As A.I. companies race to rid the world of gainful employment, we now face the question of what it would even mean to be human if labor itself becomes obsolete. For their latest book club episode of the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem read Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition,” which considered this very question in 1958. Arendt, who spent years as a stateless person during the Holocaust and surrounding years, had a unique perspective on the nature of human agency and political freedom. She suggests that the practice of participating in discursive democracy is more important than any outcomes that process produces — a view that did not sit well with Matt or Jerusalem. Check out their full discussion in the video above.

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Show notes:

This transcript was generated and edited by A.I., so it may not be perfectly consistent with the audio. If you see any deviations you find important, please get in touch, and we will fix them.

Jerusalem Demsas: Hi, I’m Jerusalem Demsas.

Matthew Yglesias: I’m Matthew Yglesias.

Jerusalem Demsas: And welcome to The Argument. This week, we read The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. We read this book because right now technological progress in the form of artificial intelligence is raising a bunch of questions about the meaning and role of humanity in a world where maybe we have to work a lot less, maybe we have to work not at all, maybe human intelligence is valued a lot less because we have artificial intelligence that is distributable to everyone for a very small amount of money. And it’s raising a bunch of questions that people are debating about: Well, what would it mean to be a person in that world? What would it mean to provide value in that world? Like, what should we be doing with our time?

Matthew Yglesias: It’s raising questions about the human condition.

Jerusalem Demsas: About the human condition.

Matthew Yglesias: So, we thought, “There’s AI, it’s raising questions about the human condition.” Conveniently, there’s a book squarely with that title.

Jerusalem Demsas: And aren’t — Basically, obviously she’s writing this in the 1950s, it comes out in 1958, and obviously she does not know about artificial intelligence, but she is very much writing about the potential for something like AI, which would do a lot of human labor and remove the need for us to work.

Matthew Yglesias: She writes about the idea of automation a fair amount explicitly in the book. She’s also got — I mean, it’s interesting. It’s something that makes the book also feel contemporary to me, even though it’s quite old, is that she — the Sputnik launch happened while she was working on this. And right at the very beginning, she says, “The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet.” And I’m not actually 100% convinced that that’s true.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: I mean, compare — if you imagine a world in which there’d been very little progress in computers over the past 30 years, but we had continued to make progress…

Jerusalem Demsas: …like space travel and space colonies.

Matthew Yglesias: Right. That, you know, if you could go to a moon base, but with the information technology of 2017, would that be a radical alteration in the human condition? It’s an…

Jerusalem Demsas: I think if you were growing up — like, if you were being born and growing up in a completely sterile human manmade environment, that would, like — it’s very difficult for me to even imagine what that would mean for a person to have no interaction with the physical reality outside of things that were mediated through — like, if you needed to breathe with technology, if you needed to eat stuff that had been packaged from Earth and was not grown on this planet, I think it’d kind of — maybe I’m just thinking it would be a bad life. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s not changing the human condition, it just sucks.

Matthew Yglesias: Well, maybe so. At any rate, the point is she is talking — she’s writing at a time when the pace of technological change had been very rapid.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: And she is thinking about how, you know, humanity relates to its securing of sustenance, and how that relates to the life of the mind, and how that relates to how — what we understand the purpose of human life to be. And she’s quite critical of the idea that all of our society — it’s hard to say any words about this book because, I have to say, she uses a lot of terms in slightly idiosyncratic ways.

Jerusalem Demsas: Slightly.

Matthew Yglesias: So, I was going to say that she’s critical of the notion that the only thing society should care about is the material well-being of its citizens. But I think she uses “society” in a different way than that. She doesn’t like the idea that that’s the only thing we should be caring about, that we should just be…

Jerusalem Demsas: Or that even it should be a political question, which, again, she’s using “political” in a kind of a bit of a weird way. But maybe we should just take a step back here, because one thing that you really liked about this book is the distinction it makes between work and labor.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, this was an interesting idea. I would say the whole deal with this book — she is working in a kind of German-derived philosophical tradition that I was taught in college not to approve of. And I think she carries over many of the annoying habits of this. Work and labor are two different words that exist in the English language. They have broadly the same meaning. You can, if you want to, squint at it really, really hard and try to come up with some disagreement. But, you know, linguistically, English often has twinned words because one comes from Germanic and the other comes from French. There’s no cosmic significance to that fact. She spends a lot of time insisting that there is, like, doing etymology about these words.

But I think that conceptually, if you just let it wash over you, what she is getting at here is that when people are doing work and labor, labor work, whatever it is, there’s two different things that are happening. And there is — people are trying to not die, and that requires work, as she calls it — no, she calls that labor. But people are also trying to make things. And she puts a lot of — she puts a lot of emphasis on the durability of the works. But I would say even beyond that, that there’s a question of — because she also talks about poetry as a potentially a form of work, if it’s enduring — that, you know, people place some intrinsic value on what it is that they are doing, that there’s a lot of — people take pride in their craftsmanship.

And I mean, I think in my own life, I write a Substack newsletter, I publish articles elsewhere, I make money doing that stuff. But I also care about…

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: …what I am doing, right? And so, there’s the labor aspect to my job, which is I want people to subscribe to the newsletter. I want people to like and subscribe to this podcast. But also, I want to get ideas that are out there. I want to be influential. I want to be well thought of by intelligent people. And that duality of work and labor is — I think we all understand that. It’s not — you hear that and you’re not like, “Oh my God, it never occurred to me that there’s any significance to my career other than as a way to get money.”

Jerusalem Demsas: I think there’s also another distinction here, which is she’s very critical of consumerism and the idea that people are just getting items in order to — because you can imagine a very durable item that someone has created that Arendt does not view as work because it was only durable because the market demanded it. For instance, I don’t want to live in a house that’s flimsy. I don’t really care a lot at this stage of my life about the artistry and the craftsmanship of the house. I don’t put a lot of stock into that. I think Arendt would be not super happy about my attitude towards that object and thinks I’m not orienting myself properly around it.

But I do think sometimes through reading this book — it’s not in my nature, but I think you have to let go of the fact that a lot of these distinctions she’s drawing are not perfectly clean. It’s not like a social science research paper. It’s not like an economics paper where you have to have very clean variables and separation between these things — and try to just get the vibe of what she’s trying to explain to you.

And I do think the big core of the book is that she thinks in order to be fully human, she wants us to take a lesson from the ancient Greeks and care not just about things like what’s going to keep me going physically, like feeding myself, feeding my family, making sure I have a roof over our heads, and not just about, “Oh, am I doing a good job at work? Am I producing good articles? Am I helping my boss out?” Whatever. But then there’s this other third thing, which she calls action, which is: How do you show up in the public space with other people to reveal who you are?

And that sounds kind of like wishy-washy vibesy, but she analogized — and she’s a really big fan of Tocqueville. So, she comes to the United States — I think she’s in Massachusetts — and she’s obviously kind of getting a sense of the American town hall culture. And she really, really likes that. She thinks it’s an example of what it means to be a full human is to show up in the same way that the ancient Greeks would in a political conversation. And she’s a big fan of Socrates as a result of this.

And I mean, I think a big context of this whole book you have to remember is that Arendt was a refugee coming out of the World War II context. She was Jewish and she was hounded out of Germany. She’s hounded out of France and she gets to the United States and she is very concerned with this problem of statelessness. She’s really concerned about the fact that even if you are a refugee who’s in a position where someone is providing you shelter and food and is caring for your very physical material needs, that you’re missing some aspect of what it means to be fully human because you have no state, no opportunity, no agora, no town hall meeting by which you can actually show up as a person and say, “These are my beliefs, these are my views that are separate from this material deprivation question.” And so, I think that that context is super important.

And I think that, you know, if you’re analogizing this to the modern day and the concerns people are having with artificial intelligence, I think what an Arendtian response to this moment would be is to say like, “Yeah, if AI creates superabundance and all of a sudden people do not have to work anymore to feed themselves, you don’t have to work anymore to fulfill this — you know, fulfill all the material deprivation that the world normally — you know, the human condition is normally built around — then we still have tons of political questions that we still have to resolve. We still have to resolve, like, OK, how do you still want your kids to learn things about history? How should public education be situated? What should cities look like?” These are political questions that she wants people to be engaged in.

And we’ve talked about — Matt and I talked about this a little bit before the pod anyway, but I do think that she has a very narrow conception of what a real full human and what full human freedom looks like that I am, you know, I really, really don’t ascribe to a lot of what she talks about in this book. But I think that it’s important that she does not believe that most people have ever or will ever approximate the level of freedom she’s talking about.

Matthew Yglesias: But here’s something that I was thinking about as I read this is Kelsey Piper wrote a piece for The Argument last fall, and the headline is “Medieval kings would envy you.” And the point that she’s making — that Kelsey’s making — is that if you compare the living standards that exist for an average middle class person in the contemporary developed world compared to the richest of the rich in the 11th century, we’re way, way, way better off in so many material ways. And I think you could take Kelsey’s article and you could certainly transport it to 1957, right? Nothing that Kelsey wrote in 2025 would not have been true in Arendt’s day. And so, from an Arendtian point of view, you could say we go back to Athens, we go back to the classical polis, and we have the citizens who…

Jerusalem Demsas: I will say, I think that if you lived through World War II, maybe you’re like, “I don’t know.”

