https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2IPIymsrn7M
Let me give you an example. So I started a company 20 years ago, and it struggled along for a long time. And then when I got better known, that solved our marketing problem. But it’s a psychological testing company. And when we first designed it, we designed, we consciously designed a company that would require no employees, that would have no overhead and that would be replicable. So it was computerized. And so it can scale without an increase in cost. And like I’m sensitive to the problems caused by the pre-distribution. But when I set up that company, I set it up in a way that absolutely contributed to it. Because we don’t pay any, no one in this company gets paid except the three people that own it. That’s it. And that’s part of the inexorability. I can’t say that damn word. Inexorability. I just read, did the audio version of my book and I had to redo all the times I said inexorable because I said it wrong. Anyways, it’s the inexorability of the Pareto distribution is very difficult to escape from. It’d be lovely if we could have a discussion politically where that problem became central and everyone’s attention could be focused on that. The capitalists who we could admire, at least in some guises, could sit down and say, look, we have to figure out how to get more money to the bottom part of the population within a structure that can also generate wealth because of course capitalism does that extremely well. That problem has to be brought to the forefront. The thing is, the further I got into this, Jordan, the more that I realized that everything foundationally is moral. That’s it. You said once to me, and I think shortly after college, you said there’s only moral decisions. That’s it. I was like, that’s so weird though because sometimes there’s pragmatic, sometimes there’s something. The more you look at that, the more it’s borne out that in fact, any shortcut you pay for, any shortcut pushes. Look, we don’t have to get all into Jungian synchronicity, but you know that drill. One of the things that I think about a lot is that we can argue as if we’re sitting around in college drinking and there’s a libertarian and there’s a conservative and there’s a liberal or a Democrat, conservative and liberal, let’s say. We all know what we’re going to say already. Nothing that is pure ideologically will ever work or function. The only answer to it, for me, part of what I realized was I realized I’m going to be arrogant enough to try to go on an adventure that tries to tell stories, not remessage the Democrats that I’m lying and repackaging and putting pig on a lipstick. That I can make an argument for classically liberal- I think you meant lipstick on a pig. What did I say? You said pig on a lipstick, which gets the ratio of pig to lipstick seriously wrong. That should appeal to the Trump viewers of this broadcast. That’s horrible. That’s horrible. But it can’t be about deception. It has to be about making actual arguments for why the core liberal values that I believe are most imperfectly but approximately embodied by the Democrats can have appeal to conservatives. We’ve talked all that big time. Hopefully, you also tilt the Democrats in that direction by producing that message. That’s right. It gives them a center around which to align. Absolutely a necessary thing. You need that center. Here’s the complexity that I realized is we didn’t make any money at all. We said everything is pro bono and we didn’t have any credit. We wouldn’t have done any of this. The no permission part is like here we went off and did it. There’s a ton of money to be made in advertising. I sent you that article. There’s an estimate that we created- it could very well be offer overblown, but there’s an estimate that the ad structures that we put in place created a billion dollars of advertising. We aimed it at the swing states. We aimed it at evangelicals. We aimed it at the Hispanic communities and the places that really mattered a lot. That’s a lot of value, even if it’s off by 50%. The thing is, part of how we got there was people when they do an ad buy with a commercial, they make money on the ad buy. Part of it was we’d go off, we’d make some commercial, we’d test it, we’d make sure that it was honest. It would be saying something that’s slightly different, but the cost of having our message conveyed in a way that might hope to be transformational was for us to give it to them and say, here, say that you did it and if there’s any sales or anything to do with it, you go make a bunch of money off it and just say it was you. That’s the price of it because if we said, well, we want to be cut in on the revenue streams, then they’d have a bunch of reasons to choose their own creative over our creative. Right? So what you did by taking yourself out of the fee structure, you enabled your voice. That’s right. And we allowed for other people, it’s like you don’t get to have all these things. We don’t get to have all the credit and make a ton of money and also be adored by the democratic establishment and then also be transformative. I’m not saying that like it’s any great shakes morally, but that was the part of me that was like, the solution is in doing the solution is in when I realized the airline buyout thing that I was an inadvertent recipient of that in a way it’s kind of rigged. That’s kind of a rigged game when there’s a buyout and there’s a stock buyout and I just make more money despite them being in failure is to do stuff and to try and do stuff properly. And so I think that a lot of it is we have such a failure of moral leadership right now in corporations. I mean, I was thinking back to like, would it be amazing if we looked up to more leaders of industry and more for the, it’s just, we’re so removed from our paragons from our avatars of meaning, I guess is what I mean to say. The fact that a politician is supposed to be there to help you and to do good for the community is almost laughable now. The fact that a college or university represents the production of a Renaissance man or woman in pure form. I mean, the lie of that I think was laid bare by that college admissions scandal. People were so furious about it because the answer to that should be no kid could cheat to get into university. They’d wash out in the first month if they didn’t deserve to be there in a way. So we’re removing ourselves like the money making mechanism of business, like great businesses and business people should be building a whole pyramid and structure of success under them. That’s how you win. And part of that again is that’s a timeframe problem, you know, is that the more fundamental, the more morally fundamental a decision is, the longer the time frame over which it operates. And so you might expect people who are benefiting from the capitalist system to set up their structures so that capitalism itself would be supported across a long span of time. And that would mean cutting in the people that in the bottom of the hierarchy, but short term considerations arise to make doing such things very, very difficult. Right. And if you keep doing, if you keep making it difficult another eight, 10, 12 years, then AOC is the president and the whole system is going to change, let’s say. Right. Well, that’s the risk. If the system, if the system fails enough people, then there’s enough people who are willing to, especially young men who are willing to take their chances in the revolution. You know, at least it’s exciting. So here’s the hardest thing that I had to figure out, which was this, I had an okay time. I think part of this is my, I’ve always had a very diverse background of friends because I write thrillers. I have a lot of friends in military community, a lot of kind of hardcore conservatives. The hardest thing for me was to try to apply the same self-awareness of my blind spots. And I don’t want to say empathy, but sort of seek to really understand the further elements of the left. That was the hardest thing for me. Instead of just saying you’re idiots and you’re squawking, you’re doing all this stuff to really slow down and listen and understand that a lot of these younger, especially the younger kids, younger who are coming up, who are very attracted to democratic socialism, who are way more radical in a lot of their views than are appealing to me. When I stopped and looked at the world through their perspective and could get over my inherent, like, you’re always more angry at your own side. It’s always that. But man, if I was, I have, you know, my wife’s a college professor, as you know, and she teaches at CSUN, which is a lot of the kids, Cal State, Northridge, a lot of kids from tough backgrounds. They don’t have time to be political. Those are the kids she has. They’re working two jobs. There’s help support their family. They’re raising their younger sibling. These are working kids. So many of those kids come out and they made the right choices, not drugs, not, you know, didn’t wind up in prison. They went and did this. They’re holding their family together. They have like 33 an hour. So that’s, so that means the price to buy into the system at a point where you have a chance of thriving can’t get too high.