures that we would have had no idea that even

existed a few hundred years ago. Obviously, the list goes on and on. Buildings, building safety,

industrial safety, transportation, even efficiencies in our use of natural resources.

My point in the book or where I am more pessimistic or rather express a sadness

is that I think we failed to acknowledge the costs or what we've lost with some of these innovations.

What's something we've lost?

Well, I place things into three conceptual categories. Obviously, there are many

examples within those categories. The high-level categories I call slack,

place and scale. Slack is this idea of downtime or white space. There's this quote I like from

Miles Davis, the musician, that music is the space between the notes. We obviously, in biological

organisms, rest and rejuvenation play important roles in growth. As we've optimized everything from

our supply chains to our markets, we've introduced a number of important and often frightening

fragilities. That's one thing we've lost. Another category I call place really refers to

the particulars and the diversity that you often see the redundancies in less optimized systems.

When you engineer things to go faster and move more efficiently, that often involves

atomizing things into units and making things all the same. Because when things are all the

same, you can line them up and reorganize them into new, faster, better configurations.

With that, we often lose the particulars that make a system less amenable to optimization,

but more interesting, more complex, more resilient. The third thing is scale,

or really a sense of integrity between parts and whole. The more we introduce

methods of transportation, for example, that boggle the mind, the fact that I can be on a

different continent in less than a day, in a different place that speaks a different language

with people in places and experiences I don't recognize. That's fantastic,

but it's also disconnected us from the first principle's understanding of, oh, actually,

like, travel takes a long time. Cultures are different. The same thing has happened with

the algorithms that are increasingly encroaching on our digital lives. When you think about the

first algorithms that existed, they were formulaic, simple, deterministic, and almost anybody could

understand how they worked. Now we have news recommendations. We have digital devices that

very few people in the world understand in their entirety how these things work.

With that has come a loss or a disconnect and a moving away from human scale understanding.

I want to read a quote from a book that really, I think, differentiates your approach to this topic

from, I think, some of the more traditional ones I think someone would expect. The quote is,

this is on page eight, depending on whom you ask, we're living in an age of anxiety,

an era of narcissism, the fourth turning, or the decline of empire. It's the end of the neoliberal

order of growth, the beginning of authoritarianism, prelude to dark days, or climate catastrophe.

Doomsday feeling is rising. That quote stuck out to me because AI recently had how one of the

coiners of the term and concept of the fourth turning, and of course this podcast,

does a lot of work on the liberalism space. How would you describe the age we're living in?

Secondly, what does the general anxiety of decline, the feelings you speak to in that quote,

have to do with this broader discussion about optimization and its false promise?

How would I describe the age we're living in? I think it's all of the above. Obviously, those

sound bites are taken from various parts of the cultural political spectrum, and different groups

or different political perspectives would describe it differently. What I feel around me is just a

profound sense of malaise and this attempt to reconcile how fast time seems to be moving

in certain ways, and how much opportunity and freedoms we feel that we have on one hand,

with how stuck and uncertain we also feel on the other.

I've noticed this in particular, and it's in part what motivated writing the book,

in experiencing the move from one of the centers of optimization in San Francisco's Silicon Valley,

which is where I grew up and where I spent a good chunk of my adult life,

to a rural place that moves at a different place and operates according to different codes.

Yeah, and the second question which you answered is why does that depressing opening

fit into a book about optimization?

I apologize if it was overly depressing. I'm, again, fairly optimistic about the future and

our human ability to invent and create whatever comes next. The reason it relates to optimization

is because in the book I tell the story of the intellectual history of how this mindset of

optimization was fomented in America primarily, but in a lot of Western thought over the last

few hundred years, and how it's come to dominate our current way of seeing, not just of doing things

in the engineered world, but also our philosophical world. One of the arguments I make is that

optimization is this cannibalizing epistemology in that the more we fall prey to this way of seeing,

the more it crowds out other ways of seeing. I think that's one of the reasons that

that we feel stuck is that we've made things faster, better, cheaper, and as a result have

become so laser focused on optimizing that when optimization starts to fail us or we start to

see it shortcomings, we can't think of anything else or any other way to do things.

That's so interesting. I guess my next question would be what is uniquely American

of optimization because I'm trying to do a totally, totally uninformed historical

comparison. I'm sure I can ancient Egyptian who's chiseling a pyramid would want to hammer

that last 15 more chisels than it did before throughout the go down and get a new one.