Matthew Yglesias: No, no, no. But I mean, sure. Yes. But I mean — but I don’t think Arendt necessarily sees that. I mean, I’m just — I’m trying to inhabit, you know, Arendt’s mindset. And she talks a lot about classical polis and the citizens and the equality of the citizens as they act in the public arena politically. And she acknowledges that, of course, most of the human beings present in classical Athens are not citizens of Athens. It is mostly a slave society. And the ability of the citizens to be citizens was dependent on the exploitation of this slave labor.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: So, you go from classical Athens to 1957. The world has become much, much, much more affluent, right? The laborer of 1957 has an objective living standard which is much higher than the citizen of classical Athens because they have all this technology that was not — you could own however many Athenian slaves you wanted and you just — you couldn’t have a car.

Jerusalem Demsas: No. Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Right? And so, you could have — if human values were oriented completely differently, we could — forgetting AI or anything like that, right? — we theoretically could have taken all the technology that was developed over the intervening 2,000 years and used it to create a world in which everybody had much lower living standards than the real living standards of 1957, but where we were doing more action.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: Right? And instead, what we chose to do was become this society of laborers in which we don’t — we don’t have slaves, and we’re doing a lot of work. And people are caring a lot about their careers, but people are also just caring a lot about their consumption, right?

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: And this book has almost no intersection with Betty Friedan’s concerns of about the same time, even though they’re two women. But what they really have in common is a really negative attitude about consumer culture of the 1950s and this kind of emphasis on material abundance in postwar America, which they don’t think is good or interesting, right? And they want people to be doing…

Jerusalem Demsas: …life of the mind, but not actually life of the mind. I mean, this is the thing that’s important.

Matthew Yglesias: Well, in Arendt’s case, at least, she really wants people doing action. Friedan is more saying, I would say — you know, if you put Friedan in Arendt’s terms, yes — Friedan is saying essentially that housewives of the 1950s are stuck laboring, that they are in effect slaves of this 1950s household economy. And she wants them to become craftsmen and artists and people who are taking pride in their activities. But Arendt doesn’t want that either. She wants people to be…

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, I think that she’ll say — I mean, it’s very difficult because, again, she’s not incredibly clear about this, but I actually can’t tell if the argument she’s making is: To be fully human, you need to be in touch with both the fact that there’s material deprivation — you need to labor sometimes, feed yourself, whatever. You don’t want that just to be handed over to everyone else. You need sometimes to work, you should take pride in the work that you create, you should be a craftsman or whatever. And sometimes you need to enter the agora and do action.

And I mean, I think the thing that she is reacting to — because I think that most people who are listening to this podcast live in the long shadow of Western philosophy that has focused much more on the internal life, right? It’s said, you start with “I think, therefore I am.” That’s the first thing that you can know. You can’t really know what’s going on outside of you. I can’t know whether you are exactly what I’m imagining you are in my head, but I can retreat into myself and think about things. I can also contemplate, which means also, you know, kind of like almost like meditating and taking in the world, all this internal life. And so much of philosophy — Western philosophy — has been focused on this internal life and what you can derive on top of that. Like, in order to get to Kant and Rawls or whatever, you have to build that on top of this internal conception of the self.

And what Arendt is saying is that all of this is, like, fucking insane. That you guys have lost the plot entirely. That philosophy — that figuring out what the good life should be like — doesn’t happen inside your own brain. It happens with other people. It happens when you are in an environment where there are free and equal individuals who have the opportunity to persuade, to argue, whatever.

She doesn’t talk about this in this book, but later on it becomes clear that she’s, like, not super — I mean, in this book, she’s not super interested in the content of what someone would do when they were acting. She doesn’t really seem to care if you go into the agora and you’re like, “Time to argue for the worst economic policy known to mankind and destroy the economy.” That’s not her concern. And later on, she gets pushed on this and she’s pretty, again, agnostic about it. Obviously, I think she doesn’t want everyone to be poor, but it’s just not the thing that she thinks is important when she’s considering the question of: Are you really a free human? Are you living the most fully a human can live?

And I find this kind of insane because I’m like, I think it really does matter what you do when you’re in the agora. If you’re in the agora and you are advocating for policies that are going to lead to the end of people’s material well-being, I don’t think we should consider that you being fully human.

Matthew Yglesias: Well, so I — OK, let’s take a break and then I want to dig in on this.

OK, we’re back. I want to dig into this question about prosperity, because all kinds of people all the time are saying, you know, “There’s more to life than GDP,” or whatever. But she truly bites the bullet on this.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: This is a fascinating discussion. She says — she’s talking about the development of a consumer society and the liberation of labor. And she says, “The point is not that for the first time in history laborers were admitted and given equal rights in the public realm, but that we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.” Which she means…

Jerusalem Demsas: Abundance mention!

Matthew Yglesias: Yes. Like, bad. She thinks that it is bad...

Jerusalem Demsas: Derogatory.

Matthew Yglesias: …that we are making the necessities of life abundant. She acknowledges that they are necessary. She doesn’t want to push us into famine. But she’s genuinely — she’s expressing genuine skepticism that obtaining above subsistence living standards is worthwhile. She says sarcastically, “Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of,” quote, “‘making a living’; such is the verdict of society.” Society, in her view, is a bad thing. Society means, like, you’re being heckled.

Jerusalem Demsas: The conformists.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, by the woke mob. “And the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly.”

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: So, she thinks that people face social pressure to try to have things, and that a lot of politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to give people material prosperity, and that this is bad, that this is an example of us all being conformists — and that the professions, which, you know — because back in the Athenian slave labor society, you have the highfalutin citizens, you have the broad mass of slaves who are either doing household work or they’re farming so people don’t starve. But there’s this middle class professionals who also exist there, and they’re — we normally think positively of them, but she thinks it’s bad that people in the professions are not challenging this. And she says the only society — “the only exception society is willing to grant is the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only ‘worker’ left in a laboring society.”

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: So, she feels from this 1957 standpoint that if you find, you know, maybe some beatnik poets or whoever down in Greenwich Village, they, yes, maybe try to make money, but everybody understands that that’s not a good career path…

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: …from a standpoint of material acquisition, but at least respects the idea that, that the artist may care about their work. But she says everybody else in postwar America — all the craftsmen, everyone has been degraded to the standpoint of a laborer, by which she just means they’re trying to do things that are useful for other human beings. And I mean, it’s not — I think this is a little stupid, but it’s not stupid. Like, she’s thought it through.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: This is what she’s saying, that we are — we’re in this postwar economic boom, and she thinks it’s a huge waste of everybody’s time.

Jerusalem Demsas: I want to dig into the social science thing, but the first thing I want to say to everyone is that Hannah Arendt — the one thing I fully understand and respect about her is that she is a hater. She’s a hater of Plato. She hates Christians. She hates Marx. She hates social science. She hates simple sentence structures. She hates society. She is, through this entire book, just absolutely hating.

And social science, I think, is the one that gets at this thing that you’re talking about most clearly. She hates the idea that at some level averages are implying — or the use of social science in politics is implying — that you can aggregate preferences, you can find some mathematical solution that is most optimal for everyone’s problems. And she thinks this is ridiculous because we are all individual special snowflakes that have different whatever, plural interests. And I agree that we are all individual special snowflakes that have very different interests. And I also think that one thing — many things that we have in common are humans don’t like to starve. They prefer to have clean air to breathe. They enjoy there being sunshine and not smog in the air. They like the idea that they can buy basic necessities and wants for their children. Vacations are nice. And there are all these things about material needs that most people alive today think it would be really great if the government would just focus on resolving these material concerns.

And Arendt is like, “No, even the idea that an economist would try to approximate an average is an insult to the individual and it’s an insult to you.” And so, next time you’re thinking to yourself, “What is the optimal economic policy?” just know Hannah Arendt hates you.

Matthew Yglesias: Well, and she says that the discussion of the whole problem of technology has been led strangely astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Where — yeah, so she thinks it’s bad to worry about the usefulness of technologies. She has this take on science where she wants to, I guess, defend the telescope against the accusation that it has some kind of useful purpose. And she wants to insist that Galileo — no, because she thinks this is good.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: She wants to insist that Galileo was just genuinely curious what astronomical objects look like. And so, they had to invent this better technology to find it out, but that there’s no point to this. She thinks that — but I’m saying, because I don’t agree with her, so I’m saying it like it makes it sound bad. But that this is, to her, a good example of the power and the merit of the Scientific Revolution, is that in her view, it’s inspired sincerely by completely abstract curiosity about the outside world, and it produces, in her view, this revolution in human self-understanding.

Jerusalem Demsas: I don’t know if she’d call herself this, but she just feels very romantic to me. Like, it just feels like very much she doesn’t enjoy the categorization that the Enlightenment has brought to science. She likes the idea that people are sort of out in the world. I mean, the part about the romantic — romanticism that she wouldn’t like is the whole just being outside and contemplating by yourself as, like, a hermit. And she wants people to be more social or whatever.

I will say, in her favor, she is willing to stake out a position that I find — she, and she knows — is so anathema to basically every human being, because she thinks that we’ve all gone wrong since Plato. That ever since Plato decided to write about the famous allegory of the cave, and he talks about — I think the most core thing he talks about…

Matthew Yglesias: I’m not super clear on where she thinks people went wrong, actually. I feel like she thinks everyone — and has just always been wrong about everything.

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, she definitely thinks — but she loves Socrates. And I think the thing that she gets mad about with Plato, who she brings up repeatedly in this, is Plato has this idea of the ideal forms. He says — an example of this is, like, if I were to draw for a young kid a triangle and it was, like, slightly askew, they would understand what a perfect triangle should look like, even if they had never ever seen one before. And so, he abstracts from this that there are these things that are outside of the world that are these perfect ideal forms — of a triangle, of a chair, of a, you know, of a, you know, whatever it is. And then he abstracts this to other things that are not material. So, there is a perfect Platonic ideal of justice, of truth, of beauty, or whatever it is. And you’re trying to approximate — you’re trying to get at that knowledge. And philosophers should be in charge because they’re the ones who are able to access that. And they come back to us in our cave and they tell us what’s going on.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah.

Jerusalem Demsas: And she hates this because she thinks that truth — I mean, definitely she’s very subjective about what truth is, and that there’s not some truth that a philosopher can find. And she seems to both chafe at the elitism of these philosopher kings coming in and telling us what to do while at the same time promoting another form of elitism, which is that this very small sect of people are the only real humans, and anyone else who’s just kind of like, “Yeah, I want to have kids and take care of them and go on vacations a couple times a year and I’ll, you know, I’ll have some — “ she fucking hates hobbies, I forgot to mention that — “and have hobbies,” all that — like, you’re not a human being.

And I mean, this is a very — I mean, I don’t know, in some ways it’s very Greek. Like, the Greeks were obsessed with this question of whether the Persians were really humans. And the whole famous thing about: Are they barbarians because of how they talk, or whatever? And I mean, Arendt defenders are like, “She’s not just — what is it — a philo-Athenian, obsessed with these people or whatever.” But I think it’s clear that she’s just like, “Yeah, Socrates was the only good human ever and everyone else has been a fucking idiot.”

Matthew Yglesias: Well, yeah. I mean, she’s down on everyone. There’s this, I thought, just very funny sentence where she says: More important is the discovery made, as far as I know, only by Montesquieu, the last political thinker to concern himself seriously with the problem of forms of government. And I don’t know, clearly lots of people other than Montesquieu have written about the forms of government, but she qualifies that by saying he’s the last to concern himself seriously. I mean, so great…

Jerusalem Demsas: …qualifier…

Matthew Yglesias: I guess.

Jerusalem Demsas: …unfalsifiable.

Matthew Yglesias: Literally all of modern political theories. Anyway, as you say, she’s a hater. It makes it hard for me to know exactly how seriously to take her specific invocations of specific people. She has this long diatribe against utilitarianism and Bentham.

Jerusalem Demsas: She goes for the EAs at the end.

Matthew Yglesias: But then she lumps Kant in with them. So, — and if you ever take a moral philosophy class, these will be counterposed as the two opposite poles. And she’s just like, yeah, all of modern moral theory she’s against.

Jerusalem Demsas: And honestly, we have to stand — I mean, this level of painting is amazing. I mean, I will say one thing that I think that she is — that I’ve been thinking about for a while that I was struck by when she talked about it in the book is in the prologue, she says: The trouble concerns the fact that the truths of modern scientific worldview, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.

So, basically the idea is mathematical notation used to actually, you know, mean, like, shorthand for certain words. And now it’s, like, so complicated that you can’t just, like — you cannot say in normal English or normal any language what these math formulas are. They are their own language. And mathematicians, especially ones at the frontier, are engaging with each other’s work. They’re doing so in math, right?

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah.

Jerusalem Demsas: And what she is concerned about is that scientists and technology and technological development has gotten so complicated and so removed from the arena by which we can talk to each other that it is eliminating the possibility for people to truly act.

I’ve been thinking about that. It’s one of those unfalsifiable things, so I’ll say it on a podcast. So, you can’t write it down. But politics and the questions that we’re engaging with politically have gotten more complicated as political administration’s gotten more complicated — like, the invention of the administrative state and then its metastasization in the New Deal era through now means that the questions you are asking are not complicated ones about should the United States go to war or should it provide the bare minimum to widows of war veterans or whatever it is — permitting reform, which is an incredibly actually complicated question about what the impact of these things will be. And now you can’t get a — they’re going to model whether or not this new permitting reform bill will have this impact or that impact, but no one can say for certain, “This is literally what’s going to happen when we pass this bill.” We have reasoned arguments about what will happen, but no one can actually fully work it out because there are just too many variables. There’s too many parts of government, there are too many bureaucrats involved. There are other forms of government that interact with the government. Anyway, it’s just really complicated.

And I’ve been having this feeling for a while that as these political debates get so complicated, they’re removed from the ability for normal people to have interaction. Not even normal people — you have to be a crazy expert to engage in some of these questions.

Matthew Yglesias: Hmm.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think it might just spur a ton of populism and anti-expert, anti-technocrat behavior in the same way that when I go to a car mechanic and I cannot really know if I’m being screwed over or not because I just cannot access the level of information they have, I’m kind of on edge and I’m waiting to be cheated and I’m pissed off and I’m like — does that relate?

Matthew Yglesias: But I think there’s a false technocratic sheen given to a lot of these political debates.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Henry Farrell, a political scientist who’s a mutual friend with a lot of people and is always coming around, he recently wrote one of these diatribes against generalist political pundits that people with PhDs sometimes like to write.

Jerusalem Demsas: Who else? I know.

Matthew Yglesias: And I always find it very false. There is a lot of complicated technical modeling associated with the BAAJA. I also think that if I went back in time and had a casual conversation about climate activism and the environmental movement with a person who knows enough about politics to be interested in engaging in a conversation like that — if I had that conversation with them in 2019, I could predict — I mean, they might have changed their mind over the past seven years.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: But I could just tell you how they would fall out on this bill. Like, I think it was possible for us to have a totally coherent podcast about BAAJA without delving into these technical modeling details. Not that everybody will be persuaded that our arguments are correct, but that in an Arendtian sense, we were there in the arena talking about…

Jerusalem Demsas: …me and you are fully human.

Matthew Yglesias: No, but I mean, I think to podcast is human. I think it’s an important insight that I want to get to that later. But, you know, I think that if you listen to our pod, or if you listen to — listen to Bill McKibben’s interview with Ezra Klein several months ago, in which permitting reform does not come up — Ezra doesn’t ask him about this at all. Ezra just says something pretty casual at one point, and then McKibben cuts in to interrupt him and says, “I actually don’t think the typical American household should be using more energy, because the reason per capita energy use in the United States is so high is that we have such large houses, and those large houses just make us more isolated from each other.” You hear that remark, and you know that what will happen happened, and that McKibben, who spent a lot of time vaguely trying to position himself as an abundance advocate, that he would be against BAAJA because this is — And I don’t know where Arendt would’ve come down on BAAJA, ’cause she’s a very idiosyncratic person, but I think she would’ve sympathized with McKibben’s basic worldview, which he has expressed in a number of different books and things along the way, which is a deep ambivalence about the idea of economic growth and material prosperity. And I think if you share that ambivalence, you will be very unsympathetic to this bill. And if you don’t have that ambivalence, you’ll be very positive to it.

Jerusalem Demsas: I agree about the question.

Matthew Yglesias: And then I think we waste an incredible amount of time in the political arena on these narrow technical questions relative to trying to disagree about what it is we are actually disagreeing about.

Jerusalem Demsas: So, I agree with you on a question of: Could you predict where someone’s going to come down on this when they’re an individual who’s actually quite informed? I mean, Bill McKibben’s like, what, the 99th percentile informed on what BAAJA is about?

Matthew Yglesias: Of course.

Jerusalem Demsas: But let’s abstract to something that I think is maybe less hot button or whatever, but we’re going to have a debate at some point — a massive political debate in this country about what to do about the deficit and Social Security.

Matthew Yglesias: Of course.

Jerusalem Demsas: And Medicare, etc. And there’s a way to interact with that, which is just like, “Don’t cut,” which is the way the average American does, which is saying, “Don’t cut Social Security and also don’t raise my taxes.” That is the dominant way that most American voters interact with this problem. And then people in Washington have had to kick this can down the road because it’s so politically toxic to deal with the fact that event — well, for a long time it didn’t really matter, but recently it’s become very clear that the deficit is going to be a big drag on the U.S.’s ability to either expand new programs, to pay for important new things, and also to keep up its existing debt obligations. The question of what to literally do about that is, I think, inaccessible to most people.

Matthew Yglesias: OK, but…

Jerusalem Demsas: You can have values of, “I don’t want you to cut my benefits, I don’t want you to raise my taxes.” And then you can have like, “OK, well, if you had to do one of those things, I prefer you raise taxes on some people.” Literally what’s going to happen is an incredibly technocratic exercise of how do we raise whose taxes in what way, what is fair? And all tax questions are moral or questions of morality and fairness. And they’re embedded in any choice about at what rate to raise it and on who and in what capacity is a — decision about what types of work or activity we find meaningful enough to not tax and what things we find able to discourage. And that is — I mean, these are, like — I actually think it’s inaccessible to most people. OK.