What's uniquely, let's say post 19th century about optimization as you're critiquing or

at least trying to articulate? This is a somewhat impressionistic argument because I'm not a

historian of early America, but I am a reader of a lot of early American literature and also

modern American literature. I love a lot of American writers from across the centuries,

and I think literature is a super important perspective or lens on how we're feeling about

the world. If you look at both early accounts, not necessarily literary, but also just

accounts of some of the first European settlers here and also accounts of Europeans who were

coming over to America later and trying to figure out what was so peculiar about this place.

One of the mythic threads that underlies our history or our founding as a country

is this idea that we have this blank slate continent to

conquer and invent upon. Now, obviously from other perspectives, the perspective of

people who were here before European settlers, they didn't see it that way. I think a lot of

the settlers didn't necessarily see it that way, but it is certainly this mythic thread that

underlies a lot of our stories, our films, so on and so forth. That relates to optimization

if you look at how it works in a mathematical, technical way. It's all about bounding a certain

system and trying to create the best or extract the most from it. I think that can do, manifest,

destiny, feeling of early America and even modern-day America relates pretty closely to

that idea and that technology. I trace a number of philosophical movements and also modern-day

lifestyle movement like Marie Kondo's minimalism that tie back into that thread.

This is also a question where there's no proper answer, but I'm just curious if we're

looking at American society circa 2023, audience members will have various images and

understandings of how optimization rules their lives and work views, but is there a period

either during your lifetime or that you've read about and have engaged with where you

feel as if the balance between optimization and its alternatives were probably right where

they needed to be? That's an interesting question. I shy away from being overly prescriptive

in the book and perhaps in my life as well. One of the points I make in thinking through

what comes next are alternatives to this monomaniacal focus on optimization.

I look at two alternatives. One is optimizing or de-optimizing optimally, which tends to be this

ethos out of Silicon Valley, which is one of the centers of optimization,

that if an optimization isn't working, we'll figure out how to de-optimize it optimally,

and that can be helpful. It can also be problematic. Another response I look at is

there are arguments from different camps that we have all these optimization. We've gone too far.

The television was okay, but streaming TV is not, or flip phones are great, but not

smartphones. You can make examples from all domains. I like a quote from the technologist

Kevin Kelly, who says that technology is everything that was invented after we were 10 years old.

This other response says, well, we should just unwind to a particular point in history,

a particular golden age where everything was great, and we had this perfect balance between

just the right amount of technology. First of all, I don't think that's possible. We can't

go back in time. It's very hard to regulate once the cat's out of the bag,

once Pandora's box is open. It's very difficult to get it back in. I think the other problem

with that response is that we often romanticize these golden eras. The pre-industrial world

might have been less polluted. Fewer people might have been dying or being severely injured in

factories and so on and so forth, but there are a lot of people dying of diseases that

they don't die of today because we have much cleaner water as just one example,

drinking water in most parts of the world. How's that for a non-dancer?

No, and it's fair because I think the reason why I said it was an unfair question from the start is

if you've read your book or listened to what you've said so far on the podcast by definition,

it's not a surprise that you would reject the idea of that golden age. I do think you

brought up something interesting, and this goes to trying to help the audience grasp what we're

discussing here. You were discussing the differences between the flip phone and the smartphone,

the normal television set with cable from streaming, but I think even in that example,

you are basically tying in the audience's mind a link between quote-unquote technological progress

and optimization, and I'm not quite sure they're the same thing in the sense that I'm not sure

that a smartphone equals an optimized flip phone, but I'd love you to explain more about that.

Yeah, that's a great point. An important thing to note about optimization as a

technology, as a mathematical idea, is that at its core, it's defined by an objective function

or what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for being able to talk to somebody when you're

standing outside of you, when you're not connected to a landline, but not being distracted by

any manner of games and distractions on the internet, a flip phone might be more optimal

if you're optimizing for being able to do your work and answer emails and search Google and

be on Instagram and all these other things, smartphone is more optimized for that.

I agree there's not technological or historical, the arrow of time doesn't necessarily

correspond to a more or less optimized state.

It's just interesting because it wasn't even me disagreeing with you. I think it just gets at

the difficulty of understanding what these terms mean and how we should actually think through

them. I think it's much easier to understand that efficiency can go too far. I think it's

much harder to argue with people against something that we conceive of as technological progress,

because even if we can argue that smartphone culture has gone too far in a different bunch of

directions, I think it's a losing argument to basically offer up the regressing to a dumb phone

as a scalable alternative. Something I really like to ask you about because I'm kind of thinking

about this on a baseline level. Out of all my guests, you are almost certainly one who I have

the least in common with in the sense that you come from the world of mathematics and I come from

the world of decently light social science. I just love for you to articulate how your

background in mathematics and the focus on empirical values and numbers has helped shape

the way you think about this topic. We might have more in common than you think.