Matthew Yglesias: But again, I don’t know. I’ve somehow dragged myself into believing in participatory democracy or something. But…

Jerusalem Demsas: My God, it worked on you.

Matthew Yglesias: Clearly, if you look at surveys, the issue with public opinion on entitlement programs is that people are not engaging with the question at all.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Really, right? It’s a very important public policy question, but the problem of surveys is, you know, people give their take, but most people don’t think about these things at all. And it would be interesting to know — there, of course, is a detailed technical aspect to tax policy and benefit design. And I don’t understand it all. You know, my grasp in my active intelligence of where the Social Security benefit bend points are comes in and out according to the needs — my needs as a laborer in Arendt’s terms.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: You know, sometimes it is commercially important to my viability as a political pundit to be able to discuss the technical details of Social Security. In those moments, I rise to the occasion and I do the research, but the numbers actually change over time.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Because of how this goes, and I lose track of it, right? But in my work as a pundit, right, what I try to convey to people and what is known by people who are engaged enough to read Slow Boring and other things like that is that we have these sliding tectonic plates of demography and productivity, and that they are not matching up.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: Right? And that you can level them out in different kinds of ways, but that you should take seriously the fact that sooner or later, it’s going to have to be done. Most people are simply — this is a democracy, and you’re entitled to a vote without thinking about the issues that are at hand. And so, that is what people are doing. And I’m just always actually curious, you know, if you could do an Hélène Landemore kind of thing and round up 17 totally random people and sit them around a table and say like, “We’re gonna have a lengthy — an extended discussion about this.” Like, what would they come up with?

Jerusalem Demsas: But I think Arendt would actually — I mean, I don’t know if you both would think it was good that we were having focus groups or whatever, for the people there. But I think part of her intervention…

Matthew Yglesias: Well, yes, so she wouldn’t care.

Jerusalem Demsas: No, but a part of her intervention is also that it’s not — it is in the arena and that everyone is there, that being seen by everyone else is a big part of this. And so, 17 people in a room that’s doing focus group, I think she’d probably be like, “No, that doesn’t count.”

Matthew Yglesias: No, no, of course. But I think — I mean, it sounds weird, but I think she would say that it doesn’t really matter if you raise taxes or cut benefits.

Jerusalem Demsas: It doesn’t matter how many people die or have…

Matthew Yglesias: But that to participate in a serious conversation about what the options are, particularly a public conversation, is a good in and of itself.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes.

Matthew Yglesias: Right?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes.

Matthew Yglesias: And so, something that I have often wondered about, because my job, again — my labor, in part, is to post. And also my work is also to post.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yep.

Matthew Yglesias: And so, I look at these — you know, I look at billionaires, I look at people who are very successful in the business world who also seem to want to post obsessively. You know, Bill Ackman is like this, but also people whose political opinions I’m more in sympathy with than Ackman’s. Patrick Collison wants people to know what his takes are. And I look at that sometimes and I’m like, “Why?” Like, I’m doing this for my job and kind of it’s my job because I enjoy it. So, I get it on that level. But there’s a real — Elon Musk, the guys who have the All-In podcast. There’s just, like, a lot of people who, now that the internet has made it possible to do takes without being a full-time takesman…

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: …they, like, really want to do it. And it seems a little funny. And a lot of people ask the question, you know, “Why don’t these rich people understand that by doing these public takes, it’s all downside to your public reputation, and you could be much more well-liked by just running a successful company and giving some money to kind of normie charities?” Like, nobody’s ever really upset that the new ballet was named after you or that you built a new wing at the museum. And if you just want people to like you, just be really chill.

But I — Arendt is expressing that there is this tradition going back thousands of years that is saying that, no, putting yourself in the public square, telling people what you think about things that are important, and accepting the slings and arrows of disapprobation from people who disagree with you, is this really high human calling.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: And that there is good reason that billionaires who are untouchable in a material way want to subject themselves to the negative publicity of entering the public arena, and that that is good, and that it is cowardly and wrong of all these other people who have means and must have some thoughts about the events transpiring in the world to restrict that to the private realm. You know, and she talks about art. She likes art. I think she’s favorable to art.

Jerusalem Demsas: Wait, wait, wait. I want — we’re gonna take a quick break and then I’m gonna do my rant about why speaking up at public meetings is not good.

OK, we’re back. So, this is not the first time that I, Jerusalem Demsas, have been triggered by someone telling me that the apotheosis of living is going to a community meeting. And Hannah Arendt, I think, in many ways is being — I mean, she was really rediscovered in the 2016 moment when people were reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is her book self-described as on the origins of totalitarianism, of course, after Trump got elected. But I mean, I think a lot of people have also kind of rediscovered her in this moment because there’s a lot of discussion around community. I mean, we did a podcast about Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. We’ve done this podcast with Derek Thompson about loneliness. We talk about it a lot because it’s something that a lot of people are interested in. And there’s a real belief in elite spaces that the thing that everyone really would benefit from and everyone really wants to do is to spend their day going to fucking community meetings and zoning meetings and whatever to discuss whether or not we should build a new house on the corner. Arendt clearly believes this.

And I think a lot of people at the local level — I mean, when you talk to them about deliberative democracy, they’re just like, “No, people would come to these meetings if only it was accessible to them.” In the pandemic, we ran what I call a fun experiment. And by that, I meant we all had to move everything online because there was a global pandemic going on. And so, what happened is that a lot of these zoning meetings, which required — they were always in person, you couldn’t show up virtually beforehand — all of a sudden became a lot easier to go to. All you had to do was go on your Zoom and find out — you know, you can then participate, right? And all of these people who were like, “Actually, the only reason people don’t participate in local government more and in local politics more is because it’s inaccessible to them,” watched as the composition of people who showed up didn’t change. It still was this highly elite, highly selected group of people — predominantly homeowners, predominantly old people who were engaging.

And I could return to this — one of my favorite quotes, this is by political scientist Robert Dahl in his book Who Governs? Yeah. Yeah. He says that basically that politicians overrate how closely an audience watches them or cares about their performance. And it’s like, yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: OK. But I want to be clear here. In this case, you and Arendt are completely aligned.

Jerusalem Demsas: No.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah.

Jerusalem Demsas: What do you mean?

Matthew Yglesias: It’s — you just have a different normative valence on this. But you are saying, right, these idealists…

Jerusalem Demsas: But I think it’s good.

Matthew Yglesias: No, no, I understand.

Jerusalem Demsas: No, normative valence is good.

Matthew Yglesias: But also — but the reason that you think community meetings are bad is that the community meeting process reduces the material prosperity of society. Arendt doesn’t deny — Arendt isn’t saying that participatory democracy will generate more material abundance. She’s saying material abundance isn’t important. You are saying that people don’t show up to the meeting even when you lower the barrier of entry. And I think Arendt is saying like, “Yeah, ’cause most people are sheep.”

Jerusalem Demsas: But the second part of my point is that — and that’s totally reasonable and fine. Like, I don’t think it is the people who show up or being more human. I don’t think that they’re engaging more fully in the political process. I think they have specific interests that they are able to protect through this incredibly ridiculous process. And it’s like, Arendt’s view is that those people are doing action in a way that is commendable, that lends itself to human greatness. And what I’m saying is it really says nothing about the freedom of the individual if they choose to allocate their time to the local zoning meeting or…

Matthew Yglesias: But I guess what I’m saying is, you know, what is the point of reading books?

Jerusalem Demsas: OK.

Matthew Yglesias: Or of reading anything?

Jerusalem Demsas: What is the point? To learn?

Matthew Yglesias: And I think that a lot of people write things that are mushy-minded, you know? And they want to be agreeable, and they want all the good things to come to an end — to come together.

Jerusalem Demsas: OK.

Matthew Yglesias: And you are a clear thinker with a strong viewpoint on this.

Jerusalem Demsas: I want you all to know I’m not saying this with a heavy derogatory tone.

Matthew Yglesias: No, no, no. And Arendt is also a clear thinker with a strong viewpoint on this. And I just — I think you, in the spirit of game recognize game, should respect the fact that this is not a book — the worst takes on this are the ones that are like, “Well, you know, if we just made it easier to participate, then the unrepresentativeness problem that Jerusalem is worrying about could be resolved and we could get more building and people wouldn’t be excluded from housing, but also there wouldn’t be — “ And Arendt is saying, I think — no, she’s just saying it doesn’t fucking matter if people have housing or material prosperity, that participation is the high calling of a citizen. And you are saying no, participation…

Jerusalem Demsas: But she doesn’t even bite that bullet, because if she bit the bullet that it didn’t matter if people had housing — it didn’t matter — then we could all just dismiss this as obviously the rantings of a raving lunatic. But she says in order to participate fully in the public sphere, in order to do action, to do this kind of political engagement whatsoever, you need to have dealt with the very base needs of human…

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, but just…

Jerusalem Demsas: No, but the reason why — you said this at the very beginning — she credits — and I don’t think she’s pro-slavery, obviously — but she credits the Athenians’ slaves for allowing…

Matthew Yglesias: Yes.

Jerusalem Demsas: …the citizens of Greece to be able — of Athens — to be able to enter the arena and to enter the agora, whatever. And it’s one of those things where she just refuses to actually then follow the logic all the way down, because there’s one way you could square that circle where you’re like, “Great, we’re gonna have machines and automation and artificial intelligence — or not artificial intelligence, but we’re gonna have really, really great machines that are gonna take care of all of our material needs, freeing us, and then we will then have all the room in order to be able to enter the public arena,” or whatever. But she also hates that.

Matthew Yglesias: Sure.

Jerusalem Demsas: And she says — it’s just like, there’s not clarity. I actually don’t think she’s a clear thinker. Where’s this clarity?

Matthew Yglesias: I just want to be — I want the audience to understand that she is not saying — because this is, again, 1957, it’s before the contemporary review process, any of that stuff exists. And she’s not calling for more community meetings as such. You’re reading the community meetings debate into it.

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, I do think that she’s very complimentary to Tocqueville because she really enjoys the — I mean, a big part of — and she’s in Massachusetts. And I think that she’s seeing — I mean, I don’t know this. You’re right. I don’t know this. But I think that she’s seeing the participatory nature of local government. She’s reading Tocqueville. She’s engaging with these questions at a historical level as well. But I think it’s like, obviously she’s not talking about land use policy.

Matthew Yglesias: But she is calling on you as a citizen to care more about engagement in the public realm and to care less about personal economic gain.

Jerusalem Demsas: And at the local level, specifically. She cares about you doing it at the local level.

Matthew Yglesias: She cares about you doing it for a public. And I think what that would mean is a little technologically mediated, because she’s at a — ’cause the ’50s are a very specific time in which it is possible to broadcast a message to the entire world, but there’s a really strong choke point on your ability to do that. Whereas in the local arena, you actually can address yourself to the public. Today, because technology’s different, you can address yourself to a global public without owning a television station. I wonder what she would say about — you know, that’s one of these, like — maybe we can get an AI Arendt and get her to talk about podcasts.

But, you know, she gives this take on art, right? Where she says that art is useless, which she does not mean in a disparaging way. She thinks it’s good. She considers the counter — the objection to the uselessness of art. She says, well, somebody might say that actually art exists primarily for religious and sacramental purposes, that Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel on commission from the Pope because the Pope believes that the glorification of God is important. We have all this religious art throughout all of history. And she says — she says, A, that she doesn’t think that’s totally true, but also “even if the historical origin of art were of an exclusively religious or mythological character, the fact is that art has survived gloriously its severance from religion, magic, and myth.”

So, you know, she is really intending to celebrate uselessness. She is really disparaging to the idea of things serving instrumental purposes for other things. She acknowledges that homo faber, the craftsman, is useful.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: That, you know, we have chairs in part because we need someplace to sit our butts down on. But she puts a lot of credence in the fact that these manmade objects are of dual nature, and that to the extent that they’re merely useful, that’s labor, and that we elevate it through its kind of — its greatness. It’s a very odd viewpoint, right? Like, the normal thing you would say about whether it’s a community meeting or any other form of participatory democracy is, “I want to do it this way because I think it will lead to better outcomes.” And those better outcomes would be assessed in some fairly banal kind of way. And she’s just really not saying that. It’s hard to understand what she is saying. I mean, just that the action — you know, there’s a line in Heat. He says, “For me, the action is the juice.”

Jerusalem Demsas: Oh, I have seen that movie. I watched it with Ross Anderson, friend of the pod.

Matthew Yglesias: He’s talking about robbing banks, not action in an Arendtian sense.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think — I don’t know.

Matthew Yglesias: But it’s the same idea, right?

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, the thing that’s — I think a lot of people will find gripping is that Arendt is worried about the lack of glory. She’s worried that people no longer are trying to do these really great things. And, you know, I mentioned earlier that she’s a big hater of Christianity, right? And the thing that she pulls out is that Christianity told people that there is an eternal life waiting for you, that what’s happening on — you shouldn’t concern yourself with worldly things. You should still live well on earth, but that you are full of sin. You can only be saved through Jesus, and that there is eternal life after this. And before then — she distinguishes eternal concerns about eternity from concerns about immortality.

And so, this idea of, like, “Oh, actually, what people wanted before they had this concept of eternity baked into their thinking was that they really wanted to create their mark on history.” They wanted to — and there are ways to do this in good and bad ways. You could create your mark in history by being a mass murderer. You can create your mark in history by being Socrates, by being Plato, and that you wanted to put up these monuments to your achievements, whether they were ideas or art or architecture. I mean, I think she really focuses on these public ones. Things like architecture are much more what she’s talking about than the novel, which she considers kind of like an individualist kind of interior form of art.

But I think that there are a lot of people who kind of feel this way, especially, I think, on the new right, where there’s this big concern that great men of history have been stifled by culture, whether they’re being flattened by a culture that doesn’t venerate these risk-taking choices. And I think that Arendt very much feels similarly to them. And I don’t want to fully dismiss it. I think it is important and good that people strive to be great. I think, personally, I believe that it’s better when people channel that striving towards something that is useful for society.

I’ve written about this on The Argument before, but you see a difference in how technologists used to talk about their technology versus how they do now that I largely attribute to the fact that technologists in the past had to be much more kind of commercial facing, versus now, where they’re very VC facing. So, they’re very — in a very insulated environment in Silicon Valley usually, where they’re trying to break the frontier for the sake of breaking the frontier. When you go back in time, you see these pieces of evidence, like Thomas Edison famously went on — went to Good Housekeeping and was pitching Good Housekeeping and the housewives of America on electricity.

Matthew Yglesias: Right.

Jerusalem Demsas: Because he was like, “This is going to help you. This is going to make your life better.” And again, you can’t run RCTs in this sort of thing or whatever, and we don’t have great public opinion data at the time, but clearly that technological innovation, which was incredibly disruptive in a lot of ways, was a lot more well understood about the benefits it was going to provide to the American people. People were more excited about that sort of thing, and also the technologists themselves were oriented around: How can I be useful? Of course, basic science — I’m not trying to say basic scientific research or people who are doing frontier-level engagement, that that is not valuable, but often arguments about how we justify that are justified on the basis that, look at the basic science innovations of the past, look how often they turn out to have this unknown useful benefit.

Matthew Yglesias: So, have you been following the Muse rollout?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Because I mean…

Jerusalem Demsas: This is the new Meta AI assistant.

Matthew Yglesias: Right. So, I have seen — first, I didn’t see it in a first-order way. I saw people talking about it.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: And they were all talking about it in a very complimentary way. A lot of, you know, sort of political consultant type people, not technology people. And they were saying, like, “At last, here’s somebody who gets it,” you know? And they were giving what I think is a Jerusalem-esque take about this. And then I dug in and I saw what they were presenting, and it was all the people were there, and it was — there was no machine god, there was no UBI, there was no post-work future. This is all your friend Mark, you know.

Jerusalem Demsas: Sorry, how is this a Jerusalem-esque take?

Matthew Yglesias: Because they’re — they’re — he and Facebook are pitching AI the way you’re saying technologists used to pitch, right? They’ve set aside all of this galaxy brain shit. And he’s just like, “You’re gonna book your flights more easily. You’re gonna keep track of your meetings,” right? And what I see when I see that is like, “I think this sucks.” Like, I…

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, that’s because — well, I think a couple things here. One, I want to be clear, I do have concerns about this specific technology that are outside the normal technology space that Mark Zuckerberg is living in. But the second thing I’ll say is the — what I saw with that discourse is all these people talking about these incredibly small-ball, small-bore things. Like, they weren’t — like, Edison was going to the housewife and saying, “We’re gonna save you hours and hours of your day of this drudgery labor that you yourself already recognize as a problem.” They’re like, “We’ve spent all this money, disrupted all of this local communities with data centers that people don’t really like for the purpose of maybe saving a few people in America time while booking a flight.” Like, what are we even talking…

Matthew Yglesias: That’s also…

Jerusalem Demsas: But that’s not the innovation of AI that should be talked about.

Matthew Yglesias: I mean, yes, but I just bring it up because, I mean, it did just happen. And I’ve read your article on this[link], and I sort of got it. But, you know, I mean, this is the challenge, right, that Arendt is speaking to, and that I think many people feel, which is, you know, you live in a society of relative affluence in which most people are well off the subsistence frontier, and yet they still have problems in their life, and they spend a lot of time musing on those problems and milling on them and picking at them and trying to solve them. And we have a lot of our politics dedicated to agreeing with people that their lives are really bad and that they deserve more help from the government in this way and that. And, you know, maybe it’s the fault of immigrants, or maybe it’s the fault of billionaires, or the grocery store monopoly is screwing you. And it’s this kind of grubby obsession that exists in stupid ways, and I think also in intelligent ways, about how we’re gonna, you know, give you some more — give you some more stuff. But people do have a lot of stuff by any kind of historical standard and bar. And, you know, maybe everyone should be doing something better with their time, should be…

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I do think…

Matthew Yglesias: …concerned about more elevated things. But then I, as a person, as a humanitarian, I just sort of, you know — I don’t like the conclusion that, well, if you’re somebody who can’t actually contribute in a really original and useful way to public debate that…

Jerusalem Demsas: …you’re not really human?