I am a writer and artist, probably masquerading as a mathematician. I happen to be good at numbers

and figures, but I think my brain doesn't work in a particularly linear fashion, which a lot of

mathematics and applied mathematics isn't particularly or it involves logic, but it's

maybe not as cut and dried as like accounting, for example. Often people ask me what I do and I

tell them and then they think I must be really good at spreadsheets and accounting, which I'm not,

because I'm not, like I said, particularly linear or detail-oriented. Also, I am very curious about

the social world. Your question was how my grounding in numbers and figures has

influenced my world view or my approach. I think I've worked with these

with numbers, with mathematical models. I have obviously first an expertise in the topic. I

know how in general algorithms work and I think that allows me to see them maybe with less of

this fear that I think when people hear AI or algorithms in the modern 2020s context, it's often

tinged with this ominous feeling. I think I've also come from the perspective that

mathematical models are their abstractions, their frames, their ways of looking at the world.

And I think a lot of you might be familiar with this from the social sciences too. There are

social and cultural theories. There are economic theories that frame and inform

how we understand the material world around us or the social world around us.

And that's the perspective that I bring to this cultural idea of optimization. It's a mathematical

technique, a way of modeling particular things in the world, but it's also a way

of seeing the world. When we see the world as something that can be optimized, that can be

sped up, that can be made better and improved, that informs how we behave in the world. And I

think that's something, going back to your earlier, your great question about why is it

uniquely American? I think that's another way in which optimization is uniquely American or

peculiarly American. We often bring this solutionist engineer's mentality to many of our,

obviously, our engineering problems, but also our cultural and social questions.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I think another question I'd have is, as I'm thinking

through the parts of the book that really resonated with me, it's the focus on

optimization's limitation on resilient. And as I'm thinking about the supply chain issues,

as I'm thinking about a lot of the post-2020 challenges we face as a country,

my end state would really be like, I want to have a society that's more resilient,

even at the cost of peak efficiency. What does a resilient society look like to you?

Yeah, I mean, there are so many ways to answer that question. I would turn that back on you

as well. I'll give a quick answer first. I'll give a tangible answer from the perspective

of living in a small community, where a small and, I think, very healthy community in which

if a need arises, if somebody is suffering, if somebody needs housing, if somebody is ill,

that need, if somebody is without food, that need is often met organically

from within the community. And there aren't very many institutions or formal institutions or

structures, even economic structures to make that happen. A lot of things here, which I find

so fascinating, happen informally through barter, through just exchanges. Obviously,

the kinds of things that happen in small healthy communities aren't scalable. They wouldn't work

in big cities for a lot of reasons. But I think that's one element of it that I'll just put out

there to begin of resilience, which is to put it sort of casually, people have each other's backs

and on all kinds of levels. And that resilience is organic. It's not top down. How would you

define it? Yeah, thanks for throwing the question back at me because I kind of cheat here and ask

big questions, I guess. I just sit back and I'll do that on my own. So it's an important

muscle to work out every once in a while. No, I think that especially because I come from the

policy world, mine is just very, very tangible. So it's the recognition that efficiency has costs,

which I don't think, which I think if you pushed a lot of engineers or people who played a role

in constructing the systems that really got stressed at the start of this decade,

they would say, yeah, we always knew that. We always knew there was a cost to just-in-time

delivery to placing, let's say, all of our semi-conductor chip capacity in a country that's

in the middle of the biggest geopolitical crisis of the 2020s. They would basically

acknowledge that reality, but I don't think that that knowledge extended beyond the tactical level

and didn't just zoom out and just be something that we get into it, obviously. So that's just

like the first step. Efficiency has cost. I think the other step would be a resilient society would

be one where we give up some immediate upside in order to prevent maximum downside. So maybe

the cost of my Yeti mic that I'm recording this podcast on is a little higher because

it's not quite made in the most perfectly efficient factory in the most optimized for

globalization location, but it is okay because unlike at the start of COVID, if there's a massive

geopolitical crisis that further limits supply chains, it won't take me four months to get a new

one because the entire supply chain shuts down. So I think that's the way I put it. You give up

some upside to prevent a lot and a lot and a lot of downside during a period where there's

crew going to be a lot of that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the

interesting things right now, and this is going back to this thought or soundbite I put out there

earlier about Silicon Valley often looking for ways to deoptimize optimally. Those questions,

I think engineers do think about those questions because engineers think in terms of trade-offs,

and I agree there's a lot of short-sightedness or there has been short-sightedness in terms

of picking off the low-hanging fruit like we can make these cheap devices overseas.