Matthew Yglesias: …that I’m just gonna write you off. Like, that doesn’t seem — I meet a lot of people whose thoughts about my work I’m not that interested in, but they’re still people, and I enjoy talking to them about our kids and, you know, our daily concerns and which restaurants we enjoy. And to me that kind of is life, this private sphere that she’s very disparaging of. But, you know…

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, I think that the most this book resonated with me was her willingness to say that there are better and worse ways for you to live your life, and that “I’m going to tell you that this is a better way to live your life.” And she’s not really even advocating for some sort of formal government structure to force us into this or whatever. She’s really very much in the plane of ideas on this sort of thing.

But I mean, there’s a complaint that has been levied at liberals for, I don’t know, ever, I guess, that because we believe in a pluralistic society where there can be many different conceptions of what it looks like to live a good life, that we’re not ever prescriptive about what bad lives — And I think that this is sometimes overblown or whatever, but I think there’s some truth to it. And there’s a lot of discourse in the fiction world about this where people will say things like, “Well, you should never criticize what someone’s reading because at least they’re reading.” “Well, I’m reading and I enjoy it. So, what’s the difference if I’m reading this Dungeon Crawler Carl book,” which is now one of the most popular books around, which is this kind of RPG video game sort of book. I haven’t actually read it, but lots of my friends have read it and recommended it to me.

Matthew Yglesias: Wait, are adults reading this?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, this is an adult book. I thought this was a children’s book. This is an adult and children’s book. I don’t know if it’s a children’s book. I haven’t read it, so I can’t — I’m not recommending it to children. I have no idea if it’s a children’s book, but it is a fantasy book. And they’re also like, “There’s no difference between me reading this and me reading Dostoevsky or War and Peace, or if there’s a difference, it doesn’t matter.” There’s no moral problem, or there’s no ordering of these kinds of books that you can do.

And I sat with this a while because I’m just like, listen, at some level, if you’re doing something for the purpose of enjoyment, you’re right. You should do something that makes you enjoy or whatever. But there is a higher order. There are books that are better and worse than each other. And there are things that you can enjoy about art that are better and worse. There are better — as you’ve written — there are better and worse TV shows. There are better and worse movies. And you should, maybe not all the time, but you should spend a good amount of your time on good, not bad art.

And I do think that the Arendt would be, like, quite horrified at the discourse that has taken over the fiction world right now, that, you know, there’s no — I mean, I guess she didn’t really care about novels very much, that they were, like, kind of stupid, I guess. But the vibe of it is very — I think the place where me and Arendt would be most aligned. It’s just like, “No,” like, “Yeah,” like, “Sometimes I read books that I think are dumb.” I’ve written about how I’ve read, like, you know, dozens of romance novels that I would not recommend. I don’t think they’re very good. But I also try and I spend a lot of time reading things that I think are good and that do challenge me and that do provide higher meaning or whatever. And so, I think that that is a place where I have — because I’ve been so mean about Arendt — some good things to say.

Matthew Yglesias: I don’t even think you’ve been that mean. I mean…

Jerusalem Demsas: I think — people told me not to be mean, so.

Matthew Yglesias: Well, because I guess I agree with what you just said there. I agree almost even more with that about nonfiction books. I am — I’m just like, I’m very mixed on nonfiction books. I have written nonfiction books. Many of my friends have written nonfiction books, because I work in the kind of field where people offer you the opportunity to write nonfiction books. And I’m kind of like, “What are we doing, guys?” Like, are — like, just do people need this? This book is — it’s so much…

Jerusalem Demsas: Do I have to call out one of your friends?

Matthew Yglesias: This book is so much worse than a book that I would write or that any of my friends would write, in the sense that it doesn’t make — she’s just constantly saying things that aren’t true. And not only is she saying things that aren’t true, she doesn’t care at all. There’s no evidence presented in this book for anything. And there’s no…

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, that would be social science.

Matthew Yglesias: It doesn’t — yes. And it doesn’t appear that she had anybody read a draft. And then, like…

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, we know an editor did, because she was gonna try and call it the Vita Activa.

Matthew Yglesias: Yes, yes. I mean, I’m not saying she literally didn’t, but there’s, I think, a theme throughout — of all the books that we’ve read, except for Putnam’s, which is the most recent, they are all written in this mid-century register that is just very alien to the contemporary day, where I don’t think it’s like nobody read the drafts, but the author is not here to present you with their grubby evidence.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Like, they have, I think, gathered some…

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, Silent Spring.

Matthew Yglesias: There’s some reason why they’re saying the things that they are saying. But even Silent Spring is, like, quite evidence-light by contemporary standards.

Jerusalem Demsas: Compared to today, yes.

Matthew Yglesias: Particularly given its subject matter.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: They’re, like — they’re doing their take. And there is something I find inspiring about it. You know, it’s so audacious.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s liberated.

Matthew Yglesias: It is.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s free.

Matthew Yglesias: And then you read it, and you’re like, it makes me upset at times, and it feels exhilarating at times. And there’s remarks that are just really offensive at times in these — I think including in the show, I’m so struck by reading The Feminine Mystique, whose core thesis is pretty banal by contemporary standards. But then, I mean, we talked about in the episode[link], just the disparaging things she says about Korean War POWs and Holocaust victims.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s insane.

Matthew Yglesias: It’s like, it’s appalling. But there’s something thrilling about the idea that people, intellectuals, were able to live in that…

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, this is the “to be sure” problem, which, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But if you read a single article at any prestigious opinion outlet, you will — especially if it’s a controversial point the person’s making, at some point when you get through the — you’re getting into the piece, probably the more annoying the piece is, the higher up this will be — there will be a paragraph that will either literally say “to be sure” and then list a bunch of qualifications about when this doesn’t apply, or it will imply the “to be sure” and just say, like, “Well, and it’s important to know that there are these other situations where it doesn’t apply.”

And I mean, people know this on the internet, that it’s so annoying that you will say something like — you know, the famous, you know, meme joke is like, “I like pancakes,” and someone responds like, “Why do you hate waffles?” And I really think it’s underrated outside of the media space how much this has transformed the world of public argument and public intellectuals, where you can’t even get an intellectual to fully inhabit their own side for the length of an article.

Matthew Yglesias: Mm-hmm.

Jerusalem Demsas: Because there’s so much — because part of what you’re trying — again, I don’t even fully — I mean, I’ve done it too. So, it’s just not a thing where I’m saying everyone else is doing it and I’m this pure whatever. But it’s just like, the purpose of an article is to communicate an idea to people. And so, it’s very difficult if you’re communicating to an audience where their first impulse is not, “Well, let’s just take in this idea.” It’s, “Well, is this idea taking into account the Ukraine perspective? Is it taking into account whether or not people like waffles or whatever?” It’s like, well, they just wanted to write this one idea — is not a socially agreed upon thing. And as a result, I mean, I just do think I agree. I mean, I think nonfiction articles and…

Matthew Yglesias: And I also think...

Jerusalem Demsas: …books have gotten worse.

Matthew Yglesias: When I was first starting out in my career, in the waning days — the last days of the magazine industry — there used to be takedown articles would be published. This was just a recognized genre of thing.

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: That a writer, presumably with the complicity of an editor, would write a piece whose thesis was like, “Some person who is of some prominence and esteem is a fraud and is terrible.”

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: And those articles still — articles with that level of negativity still occur, but they are very factional, very ideological, right? So, a certain number of Yglesias takedowns have been written, but they all occur in very left-wing publications that, on some level, it’s like the criticism doesn’t sting, because it’s just people who don’t agree with me being like, “This guy has things we don’t agree with.” And they often proceed by actually just exaggerating the level of disagreement that may even exist there for the sake of getting up into high dudgeon.

Jerusalem Demsas: High dudgeon is a great phrase.

Matthew Yglesias: When people would do a Tom Friedman takedown in 2002, it’s not that everybody hated Tom Friedman. He was very successful. But also, some people with kind of mainstream views would just be like, “This other mainstream guy with this mainstream view position of prominence, he fucking sucks.”

Jerusalem Demsas: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Yglesias: “He’s boring. He’s a boring hack who uses annoying metaphors.” And I used to really feel that way about him. And then I, as part of this whole softening of culture, was just like, “You know what? Like, I actually basically agree with Tom Friedman about things.” Like, why? Like, what’s — what is this hate for a guy with a prominent column who’s, like, basically right about the main issues in our society? Who cares that his metaphors are a little hacky and weird? Like, why is that important? And I mean, that’s me inhabiting my own viewpoint. I just care more now, I guess, about who I agree with and who I disagree with than who I think is manifesting, like, virtue or something. But it’s a real change. It’s a…

Jerusalem Demsas: But I think what I will say is this, is I read a high-quality nonfiction book. So, for instance, I just recently read a book you’ve written about[link] too, The Everywhere Millionaire by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. Did I get that right? OK. Hope I did.

Matthew Yglesias: It might be the other way around.

Jerusalem Demsas: Is it Owen?

Matthew Yglesias: Zwick and Zidar. I don’t know.

Jerusalem Demsas: Owen Zwick and Eric — oh, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. I was right. Did I say that?

Matthew Yglesias: I don’t remember.

Jerusalem Demsas: Whatever. Well…

Matthew Yglesias: The point is, what matters isn’t who’s right and who’s wrong, but that we came out here and I gave my opinion about which those guys’ names are.

Jerusalem Demsas: Anyway, this book, The Everywhere Millionaire, it’s a really, really good book. It’s a very well-researched book. I am pretty confident that these guys — I’m not going to replicate their work. I’m not even going to really — I’m not going to dive into the data in any way, but I feel very confident that the process that produced this — the multiple, multiple years of peer-reviewed research that produced eventually a book that has been — that is now circulating amongst a bunch of the wonks of the country — is correct about the facts that it is saying. That if there was an error, that someone would find it, that it would be publicized, they would publish some sort of correction somewhere. That the process of scientific research and us knowing — getting closer and closer to a capital T truth in some sense — is better now.

Matthew Yglesias: Hmm.

Jerusalem Demsas: At the same time, questions that are — nonfiction books that are trying to answer much bigger questions are worse. And again, what Arendt is getting at here is the nature of freedom. If someone tried to write a book from a social science perspective on the nature of freedom, it would both be — it would be bad.

Matthew Yglesias: Yes.

Jerusalem Demsas: It would not be good, and it would not fulfill either purpose of being accurate or engaging with the big questions about the nature of human freedom and human condition. And I think that — and that’s what’s sad here, is that we don’t have people doing this other thing. We just have everyone kind of being like, “Well, you can’t apply these social science research methods to these large questions about human existence and the point of being here, what we should do with our time on the earth.” And so, instead, “I’m going to write these books that” — again, I mean, I don’t want to be shitting on this book. This book is great. I really enjoyed it and thought it was fantastic. But you have to pick a narrower subject matter.

Matthew Yglesias: But also, I mean, a book I think about a lot — and maybe we should do it on the podcast, although it might be too contemporary — is What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Jerusalem Demsas: I haven’t read it, but I do know about it, yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: OK. So, I remember when What’s the Matter with Kansas? came out, and I was one of many people who at the time wrote debunkings of that book because its core empirical claims are wrong.

Jerusalem Demsas: What’s the argument?

Matthew Yglesias: Well, but here’s what I want to say.

Jerusalem Demsas: OK.

Matthew Yglesias: Everything that Tom Frank said — I don’t want to say literally everything, but broadly speaking, what Tom Frank said was happening did happen. Like, it happened in the future.

Jerusalem Demsas: What did he say?

Matthew Yglesias: I don’t know. So, he’s writing about how there’s been this class inversion of American politics.

Jerusalem Demsas: OK.

Matthew Yglesias: And how lower-income, lower-class people are on the right now, and how the political left has become bougie and upscale. And we were all sitting there in 2006 or whatever, squinting at the 2004 election results and saying, like, “Frank’s not right, right? He’s ignoring the existence — I mean, in Kansas, everybody is white, but in America, many people aren’t. And when you include all this stuff, yada, yada, yada.” Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State — Red State, Blue State is the classic quant refutation. But if you take the quant model that debunked Frank in 2004, and you apply it forward to 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024, the world that Frank saw becomes true. And I think, in retrospect, it wasn’t just dumb luck on his part, that he was perceiving something actually correct in the evolution of American politics, that the vibesmanship was in some ways more insightful than the factual splicing of what was actually a lagging indicator of this big structural transformation.

Jerusalem Demsas: He should have had the courage to write a mid-century book and not devolve into social science research.

Matthew Yglesias: Yes. I mean, in some ways — and David Brooks had a book at the same time called Bobos in Paradise that makes fewer explicit empirical claims, but that was also subject to a hilarious takedown in [Philadelphia magazine]the Washington Monthly, where he put — you know, Brooks at one point was like, “Oh, in my neighborhood in Bethesda, it’s like people go to Thai restaurants all the time, but in this town in Pennsylvania, nobody’s ever heard of Thai food.” And then the takedown is like, “Actually, there’s a Thai restaurant at the mall one way down.”

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: But again, what Brooks was saying about the structural transformation of American politics, that happened. He was right, and to an extent was brought down by nitpickers who are also right. I’m very torn on this. Like, I just wrote a piece about — you don’t want any spoilers for…

Jerusalem Demsas: Don’t you dare.

Matthew Yglesias: No, so I won’t give you. But it was just — it was about the…

Jerusalem Demsas: You Can See Everything.

Matthew Yglesias: You Can See Everything. And just, my thesis was that we need to become more rigid and persnickety about the truth.

Jerusalem Demsas: That’s a spoiler.

Matthew Yglesias: Which I — it is not. It’s not a spoiler for the movie. That’s just me doing a take with the movie as a thin hook.

Jerusalem Demsas: OK.

Matthew Yglesias: But it is also true that the people who do a good job of capturing big social trends are often not the same as the people who are sitting around in the bushes waiting to jump out and do the debunkings.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think that…

Matthew Yglesias: It’s very easy to debunk.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes, I mean, you are on a long arc against social science research in political conversations that I am not going down there with you. But I think it is one of those things where criticism has become very easy to give, and pretty reasoned criticism has become easy to give. Like, it used to be that in order to get a real critique — like, not just, like, “Oh, an LTE [letter to the editor] where someone says, ‘Well, I don’t really care about this thing you wrote,’ and it’s 200 words,” you can ignore it or whatever. But you write anything on Substack or something like that — like, you have your own newsletter, you have a few hundred followers or whatever — you could write, especially with the use of AI, a real effective takedown of anyone who’s at one of these prestigious media outlets. And that is good in many respects for the pursuit of being very correct.

Matthew Yglesias: Accuracy.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah. Of accuracy. But I — it just — I mean, this is what we’re saying is this question about, like: Can you have conversations about broader truths without devolving into that type of a conversation? And also, how then do you even engage in a falsification of these? Because you could have people who are just like, “I’m not gonna make any falsifiable statements, I’m just gonna vibes my way into an argument.” And I also find that thing kind of annoying too, because I’m just like, well, I guess you can just say that thing and we all have to just sit here and be like, “There’s not a single falsifiable statement here.” Which is how I kind of feel about Arendt’s book, where I’m just — It’s very, very difficult to engage with the material.

Matthew Yglesias: But I guess I would say, you know, if I was a professor — which I am not and I have never been — but if I assigned this book in a class, which I probably wouldn’t because I think it’s…

Jerusalem Demsas: Please do not.

Matthew Yglesias: …honestly, very confusingly written.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: But if somebody came back, you know, with their essay on the book and they were like, “This book is bad because she says this thing about how Montesquieu was the only person to engage seriously with the forms of government, but here’s seven other people who engaged…”

Jerusalem Demsas: Are you kidding? That’s an A+. I would give that kid a 100%.

Matthew Yglesias: I would say to that student, like, “You have missed the point here, and you have in fact not engaged seriously…”

Jerusalem Demsas: That’s anti-autism discrimination.

Matthew Yglesias: “…with the material.” No, and I, like — I’m a literal-minded person, and it bothers me about this book. There’s also — she has this thing, her whole discussion of Galileo, I think, is a little confused as it literally — what is the time — timeline in which we came up with these different astronomical observations? I don’t think she really has that right. She’s not a historian of science. We keep threatening to each other to record a podcast assessing the legacy of the Protestant Reformation.

Jerusalem Demsas: We have to do it.

Matthew Yglesias: Which she does. I thought this idea was hilarious. She has just, like, a one-paragraph summary of the Protestant Reformation and its consequences for history, which is almost absurd. But, you know, again, is not what the book is about, right? And I think the idea — I mean, I’m glad…

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, she’s free. I mean, that’s the thing too. I do think that people who are in our day, we’re just not liberated from public opinion.

Matthew Yglesias: This is what I mean, that you could reasonably — I think should — reject her view that the only thing that matters in life is stepping into the public arena and engaging with these big ideas. I don’t find that persuasive. I am persuaded that if you are going to step into the public arena and engage with these big public questions, that you ought to do it in a big way. You ought to do it like you want to engage and like you are — I see people doing, I guess, intellectual labor in her terms, just kind of proving that you can — like, you can say something that’s true or that’s not true and get back at each other and just do discourse. And there’s something cool about taking on the biggest possible topics, about speaking about those topics quite fearlessly, about clearly not being worried that people are gonna be mad about some of the things that you said.

And my criticisms of the book are that I think — I just think her choices about how to use words are unclear, you know? But that what’s bracing about the book is how clear it is at specific points in time, how forceful it is, you know? And if anything, it undermines the forcefulness to spend so — she has a — like a, like a nitpicky part where she’s complaining that certain Greek words were translated into Latin in the wrong way. And that’s the part where I want to say, like — “What are we doing here?” Like, that, that, that’s not a — that’s not a good criticism of — even if she’s right, I have no idea. I don’t know classical languages, but it doesn’t…

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s not evidence.

Matthew Yglesias: It also just doesn’t matter if the phrase homo politicus was or was not rendered into Latin correctly by somebody else. Like, that’s not…

Jerusalem Demsas: …that’s not why all of Western philosophy turned to the individual.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah. And I think — and she insists on animal laborans or something as a term. And it’s like, again, who cares, right? But the idea that you should dedicate yourself to something big and something that matters, you know, and that in the face of automation and technological change and material prosperity, you should aspire to something more for yourself than to make a living — I don’t know. It’s kind of neat.