Who needs to look into where they're being made or how they're being made because consumers are

buying them and they're getting cheaper every year. But I don't think that engineers don't

think about trade-offs entirely, including trade-offs between the present and the future.

I think the devil's in the details and this is where it gets really tricky. I

have spent a lot of time with farmers in the Midwest and doing work. It started out with

sort of mathematical modeling type work and then I became interested in industrial agriculture in

the US as a system and as a remarkable industry but one that's fraught with fragilities.

This question of how do you scale things back to the point of that trade-off that you're talking

about between efficiency and redundancy is met. I think number one is a very difficult

question to answer and I'm not even sure it can be answered with this engineer's mindset of we're

going to de-optimize optimally. Something I'm really curious about as we're nearing the end of

our conversation is so much of the way you write in the book and the way you think about this issue

is really defined by your interactions with Silicon Valley. A lot of your time in Silicon

Valley is especially focused on the 2010s, which on 15 different levels we've moved on from. You

don't have the same tech bull market, IPOs aren't happening, you don't quite have the same SPF or

Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Newman energy that's kind of coming there. It really feels like at least

for a while the gold rush has slowed a bit. I'd love for you just to kind of articulate the

differences between the Silicon Valley you see today and just like the past one that I think

shapes a lot of the world that you're responding to in the book. Yeah, that's a great question

and a difficult one because I haven't been in tech physically or geographically even though I've

still kept some toes in that world in terms of my work. But I think, yeah, there are a couple

shifts. I'm not sure I could identify 15, but the big ones to me are this energy of growth

that you identify in the SPFs and the Elizabeth Holmes and the IPOs. There's the energy of growth

and then there's also the deification of this world. And I think both of those started to decline

maybe in the late 2010s, maybe 2018 or so when suddenly people started asking questions about

giving their personal data to these giant tech companies when people started asking questions

about the business practices of some of these too good to be true kind of founders.

And now my sense is that these companies still exist, but they've become kind of commoditized,

they're more like utilities. They're still drawing a lot of talent,

but maybe not, I think there's a micro bubble right now with AI and talent going there

and a bubble in belief there, but it's certainly not as big as what we saw in the late 2000s and

throughout the 2010s. So I think it's a long way of saying I think the industry has become

kind of boring and also more universally despised or looked down upon even as we continue to use

all these products. I think the closing question and this is just kind of interesting because

obviously you moving to a rural part of the country plays a big role in this story and this

journey. I'm just kind of fascinated by the idea that you kind of said that I got alive and really

been in Silicon Valley, I'm looking on the outside, but it feels like so much of the story of the past

20 years or so is everything in many ways becoming like Silicon Valley, tech swallowing everything,

soft breeding the world to give the Mark Andreessen shout out. It seems like part of the

another way of articulating your point that tech has become boring is that everything has just

become tech and when everything is just this thing, it's obviously there. If everyone's kind of

walking around in all birds in certain parts of the country, obviously this isn't everywhere

because there's been a tech de-formalization of the workplace. It's hard for me to imagine a

war where you're just totally separated from. So just close with your articulation of your ability

to just be on the outside and escape something that feels really totalizing.

Yeah, well, that is one of the places I land in the book is that there's no opting out of

optimization. We're all part of this world for better or for worse. I will say though that

I think optimization in Silicon Valley, the tech world, it's infused our culture in

these subtle and in some ways quite dangerous ways, this way of seeing things.

But in terms of the actual technologies, I'm always amazed at the disconnect when I talk to

friends who are in San Francisco or New York or still very much in the trenches in this world.

And all the front and center are these debates about AI and chat GPT and so on and so forth.

And then I go to a party here or in a population of a few thousand, I could probably find if I

tried really hard, like maybe 10 people who had even heard of chat GPT. So I think Silicon Valley

does overestimate its reach in terms or I guess its own importance. It overestimates its own

importance, which is not to say that some of these underlying philosophies aren't still,

you know, I think they are definitely in the water in many places beyond Silicon Valley.

That is an excellent place to end. The book is optimal illusions, the false promise

of optimization. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.

Thank you so much, Marshall. Really enjoyed it.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. You learned something like the sort of mission

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.