Jerusalem Demsas: I know we just talked about how you shouldn’t just nitpick one thing, but I did have this on my mind the entire time you were talking, and I have to say it. She goes on this aside for quite a bit of time. And one of her digs at Christianity, where she’s like, “Christians made good works private.” And she cites these verses from the Bible where it says that you shouldn’t — I mean…

Matthew Yglesias: She’s out on helping people.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s just fucking insane. So, a big part of Christianity is that you should help people out and you shouldn’t just do it for glory, right? It’s not like — you shouldn’t pray in public and you shouldn’t be doing these big displays of, like, “Look how great I am.” Don’t tell your right hand what your left hand’s doing kind of thing. The point of that is that you should try to be good for good’s sake. Not that you should literally hide the fact that you’re doing good things from people, but she takes this incredibly literally. And she takes it so literally that she’s like, “This is why, you know, you can’t have — you don’t have — “ like, you see the degradation of human freedom or whatever is because Christians were like, “Hey, it’s good to do good stuff for its own sake.” I have nothing else to add about this. I just find it fucking insane to interpret it that way.

Matthew Yglesias: I think it is strange that she — Claude tells me that — scolded me for raising this when I asked.

Jerusalem Demsas: What?

Matthew Yglesias: I just think it’s odd to be a woman intellectual in 1957 talking about sweeping transformations of human relationships and say nothing about gender.

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, she is not a girl’s girl.

Matthew Yglesias: Yes.

Jerusalem Demsas: OK. We have to have a poll of readers. So, definitely let us know in the comments: What is the most problematic part of her relationship with Heidegger? One, that he was a Nazi. Two, the age gap. Or three, that he was married and they were committing adultery. Definitely let us know which one of those is the most problematic.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot there, but yeah. I mean, she’s not supporting other women.

Jerusalem Demsas: Well, maybe it is supporting his wife, because then she was keeping her Nazi husband away from her.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah. So, maybe it was supporting self-care. In the work, though, it’s like she’s got nothing — you know, because I think it’s quite directly in dialogue with — I guess to get the sequence right, they’re like, Friedan’s book is quite directly in dialogue with this.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: And it’s like, first-wave feminism happened in Arendt’s lifetime.

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, I get — you witnessed the Holocaust happen.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah.

Jerusalem Demsas: You are stateless, and you are saved quite last minute as a refugee while you’re in France after they’ve also tried to imprison you — or they have imprisoned you, whatever it is. And you’re mostly concerned with this very big question of basic human freedom.

Matthew Yglesias: Sure.

Jerusalem Demsas: I’m not saying that Betty Friedan was not also concerned with human freedom. I will say, I think that the totalitarian threat of the Nazis was a bigger threat to human freedom than patriarchy of housewives.

Matthew Yglesias: And I’m not surprised that the Origins of Totalitarianism doesn’t talk about gender roles. I was surprised that this book doesn’t, though, because this book is so concerned with…

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, it’s so condescending about what — I mean, she doesn’t say this outright, but clearly all of the labor that women are doing — I mean, labor, she even specifically mentions labor as, you know, pregnancy and having kids, etc. But all of that is not work. It’s not even work. It’s not even craftsman work. Like, taking care of your children, taking care of the home, whatever. All of that — I mean, she basically is analogizing them to slaves of Athens.

Matthew Yglesias: Yes, yes, yeah.

Jerusalem Demsas: And so, she’s implicitly saying that basically no woman at any point in history has ever really been a full human being.

Matthew Yglesias: Except for her.

Jerusalem Demsas: Except for her.

Matthew Yglesias: No, but that’s why I said — right. That’s why, again, I said that I do think Feminine Mystique is very much in dialogue with this, because she’s walking around the subject matter, right? It’s clearly not that it hasn’t occurred to her that there are women, because she is a woman. She does mention that labor includes all of this unpaid domestic labor.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: And she’s very against dedicating your life to that. She must have noticed that society — right, that the stultifying forces of conformity — are really, really, really pushing women at this time in a particular direction, that that is a contrast the prevailing vibes of Weimar-era Germany that she was present in, that this was in fact a topic of discussion in the rise of Nazi — you know what I mean? And she just, like — she doesn’t want to deal with this at all, right?

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, we find out later — and I mean, this doesn’t get in the book — but her views on race aren’t great either. I mean, she is not very interested in the marginalized populations of the world. She’s interested specifically — I mean, I see this a lot with people who write books like this. They can only conceptualize themselves, rightly or wrongly, as main characters.

Matthew Yglesias: Mm-hmm.

Jerusalem Demsas: That they’re doing philosophy. She’s very much not a universalist. She is not universalizing anything. This is not about “anyone can have this, anyone can be whatever.” She’s thinking about herself and people like her. She can’t imagine ever having been a marginal bit player or, like, an NPC or whatever it is in society. And as a result, she’s not interested in the philosophy that would speak to the freedoms of those people, what their experience is.

She says something in the book about how, like — something about how humanity runs — like, I don’t know, she makes some sort of comment that indicates that large swaths of people or large parts of many people are just not actually human and basically just like animals. Because what do we have in common with animals? Animals are also social. Animals also have to labor in order to continue to live, etc. And so, if you’re just laboring and you’re just kind of being a social human being and you’re not ever engaging in the arena, you’re never doing craftsman-level work or whatever, she barely believes you’re the same species.

Matthew Yglesias: So, we should say this, right, allegedly Greek idea that she takes up, that whatever — that to be human, or that the human qualities are specifically the qualities that distinguish a human being…

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes.

Matthew Yglesias: …from non-human animals. So, that what we have in common with, like, dogs — that we enjoy food, we like to hang out with our friends — like, that doesn’t count.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: Right? And, you know, I, like — I read some classical philosophy, and I didn’t — like, I didn’t read the part where they cover that. And I’ve heard around the way, because I’ve read modern philosophers, this attributed to the Greeks. And I’m always a little curious. I should go back and find the original. It’s like, what exactly? ’Cause it is clearly true. There are some things that are distinctively human, and there are some things that are true of humans, but also true of other things.

Jerusalem Demsas: She doesn’t want to bite the bullet. I mean, most philosophers are like, “It’s the rationality.” Like, the thing that makes you human, that makes us special, is our, like, “I think, therefore I am.” And then, all of Kantian philosophy — all of most liberal philosophy — is based on this idea. And there, of course, then becomes a bunch of problems about edge cases, about, like, people who are irrational or whatever, but she doesn’t want — I mean, the book literally, I mean, has like two mentions of thinking. One at the beginning, where she says, “I’m not going to talk about thinking.” And then at the very end, when she’s like, “Thinking is also very important. I have to say that thinking is an important thing to care about.” But it’s like, that is the thing. When I think what’s different between a human being and a pig, it’s the higher order rational thought, which is why — which is how we began the beginning of this conversation. And which is why it’s really concerning that if we create beings that are not only able to think at our level, but way beyond, what does that mean for our value? I mean, for me, as I’ve said multiple times now in this podcast and before, this is the purpose of religion. You can find God and you’ll be happy.

Matthew Yglesias: But we can act.

Jerusalem Demsas: You can act with God.

Matthew Yglesias: Well, but yeah, yes, it is bringing it full circle. I think you are correct that for the vast majority of human history, people would’ve said it’s man’s faculty to reason that is our distinguishing quality. And we are now here. I think, you know, the year of our Lord 2026 is probably the first time in which you could say accurately that the ability to reason is not uniquely human.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah.

Matthew Yglesias: And that my little pocket friends on my phone can reason quite well.

Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, I had to ask Claude multiple times for help while reading this book.

Matthew Yglesias: And yet…

Jerusalem Demsas: It was reasonable.

Matthew Yglesias: And not just as its retrieval, you know, I mean…

Jerusalem Demsas: No, to help me think through ideas.

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah, you can converse. I mean, I also — I was working on a — what I intended as a factual research query, not related to this book, just something else. And, you know, Claude could infer from the set of questions that I was — specific questions that I was asking it what I was driving at. And it started presenting information with a little more English on it to say, “Here’s what you asked for. The problem with using this for the argument that I think you are trying to build is…” And it had correctly inferred — like, I didn’t say explicitly, “I’m working on a piece with the following thesis. I am looking for factual information that would base it — back it up,” which, of course, is not how anyone would ever do journalism. We gather our facts first.

Jerusalem Demsas: I should hope not.

Matthew Yglesias: Anyway, you know, and it’s distressing, right? Like, we have lost what most of us think of as our unique human qualities. We have here a different take on what might make us unique — what might make us truly human. So, sound off in the comments section.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, what makes you human? Let us know.

Matthew Yglesias: To show — to show that you are human. No, it’s just like…

Jerusalem Demsas: No, act in the arena. That’s the comments section of The Argument Mag and Slow Boring.

Matthew Yglesias: Right. It’s like, people say you shouldn’t waste time arguing with strangers on the internet, that you should find fulfilling human relationships.

Jerusalem Demsas: Hannah Arendt says no.

Matthew Yglesias: Here’s a book that proposes no.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think that’s a good place…

Matthew Yglesias: Yeah. So, if you like the show…

Jerusalem Demsas: If you like the show, like, comment, subscribe. Because if you are a paid subscriber to either theargumentmag.com or slowboring.com, you can listen to this ad-free. The instructions for how to do so are in the show notes, and we’ll see you next week.